Befriending Death in Oaxaca
Between the booming popularity of mezcal and its internationally fawned over culinary offerings, the southwestern Mexican city of Oaxaca has garnered quite a bit of hype in recent years. Since living in Mexico off and on during the second half of this year, most people I’ve met here told me to visit, so here I am. A couple hours after getting here I knew it was one of my favorite cities.
Oaxaca is an undeniably hip place to be, especially during Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), which rund October 31st through November 1st every year. In 2020, Travel and Leisure magazine hailed it as the best food city on the planet, and during my visit I’ve been struck by the strong showing of gringos and white-teethed influencers taking selfies in the streets and ordering mezcal shots at rooftop bars.
Like a great meal, Día de Muertos is a holiday built with contrasts. It’s a time to acknowledge and accept the irreversible losses of death, but it does so with vibrancy, optimism, and an unguarded love for all things living. Papel picado banners adorned with bright colors and strings of marigold flowers hang over streets buzzing with drunk revellers and mouthy street vendors urging you to try their elotes y esquites, helado, pan de muerto. Skulls and framed photographs of the dead pop out of the flowers in ofrendas to remind us not only of the ones we have lost, but that we too will someday meet the same fate. We are all going to die, and this holiday won’t let you forget it.
Oaxaca reminds me of New Orleans, another one of my favorite cities. Both places measure up the unavoidable pain, loss, and turmoil in front of them and respond by celebrating. Both cities have a strong potential to bless you with the best food you’ve eaten in your life regardless of your age and where you’ve traveled. And the unique cultural fabric of these places comes from a unique blending of diverse peoples and their ideas that’s been playing out for centuries. Like New Orleans, Oaxaca is a place that seems to go out of its way to reward you just for being there, for showing up, for being alive.
I’m visiting Oaxaca for Day of the Dead during my own state of deep grief, but unlike Oaxaca and New Orleans, the pain feels almost impossible for me to smile through much of the time. It’s the kind of loss that levels you and leaves much of you changed by the time you get back up on your feet again. I’m currently in the hands and knees stage of my grief, somewhere between laid out and upright, and I already know the changes are big and permanent, some good, some not so good.
Instead of mourning someone who has died, I’m coping with the sudden end of a long-term relationship, though most of the time it feels like grieving an actual death. I like the idea of waking up each day not only with my own death on my mind, but also armed with the knowledge that everything will end, and it’s not so bad. After all, something new can’t start unless something else wraps up, and newness gives life energy and direction. Had I known this all six months ago, my breakup wouldn’t have been so painful and surprising. Now I know. That’s one of the good changes.
As I walk the streets of a city I probably wouldn’t have seen hand in hand with a person I absolutely wouldn’t have met had it not been for my loss, I feel everything at once––joy and wonder, anxious despair. During a time when the dead and living are said to come into contact with one another, the new and the old war inside of me, both sides hellbent on not losing ground.