Life on the Day of the Dead
Rafael was born on the Day of the Dead. Perhaps it was my deceased boyfriend’s way of saying hello, transmitting love. I could no longer blame him for my childless life — his death sending me into a spiral of grief that seemed to make me an untouchable mid-30-year-old. “So, how did your last relationship end?” first dates asked. “He died of brain cancer,” I’d reply. No luck, until I met new love, surfing the Pacific. In the same hospital we went for radiation appointments, I held my newborn child. The Day of the Dead had never felt more alive. — Anna Else Pasternak
Time and Space Be Damned
On Halloween, there you were, your face covered in black-and-white makeup, a thin braid splitting your face à la Glenn Danzig, the Misfits’ singer. Who had you been in all our other lives, in which I felt I’d known you? A school-aged boy on the playground, a Mount Kailash guru? I knew you in those past lives, too. A year after Halloween, sans face paint, the question of age — 20 years between us. “Very Woody Allen,” a mom friend commented. But there you were, for the first time and the trillionth, rendering the time and space between inconsequential. — Jacquelin Winter
Our Fifth Election
My nerdy best friend, whom I quietly loved, confirmed he just wanted to be friends a month before the 2008 election. Heart shattered, I kept a list of news I yearned to share with him so I wouldn’t call. “Meet someone at a political party,” Grandmother advised. “People don’t do that anymore,” I protested. But a week before Election Day, Tom and I talked Obama at a co-worker’s birthday. “This never happens to me,” I said when he kissed me. Today, Tom and I talk Kamala with our 7-year-old, his eyes lighting at the prospect of America’s first female president. — Elizabeth McCaffery
Uncle Vic’s Hands
My uncle Vic’s hands were thick and dark, the hands of Sicilian ancestors, of a man who loved men. When I was little, I would watch his hands cut the stems of roses and peonies, arranging flowers in his Fort Lauderdale shop, grasping a lighted cigarette between his middle and index. Years later, I would clasp his hand walking down the wedding aisle, holding the bouquet he’d made for me of dahlias and sweet peas. Since he died from Covid on Oct. 30, 2021, my most haunted memory has been that I wasn’t there, at the end, to hold his hand. — Kristen McGuiness
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