Happy Halloween

I used to love Halloween. I still love seeing the little kids being almost pushed to the front door by their parents and older siblings, coached to say "Trick or Treat!" But an element of meanness entered the picture some years ago, and now in addition to the shy five-year olds, there are the rough-looking teens who don't even bother to put on a costume, or if they do, it's something Goth that you suspect is part of their everyday "look" anyway. Still, even they can't quell my fascination with the whole reason for the holiday. As a nonreligious person (at least, in the usual sense), I find the human need to explain and understand the phenomenon of death to be part of what makes us different from the other species on the planet. I say that, even though I have observed my cats grieving for one of their own, and I honestly do believe that animals think, feel, and hope.

Many years ago, my cousin Mary and I, with our dates, spent Halloween in the family graveyard, the one where my parents and Mary's mother have since been buried. It was one of those great Louisiana October nights--cool and windy, with brown leaves flying wetly from the trees, the ground becoming a slippery mat of pine needles. It's an old graveyard, part of a church reportedly begun by one of my great-grandfathers, and like so many old graveyards, not as well kept as it should be. Ernie--I can't remember now if he was my date or Mary's since we both dated him and his cousin Gary, who was the other guy with us--stepped into a hole in the graveyard and completely lost it. I don't know if he was imagining that one of the buried dead had reached up to seize him, but it was not one of his better moments if manly courage is to be any guide.

I've never felt uncomfortable in graveyards. We lived in front of one when I was a child, and it never bothered me. I kind of like the quiet one finds in these neighborhoods of the dead. And it doesn't surprise me that people derive comfort from graves. Last May, when we drove to Louisiana at break-neck speed to be there for Aunt Susie's funeral, I sat near my cousin Edward in the funeral home's little coffee room. Edward, now a handsome white-haired fellow married to his second wife, talked at length about visiting the grave of his first wife, Doris. He says he lies on the ground at her grave and talks to her and "has a good visit." His second wife, to her credit, seems to accept that he needs to talk to Doris now and again. Perhaps she also visits loved ones at graves.

It makes me want to rethink my plan for cremation. I can't imagine an urn carries quite the same comfort level of a weathered tombstone amid the graves of one's ancestors. Of course, I also wonder whether we chubbier folks might "burn a bit too hot" given our fat layers. Maybe the old charnel house of Shakespeare's day is the answer, although apparently the Bard was really bothered by the idea that after his flesh fell from his bones, he'd be dug up and his bones tossed helter-skelter into a bone pile with those of others. Did he, even then, recognize his unique genius and not wish to be democratized in death with the ordinary folk?

I dream so often of my parents. Daddy gets younger and livelier with every dream. Now he's the father of my childhood, powerful and energetic, but with the wisdom and urbanity that I always wish my parents had had. I am creating him in the image of the father I wanted rather than the one I had. He's been gone since 1988. I wonder when I'll start the make-over of Mama. She's improving, but since she's been dead since 1993, she hasn't quite turned into the parental ideal that Daddy is becoming. Of course, she had a lot farther to go. There was very little that I had to forgive Daddy for. He wasn't educated, he was rough, and he was crude, and every now and then, he could be mean, but he was never mean to me. Mama, on the other hand, is harder to forgive for her alcoholic rages, her bleary indifference, her soul-scorching criticisms. If I myself live long enough, perhaps Mama will become June Cleaver or some such idealized mother in my dreams.

And now, of course, I wonder how I will appear to my sons in their dreams after I am gone. --Dr.S.