The first of November marked Ziua Mortilor, the “Day of the Dead” (or All Saints or All Souls Day in other parts of the world) and despite one of our staff members swearing that this was a local holiday, unique only to the Jiu Valley, we know otherwise. In Germany two weeks ago we saw cemetery candles “on special” in grocery store adds, featured in between house slippers and cake pans, and in Cluj last week they were being bought up in a home-furnishing store along with teapots and tablecloths, a piled-high display that greeted customers when they first entered the store.
Maybe no one but a North American, or maybe I should just speak for myself, would even notice the oddity.
Dana just read yet another treatise on the "denial of death" in America, this time in the New York Times. When we first moved to Romania an American friend who'd long lived here referred to Romania's "culture of death." We sit here, somewhere in between those two.
After 9 years, the foreignness of the phenomenon of the “Day of the Dead” has not worn off on me. I don’t know how the day is spent in other parts of the world, but here mums are on sale in droves for the week leading up to November 1. (In Cluj, we saw a Dacia weighted down under hundreds of stem-cut mums, filling the back seat and piled high over its roof, ready for market the following day.) Family members visit the grave(s) of their loved ones the week before, sweeping and weeding, tidying up and then beautifying the site with these mums. (I learned the hard way that mums are strictly seen as flowers for the dead. I took a beautiful arrangement as a thank you to a woman a few years ago and learned quickly by the expression on her face that mums cannot be thank you flowers.)
On November 1 the sidewalks are full, instead of with generational groupings (a cluster of teens, a benchful of white haired men) with individual family units (a teenager, a father, a grandmother) together making their way - a plate of cookies, a sack of candles – to the cemetery where they will pray, gossip, politely offer cookies to the same begging children with mud-smeared faces they may shoo aside on other days, laugh, drink, light candles, pour plum brandy onto the grave, remember, and then return home.
One cannot walk through a cemetery on the night of Ziua Mortilor without being profoundly moved. One cannot not think about death, nor the people they have lost, no matter how far away or long ago those losses may have begun. And after 9 years I can’t shake this thought: it must be hard to remain bitter or hurt or angry towards a person you’ve buried when every year there's a day when you show up at their side and pay your respects. Maybe I’m naïve, but in my mind November 1 has one more name: Day of Forgiveness.
Happy Thanksgiving from the Bates'
