Raising Your Dead: Samhain is Here
Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?
I imagine death as the feeling of leaving a party when you’ve run out of things to say. When the remaining contents of your glass gets less compelling to swallow, and the act of finding and putting on your coat and weaving your way to the door sounds comforting.
I don’t know what kind of death I’ll have, of course. One where I’m beelining towards the exit, trying to avoid goodbyes, or one where I gradually start moving towards the door, hugging and waving and saying farewell.
It’s almost Halloween, the days are getting darker, and October has felt long this year. Full and wonderful, but long. I have wrapped up my second-to-last literary show for the month, I went camping and frolicking with pagans in the forest, led panels, read poems, was both entertained and entertaining. And now I’m ready to become soup and sweaters and to read books and make crafts.
But the veil is thinning, as we tend to say. And I am thinking much more about my ancestral dead, beloved or otherwise. I made the altar and added their pictures, and this time of year I hold a dumb supper and invite at least one passed family member to come and complain about my food.
The biggest challenge I’ve found in ancestor practice is being able to accept it as static. I can make a project out of anything and I am not letting my lineage get away with Jack these days. This year, my father was added to the long line of former farm hands and bad parents who decorate the mantel.
I almost wrote that it’s the first Halloween without him, but that’s not really true. We were estranged before he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2023, and as we did the dance of rapid death together, it brought closure but not comfort. That’s probably my challenge of grief, everything that ever hurt still hurts. And his death has felt louder that I thought it would.
I think losing a parent has reminded me that I’m next. Hopefully not soon, of course, but I am becoming my own ancestor, and eventually I will join whatever we become when we die. I try to not worry about it too much, it’s above my pay grade anyhow.
Ask not for who the hag howls, she howls for thee.
I don’t know that I demand that people who disliked their relatives continue to engage with them after they’ve died. I support people cutting people off in life, in death it seems even easier. But I’m working on a new strategy. Call it a parentified oldest daughter calling in her inheritance — you were awful at your job on earth, you will improve in death.
Now, in the time of the dead, we’re negotiating our relationship. My father always wanted to be a hero but struggled with the responsibility for a lot of reasons. But I’m in the business of making deals. I live on a crossroad for a reason. My father was chaotic in life, a rigid person with a strong sense of justice and little emotional regulation, and in the flickering candlelight I offer a dead man a deal — do what I tell you, and I’ll make you the hero you wanted to be.
Friend’s abusive husband? Unjust boss? Need someone to make good? Nothing like a bully to shake a victory out of a situation.
We are sitting together in an apartment he never saw. He’s smaller now, his child self more honest. He struggled as a soldier, a husband, a father, a brother, all the cobwebbed intimacies of being alive. He thinks there should be meat. I think he should take three more bites before leaving the table.
Folklore loves a deal with the devil, and with a careful placement of mirrors, the sort of chanting that worries the neighbors, and a lot of candles, you can become the sort of devil that offers the worst of your DNA a redemption arc. But like all signers, if they don’t live up to the deal, the cost is steep with interest.
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