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 Halloween Guy

“Steve?”

My neighbor looks deeply troubled. I go over to see what's wrong.

He's been up all night. His wife of 60-some years has just died.

I listen to his story, and say the things that one says.

My neighbor is a good man. His life has been one of undeserved tragedy.

Years ago, a motorcycle accident reduced his son to a permanent vegetative state. His daughter struggled with cancer and eventually overcame it, only to die recently of a sudden heart attack. Now, with his wife's death, everything that this man has ever loved has been taken from him, everything.

It's mid-October, and the guy next door—every block seems to have one—is the Halloween Guy. His front yard is mocked up as a faux cemetery: gray styro tombstones spiked into the crisp autumn lawn with glib little ha-ha inscriptions, skeleton hands erupting from the soil, plastic bones strewn between.

I'm struck by the gap between this silly cartoon of death and the immensity of the real thing. It seems, simultaneously, a mockery and, in its sheer fatuousness, utterly beneath notice.

La Muerte no duerme.

If the tales be true, some stormy night Old Hornie will ride up to the Old Warlocks' Home on a black horse (who knows, these days he may drive up in a black Porsche), sling me over his shoulder, and carry me off screaming into the night.

And they'll say: Well, that's the end of him.

Well, maybe. Otherwise, barring the unforeseen or the mob with torches and pitchforks (these things do happen), I'll have my heart attack and be dead before I hit the ground. That's generally how men in my family die. My lifelong vegetarianism may buy me a few extra years and better health at the end, but the final prognosis is nohow in doubt.

With luck, I'm looking at another 30 years ahead; with lots of luck, maybe another 40. I've always admired the title of Margaret Murray's autobiography: My First Hundred Years. She died at 101.

In every language that I've ever studied, death is a noun, but, of course, death is not a noun, a thing. What we call death is a cessation, a stoppage: when the parts stop working together. That it's so intangible somehow makes it that much more undefinable.

Oh, yeah. The vault. That's where the stuff I can't handle goes. Kerplunk! - Finn, Adventure Time

For those of you who have been with me for long enough, you know I have an unsteady relationship with death.  I'm not one of those Witches who can see spirits, talk to ghosts and visualize the other side of the Veil.  Or really visualize very much at all, though that's improved a little over the years.  I tend to "see" things in words, song lyrics, poetry and emotions.  You can imagine how fun this was as a baby Witch where every exercise ever starts with "Visualize . . ."  My sister, the Divine Miss M, who is not a practicing Witch and not really all that Catholic, has a much more open dialogue with the other side than I do and does not spend her dreams with dead people telling them that they're dead like I do.  She catches omens, portents and prophecy at a rate that is completely annoying given that she's not into the occult.

When we lived in Seattle, we hosted a Halloween/Samhain party each year for both pagans and non-pagans. We invited friends of all ages to join us for pumpkin soup, roasted turnips, hot cider, apple bobbing, and seed bread.  The children were gathered for trick-or-treating (real food before the candy), and after we returned and the kids compared (and sometimes traded) loot, we'd begin the real party, starting with the sliced apple to reveal the star, and tales about the history of Samhain.  At this point, non-pagan families who choose not to share in the divination, speaking with the dead, or honoring them, left.  The rest of us joined in quieter work.

Now that we live in a rural town, people are less inclined to make the long drive for a celebration, but there are some traditions we continue.  The kids still trick-or-treat in the neighborhood, and we still come home to do our good work for the holiday. 

Every so often, I offer a workshop or discussion on Ancestor veneration. I hadn't done one in several years, but felt the urge to do it this year.  Last night was the chosen evening and we drew in together at Mother Grove's little chapel to talk about the Dead and our Dead.

It was informal--more of a conversation than a class.  I started out with some general information about honoring our Beloved Dead through altars or memorial displays. We went on to discuss the layers of the Dead that we may choose to honor--family and friends who have died,  all those folks we find on Ancestrydotcom and those intentionally selected heroes and inspirations who have no blood or cultural tie to us but who have inspired us through their story.

The air is cool, the mists swirl, and the veils are thin…its the time to listen to our Ancestors as we honor our departed ones.

Many seekers of different paths honor the life/death/life process and venerate their Ancestors. Traditionally we honored our Ancestors to maintain familial relationships and heritage and also to learn-divination is performed at Samhaim and during the Day of the Dead so that we might get insight on the year ahead.

Two fascinating insights deepen our understanding of death and Samhain, which honors its sacred dimension.  In one of his essays on nature poet Gary Snyder made a point I have never forgotten. 

An ecosystem is a kind of mandala in which there are multiple relations that are all-powerful and instructive.  Each figure in the mandala – a little mouse or bird (or little god or demon figure) – has an important position and a role to play.  Though ecosystems can be described as hierarchical in terms of energy flow, from the standpoint of the whole all of its members are equal.

   . . . We are all guests at the feast, and we are also the meal!  All of biological nature can be seen as an enormous puja, a ceremony of offering and sharing.

As I was finishing a chapter in my forthcoming book, Faultlines, I encountered a compatible observation by Carl von Essen regarding what he called the “hunter’s trance.”  Von Essen wrote