MONARCHS: ART OF GRIEVING
-for Homero Gómez González and Raúl Hernández Romero
She’d ignored the sharp pain in her jaw for months, and when she finally went to the dentist, she discovered her tooth had abscessed at the root. This required a particular kind of standing X-ray that scanned her entire head. When the dentist tilted the screen to show her, she was surprised to see, peering back at her through the ghostly scrim of the screen, her own grinning skull. “No other option,” her dentist said. “We’ll have to extract the whole thing.” It was the season of the wolf-face sulphur butterflies. She’d noticed their pale-yellow wings pasted on the sidewalks of her daughter’s school.
She lives in a city located only sixty miles from the US-Mexico border. In a neighborhood where the local grocery carries fresh guavas, prickly pear pads, and apple empanadas. And, in December, tejocotes and tamarind pods to make Ponche Navideño for Christmas. Where her children’s favorite summer treat is to visit Peñas Snowcones, Tacos Y Mas and order raspados made with shaved ice and fresh syrups of crushed mango, raspberry, or lime. Where you cannot stop at stoplights without noticing the candles and sun-worn silk flowers of roadside memorials. Where when her family is sick, they are gifted homemade tamales and pozole by friends. Where houses and public spaces carry ofrendas for Día de los Muertos, and she’s seen truck beds stacked high with marigolds in the last days of October. Where friends have gifted her objects to make her own.
When her younger brother first became a physician, he would call her when one of his patients died. Some awful stories. The young father that had a heart attack while swimming with his children in a hotel pool. The children were too little to pull him out; he slid from their hands to the pool bottom. Or the larger-bodied woman who died in his arms when, just after his shift, he’d walked out to the parking lot and saw her collapsed half out of her car. The young man’s suicide after he’d only had one appointment and had told her brother afterward that, for the first time in a long time, he felt more hopeful. Her brother had lived in Albuquerque for his residency. At the apartment where they’d filmed the scene in Breaking Bad where Jane dies choking on her own vomit, and Walt stands there watching her die and does nothing. Fans of the show would sometimes collect outside his house, and when he’d leave for work, ask if they could see inside. Which, of course, he’d say no to, but then tell her on the phone—what do they want to do with that? I mean, what is it they’re looking for?
Certain things are hidden inside other things. Fruit, for example, hidden inside blossoms. Butterflies hidden inside chrysalises. A speck of grit hidden inside a raindrop. All of the colors of the spectrum hidden inside white light. During pandemic homeschool, she teaches her daughter how to find the rainbow hidden inside sunlight. It turns out all you need is a glass of water, a slit in a notecard, and a window where the sun can shine through.
The eerie floating image of her skull reminded her of being a fetus and a corpse at the same time. She remembers the profiled, hazy sonograms of her children’s skulls and the macabre mustiness of innumerable and unidentifiable skulls in the Paris Catacombs. Bones make language fall away like skin. At the dentist’s office, her skull stared back at her as if it recognized her. That hidden thing swarming out of the screen into the glare of the overhead lights. As if surprised to have been found.
When her brother lived in Mexico, he was invited by friends to Oaxaca for Día de los Muertos. He said that he followed the paths of marigold petals all night into houses, That in candlelight the petals shone like embers. Total strangers opened their doors and told him about their loved ones, allowed him in.
Some things hide inside other things and you do not see them. For example, this morning, she walked her son to school across a wash clotted with debris swept down from the summer monsoons, and the river bottom smelled like old granite boulders and crushed creosote, and the whole time she was saying hello to other kids and parents and holding her son’s hand she also held the death of her friend inside of her. The shape of her grief like a gray paper doll that, if you reached for it, would unfold and unfold its tissue-paper creases in an almost infinite progression. As she walks by the other mothers, she thinks about the paper dolls they’re carrying too. How if they drew them out of their bodies, they would begin to billow like shadowy sails. What they would catch on, how they might get tangled up with each other. How they might tear.
Her grandmother was Swedish, and her grandfather Norwegian. Some of her ancestors are buried far away in a small church cemetery in Farsund, Norway. She has never been there. She does not have a single recipe of her grandmother’s, though her grandmother loved to cook. In Sweden, on All Saints’ Day, candles and flowers are placed on the graves of loved ones. In Norway, candles are lit by graves on Christmas Eve, where the light is sometimes scattered inside the falling snow. No one in her family ever followed these rituals. What her children know is her friend Lilly’s pozole, cups of Mexican hot chocolate when the days grow cold. She grates thick cakes of chocolate on a cheese grater, then whisks it with milk and cinnamon. A little chili powder. When her family makes Swedish vaniljkakor cookies at Christmas, they make them from a recipe she found online.
She is thinking about those things hidden inside other things because she sometimes carries the deaths that her brother has carried. She can’t stop thinking, for example, about the father drowned at the bottom of the pool. Or how hidden inside the holiday Día de los Muertos is the three-thousand-year-old Aztec celebration that honored both the changing seasons and the dead. (The Aztec goddess Mictēcacihuātl, “Lady of the Dead,” was said to guard the bones in the underworld and oversee the festivities; her skull face often has its jaws open—she swallows the stars so that they become hidden during the day.) Another hidden thing: stars in daylight. And her name, Larson, which hides another name. Her ancestral name, Larsen, was changed on Ellis Island.
In the desert, the shift of seasons is subtle. There are no showy curtains of chlorophyll dying and leaving maples wrapped in shades of pink and scarlet (except in certain canyons high in the mountains). You mostly know it’s fall by the slow change in light. How the mornings fall across the doors with a low, slanting coolness. How the lizards begin to disappear. How the Santa Rita prickly pear suffuses a deeper shade of purple.
Monarch butterflies are particularly associated with Día de los Muertos. To the Purépecha and Mazahua peoples of Mexico, monarch butterflies represent the souls of their ancestors returning to visit them. When temperatures begin to fall, millions of butterflies travel through flyway corridors across the US, winding downward until they arrive at butterfly sanctuaries in Michoacán. Some land in her city, in her own yard, and the yards of her neighbors. Some travel more than three thousand miles.
Time rushes through our bodies; time becomes embedded in them too. What occurs to her: it’s not about the tissue-paper shapes at all. It’s what’s behind the paper, what’s been scabbed over, what the paper covers. The shapes are just what’s in front of the absence. Grief (a noun) is different than grieving (a verb). Grief lives in us like weather, unpredictable and intense. If grief is a room that our bodies must carry, what place can we set it in order to grieve?
When scientists studied monarch metamorphosis, they found that caterpillars remembered the taste of certain foods when they were adult butterflies. Which seems miraculous since metamorphosis involves a nearly complete dissolving of the body—the caterpillar must digest itself before sleeping cells switch on to rapidly grow the new body parts it will need. She doesn’t know what to think of this. Does it mean that some things stay inside us forever? Or that sometimes it’s possible to remember things when the veils between the worlds grow thin?
She likes the thought of veils growing thin. That kind of permeability. That metamorphosis means there can be a time to live with ghosts. There can be a time to remember. That the remembering doesn’t have to be a time of weighing down. It can also be filled with buoyancy.
She reads the monarchs are officially endangered. Their winter grounds are being deforested. Pesticides are systematically destroying the plants they need to survive. It suddenly brings back a memory of going mothing with one of her entomology professors. How he set out poisoned bucket traps, and the next morning, combed through hundreds of dead moths for a few rare specimens for his collection. The waste of it. The rage she felt at someone who she thought, of all people, should have known better.
Because of the pandemic, she’s spent two years living with a hole in her mouth where her abscessed tooth had been. Her tongue lived with the absence of it. There was a window in the X-ray of her skull. And for more than a few days after the new tooth was placed, she still felt it—that space of the new covering the former place of absence. The dentist’s assistant takes another X-ray, and for the second time, it’s like looking at her own death face-to-face. But this time, she feels it tenderly. Día de los Muertos is coming; Trader Joe’s is already carrying its pots of marigolds. The most beautiful part of the ritual is that the day is both grieving and celebration. The skulls are not macabre; they’re colorful, jolly, full of remembrance, full of life.
Thom van Dooren tells us, “Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here. In this context, genuine mourning should open us into an awareness of our dependence on and relationships with those countless others being driven over the edge of extinction.” In her city, thousands travel to be a part of the November All Souls Procession. Meant to honor and grieve loss. Here’s the thing—the signs and pictures they hold are not just for people. Endangered species are honored too.
In Alison Hawthorne Deming’s Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, a woman boats through a haze of monarchs, abandoning the instructions of her delicately-tuned instruments to “[steer]/ instead by butterflies […].”
When she hears about the murders of the monarch stewards in Michoacán, she feels the news travel across the skin of her chest in waves of chills, as if she’s been struck with a virus. Homero Gómez González had first been a logger, then became an activist. His body was found floating in a well near El Rosario monarch butterfly sanctuary, a place he’d spent decades of his life working to protect. Raúl Hernández Romero’s body was discovered in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve where he’d been a butterfly tour guide. His relatives said he’d been receiving death threats from a cartel that wanted him to stop protesting the illegal logging that threatened the monarch sanctuary.
How does one live with ghosts? When she tries to learn something about Norwegian funeral traditions, she keeps reading about Norwegians’ love of candles. Lighting candles not just indoors, but in the snowy cemeteries. Inside sculptures they make out of snow.
Then a friend sends her an article about grieving for glaciers. How a funeral was organized for Okjökull, the first glacier in Iceland to be declared dead. More glacial funerals followed: for the Swiss Pizol and Basodino glaciers, the Oregon Clark glacier, and the Mexican Ayoloco glacier. The inscription on the brass plaque that commemorated Okjökull’s disappearance read, “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
What interests her is learning more restorative ways to grieve. To recognize loss yet affirm connectivity and life. When she walks through the street next to the cemetery in Nogales with her friend, there is an air of festivity—crowds of people and pan de muerto and mariachis, pastel wreaths and marigolds. And then beyond, among the gravestones, shadowy figures clustered around pockets of candlelight. On one hillside, someone playing a guitar and singing. And the soft darkness is so tangible that she simply stands there, allowing hot currents of unmappable emotion to flood through her like a summer monsoon into a hidden canyon pool.
When she takes out the box that holds the objects for her All Souls’ Day shrine, she unwraps the tissue paper with care. Sets out photos of her grandparents, beloved friends. Candles, a small bowl for salt, a cup for water. A skeletal bride and groom grinning from the blue glittery recesses of a shadowbox. This time she places dead monarch butterflies on the altar that she’s collected on her morning walks. Tucks a notecard beneath them. For Raúl, she writes next to one butterfly. For Homero, another. One must sometimes create a space in which to grieve.