Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [75]
It’s impossible to maintain, impossible to sustain. You can’t stay like this forever. Blissed out. Bugged out. High, but not stoned. I’m in this moment. This second. Nowhere else. The work is done.
On the highway a few red embers glow on the horizon. I press down on the gas pedal and imagine myself dissolving into the dark, exploding into molecules transmitted through the air, floating forever in silent space—surrounded by potential, never having to slow down, never having to land.
Epilogue
IN OAXACA, MEXICO, there is a celebration called el Dios de la Muerte, the Day of the Dead. It takes place every year on Halloween, the day when the souls of the dead are said to return for a few hours to the world of the living. On the night of October 31, Oaxaca’s cemeteries fill with people who’ve come to welcome back their lost loved ones. They place candles around the graves and bring offerings of food and drink to help the dead sample the material world they’ve left behind.
I’ve come to Oaxaca because I wasn’t sure where else to go. When I returned to New York from Waveland, I was told to take some time off, a couple of days at least.
“Go to a beach. Relax,” someone suggested. The idea seemed impossible to entertain. I couldn’t imagine lying on a beach, watching people sunbathe and swim in the surf. I feel as if I’m carrying with me all those I met and saw this year. I want to be someplace where they will be welcome.
I spend most of the week in Oaxaca sleeping and writing the beginnings of this book, but on Halloween night I head to the city’s largest cemetery.
Oaxacans believe that the souls of infants come back first, and at their graves there is only sadness. At one child’s headstone, I watch an elderly woman relight candles that keep blowing out in the wind. She’s all alone. Parents of children tell no stories about their babies. The joy of their birth makes their sudden death that much harder to bear. At older people’s graves, however, there is drinking and laughter. Funny tales about moments they shared.
Around one candlelit grave, I count nearly a dozen men standing shoulder to shoulder. They play some guitars and sing out of tune. Some clutch glasses of beer. One of the men is far drunker than the rest, and he hangs on the shoulders of his friends, weeping while they sing. Later I see him sprawled on top of another grave. His arms stretch out, he shouts at the stars.
I imagine all those whose stories I’ve told this year returning to their loved ones: Sunera and Jinandari, Aminu and Habu, Christina and Edgar Bane, with Carl and Edgar Junior. I think about the people whose names I don’t even know, whose bodies I saw abandoned or buried in unmarked graves. Who would be there to welcome them back?
I picture my own small family sitting around the graves of my father and brother. I suppose it would be just my mother and I. How would I welcome them back to the world of the living? What would I say? I’ve told their stories. I’ve kept them close. It’s not enough, but it’s all I was capable of.
I still wish I knew what my brother was thinking when he put his feet over the balcony outside my room. It’s doubtful I ever will. He was a young man who wanted to be in control. In the end, he simply wasn’t.
For so long I’ve been isolated by sadness; by the end of this year, however, I finally feel whole—connected to both the past and the present, the living and the lost. The world has many edges, and all of us dangle from them by a very delicate thread. The key is not to let go.
By midnight, Oaxaca’s cemeteries are crowded. The dirt paths have turned to mud. Children dressed as skeletons and ghouls run amid the graves, asking for candy or trying to scare people passing by. There is so much laughter, even in the midst of all this loss. It’s the way it should be—no