In a particularly heartbreaking example, many Muslims would like to be able to open funeral homes in the U.S. and serve their communities as licensed funeral directors. Islamic custom is to wash and purify the body immediately after death before burying it as quickly as possible, ideally before nightfall. The Muslim community rejects embalming, recoiling at the idea of cutting into the body and injecting it with chemicals and preservatives. Yet many states have draconian regulations requiring funeral homes to offer embalming and all funeral directors to be trained as embalmers, despite the fact that the embalming process itself is never required. Muslim funeral directors must compromise their beliefs if they want a chance to help their community in death.
Sarah’s first, and most lasting, gateway into Mexican culture was the work of the painter Frida Kahlo, Mexico’s heroína del dolor, the heroine of pain. In her 1932 painting Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, a defiant Frida straddles an imaginary boundary between Mexico and Detroit, where she was living at the time with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. The Mexican side is strewn with skulls, ruins, plants, and flowers with thick roots burrowed deep into the soil. The Detroit side contains factories, skyscrapers, and plumes of smoke—an industrial city that hides the natural cycle of life and death.
While living in Detroit, Kahlo became pregnant. She wrote of the pregnancy to her former physician, Leo Eloesser, her devoted correspondent from 1932 to 1951. She worried that pregnancy was too dangerous, that her body had been damaged by the famous streetcar accident that shattered part of her pelvis and punctured her uterus. Kahlo reported that her doctor in Detroit “gave me quinine and very strong castor oil for purge.” When the chemicals failed to end the pregnancy, her doctor declined to perform a surgical abortion, and Kahlo faced the prospect of carrying the risky pregnancy to term. She begged Eloesser to write to her doctor in Detroit, “since performing an abortion is against the law, maybe he is scared or something, and later it would be impossible to undergo such an operation.” We don’t know how Eloesser responded to Kahlo’s request, but two months later, she suffered a violent miscarriage.
In a painting she created after her experience, Henry Ford Hospital (La cama volando), Frida lies naked on a hospital bed, the sheets soaked with blood. Objects float in the space around her, attached to her stomach by umbilical cords made of red ribbon: a male fetus (her son), medical objects, and symbols like a snail and an orchid. Detroit’s stark, manufacturing skyline disturbs the background. Regardless of her visceral distaste for Detroit and the horrible misfortune that occurred there, art historian Victor Zamudio Taylor claims it was here that “Kahlo, for the first time, consciously decides that she will paint about herself, and that she will paint the most private and painful aspects of herself.”
For Sarah, adrift amid a sea of “God has a plan for you” banalities, the frankness of Kahlo’s art and letters served as a balm. In Kahlo she saw another Mexican woman forced to grapple with impossible choices for her child and her own body. Kahlo was able to project this pain and confusion through her work, portraying her body and her grief without shame.
Sarah’s son died in July 2013. In November of that same year, she and her partner Ruben, who is also Mexican American, visited Mexico during Días de los Muertos. “We weren’t coming to ‘visit’ death. We weren’t tourists,” Sarah said. “We were living with death every single day.”
Among the elaborate altars for the dead and the very public images of skulls and skeletons, Sarah found both the confrontation and the peace that she hadn’t found in California. “Being in Mexico, it felt like a place to lay down my grief. It was recognized. I wasn’t making other people uncomfortable. I could breathe.”
Among the places they visited was Guanajuato, home to a famed collection of mummies. In the late nineteenth century, bodies buried in the local cemetery were subject to a fee, a grave tax, for “perpetual” interment. If the family couldn’t pay the fee, the bones were eventually removed to make room for a fresh body. During one such disinterment, the city was shocked to discover that they were not digging up bones but “flesh mummified in grotesque forms and facial expressions.” The soil’s chemical components, along with the atmosphere in Guanajuato, had naturally mummified the bodies.
The city continued to unearth mummified bodies over the course of six decades, cremating the less impressive mummies and putting the truly expressive ones on display in the town museum, El Museo de las Momias.
Author Ray Bradbury visited these mummies in the late 1970s and wrote a story about them, adding that “the experience so wounded and terrified me, I could hardly wait to flee Mexico. I had nightmares about dying and having to remain in the halls of the dead with those propped and wired bodies.”
Because the mummies were not intentionally preserved by the hands of other humans but naturally mummified by their environment, many of them have gaping mouths and twisted arms and necks. After death, the body reverts to “primary flaccidity”—all of the muscles in the body relax, dropping the jaw open, loosening tension in the eyelids, and affording the joints extreme flexibility. In death, corpses don’t hold themselves together. They no longer have to play by the living’s rules. The visual ghastliness of the Guanajuato mummies was not designed to “terrify” Mr. Bradbury, but a result of the bodies’ normal postmortem bioprocesses.
The mummies, still on display, did not have the same confronting effect on Sarah. She turned a dark corner and stopped in front of the mummified body of a small baby girl, dressed in white and lying on velvet. “She looked like an angel with this halo of light around her, and I swear that in that moment I felt like I could stand there forever and just look at her.”
Another woman noticed Sarah’s silent tears and went to get her a tissue, quietly holding her arm.
Other child mummies in the museum had their own props, such as scepters and crowns. These were the Angelitos, or Little Angels. Prior to the mid-twentieth century in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, a dead baby or child was considered a spiritual being, almost a saint, with a direct audience with God. These Angelitos, free from sin, could offer favors for the family members they left behind.
The godmother would prepare the body, washing and dressing it in the garb of a pint-sized saint, and surround it with candles and flowers. The mother wouldn’t see the corpse until after this process, at which point the body had relinquished the burdens of grief, transformed into a heavenly being ready to take its place by God’s right side.
Friends and family were invited to the party, not only to honor the child but also to impress and gain its favor; remember, it now possessed great spiritual power. Sometimes the child was even carried from party to party, with other children acting as the pallbearers, with the parents and family in procession. Often the Angelito was photographed or painted amid a brilliant tableau.
For Sarah, though she holds no belief in the saints or the afterlife, it was the recognition of the child’s death that moved her. “These children were treated as so special. Something was done just for them,” she said. There were parties and paintings and games and, most of all, tasks to perform for the child—tasks beyond the lonely, interminable silences.