Honor Your Dead This Halloween

I’ve been thinking about the ancestors a lot lately. Obviously, it’s Halloween, which is derived from the ancient Celtic fire festival of Samhain (SOW-wen). It’s a night when the veil between our world and that of the Otherworld is thinnest. It’s why we don costumes and masks so that we might blend in with the spirits of the dead that walk among us that night.

The commercial, capitalist Halloween we celebrate now is divorced from these origins in favor of aesthetic. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my spooky season as well, but we’ve long forgotten this history as white Americans and to our detriment.

While scrolling Facebook one day, I came across a girl from my hometown. She wanted to honor her ancestors and teach her children about them, so she was asking about ways she could respectfully participate in Día de Los Muertos.

 Many people were telling her to back off without actually helping foster her real curiosity about ancestor veneration, something that has been practiced, and is still practiced, across the world, not just in Mexico. I understood where their reservations were with regards to appropriation, but some things, like an ancestral altar or giving offerings to the ancestors aren’t closed practices available only to those who celebrate Día de Los Muertos.

This holiday for honoring the dead is widely celebrated in Mexico and the Southwest. Other than Halloween, which has become a commercial affair in the U.S, it's probably the most well known celebration of the dead in this country. It's no wonder, then, that white Americans don't understand that Halloween's Irish origins (as well as other holidays of this time of year) were specifically about honoring our dead. Yet, we still reach for something to connect us to the Other World.

In recent years, I’ve been connecting with my ancestors more and more. Keeping ties with them has helped me attend to long-ignored grief. It started with the usual mining of my family history and genealogy to find the stories I wasn’t told about them, especially those of my Polish ancestors. But learning more about Samhain traditions and Slavic ancestor veneration has helped me strengthen these bonds beyond platitudes of “I know my grandmother is always with me.”

Your ancestors can be many people in your life: your immediate direct ancestors, distant ancestors, mentors, heroes, etc. Anyone who meant anything to you or is connected to you in some way in life surely is with you in death. I used to be very afraid of death before I began this work—sickly anxious about it to the point of obsession and frozen in terror of it if I suspected even a mole of being cancerous.

When beginning my ancestral work, I started by placing photos of those dearly departed in prominent places in my home so that I could at least acknowledge them daily. I walk past a mural of my grandmothers, my uncles, my stepfather, my great-grandparents from Poland every day on my way out the door or on my way to the kitchen to make coffee.

Recently, I dreamed of my Polish great-grandparents, two people I never met and my dad remembers little of. But I was given a packet of photos and letters about them from a distant (now-deceased) cousin of his. I will call them Babcia and Popsky because I think to call them anything more formal creates distance from them and I think they’ve invited me closer through this dream. I don’t know what they called my great-grandmother other than by her name Bolesława, or Bolka, but I know they called him Popsky. 

In the dream, I was visiting them. They were young as I have only seen in one photo: their wedding photo. I was introducing myself and Popsky said, “Ah, I’m your…grand uncle?”

“You’re my great-grandfather, Mikolaj,” I said, deliberate in using his Polish name and not his anglicized name of Michael.

He smiled and said, “You say that so beautifully.”

My grandmother had a strange, melancholy air about her. If she spoke to me I don’t remember it. When I woke up, it felt as though she didn’t know how to host me in this dream space.

I knew I had to get out my cards and see if I could make meaning from this encounter as it was visceral and as real as talking with them at my kitchen table. I won’t get into that reading except to say that while I was sad for my babcia, it was she who was sad for me and all of those descendants who were cut from knowing her and her stories.

My grandfather was one of many children and he, and other siblings of his, were estranged from their parents. I don’t know why and I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure. I wonder if there is some dark secret like those of my mother’s family, or if it’s as simple as American children assimilating into the country their parents fled to and leaving the old world behind. Maybe it’s a little of both.

Babcia and Popsky came from a place that was an occupied country. It wasn’t Poland then. It was land divvied up to the geopolitical power players of Europe. On their ship manifests they are from a region that “no longer exists” in the sense that it is someplace else now. They are also listed as “Austrian,” but Polish-speaking. I was surprised to find this out. I was always told we were Polish. Once I learned more about why they would be “Austrian” on paper, I realized colonial forces sought to erase their very ethnicity as Polish people. That kind of erasure can wreak untold trauma on those living through it and trickle down into us.

After that dream, I collected the last of the wild sunflowers from my yard and placed them on my altar for Babcia. I always leave coffee out for the ancestors, but I know Babcia loved her garden of flowers. I wonder if her love of them has passed down to me through my love of florals—the same way I happen to love Four Roses bourbon the way Popsky did. 

I am woefully tardy in doing my Samhain upkeep, but I plan to do as I always do: Clean my altar and adorn it with the photos and keepsakes of the ancestors, maybe bake some bread, and give my best offerings to them until spring arrives when I do the whole thing over again at Imbolc.

If this sounds similar to an ofrenda for a Día de Los Muertos-type practice, that’s that's because honoring the dead is a universal tradition. Some of us have just forgotten it. This time of year is tied to the rhythms of the land, a time of transition into resting for the winter after the crops have been harvested. I tend to this work year-round, but it's this time of year that I feel closest to my ancestors because of this liminal time. That's what it truly means for the veil to be thin.

If you’re a white American looking to honor your ancestors, I encourage you to look into your family traditions. You likely have them as I do—the Irish Samhain, the Slavic Dziady.

Seek out folk practitioners from your heritages as I have. It’s the actual reason for the spooky season.

 Sources:

1. "Samhain in Ireland: Darkness & Death," The Irish Pagan School
2. "Dziady: Celebrating the Day of the Dead," Joanna Tarnawska, The Polish Folk Witch

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Oíche Shamhna Shona Daoibh, 

Sam 

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