Goodreads Bookshelf
Xantolo
Continuing to listen to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, I was struck by the passage in which she recounts the Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.
Dia de los Muertos is still an entirely happy ritual of remembered one's departed loved ones, welcoming them into the living room by means of altars covered with photographs and other treasured things that bring memory into the present. (289)
Writing about its cultural roots from the Aztecs, she notes that
When Aztec people left their bodies, they were presumed to be on an exciting trip through the ether. It wasn't something to cry about, except that the living still wanted to visit with them. People's sadness was not for the departed, but for themselves, and could be addressed through ritual visiting called Xantolo, an ordinary communion between the dead and the living.
[...]
I'm drawn to this celebration, I'm sure, because I live in a culture that allows almost no room for dead people. [...] When I cultivate my garden, I'm spending time with my grandfather, sometimes recalling deeply buried memories of him, decades after his death. While shaking beans from an envelope, I have been overwhelmed by a vision of my Pappaw's speckled beans and flat corn seeds in peanut butter jars in his garage, lined up in rows, curated as carefully as a museum collection. That's Xantolo, a memory space opened before my eyes, which has no name in my language. (290)
I've been feeling a fair bit of that myself the past few days. Readers may recall my memorial for my friend James. A couple days ago, his wife e-mailed me and the bass from our old quartet, asking about James's favorite barbershop songs, as the chorus from his hometown wanted to sing some of them at his memorial service.
That got me to thinking about all the songs we sang together, many of which I have since taught to my all-male singing groups here. Every time, I realized, he (and the other guys in the quartet, but especially him, the driving force and the lead singer) was in my mind. That's especially true now as my double quartet starts learning one of the songs that James brought to our group, a barbershop-ish arrangement of "Today" by John Denver. It seems especially appropriate as a sort of "seize the day" song, which I think at least on some level is what James always knew he had to do. Given his health problems, he probably didn't expect to live a long, carefree life, which I think feeds into the intensity with which he approached the things he cared about... and the relative apathy he showed to other things that weren't as important. Life's too short to spend it doing things you hate, especially when your body bears a constant reminder of how short life really is.
And that's my xantolo story.