Flores Para Los Muertes

When I was a kid, going to church every sunday, every week of the year, every year, the long succession of Catholic sundays stretched out before me almost endlessley, as far as I could see - it was the deep structure of the church, the way the liturgy was planned out every day, every Sunday, the same readings, repeated according to the seasons, the same responses to the ritual of transubstiantiation, that felt to me like a trap, a straight jacket on a slow moving freight train toward anihilation, nothingness, black eternity - muerte, death. I remember fighting to stay awake during the narcotic drone of the Catholic Mass: Sit, Stand Kneel, Sit, Amen. The sad, melancholy, deathly cadence of all the faceless parishioners as they all spoke in sync, that lugubrious rhythm like some melodic requiem for the death of my own soul, that sound of the waking dead intimated my own death, the impossibility of my own immortality, for even as a child I did not believe, could not believe that the little wafer was the body of Christ, could not believe the powerful sip of port was indeed the Holy One's blood, and that all this fine planning of the mass was really just an ornate, elaborate, labyrinthine pacifier to keep one from losing one's mind. Every once in a while I'd see something human, outside the lattice work of Church ritual: the look of my mothers face as she prayed after holy communion - her eyes closed, serious, sad, and I, a little boy, wondering where my mother went during those times, what she saw behind her eyelids in the expanses of her mind and soul. Sad, older than me, deep in prayer. Where did my own mother go? Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. My mother's eyes would open and she would look forward, away from me, straight ahead, serious. Looking at exactly what, I don't know.