By Gordon Mott

Oct. 31, 2026

Living and Dying

This weekend is the Day of the Dead holiday in Mexico, where I live. Death is not a taboo subject in Mexican culture. While Day of the Dead has become inextricably linked to Halloween, the focus remains the same: the celebration of loved ones who have died.

The holiday highlights how death is part of life here. Small, colorful altars adorned with cempasúchils color the cemeteries where families and friends hold all-night vigils, their faces shimmering in the light of hundreds of candles. The altars usually commemorate more than one dead person (or even beloved pets), and for each loved one, the altars include relics from their life: a bottle of their favorite tequila, a favorite book, a piece of jewelry, anything precious that belonged to them or symbolized who they were. One would never describe the atmosphere as morbid or festive, but rather respectful of a life lived by someone now dead.

I contrast my experience in Mexico with how I grew up. Both my grandfathers died before I was 10. I was not allowed to attend either funeral, and my clearest memory is of the whispers between my mother and father, apparently trying not to upset me with any details of my grandfathers’ deaths. There was essentially no discussion of what had happened.

As I reached young adulthood, there was no hiding from death. My older brothers and sister, my parents, and friends had a common lament: friends and acquaintances start dying around you. My mother’s experience was as poignant as any; she lived to be 104, the last 10 years in assisted living in Florida; of her initial group of friends – at least 10 older women like her – she was the penultimate survivor.

My own experience delivered frequent reminders of the fragility of life. In my 30s, friends and colleagues were killed in action or died from sudden and catastrophic illnesses. There were two photographers in Central America and the wife of one of my colleagues. In retrospect, the weight of the horrific deaths around me in countries where I worked deeply scarred me, in part due to the code of silence around the subject of death. Those events and how I dealt with them caused decades of mild PTSD, which sometimes flared up, as in the days following 9/11 when I was living in New York. I have lost three close friends from college, all too young and so random that their deaths seemed terrifyingly unfair. In recent years, I’ve lost two friends and peers from my journalism life. Even closer to home, my oldest brother died at 58 when I was 45 years old. And this week, my friend and mentor for 37 years, Marvin R. Shanken is gone.

In most situations, I prefer definitive, unambiguous words: “death,”“dead,” or “dying.” I find euphemisms to be ambiguous, an attempt to hide the reality of someone’s death. Out of curiosity, I investigated the origins of one of those expressions, “passing.” It comes from 15th or 16th century England, where it suggested people’s souls were in passage to another place, still existing, just not on earth.

If you are a Christian, “passing” may hold those meanings for you, that your immortal soul is en route to one of two places—heaven or hell. Most religions — Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism — share a belief in an immortal soul, and in some cases an afterlife, but the specifics differ. Judaism: a world to come. Islam: Paradise or Hell. Buddhism: cycles of reincarnation until Nirvana is reached. Hinduism: reincarnation based on karma and the hope of ending the cycle.

There are a host of other euphemisms in English for dying: kicked the bucket, passed through the veil, gave up the ghost, crossed to the other side, bought the farm, joined the ancestors, departed, in a better place, called home, left this life.

I understand that euphemisms are important linguistic tools, making it easier to discuss and cope with difficult topics. They acknowledge people’s feelings at the moment of a loss are complicated and emotions intense. Sanitizing the emotions can make it easier to recover some sense of invulnerability, without which the threat of death is terrifying. But euphemisms can also gloss over the finality of life. Even if you believe in an afterlife, you are no longer on planet Earth.

I do find solace in the memories I hold dear about my friends and loved ones who are dead. Tangible things like photographs, letters and gifts, can help to keep the nature of human existence from overwhelming us. We are born. We live. And we die. Despite the best efforts of humans over the millennia, no one has found a way around the inevitability of that cycle. I do believe that confronting this truth, and not burying or hiding from it, leads to a healthier day-to-day existence. It reminds us to make the most of the time we live.

My musings are animated by being in my 70s, having turned 74 this past week. Death is ever more present in my thoughts, not to the point of paralyzing me, but there are constant reminders that the time I have left is finite. My youthful illusions of invulnerability, and certainly of immortality, have been long forgotten.

Death. It’s part of living. We should all live every day with that in mind. As a friend of mine says, the bombs are falling closer and closer, or I might say, there are more of them than ever before. I will keep celebrating the living until they are dead. Then, I will hold their memories dear. And I will cherish my own precious life until the day I die.