back in November, my daughter and i decided to make a shrine. we had stopped at our neighborhood coffee shop on our way home from school and they had a Dia de los Muertos shrine up. we live in an area with a very large Latino population so this was not surprising. we talked about it for a while, looking at the flowers, candles, photographs and sugar skulls. by the time we had walked one block away we had decided to create our own. November is a rough month for me as it is the month that both my mother and my son died. i never thought i would be one of those people who get hung up by stuff like that but it happens unconsciously. November comes and inevitably brings with it a shadow. i don't know if this happens to my husband or daughter. we haven't spoken of it. we speak of death and loss but have not spoken specifically of the idea of an event, flavoring a date throughout our own personal history.

we are not catholic. we are christian but not catholic. our shrine was not built so that we could "communicate with" or "pray for" the dead. our dead are dead. they need nothing from us. this shrine was, simply put, a memorial. nothing more, nothing less.

we wanted to be true to the tradition so we used marigolds from the yard, candles, photographs and painted skulls. i talked about my mother and grandmother, greenleaf talked about her baby brother and how she would like to talk about him more but she doesn't like when i cry. we were sad, we shed tears, we laughed over our silly skulls AND we decided to build another, bigger shrine next year.

it might seem weird to some people, for us to embrace this tradition so outside our own ethnic and religious culture but, and i have no other way of saying this, it was good. instead of waiting for the shadow to fall upon me i ran towards it. i danced inside of it. instead of waking my husband in the night with my muffled cries, i held my daughters hand and cried out loud. if i set aside this time, each year, as a promise to myself to remember, maybe i won't feel so bad about the times when i forget.