Memento Mori

(a year of living with the dead)

People often ask me what they should do if they don’t have a photograph of a departed loved one. How do they acknowledge this person on their ancestor altar?

It is important to remember that except for the past hundred years or so people did not have any photos at all. They might have a painting if they were wealthy, or a small cameo portrait if they were clever, or often just a lock of hair. In the past the relics of the saint—a fingernail clipping, a bone, some tears caught in a vial—were a way of having a talismanic object in which to honor someone on the other side. Even now one can find “secondary relics” of various saints, which means that it is something, usually a piece of cloth or bit of metal, that has touched the first-hand relic that came from the body of a saint.

[the holy tongue of the blessed St. Anthony]

Bodies matter. We love them. We want to remember them.

I have a ton of photos on my ancestor altar, but I also have small canisters with the dirt from the graves of those I’ve visited—secondary relics for sure. We might have an object that belonged to a loved one—a brooch or a ring, a book or a button. We touch it, and remember that they also touched it and somehow, mysterously, our bodies touch each other again.

Our very ancient ancestors used to put the skulls of their loved ones in the foundations of their homes to remind themselves that not only were the dead close but that our lives were built atop their very bodies.

[a church built with skulls in Brittany]

There is no limit but our own imaginations to how we can remember the dead. Some people use stones or feather to represent someone they have known. One woman I know uses small crystal skulls. Still another simply writes the names of her dead and places them on her altar. What matters is that we say those names, we remember those souls and make a space for us to touch each other again.

How do you remember the dead on your altar for whom you don’t have photos? Let’s share all of our creative ideas as we prepare for the Day of the Dead and walk through a year of coming back to life with the dead.

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A Year of Living with the Dead is an Ongoing series for my free subscribers. I also offer a Paid Substack which includes monthly conversations and excerpts from books in progress.

Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. She teaches popular workshops on collaborating with the dead. With her husband Clark Strand she is the founder of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose and the book by the same name.