[Part II in Marcus J Freed’s series “Facing Death: innovative insights on our final destination”]
I am writing from central Mexico where preparations are underway for the annual Día de Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Bejeweled skulls are on sale in stores with their ornate morbidity. Families are preparing for their festive graveside picnics by deceased relatives’ tombstones, and makeup is being chosen for painting skulls on picnickers’ faces. Meanwhile I’m just trying to get to shul each day to say kaddish for my dear Dad who passed away in January. To use my father’s words, I need this morbidity like a hole in the head, since this year every day feels like a Day of the Dead.
I met a beautiful woman here, and we went on a dinner party date with another couple. She’s a relationship coach who speaks with great authority on how to achieve marital success, despite being single and never married.
“I’m also a medium,” she said at the dinner gathering before sharing an anecdote of a recent exorcism she performed at a nearby house. Since death is regularly on my mind, I exorcized myself from the table until she switched to cheerier subjects like the shopping list of requirements she has for her dream husband.
As with so many dates these days, the bottom line is: “I want a man who is masculine! A man who is strong! A man who will lead! And this is how I want him to lead — by doing A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H.”
Heaven forbid this fantasy strong masculine man-leader does not do exactly what he is told, and lead in the precise way that he is instructed.
With all this Day of the Dead vibe, part of me wonders if I didn’t actually die on the operating table at Cedars-Sinai on the third of November 2017, after being hit by a car and having a near-death experience. It feels like I’m a ghost stuck in an endless hellscape that is the Jewish dating scene for people over the age of 35. I need a Kabbalist-exorcist to extricate me from this dystopic relationship wasteland.
There is a beauty to Day of the Dead — much like the peaceful joy of the movie “Coco,” rather than the drug-fueled chaos of “Beetlejuice” (the original movie, rather than its recent bizarre sequel). There is a time for a franchise to die a peaceful death, rather like Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, who was finally defeated by the toughest Bond villain of them all: 21st-century toxic feminism.
We walked past a cemetery on the way back from shul on Friday night, and I stopped to take a look. There was a sweetness and peace to it, as if the transitioned souls were at Coco-esque rest, awaiting visits from their ancestors with chirpy picnics. It was unlike the Gothic English Christian cemeteries of my homeland — the nationwide memorials and roadside cenotaphs to all the boys who died in the two World Wars, and the avoidable tragedy of World War One, where entire villages were sent out in the same platoon, wiping out the young men of England. Often, these were bands of literal brothers as the army companies contained siblings who died on the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme.
The peaceful graveyard out here is unlike the Gothic splendor of Highgate Cemetery in London, where you can visit the tomb of Karl Marx, the false prophet of NYC Democratic Mayor-nominee Zohran Mamdani and the idol-god for presumptive Democratic Party leader and next presidential nominee, AOC.
That said, my father is in a peaceful resting place in Bushey, Hertfordshire, in the North London area, which is the main cemetery for Anglo-Jewry’s Orthodox synagogues in the south. I pass the grave of emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks whenever visiting my dad, and I’m grateful that these two great men were part of my life. I often feel that I won a jackpot.
When we embrace the temporal nature of our time on this physical plane, there is freedom to be found. Day of the Dead is a reminder that every morning we get to experience, enjoy and appreciate another day of life.
Marcus J Freed is an actor and writer. His critically-acclaimed play “Marcus Is Alive” is on tour; www.marcusisalive.com. IG: @marcusjfreed.
