feast of all souls

I made my own altar of the dead, a la Dios de los Muertos. I even gathered marigolds from our garden, but they were not the gold variety, but maroon and gold, so a different effect. I gathered pictures of my grandparents and lit a pillar candle and put some roses in a vase and created my own prayer time. I sat with them, and it was lovely. In fact, what happened was I recalled their presences from my memories of them and what came showering down was this almost overwhelming sense of love. This awareness: What good people they were and how they were guided by a desire to be good and to love well. In their different stations in life, teachers, engineers, homemakers, writers, I knew them as family. They were dedicated to their spouses and to their children. They were human and for some reason it is so easy to recall how, while they had tempers, attachments to ideas and things, and were sometimes selfish, all those human things, they also were deeply and profoundly good. They tried to the best of their ability to do the right thing and to love generously. I thank God for them and for this opportunity to remember them.