On Día De Los Muertos as a Therapeutic Experience
As my lovely coworkers know, spooky season is my time to shine. While I love all things creepy, the real reason I love the season is Día De Los Muertos. For those of you that are unfamiliar, Día De Los Muertos is a Latinx holiday that is celebrated mainly by Mexican culture. It takes place from November 1st to 2nd, which means the spooky season gets another two days...and I am here for it.
what is Día De Los Muertos?
Día De Los Muertos is a chance for us to remember our loved ones who have passed, or celebrate the life they lived. We take our time building an ofrenda, or altar, which displays photos of our loved ones (pets included!), their favorite foods, keepsakes, and basically anything we think is special to them or us. We cover the altar in Cempasuchils, or marigolds, whose fragrance is used to lead the dead back to the altar for this one day every year. The flower’s orange and vibrant color is a reminder that our altar is a celebration rather than some somber holiday. This holiday is incredibly detailed and has so many beautiful elements, but I’d like to share with you what it means to me.
I wasn’t always this passionate about Dia De Los Muertos. My immediate family didn’t celebrate it. However, I have loved reintroducing it into our family traditions. My love for the holiday began as a way to cope with a loss that felt unexplainable.
Día De Los Muertos as a grief ritual
My cousin was 25 when he died. It came as a shock to most of us. There was something so difficult for me to understand. At the time, I was younger than him. He was someone I looked up to. My family moved through their own patterns of grief and loss. Everyone’s looked a little different, and I struggled with understanding how to feel. I wanted to respect those around me who had a much deeper bond with him, but also knew I needed to allow myself the space to grieve in my own way. I struggled with ways to process my grief for a few years. (If you’d like to read more about grief, I cannot say it any better than Anna (one of our therapists at Kindman & Co.)!! Read her blog about finding wholeness after loss here.)
Learning about such a rich tradition from my culture allowed me to create my own therapeutic experience and move through my grief.
My cousin’s photo was the first photo I had on my ofrenda. At the time, I was living at home with my parents and my abuelita. My abuelita enjoyed watching me create the altar in the ways that I had learned how, and she shared her own knowledge of ofrendas from when she lived in Mexico. To me, the ofrenda gives me the opportunity to be faced with the amount of loss my family has experienced. At first, it felt so strange to see photos of all of the loved ones we had lost in one sitting. My cousin’s photo always seems like the hardest one to place on the altar. It can feel overwhelming! However, what I have been able to feel now is a sense of peace. It allows me to have my own cathartic experience as I pull out photos of each person I have lost. I hold them with me and use the whole month of October to reflect as they sit on my altar. I wish I could say that Día De Los Muertos “cured” me of my sense of loss. I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how grief works. What it did for me was provide a sense of connection for me with those that have gone before me.
I feel enveloped with the colors that fill my altar, the flowers give me a sense of joy, the candles bring me a sense of comfort, and I feel so much love from the items that family and friends have given to me to add to my ofrenda. There is so much more life than death on my altar. Connection and love overwhelm me in this season of Día De Los Muertos. I am so thankful that this tradition has become a sense of therapy for me.
If you’ve experienced grief & loss and are looking for support, don’t hesitate to reach out here: Grief & Loss Counseling
Gaby Teresa is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, Latina/mixed raced, social justice-oriented, and exceptionally curious. She works with individuals, intimate relationships, and families. She is passionate about supporting undocumented immigrants, Latinx, & BIPOC folks to explore and unpack the harms of systemic oppression & white supremacy and move towards individual and collective healing from racial trauma.
From a Health at Every Size perspective, Gaby challenges fat phobic narratives and helps people adopt amore loving relationships with their bodies by promoting body diversity and dismantling the “thin ideal.”Overall, Gaby is proud to be another messy human walking alongside you, helping you to build tools and relationships that better support you and ensure that you get your relational needs met.
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