For years, while living in Mexico and now Nicaragua, I’ve wanted to visit one of the local cemeteries on the Day of the Dead.
This year I was able to talk my friends Eve and Nathalie into going with me. I’d been told that the cemetery in the larger, neighboring town of Rivas was the one to visit, so that’s where we went.
Outside of the cemetery, flower vendors had set up shop. We bought some flowers and headed into the cemetery itself.
There we saw people gathered around tombstones, painting, sweeping, eating, chatting, laying down flowers.
I felt shy, being a sightseer basically, without a family’s tomb to care for, but my presence did not feel begrudged.
We laid our flowers on tombs that called to us, and when I still had some in my hands when Eve and Nathalie were ready to leave, I gave them to a young mother and her daughter who entered as we left.
Next year I want to visit the cemetery in San Juan del Sur.