Día de Muertos
Rachel Whalen | Nonfiction, Spring 2026
—For Joel
In January 2023, I saw an invincible man. He stood atop the pyramid of the moon and pressed a stone to his eye. He looked into the sun. He told me he was falling in love.
He died on a Friday. We had been expecting him at the party. Instead, we got a phone call informing us that he’d had a sudden, fatal heart attack.
After Joel’s wake in Mexico City, they took him to a Tathí, Hidalgo. They carried him up in the hills, to the crest of green near his grandmother’s house, where she had planted fruit trees decades before. I went there with Lili, a friend of Joel’s since high school, on what would have been Joel’s 35th birthday. I hardly knew Lili then, but our shared grief and mutual companionship quickly brought us extremely close (“esposas,” we later dubbed each other, as we’d joke that we were going to marry each other for mutual green card benefits). As we neared the small town, the sprawling city was replaced by fields of nopales. We turned onto Joel’s family’s road, where a discrete horseracing track attracted local spectators; we drove past horses flying under the open, arid sky.
Joel was buried in a small cemetery just beyond the ranch. We went there the following day, Joel’s mother, his brother, his aunts, his grandmother, his cousins, Lili, and myself. There was no pyramid where his body lay—per custom, there was not even an adornment. I learnt that the grave is meant to be left bare for one full year. Joel’s relatives said the rosary, and in my mind I accompanied them, tracing those same words in English’s sharp tones. I felt an immense sense of panic. “We can’t leave him here,” I said. But we did. We washed our hands and left the cemetery, then clambered down the mountain, the sky above us opening its impossibly wide jaw.
After a few days of cooking, eating, laughing, crying, and talking about Joel, we said our goodbyes to his family and prepared to return to the city. Before we left, his grandmother pulled me aside.
“¿Eres amiguita de m’ijo?” she said, peering at me through cloudy eyes. She began to tell me about her home. “My husband brought me here on a mule,” she said. “I was 16 when we married. He brought me up the hill to this ranch. We planted guayava and apples and orange trees here.” She was crying. “But it’s all gone now. It’s all gone.”
____________
About a month before Joel’s death, my anxiety had taken an obsessive turn. I wasn’t sleeping well, I was ruminating. At first, I did the usual things: I’d walk twenty minutes to the metro before walking twenty minutes back, sure that I’d left the stove on. Then, I began to worry incessantly about my teeth. I was convinced they were shifting, about to fall out. I would spend hours in front of the mirror observing them, manage to assure myself that everything was fine, and then return to the mirror five minutes later in a panic.
“Do you know what preoccupation with teeth signifies?” my psychiatrist asked me when I told him this. I knew it meant a fear of death. My mouth, I felt, was a microcosm of my finitude. My skin would keep changing, my hair, my hands. But my teeth are the teeth I would die with.
About a month after Joel’s birthday celebration, I went to Lili’s house to celebrate Day of the Dead with her and her mother. I brought printed pictures of Joel, of Lili’s pets, of her relatives. We went to her local market and bought copal, papel picado, cempasuchiles. We spent hours working at the little table in her house, turning it into a colorful ofrenda. Lili was concerned that she’d forgotten to print a picture of her friend’s baby, who’d passed away that year as well.
“You’ll have to put it up later,” her mom said. “Otherwise, he won’t know to come back.”
There was nothing superficial in this ritual. For Lili and her family and countless others, the act of creating an altar was a true and earnest communication with the dead, a moment to coalesce with those of us who are still part of our families, just lingering on the other side.
____________
At the end of October, Mexico explodes in orange, in papier-mâché skulls and catrina costumes. In the cobblestone streets of small pueblos outside the city or winding through lesser-trodden paths within the city itself, brilliant cempasuchil petals lead from the curb through open front doors. Their circular petals invite a possibility of entrance, a natural structure emphasizing their purpose as portals between this world and the next. These days are imbued with history and meaning, spiritual connections and family remembrance.
My fiancé is Mexican, but his family never formally celebrated Day of the Dead. This year is the first year we’ve made an ofrenda together. As both of us are relative newcomers to this tradition, we stumbled around the local market, searching for whatever we might need to assemble a small gathering place for our deceased. We put out a table cloth on our side table and adorned it with candles, flowers, and a little clay dog (as the legend goes, the dogs we had in life guide us into the land of the dead when we pass). We put up photos of our relatives, and I put up one of Joel.
With the ofrenda, it’s easy to imagine them all together, in one place—my grandparents from Iowa and my partner’s from Atlacomulco and my friend from Mexico City. I consider that the link for all of these people, their celestial meeting point, isn’t really the ofrenda, but us. As my partner and I plan for our marriage and begin to form a family, we unify these people from such distant places who lived such different lives. Día de Muertos serves as a reminder that they are immortal: we are their living altar.
Almost two years ago now, the morning after Joel’s passing, I woke up at the crack of dawn, my eyes swollen, to check my teeth—but something stopped me on the way to the bathroom. It seemed like a bird had crashed into our window in the night—its outline was visible in detail, down to the feathers on its outstretched wings. I let myself think, if only for a moment, that this ghostly silhouette was something else. I looked through it, the way Joel had once looked through obsidian, straight out into the sun.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“The trip I made with Lili to see Joel after his passing was such a sacred and impressionable moment for me. It was the first time a friend of mine had died, and at the same time I was grappling with an internal minefield of anxiety and grief. That experience, and then celebrating Día de Muertos, allowed me to foster a new relationship with death. I now have a completely different understanding of who I am and how I want to live my life.”
Rachel Whalen is a writer and translator from Buffalo, New York. She has an MFA from NYU and currently lives in Mexico City. You can find more of her work at rachel-whalen.com.
Día de Muertos
Rachel Whalen | Nonfiction, Spring 2026
—For Joel
In January 2023, I saw an invincible man. He stood atop the pyramid of the moon and pressed a stone to his eye. He looked into the sun. He told me he was falling in love.
He died on a Friday. We had been expecting him at the party. Instead, we got a phone call informing us that he’d had a sudden, fatal heart attack.
After Joel’s wake in Mexico City, they took him to a Tathí, Hidalgo. They carried him up in the hills, to the crest of green near his grandmother’s house, where she had planted fruit trees decades before. I went there with Lili, a friend of Joel’s since high school, on what would have been Joel’s 35th birthday. I hardly knew Lili then, but our shared grief and mutual companionship quickly brought us extremely close (“esposas,” we later dubbed each other, as we’d joke that we were going to marry each other for mutual green card benefits). As we neared the small town, the sprawling city was replaced by fields of nopales. We turned onto Joel’s family’s road, where a discrete horseracing track attracted local spectators; we drove past horses flying under the open, arid sky.
Joel was buried in a small cemetery just beyond the ranch. We went there the following day, Joel’s mother, his brother, his aunts, his grandmother, his cousins, Lili, and myself. There was no pyramid where his body lay—per custom, there was not even an adornment. I learnt that the grave is meant to be left bare for one full year. Joel’s relatives said the rosary, and in my mind I accompanied them, tracing those same words in English’s sharp tones. I felt an immense sense of panic. “We can’t leave him here,” I said. But we did. We washed our hands and left the cemetery, then clambered down the mountain, the sky above us opening its impossibly wide jaw.
After a few days of cooking, eating, laughing, crying, and talking about Joel, we said our goodbyes to his family and prepared to return to the city. Before we left, his grandmother pulled me aside.
“¿Eres amiguita de m’ijo?” she said, peering at me through cloudy eyes. She began to tell me about her home. “My husband brought me here on a mule,” she said. “I was 16 when we married. He brought me up the hill to this ranch. We planted guayava and apples and orange trees here.” She was crying. “But it’s all gone now. It’s all gone.”
____________
About a month before Joel’s death, my anxiety had taken an obsessive turn. I wasn’t sleeping well, I was ruminating. At first, I did the usual things: I’d walk twenty minutes to the metro before walking twenty minutes back, sure that I’d left the stove on. Then, I began to worry incessantly about my teeth. I was convinced they were shifting, about to fall out. I would spend hours in front of the mirror observing them, manage to assure myself that everything was fine, and then return to the mirror five minutes later in a panic.
“Do you know what preoccupation with teeth signifies?” my psychiatrist asked me when I told him this. I knew it meant a fear of death. My mouth, I felt, was a microcosm of my finitude. My skin would keep changing, my hair, my hands. But my teeth are the teeth I would die with.
About a month after Joel’s birthday celebration, I went to Lili’s house to celebrate Day of the Dead with her and her mother. I brought printed pictures of Joel, of Lili’s pets, of her relatives. We went to her local market and bought copal, papel picado, cempasuchiles. We spent hours working at the little table in her house, turning it into a colorful ofrenda. Lili was concerned that she’d forgotten to print a picture of her friend’s baby, who’d passed away that year as well.
“You’ll have to put it up later,” her mom said. “Otherwise, he won’t know to come back.”
There was nothing superficial in this ritual. For Lili and her family and countless others, the act of creating an altar was a true and earnest communication with the dead, a moment to coalesce with those of us who are still part of our families, just lingering on the other side.
____________
At the end of October, Mexico explodes in orange, in papier-mâché skulls and catrina costumes. In the cobblestone streets of small pueblos outside the city or winding through lesser-trodden paths within the city itself, brilliant cempasuchil petals lead from the curb through open front doors. Their circular petals invite a possibility of entrance, a natural structure emphasizing their purpose as portals between this world and the next. These days are imbued with history and meaning, spiritual connections and family remembrance.
My fiancé is Mexican, but his family never formally celebrated Day of the Dead. This year is the first year we’ve made an ofrenda together. As both of us are relative newcomers to this tradition, we stumbled around the local market, searching for whatever we might need to assemble a small gathering place for our deceased. We put out a table cloth on our side table and adorned it with candles, flowers, and a little clay dog (as the legend goes, the dogs we had in life guide us into the land of the dead when we pass). We put up photos of our relatives, and I put up one of Joel.
With the ofrenda, it’s easy to imagine them all together, in one place—my grandparents from Iowa and my partner’s from Atlacomulco and my friend from Mexico City. I consider that the link for all of these people, their celestial meeting point, isn’t really the ofrenda, but us. As my partner and I plan for our marriage and begin to form a family, we unify these people from such distant places who lived such different lives. Día de Muertos serves as a reminder that they are immortal: we are their living altar.
Almost two years ago now, the morning after Joel’s passing, I woke up at the crack of dawn, my eyes swollen, to check my teeth—but something stopped me on the way to the bathroom. It seemed like a bird had crashed into our window in the night—its outline was visible in detail, down to the feathers on its outstretched wings. I let myself think, if only for a moment, that this ghostly silhouette was something else. I looked through it, the way Joel had once looked through obsidian, straight out into the sun.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“The trip I made with Lili to see Joel after his passing was such a sacred and impressionable moment for me. It was the first time a friend of mine had died, and at the same time I was grappling with an internal minefield of anxiety and grief. That experience, and then celebrating Día de Muertos, allowed me to foster a new relationship with death. I now have a completely different understanding of who I am and how I want to live my life.”
Rachel Whalen is a writer and translator from Buffalo, New York. She has an MFA from NYU and currently lives in Mexico City. You can find more of her work at rachel-whalen.com.