A Cuban emigrant reflects on life and death

Every first of November, for the past three years, I’ve tried to enter Green-Wood and sit down to celebrate that death is not the end. The first two times, I walked as far as the arch where the monk parakeets fortify their monumental nest. But I was so sad back then that I couldn’t make it past the entrance to hear their song. Life’s worked out in a way that I no longer question that I should live near cemeteries. I enjoy walking through them.

I came to know Green-Wood by grounding myself on foliage and grass, learning all its corners and vortices, the beings that fly and buzz on its grounds, centuries-old photosynthetic beings or new warm-blooded ones; at other times, simply lying on the fungal interface that covers the burial ground.

In my Havana, when I was a girl, I would sometimes cross the fully paved Colón Cemetery, wearing shoes, at dawn and at dusk, holding my aunt’s hand to take a shortcut. Together we peered into the emptiness of an open catacomb shaped like a great shell that always seemed to have just begotten the world, and we shouted: “Good morning, Count!”

For someone who emigrates, it’s hard to enter a cemetery they never walked through holding their aunt’s hand, or one where they never tried to shout a count awake from his eternal sleep. It may be hard to enter the burial ground because of the paralyzing forms that respect can take, fears still to be decolonized or ideas cast in rigid moldings. It may also be that there is not yet an us, or someone like us there to visit and honor. In none of its niches have we seen, one midday, our father’s femur and collarbone.

Or perhaps it is only the illusion that we will not have to rest forever here, where we have just arrived, because we are new, because we are not from here, because we secretly dream of one day returning home to die in the nest. That illusion keeps us distant, cautious, prevents us from truly knowing the cemetery.

We are not tourists and not long-established residents either; the cemetery is there, but we prefer to see it as a nature park or a vast garden of silence. In exile, one may think at every moment: Am I going to die here? Will my lost soul flutter in search of the familiar, trapped in a circuit of will-o’-the-wisps in déjà vu?

Deep down, we know we will fall here or there in a way we cannot know, without asking ourselves, near that hour, who will mother our bones once they are crystalline and empty as fulgurites on new beaches, bleached and yearning for our selves. Or who will exhume our porcelain remains, cracked by the vapors of our final breath. Who will whisper loving things to our gleaming ashes and shed salted tears to bind us together, so that we might pass on our tiny share of universal knowledge? Who will try to wake us by shouting? Nature will mother us, of course, and the drops of salt are already falling.

Sometimes one must die free, there where vultures on a summit tear the fascia and howl as they strip ligaments, muscles and flesh from bones in a sky burial. Sometimes one must die in the arms of love, pierced by the bitter sweetness of copal and cempasúchil, within honeycomb chambers resonating with the layered rhythms of eight violins.

So many ways to live, so many ways to die.

I am at the altar, in rest and remembrance, beyond territory and culture, far beyond both. I place a photograph on the mantel and let a cast be set on my fractured soul, in one of civilization’s most beautiful and honest acts. From Mexico to all humanity. Happy Day of the Dead.