The Aztec Marigold

Day 1:

It is nearing 2 am and I cannot find a stopping point. I am sitting on the floor of my temporary living room, cross-legged at the coffee table, obsessively — no, maniacally — focused on fashioning paper marigolds. I am in southern Spain where the sunshine is bright and constant, the smell of sea salt is always in the air, there is always a light breeze to kiss the cheek, and the Mediterranean waters lap crisp and chilly against the toes. It is a place where the sun rises at a civilized 8:30 am and at night the street lights emit a soft glow diffused by the humidity in the air. 

I should be sleeping — I should have been asleep hours ago — but the repetitive task at hand has begun to consume me. With the looming deadline, I am charged with making as many paper marigolds — or cempasúchiles — as I can to fill a room. 

I don’t usually travel this time of year. I prefer watching the seasons change between holidays with the sunny mornings turned rainy evenings as the clouds roll into the shallow Mexico City skies overhead. I love when the bright yellow and orange cempasúchiles and fluorescent pink and yellow fuzzy terciopelo flowers that leave a trail of black seeds in their shadows, begin to appear all over the city. I love witnessing the energy of the city shift to death, and thus, life, as we all collectively prepare to receive our loved ones. 

But cempasúchiles are hard to find in southern Spain, and the tradition of receiving death in order to honor life doesn’t exist in the same ways. So here I am, the second night in a row sitting on my floor in Alicante, feet under the coffee table, “Loot” playing in the background, fashioning flower after paper flower. 

I have a lot of dead people. 

Every year in the fall I commit to staying home in order to build an altar that honors those dead people. Every year it seems to grow bigger, both in size and in the number of photos placed on it. 

They say that to love is to grieve, and as I construct my altar I grieve for those I have lost. It is not just about placing a photo next to a flower or lighting a candle, it is about the nostalgia that hits like a punch to the gut, the memories that come flooding in the form of tears as each photo is placed, each flower arranged, each object curated. 

It grows bigger and bigger as the memories become more distant, the sounds of their voices more intangible, their warmth of body and skin non-existent, the sounds of laughter but a faint echo. 

Day 2:

I am sitting in a restaurant in Alicante. My deadline is approaching rapidly and the overwhelming feeling of not having enough is weighing on me. This year it will not just be my altar, but a large one for all our friends and family and ‘friend family’ in Alicante, and we will all gather together to receive our dead, share stories, shed tears, and with a little luck, share some tequila too. 

Armando is with me, Vinayak will soon join us. They are my rock and my mountain and the reason I am not in Mexico — because if anyone knows the benefits of running it’s the two of them, and sometimes one must run in order to heal. 

We are the only ones in the restaurant, and as we chat I pull out stacks of tissue paper and fuzzy green pipe cleaners. We learned how to do this in elementary school in Texas. They will never be the same, they will never share the same fragrance of proper marigold petals, and the greens will never be as thick or wild, but they will suffice, and sometimes, when you are on the opposite side of the world, to suffice is just enough. 

It’s a metaphor really, because these days all I can seem to do is to suffice. 

So we sit at a table opposite each other, joined by Vinayak, and we drink our coffee, cava, and tea, we eat our salads and cheesecake, and we pull apart thin sheets of bright orange, yellow, and green tissue paper. At some point the Spanish waitress comes by and admires our handiwork, and I pull the sheets apart with more fervor, more gusto. 

Day 3: 

It’s an easy technique, one that requires only a few cuts, and it can work easily in an assembly line if you can gather enough people with enough interest. 

Tissue paper in Spain is called “silk paper” or papel sede, and it comes in packs of singular colors — orange, yellow, white, green, purple, blue, etc etc — with ten sheets that measure 50 x 66 centimeters. The sheets are all folded together into long and narrow plastic packaging, which is actually quite convenient. I recommend pulling the tissue paper out and leaving it intact with the folds. What I have learned is, if you cut along the folds you get the perfect amount of sheets in the perfect size for marigold making. 

We learned this technique as children in elementary school in Texas. Every year we all sat at our desks and made flowers and celebrated whatever politically correct version of Día de los Muertos was acceptable, depending on how separate church was from state at the time. I don’t remember much beyond making flowers, which probably meant we were entering an era of political correctness that was less about honoring ancestors and more about the obligatory box checking of cultural diplomacy required of a place considered a border state. 

I mostly remember the repetition. 

Once the paper is cut, take ten or so stacked sheets and fold them accordion style along the short edge. Before folding, make sure the stack of tissue paper is laying so the short edge is nearest the body. Then fold the edge over tightly, no wider than the tips of the fingers, and flip the entire stack over and repeat. 

Fold, flip, fold and flip, then fold and flip again until the entire stack of tissue paper is one long thin strip of folds. Take a green pipe cleaner and tightly wrap it in the center, creating what will become the “stem” of the flower. 

Once the pipe cleaner is wrapped around the folded paper, hold the paper so the “stem” is down, then gently fan out the stacked sheets from each side of the pipe cleaner. At this point it will look nothing like a flower — more like a bad, indiscernible craft item. 

Once each side of paper has been fanned out, begin to painstakingly separate each thin, individual sheet of tissue paper by pulling them carefully from the outside, working your way in towards the base or the green “stem” of the pipe cleaner. The base will become tight as more pages are separated, the density will grow, some pages will tear, some will warp and fold in on themselves, some will be an absolute failure. But do not fret. Continue to pull and separate, because each imperfection adds to the paper illusion of the real marigold, and after all, nothing in nature is ever really perfect. 

When each sheet has been separated you will end up with a poofy, puff of paper. This poof puff is the artificial and handmade version of a marigold, a beautiful, imperfect flower of dense, technicolor petals. If you’re lucky, and if you’ve spent enough time making marigolds, they will serve as the formal invitation for your beloved ancestors to pop in for their annual visit, even if you are far away from home. 

Day 4: 

Once again I am sitting on my floor in Alicante, cross-legged at my coffee table, “Loot” playing in the background, and I am beginning to question my marigold-making capabilities. 

Perhaps “capabilities” is too strong a word. Perhaps I am beginning to doubt the speed at which I can produce the number of marigolds necessary to create the altar necessary to call my own deceased and those receiving invitations from my friends as well. This has grown into a symbol for all of us, a quotidian, baroque mass of orange, yellow, purple, and pink density meant to be an invitation. 

Perhaps I have instead planted a seed of martyrdom, a sort of “self-flagellation via green pipe cleaner” because more than anything I need to believe that I will be visited this year. 

I must be visited this year. 

Because this year, more than any other year, I need to be surrounded by the love of those that I have lost, because this year I have never felt more untethered. 

Day 5:

Five days have passed and I have a respectable mound of paper marigolds growing. I have been to the Asian retail store every day, the one that sells all the random home goods like paper thin bath towels, Tupperware that will always stain. The store where rolls of plastic in all levels of texture, color, and overall gaudiness are available, where anyone can find the cheap shower curtain of their whimsical dreams, and where every single fabric flower except a marigold is sold. 

They are also open during the Spanish lunch and siesta times between 3-5 pm, the window of time after which I have spent hours working, have eaten lunch, have had a cup or two of cava and either need to sleep until the next day or wander aimlessly for fear of sleeping until the next day. They recognize me as I walk in because every day for the last four days I have purchased an obscene amount of pipe cleaners and tissue paper. 

I have a mission. I have a goal, and the owners of L’Estrella Home are an essential part of attaining both. 

Days 6-7: 

I am in Madrid, and I brought a massive bag full of pre-folded tissue paper pre-wrapped with pipe cleaners. I am here with Armando and Vinayak who are taking their undergraduate study abroad students through Madrid for the weekend. There are only 20 of us including Armando, Vinayak, and myself and the bus had plenty of space, Wi-Fi, and TVs with streaming services and moved over the smooth Spanish highways like a hovering spaceship. Normally it’s a three hour drive to Madrid from Alicante, but our hovering spaceship made it in a little more than four. We were dropped at the Puerta de Toledo, walked our bags up the hill to our hotel, checked in, regathered, and walked further up the hill to the Museo del Prado where together we will see and talk about the work of Goya. 

The Prado is a spectacular place. Standing in the gallery surrounded by Goya’s black paintings is always a gut-wrenching experience. The horror is visceral, and the paint applied with what I imagine to be an emotion-fueled frenzy. The ceilings in the gallery are low and create a cave-like effect. It’s claustrophobic and terrifying. 

We often talk about the impulse to create, the impulse to put our pain into words or images, to find some sort of catharsis and community within what hurts. All I can think about is how our histories are cyclical, and how violence just continues to evolve and reveal itself in different ways with different technologies. We talk about the impulse to create through the pain, and perhaps this is the metaphor I have needed in my compulsive flower-making. This is my catharsis, my therapy — an obsessive rerouting of time, focus, and energy in something mundane in order to heal. 

From the Prado we all walk together into the Plaza del Sol, ground zero, the point of origin and the heart of the city. We turned a corner, and another one, we walked through the maze, the throngs of tourists attempting to enjoy marcha much too early, and just out of nowhere, tucked between many entryways, clusters of people, and fluorescent lights we turn left into a doorway and make our way up the stairs to a large table already set for all of us. 

We shuffle around the table trying to settle into our appropriate spots, somehow extra chairs are removed, and somehow another table added, followed by more shuffling as everyone scoots their heavy wooden chairs about an inch to the right to make more space. Waters are procured, wine makes its way to the table and bathrooms are sought out, two floors below. Once everyone is finally settled I make my way down the steep and winding staircase from the second floor, to the first floor. As I took the final step down I glanced up and stopped in my tracks. I think the world stood still. I think I stopped breathing, because sitting there at a table tucked between the front door and the window was my maternal grandmother drinking a cup of cafe con leche, as casual and comfortable as ever. 

My maternal grandmother passed away in May of 2023. 

I did a double take and she was gone. In her place was an older woman who looked nothing like my grandmother. There was no cup of coffee, and the world started moving again. I smiled and continued my way down the stairs. She was there, she had been there and I had no doubt of it, and it would have been the most natural thing in the world to sit down next to her, order my own cafe con leche and do everything I could to make her laugh, because she had an infectious laugh. 

It was an apparition of her. It was her way of showing me she would always be with me. She was a woman that rarely left the border region of South Texas, but she had followed me to Madrid and it would always be our own little secret. 

It warmed my heart that she was living this adventure with me. 

I cried tears in front of Guernica the next day. I have seen the piece many times, but visiting it again after a year of incessant and stubborn traumas changes it. Perhaps it’s better to say that through the course of the year I have changed enough to allow the piece to really penetrate my own veneer. 

I cannot identify with seeing the violence of war by any means. But through the last year I feel like I have been fighting for my life. Getting out of bed every day has required all my might and will. Some days — weeks, in fact — I have actually not left my bed. On more than one occasion I woke up with my face covered with the wetness of the tears I cried in my sleep. I have often wondered when the tides will turn. When the final funeral will be the final funeral for a while, when a return to the states will be celebratory and not traumatic, when there will be no more fires, when falling in love will mean a singular love and not the astonishment of a man who is actually married with a laundry list of lies that follows his every footstep. 

One day there will be a day that’s a little easier. 

Day 8: 

We piled into the bus and made our way out of Madrid. It rained nearly the entire drive. 

We all made paper Marigolds that afternoon on our way back to Alicante. We pulled out paper petals, separated sheets, and filled a bag that would eventually become an altar. 

Day 9:

The altar is built. It has three tiers covered with textiles borrowed from Armando who has saved them from his time living in both India and Mexico. There are plenty of paper flowers. The time has come to add the photos and the things they loved alongside them. It has become celebratory now, and the ofrenda is delightfully large and continually growing. 

There is a small bottle of Cava for Aliana. Nana Resendez gets a pack of bingo cards. There is a can of Coca-Cola, a cigarette, and a Budweiser that I miraculously found plus the mercado for Latin American products. Nana Moody will have a crocheting needle. Tomorrow I will hunt for a piece of wood for Sam, a carpenter, family friend, and father figure. 

Placing the photos on the altar is always the hardest part for me. That’s when the tears come, when I can recall the stories and reminisce about their lives and how they shaped and molded me. Now an entire continent away, I have been more determined than ever to acknowledge their lives within their deaths. Together we will light the 130 candles and we will wait. 

Day 10 [the day after]:

I stayed up all night waiting, lighting and relighting candles, crying real, fat tears. It’s hard to imagine love without heartbreak. I hope that changes one day. 

I take the flowers off the altar one by one. The ritual is done, and somehow I feel like I have shed a full skin.