Baskets sat atop the cement platforms of the graves, so the dead who returned would have something to carry their offerings back in. Small wood fires burned, keeping the gathered families warm. A band, made up of trombones, trumpets, drums, and a massive tuba, moved from grave to grave, playing songs that sounded, to my untrained ear, like ranchera mashups of mariachi and college fight songs.
Sarah stopped at the grave of Marco Antonio Barriga, who died at only one year old. A picture of Marco showed a dove flying above him. His grave was a fortress, seven feet high, reflecting the size of his parents’ grief. Marco had died twenty years before, but his grave was still covered in candles and flowers, proof that the pain of losing a child never goes away.
Before coming to Mexico, I had known that Sarah’s son had died. But I did not know the circumstances. Alone in our hotel room, she revealed the devastating truth.
At Sarah’s first ultrasound, a chatty technician slid the wand over Sarah’s stomach and suddenly fell silent. “I’m going to bring the doctor in,” she announced.
At the second ultrasound, the specialist was astonishingly blunt. “Ah, I see a club foot here,” she narrated, “this hand has three fingers; this hand has four. Poor development in the heart. Oh, look—he has two eyes, though! Most don’t.” And then the final kick to the gut: “I just don’t think this pregnancy is going to be viable.”
Sarah’s baby had trisomy 13, a rare chromosomal condition that causes intellectual and physical abnormalities. Most babies born with the condition will not live beyond a few days.
A third doctor told Sarah, “If you were my wife, I would tell you not to carry this pregnancy to term.”
A fourth doctor offered two grim choices. The first was to induce labor in the hospital. Her baby would live outside the womb a very short time, and then die. The second was to terminate the pregnancy. “I know someone in Los Angeles who can do this for you,” the doctor said. “She doesn’t usually perform the procedure this late, but I’ll call her for you.”
At this point, Sarah was almost six months pregnant. She made the appointment. She tried to distance herself from her baby to prepare for what was coming, but he was kicking inside her. She didn’t want him taken away. “He wasn’t something foreign inside me; he was my son.”
To end a pregnancy at such a late stage required three appointments over three days. A line of protestors blocked Sarah and Ruben’s path to enter the clinic. “One particularly vile woman screamed over and over that I was a murderer. I couldn’t take it, so I walked directly up to her and screamed in her face, ‘My baby is already dead! How dare you!’ ”
They waited in the clinic for an hour, listening to the faint screams of the protesters outside: “Hey, lady with the dead baby! Listen, we can still save you!”
These were the three worst days of Sarah and Ruben’s lives. A final ultrasound was required. Sarah turned away from the monitor, but Ruben saw their baby moving its hand, as if waving goodbye.
In another room Sarah could hear the wrenching sobs of a young girl who had tried to end her life because she was pregnant. “I don’t want it! I don’t want it!” the girl screamed.
“I wanted to comfort her, and tell her I would take her baby,” Sarah thought, “but that wasn’t really what I wanted. I wanted this baby, my baby.”
On the last day of the procedure, the whole staff came in and stood around her operating table and told Sarah how very sorry they were this had happened, and how they promised to take good care of her. “This is where people treated me with the most kindness,” Sarah said, “in the place that was, for me, a place of death.”
More than three years later, the weight of her son’s death is like a constant anchor in Sarah’s body. In the cemetery in Tzintzuntzan, as Sarah stared at the photo of baby Marco, Ruben lovingly rubbed the small of her back. She broke the silence. “Parents just want to show off their baby. They are so proud. If their baby dies, that opportunity is taken away. This is their chance, to show they still love their child, they are still proud of him.”
Instead of pride, Sarah felt the opposite when her son died. She felt pressure to maintain her “dignity” and to keep her grief silent, lest her visceral trauma depress anyone else.
The Western funeral home loves the word “dignity.” The largest American funeral corporation has even trademarked the word. What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality. Wakes last exactly two hours. Processions lead to the cemetery. The family leaves the cemetery before the casket is even lowered into the ground.
In the cemetery we found grave after grave memorializing young children, including Adriel Teras de la Cruz. He was born on what would have been Sarah’s due date, and lived just over a week. His parents sat at his graveside. A small girl lay on her mother’s chest, and an older boy was tucked up under a blanket next to the grave, sound asleep.
Adopting or adapting the customs of the Días de los Muertos, argues Claudio Lomnitz, could end up saving the emotional lives of Mexico’s neighbors to the north. He writes that Mexicans “have powers of healing, and of healing what is certainly the United States’ most painfully chronic ailment: its denial of death . . . and its abandonment of the bereaved to a kind of solitary confinement.”
ON OUR LAST DAY in Mexico, we returned to Mexico City, and we visited the home of Frida Kahlo, the famous Casa Azul. It was in this house that Kahlo was born, and where she died at age forty-seven. “As outlandish and weird as this sounds, coming here is almost an act of gratitude,” Sarah explained. “Frida helped me. La Casa Azul is a pilgrimage.”
“I think most mothers have at least some fear of being imprisoned by the birth of a child,” Sarah said. “I’m always aware of all the things I can do, all the places I can travel, these pilgrimages I can take, because I don’t have a young child. I’m aware of all the time I have. It makes it more valuable, because I possess this time at a terrible cost.”
On display in La Casa Azul was Kahlo’s painting Frida and the Cesarean, an unfinished work that depicts Frida with a split stomach, lying next to a full-term baby. Sarah gasped when she saw it. “This is my first in-person meeting with one of these pieces. It’s like making friends with a person online and then meeting them face to face, in real life. It’s emotional.”