Día de los Muertos

sketch from the Basilica di Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome kate sullivan

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My cousin Jerry and his husband Dennis live in San Miguel de Allende, MX. When I visited them last year, they gave me a whirlwind tour. It is truly a magical place, full of the reverence and mystery of life.

Jerry emailed me a few days ago, requesting a picture of our Aunt Joan for their Día de los Muertos ‘ofrenda’ this year, their altar dedicated to all the saints that have gone before.

Such a beautiful concept, a day to remember all of the people who have touched our lives here on earth.

Of course, growing up, we had All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, but neither could compete with Halloween in the heart of a child. And besides, what kid is thinking about the dead, religion, any of it?

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Excerpt from Memoir in the Drawer

I left the nuns after sixth grade, not because of any enlightenment on the part of my parents but because they were  spread a little thin in the money department.  My two older sisters were in college, the next sister was the the high school division of my Catholic school and my brother was at St. Sebastian’s. So I was squeezed out of Catholic education, which wasn’t a bad thing.

         And I'm not going to spend a lot of time whining about having been brought up Catholic because too many people have  already whined about it and we're all a little tired of it.   Although religion, in general, is a very interesting topic.  It seems everyone hates the one they were in when they were little and feel it cramped their style for the rest of their life.  And the people who didn't have one think they were gypped--that they don't have any base to work from.  And everybody is basically pretty fed up with it all until they have a baby and then they start going to their old church and acting all fervent for the baby's sake, which then fools the baby into thinking religion is important.  Well, it isn't really fair, is it?  How's a baby to know everybody's faking.  So that baby grows up and ...well I don't want to insult you with the rest of that sentence…

My father survived church by making up games for himself--games which always included somebody next to him.  A game in a vacuum is useless.  It was also an opportunity for him to show physical affection, which, along with my mother, was not one of his long suits.   He showed affection with verbal jousting and physical comedy.  So, one of his favorite church games was when you were stuck standing in the pew  for long periods.  You'd be standing there next to him, minding your own business, thinking about the 11" doll you'd ordered off the Sugar Pops box and wondering if it had been six weeks yet, and you'd feel a slight pressure coming from his direction.  Then more.  He wanted you to move.  Slowly, imperceptibly, he'd head you swaying in one direction, feet firmly planted--a slow sway in one direction with shoulders touching.  Then, once he knew he had you , he'd start to shift direction, SLOWLY, back toward him, (you knew by then to follow, to keep your shoulder touching his) then, a little forward, then long back, SLOWLY until you felt like the people behind were going to notice.  But they never did because they were too busy thinking about whether to peel the potatoes and put them in with the roast or to just bake them, or what time the football game was.  So, you'd be swaying like two long birch trees and before you knew it, it was time to sit down again. 

He had different games for sitting down times.  I can still feel the determined pressure of his thumb beating mine into submission.  And then, another favorite of his was to set his hand over yours, if you had been stupid enough to leave it vulnerable on the pew, and hold it down when he knew it was time to stand.  So you'd go to stand up for the Our Father, but your hand was stuck to the pew.  He must have spent all his time planning ahead.  He also had a secret way of pressing the quarter into your hand for the collection that he thought was funny.  And if dad thought it was funny, he just kept doing it, or saying it.  He was enjoying himself tremendously and he saw no reason why we shoudn't.

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The ritual of it all, the myths and stories stay with you. I think we pick and choose the ideas that work for us, the ideas that give us that sense of wonder of the vastness of the universe, the miracle of our brief lives here.

I painted The Three Fates several years ago to accompany my music composition for strings: Birth, Youth, Middle Age and Old Age. Klotho weaves the thread of our lives, Lachesis measures and Atropos is in charge of cutting the thread.

Souls, just passing through.

I’ll Fly Away

published by Writers.com

So, you might remember how I was telling you about my sister’s funeral, which happened during all the Covid 19 madness and even though she didn’t die of the virus (at least that’s what the assisted living place told us), we had to abide by all the restrictions, you know, no church service, no wake to speak of-just a smattering of family standing awkwardly around the open casket of my older sister, the third of four sisters who are all pretty good-looking, but she was the prettiest – always dressed to the nines, everything just right, with the special silver necklace and the matching scarves and tasteful silk blouses, she certainly knew how to present a polished and professional look (more than any of the rest of us!), so you can imagine that everyone agreed how wonderful it was that she could be made so pretty again, lying in her white satin bed, wearing all her favorite jewelry and her hair just right, dressed in her favorite color-red, looking so peaceful… but funny, I can’t remember now if she was holding rosary beads, which is the custom, but she probably was, because she adored tradition and custom and decorum and of course her husband, who perhaps leaned a bit heavy in general on how things looked, had arranged that every detail be picture-perfect and had the clout or the pull or whatever, to first of all, arrange a very nice funeral so quickly, but also to arrange an open casket on the first day, with ashes (I’ve read there is a huge back up on cremations!)  in a lovely Chinese vase on the next, making sure that everything was smooth and seamless – so much so that we felt we were part of a Fellini film when we all drove in a parade of separate cars to St. Mary’s cemetery to gather at the gravesite of my father and mother and younger brother, who died of epilepsy when he was 25 – so young, but he had had a tough go of it, ending up in a room in a lonely boarding house, a fact that broke my mother’s heart and of course we all wonder if that grief is really what killed my father less than a year later, but you know, to tell you the truth, nobody really knows about these things and God knows, every family has their dramas and their sagas, their triumphs and their failures, but back to Fellini, when we all pulled up in that caravan of cars to that beautiful cemetery, we were greeted by friends standing like Greek statues in small clusters, (I couldn’t help but think of the Caryatids that my sister loved so much, being a student and then a teacher of Latin and Greek), and as I was saying, standing like Greek statues in front of that spectacular house-sized outcropping of granite which

graces that section of the cemetery – the rock, topped with a white marble statue of the Pietà, gleaming in the late May sun and there were the friends, standing solemnly, like a painting, buffeted by occasional strong outbursts of wind, in silent witness to a death, a frozen gathering of Caryatids.

palazzo fanno, lucca, italy kate sullivan

The priest did not come, for fear of Covid, but a very nice gentleman, whom we had never met, gave a very beautiful personal tribute to my sister, which was pretty amazing, seeing as he had never met her (such a great gift, don’t you think?) and then we all sang I’ll Fly Away, that beautiful old gospel hymn that says ‘When I die, Hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away’ – such a marvelous message for my sister who had the good fortune to slip away in her sleep (a gift from the angels, they say) before her Lewy Body dementia totally destroyed her and all of us, and so the whole thing ended up being a joyous celebration of death and flying and I have to say, I was so distracted by the Caryatids, the Pietà, the wind, the Chinese vase, the eulogy, the singing, and well, the beauty of the whole thing that it was all I could think about, and I wanted desperately to capture the scene with my iPhone, but thankfully was aware enough to feel in my still-living bones how inappropriate it would be to take a picture of such fine friends come to mourn with us, but I have to say, because I was not able to take that photograph, I will never be done with trying to describe the scene.

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I recently had the thrill of walking past a herd of cows, across Salisbury Plain towards the mystery of Stonehenge. Hard not to feel a deep connection to those who have come before. Funny how thousands of years melt in the face of our own shorter-than-we-used-to-think lives. We are not that removed from the ancients who maneuvered 25 ton stones from far-off places, across this windswept plain, to place them in a formation we are still trying to figure out. The universe is a vast and never-quite-knowable place.

But we all know what love looks and feels like. Spread it around.

cecily beane cullinan and olivia beane/vocals; kate sullivan/guitar

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Most of the art you see on these pages will show up on shop.sullyarts.com. I’m in the slow process of cataloguing my work. Visit and enjoy the tour! If you don’t see an image you’d like, let me know!