To Mourn and to Honor

On a recent dark night, under the half-light of a waxing moon, gusty
winds swept through Tucson.

At the Splinter Brothers and Sisters Warehouse studios, just east of
the railroad tracks, a chain-link fence rattled in the breeze. Every
once in a while, a train whistle wailed.

The weather had shifted, with October’s balmy Indian summer suddenly
giving way to a wintry chill. Ghostly November was coming. And a band
of brave souls, wrapped up in sweaters and scarves, were outside
creating homages to the dead.

Carol Bender was leaning over a giant puppet head of her late
husband, David Rowe, dead since 2003. His papier-mâché
likeness lay on the ground at her feet, his white hair curling onto his
forehead over his big blue eyes.

“It doesn’t really look like him,” she said with a smile. But it was
close enough. “He had curly, dark blonde hair and very blue eyes.”

Carol was making a David mask to wear in the All Souls Procession,
occurring this Sunday, Nov. 8. For the long, haunting march down Fourth
Avenue and through downtown, Carol will have the puppet mounted on a
backpack frame. David’s head will tower over her own, teetering 12 feet
in the air.

She’s given him a lab coat—he was a scientist at the
University of Arizona until his death from liver cancer at 53—and
she herself will be hidden in the coat’s white folds. Wearing his head
and his work uniform, she’ll march to mourn him, and to honor him.

“It feels like the right time,” Carol said. “It took me a long time
before I could talk about him without crying.”

The late David Rowe was not the only loved one whose effigy was
under construction in the crowded dirt-floor courtyard. A team from the
Center for Biological Diversity was crafting an image of the late
jaguar Macho B. The last known wild jaguar in the United States, Macho
B was controversially euthanized by Arizona wildlife officials last
March.

A collective of Peruvian artists, Entre Peruanos, was busily making
condor headdresses for the flutists who will join their band of devil
dancers this year.

A papier-mâché head of Glenda Ward stood poised on a
platform, the handiwork of her daughter, Meli Engel. Glenda wore a
crown on her head, and her nose was long and curving.

“My mom was pretty young, 62,” said Meli, her own head snug in a
gray woolen cap. “She passed away a few months ago. She was a queen,”
she added, nodding at the regal crown. “It was her way or the highway.
But she cooked; she loved people, and people loved her.”

Meli had an elaborate procession planned. Two friends will wear
different Glenda heads, and still more friends will carry a banner
painted with “personal hieroglyphics” about her life.

It might be hard for Meli to act out her grief in public at All
Souls, she said, but “my friends will be with me. My girlfriend and her
daughter and other friends will help.”

Meli and company will have the support of a cast of thousands.
Organizers estimated that last year, between those marching and those
watching, 15,000 people thronged the All Souls Procession.

Started in 1990 by Susan Kay Johnson, an artist grieving over her
father’s death, the procession has become a magical Tucson tradition.
Costumed marchers bearing homemade effigies of the dead walk to the
rhythms of a panoply of music-makers, from Scottish bagpipers to
Peruvian pipe players.

They might dress in skulls borrowed from the Mexican Día de
los Muertos or Halloween, or, as the Peruvian collective Entre Peruanos
does, dress as the devils of Andean lore. Parents push costumed babies
in strollers, and giant floats and memorial shrines go by on wheels,
often with the help of the rolling-wheel experts at BICAS, the bicycle
collective. Last year, a man and a woman carried a coffin representing
the borderlands’ migrant dead.

Sometimes the revelers dance to the music, celebrating life; other
times, they stumble along, overcome by grief.

“What you have here is a festival that addresses an archetypal human
experience—death,” said Daniel Meyers, board president of Many
Mouths One Stomach, the nonprofit that organizes the procession each
year. “The body dies, and love continues. What do we do with all that
love?”

During All Souls, mourners find plenty to do with that love. They
can write a message to their lost loved one and place it in a giant urn
that will be set afire at the end of the parade, their words wafting up
in smoke to the heavens. Or they can have a photo of their mom or their
cat or their favorite jaguar projected larger-than-life on building
façades along the parade route.

“Some make a mask of the loved one, or wear a T-shirt printed with a
loved one’s picture, or carry signs evoking that person, calling them
back to be present,” Meyers said. “It’s a very powerful thing.”

A former Jungian analyst, Meyers sees the home-grown All Souls
Procession as a ritual that engenders “deep community, deep healing and
deep unity.”

Mourners in America sometimes have trouble finding an outlet for
their grief, he said. “American culture has a bias against it. It
expects you to be introspective for a week or two if your mother
dies—the person who birthed you. The culture doesn’t have a way
to express that grief.”

Mourners are invited to “be as creative as possible. In a mass
public ceremony, we’re saying, ‘Come and express yourself.’ We invite
all religions and ethnic groups.”

The grand finale is an explosion of talent. Most spectacularly, the
fire dancers of Flam Chen soar through the air. And this year, Calexico
may appear on the Franklin Flats stage west of Stone, for Flor de
Muertos, the indie movie filmmaker Danny Vinik is making. (See the
accompanying story.)

Like Nevada’s Burning Man, Tucson’s All Souls is a modern, invented
festival, but it has links to ancient rituals from Europe and Mexico.
It’s named for the Catholic religious feast of All Souls, still
celebrated by the church on Nov. 2, following All Saints on Nov. 1. But
these Christian holy days honoring the dead—the saints are
presumed to be in heaven, with the souls still struggling in purgatory
and needing our prayers—were glommed on to earlier festivals.

In old Ireland, Samhain, the Celtic New Year, was celebrated on Nov.
1, marking the time when the veil separating the dead from the living
grew thinner. On Samhain Eve, the dead could return to Earth, and
bonfires were lit to guide their way. When Catholics turned up on the
Emerald Isle, they tried to Christianize the old pagan feast by moving
All Saints—the feast of All Hallows—from the spring to Nov.
1.

Oct. 31 became All Hallows Eve, and some of its
traditions—costumes conjuring the dead and demons, lighted
candles in carved turnips—were brought to a puzzled United States
by Irish immigrants in the 19th century. Over time, the festival’s
spiritual dimensions were lost, and it evolved into the American
Halloween. But even the modern secular holiday has candles lighted in
the darkness, and spirits traveling abroad.

Mexico’s Day of the Dead goes back thousands of years as well.
Indigenous peoples performed masked rituals commemorating the dead. As
in Ireland, Catholic missionaries put a Christian stamp on older
traditions. Día de los Muertos became associated with All Souls
and evolved into “a remarkable blending of Catholic and native beliefs
and observances,” folklorist Jim Griffith has written.

Despite its ubiquitous skulls and skeletons, the Mexican holiday is
a cheerful, even comical celebration of death as a part of life.
Families picnic in the cemetery and cheerfully clean up the graves of
their loved ones; they return by night carrying lighted candles. At
home, they eat pan de muertos and sugared skulls and set up
shrines ornamented with marigolds and photos of their dead.

The holiday has stretched into a days-long celebration, and can
extend from Oct. 31 through Nov. 2. Nov. 1 is the day reserved for
remembering lost children, los angelitos.

Mixed and meshed along the border, these forms have survived or been
revitalized in some form in Tucson’s arty All Souls. The jaguar Macho B
will have a Mexican-style memorial shrine, rolled alongside his dancing
jaguar body. His cloth body, incidentally, will be modeled on a Chinese
dragon.

The Peruvian arts collective hopes to inject a dose of untouched
Latin culture into the festivities.

“I felt the procession was not representing the Latin-American
community,” explained Roberto Ojeda, one of the Peruvians making condor
headdresses last week. So he got a little grant in 2008 and brought the
flute rhythms of the Andes—and its folk devils—to Tucson’s
streets.

Susan Kay Johnson lives in a church, literally.

Once a Baptist sanctuary in the Dunbar Spring neighborhood, just
north of downtown, the church now houses Susan, her husband and a
collection of figurative sculptures and giant-head puppets.

Propped up permanently in a corner is the head of one Eldon
Danhausen, Susan’s professor at the Art Institute of Chicago and a dear
friend. “He was my art mentor, like my real father,” she said, and when
he died, she was grief-stricken. But she knew exactly what to do: make
a sculptural likeness of his head and march him through the autumnal
streets of Tucson.

After all, it was Johnson who created the All Souls Procession back
in 1990.

“My father had died,” she said one sunny afternoon in mid-October,
before the weather turned. She sat in a patio outside the church, near
a big dragon on wheels she hauled through the procession one year. “I
wanted to honor him.”

Johnson found that the typical American funeral that her father got
in rural Illinois didn’t begin to help her with the complicated
feelings she had toward him.

“It was like living with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” she said.
Cheerful one minute, raging the next, he was a sailor who had survived
the bombing at Pearl Harbor. He was a tool and dye maker, and on the
fateful day of Dec. 7, 1941, “he happened to be on shore, working in a
shop.” She believes the terror of that moment stayed with him. “He
never talked about it once.”

Like Daniel Meyers, Susan had studied Carl Jung.

“He traveled around the world and studied people’s rituals,” she
said. “He thought it was important that we express ourselves.”

She came up with the idea of performing a community ritual here in
Tucson to express her sorrow.

“A death like that—mother, father, sibling—affects you
deeply. I had unexpressed emotions,” she explained. “I knew a little
about Day of the Dead. I love the things Mexicans do around Day of the
Dead; they’re free in expressing themselves. But I didn’t want to use
it; I’m not Hispanic.

“I liked the idea of All Souls, celebrated around the world.”

Susan had worked for Arizona Opera for four years, so she knew how
to make costumes and masks. She had a studio downtown then, and she
transformed the space with black cloth and lights.

“I made skeletons out of wire and rubber, masks and bones,” and hung
them all over the studio. She put hinges on the molds she uses to make
her life-size figurative sculptures and opened them up to make double
figures. Assorted other artists and friends, including singer
To-Ree-Nee Wolf McArdle and musicians Daniel Moore and Mat Bevel,
volunteered to dance and sing and play.

Outside, Susan erected an altar, lit by candles, and people looked
through the studio windows to watch the performance inside.

“We started it on All Hallows’ Eve and did it for three nights. We
did the performance and then a procession, through the alley and down
Congress Street to the Tucson Convention Center Leo Rich (Theater).”
People wrote wishes on little paper boats, and set them a-sail in the
fountains, a lit candle on each one.

“We tried to have lots of cultural traditions,” she said.

Enough people saw the event, either peering into her studio or
marching along Congress, that Susan was besieged with requests. “My
mother died,” someone would say. Or, “My dog died. Can’t you help
me?’

The next year, Susan got a grant from the old Tucson Arts District
Partnership to teach mask-making and lantern-making. She turned the
Armory Park stage into an altar, and more people flocked to her
procession.

A Tucson tradition was born.

A Little Angels procession was added a few years back, the night
before the main march, for kids to memorialize grandmas who’ve gone to
heaven and pets who’ve moved on to the big kennel in the sky. (A Little
Angels shrine will be set up in the library plaza to honor children who
have died.)

In a little border cultural collision, the workshop on Stone Avenue
where kids paint wings and make halos is just a few doors down from a
Mexican piñata-maker. This time of year, the piñata-maker
specializes in Celtic witches and skeletons and pumpkins for
Halloween.

Jhon Sanders ran the Little Angels workshop for Many Mouths this
year, cutting out several hundred tiny pairs of wings with the help of
a team of volunteers. Two kids who painted a glittered set of wings
were going in the procession as “animals who died. One of them’s a frog
angel.”

“This gives parents an opportunity to present the idea of
mortality,” he said. “Discussions about death are missing from our
culture.”

The lone child working on her costume at the children’s workshop one
Tuesday night, Grace Thomas, age 4 1/2, decided against the angel
wings. She hadn’t heard anything about the death theme, and she
politely insisted on going as a spider web. Her doting mom and a
costume-design student from the UA were patiently helping her spin a
web out of white fibers.

Despite her eclectic choice, Grace seemed to have already picked up
the festival’s ancestral theme. She wanted tiny spiders on the web
she’d wear on her back, and first and foremost, she said, “I want a
Mommy and Daddy spider.”

Over at Splinter Brothers and Sisters, adults who’d suffered life
sorrows that Grace had not were wrestling with their own demons. Or, in
the case of two Mexican-American women, Marie Rosas and Lupe Lopez,
their own snakes.

Marie was repairing a snake-haired Medusa head straight out of Greek
mythology. She and Lupe have been in the procession five
times—”It’s very emotional. It’s a good thing. It helps you let
things go”—and last year, she wore the Medusa for the first
time.

“It was for the men in my life, my father, my grandfather, my
uncle,” she said. But wind and rain whipped the procession, and
marchers had trouble keeping their puppet heads aloft. Marie’s was
badly damaged, and she had to pull off the snakes.

Worse, it was a kind of torture to walk the mile and a half with the
heavy structure—70 pounds and 13 feet high—on her back,
blowing around in the wind. But she kept up the struggle, re-enacting
in a sense what her father went through when he was dying. It made her
feel all the closer to his suffering.

“I had to fight some battle,” she said. “I was crying. My dad fought
with cancer. I wanted to take the puppet off. But I had to keep going
like he did, the hurt and the scare he went through.”

Artist Matt Cotten, one of the masterminds behind Puppetworks,
Tucson’s puppetmaking collective, has been helping the grief-stricken
of Tucson make their memorial masks for at least 10 years.

On the cold night last week when Carol Bender was making her David
head, Matt wandered around the dirt yard at the Splinter studios. It
was crowded with dozens of maskmakers, adults and kids alike. Buckets
of clay and wet strips of papier-mâché littered the
tables, and the puppets on the ground made walking difficult. A Weed
and Seed grant helped pay for the materials—clay, paint, cloth,
paper—but Many Mouths is struggling now to amass enough money to
pay for all of All Souls.

Matt stopped to help Carol.

“It’s top-heavy,” he explained gently when she tried on the David
head and frame for the first time and tried to keep her balance in the
wind. “It takes some getting used to. You have to squat a little.”

Matt has had losses of his own. Inside one of the Splinter sheds,
leaning up against the wall, are giant puppet heads: His dad, Robert R.
Cotten, who died at 89, and his maternal grandma, Rachel Marden Boyer,
who died at 99 in 2003, “the same year my daughter Lucy was born.”

Just like Carol, he couldn’t bear to make or wear the masks of his
beloved dead right away, when his grief was fresh. But he eventually
celebrated their lives by striding in the procession with thousands of
other mourners, the heads of his lost elders sailing above his own.

“What’s so cool about the procession,” he said, “is that it blurs
the line between participants and audience. Anyone is welcome to come
out on the road and become part of a ritual performance.”

Margaret Regan dedicates this story to her mother, Mary G. Regan,
who died July 9 at the age of 89. Nov. 5 would have been her 90th
birthday.

All Souls Weekend Events

Thursday, Nov. 5

Amparo Sánchezwith members of Calexico

9 p.m.

Solar Culture

31 E. Toole Ave.

$10

884-0874

Friday, Nov. 6

Shooting Souls Photography Exhibition and Contest

Opening at 8 p.m.

Hotel Congress

311 E. Congress St.

Free

622-8848

Saturday, Nov. 7

Little Angels children’s events

3 to 11 p.m.: Personal Altars Vigil

3 p.m.: Art Activities

4:30 p.m.: Story Performance

5 p.m.: Workshops

6 p.m.: Procession of Little Angels

6:45 p.m.: Little Angels Finale

7:30 p.m.: Spoken Word Soul Poetry

Jacomé Plaza

Joel D. Valdez Main Library

101 N. Stone Ave.

Free

Sunday, Nov. 8

All Souls Procession

5 p.m.: Gather outside Epic Café, Fourth Avenue and
University Boulevard

(Advance registration for floats, groups, musical bands recommended
at www.allsoulsprocession.org)

6 p.m.: Procession begins: Fourth Avenue to Congress Street to Stone
Avenue to Franklin Docks

Grand Finale: Performances by Flam Chen, Community Spirit Group,
Seven Pipers Bagpipe Society, Magpie Collective and Paul Bagley;
burning of the great urn

Donations needed and welcome

www.allsoulsprocession.org

Calexico and filming of Flor de Muertos

with Amparo Sánchez, Mariachi Luz de Luna,
Sergio Mendoza y La Orkesta, Salvador Duran and Molehill
Orkestrah

8:30 p.m.

Rialto Theatre

318 E. Congress St.

$30 general admission in advance; $32 day of; balcony sold out

740-1000

This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2009.