How I Celebrate Day of the Dead

by Myriam Gurba

Autumn is approaching and with it comes the Day of the Dead. I use this holiday to honor women taken by femicide.

A gender-based form of lethal violence, femicide is always motivated by the same thing: misogyny. While misogyny is popularly defined as an irrational hatred of women, it’s not. Instead, misogyny is the mechanism through which women are punished for violating traditional gender roles.

Every day in the U.S., “romantic” misogynists execute three or more women. These perpetrators murder former wives and girlfriends for daring to escape from them, for asserting agency and rejecting submission. The nonzero possibility of femicide makes leaving an abuser dangerous. Urging a survivor to “just leave” heightens her vulnerability to post-separation violence and premature death. When escaping, survivors need a safety plan. These are not ordinary “breakups.” Fleeing an abuser is more like fleeing a prison.

I learned how dangerous it is for a girl to leave an abuser when I was nineteen. After I graduated high school, my brother and sister began their high school experience. During her freshman year, my sister heard rumors that a friend of hers, a ballerina, was being physically abused by her boyfriend. Kids witnessed him hit her after school, by her locker. When the ballerina ended the relationship, she told people that she feared her ex-boyfriend. She had very good reason to. One Friday the 13th he snuck into her home with a rifle and ended her life. She was fifteen years old. At school, a priest told the ballerina’s classmates not to judge her killer.

I honor the ballerina and others lost to misogyny by constructing an altar for them in my garden. First, I stack five whitewashed wooden crates. Then, I place a print of Saint Rita of Cascia in a central niche. Rita is the patron saint of abused women, and witches have been known to appeal to her for assistance when doing justice work on behalf of rape and domestic violence survivors. Rita was freed from her rapist after an assailant stabbed her husband to death. Many of the women who pray to Rita ask her to end their suffering by similar means.