All Saints’ Day Round 2: The Dead Are Better Company

It says a lot when both my son and I prefer the dead to the living. Color me surprised when I throw him the suggestion that we visit the cemetery on Sunday, and he says yes. I take it as a win because at this point in my life, the living are literally pains in my ass. The least the dead can do is remain silent and still.

I have never been a cemetery person, mostly because I never had one to visit. No close relatives died while I lived in the United States. Everyone clung to life, and only distant relatives shuffled off their mortal coil. Even then, we didn’t go, and that was more on my mother.

Except for the time I crossed an ocean to find my paternal great-grandfather’s resting place as a thing to do on my first trip to England. And somewhere in London I found the location and made the pilgrimage. But that was a long time ago.

Last year, the first All Saints’ Day we spent in Guatemala was also the first weekend we spent in the country, and I asked my mother if she wanted to go visit the cemetery, it being a major holiday weekend and all. She was like, sure. My son, less interested in spending quality time with the one living member of our family who happens to be the one most wished to be in the ground, went with us, but as part of the cultural experience, and mostly by force.

This year, there was no coercion needed. And it feels real Chapin (Guatemalan, for the uninitiated) to take a picnic and flowers to visit the gravesite of the founding members of the family, and specifically founders of the home in which I now reside.

What does it mean that both he and I prefer the dead? I know what it means for me. I have spent the last twenty or so years dissecting my generational trauma, my complex PTSD, and whatever remains of me after decades of drinking the toxic cocktail of emotional, verbal, and sometimes physical abuse fed to me at the hands of my mother, my father, and mr horrible, and have concluded that the living suck ass. Being dead is a point in someone’s favor at this juncture.

For my son? My mother’s guilt will not let me dive too deep into that pool. I fear what I may find and at this point I can only navigate one existential crisis at a time.

I expect there will be less drama this year since we know where we are going, and I already know what to expect. I also don’t have to deal with the strange emotional outflowing from my mother. That weekend it was a toxic sludge of tears, anger, and who knows what. Overall, I was more tired from having to deal with her, than any residual thoughts about having dead relatives, neither of whom ever knew me during their life span. Maybe my grandfather. It is possible he may have met me as a child before we emigrated to the United States, but considering he died shortly after, it is also possible he did not.

I could ask my mother about him, but I don’t feel like dealing with La Llorona, or tipping her off about the plan. I’d like to do this on my own terms, with zero side quests and zero manipulation.

The dead, at least, never ask where we’ve been.