What to Write in a Día de los Muertos Card

Start with the living person, not with the festival

A card for this week has two people in it, and most bad cards mix them up. One is the person you are writing to, who is alive, busy, and probably cooking. The other is the person being remembered, whose photograph is on the ofrenda and whose name belongs in the second or third line, said plainly. If you start with the festival, with marigolds and candles and the beauty of the tradition, you have written a card about a custom. Customs do not read cards. People do.

So decide the addressee first. One person. The daughter who builds the altar, the brother who drives across town with the bread, the grandmother who decides where every photograph goes. Write to that person, by name, at the top of the card. Everybody else in the house can be brought in later, in one warm line, but the card needs an owner or it will be read aloud once in a crowded kitchen and then put down under a shopping list.

Then name the remembered person early, with one true detail attached. Not a quality. A detail. The soup he salted twice. The radio she kept on a station nobody else liked. The hat, the trade, the song sung badly on purpose. A card with one detail like that can sit on an ofrenda for three days and still be saying something on the third day.

Get it there while the altar is still going up

This year the days fall on Sunday, November 1 and Monday, November 2. Many households spend the last evenings of October building the ofrenda, cleaning photographs, and arguing in a friendly way about which level a candle should sit on. A card that arrives by October 30 can still take part. It can be read while the altar is being made, a memory in it can send somebody upstairs for a better photograph, and a dish you mention can end up on the shopping list. A card that arrives on November 3 arrives to a house taking the altar down, which is a different and quieter job.

Post early, then. If you are handing the card over in person, hand it over on a building day, not in the middle of the evening itself, when the house is full and the food is coming out and nobody has a free hand or a free minute. And if you enclose a photograph, enclose a copy. Say so in the card, in plain words, so nobody has to worry. Originals stay in albums. A good copy can be propped, taped, carried to a grave and brought home again without anybody guarding it.

November 1 and November 2 are not the same card

In many families November 1 is given to children who have died, the angelitos, and November 2 to adults. Families differ, and the family's own way of keeping the days outranks any guide, including this one. But the split should change how you write. A card that mentions a remembered grandfather belongs naturally to the second day. A card about a child belongs to the first, and it is a shorter, plainer card, or it is no card at all.

That second option is real. If a family lost a child recently, or lost one long ago and keeps that grief close, a card from outside the family can land badly however carefully it is written. Ask one person in the family, quietly and well before the week, whether a card would be welcome. If the answer is hesitant, bring flowers instead and say one sentence in person. Restraint is not coldness here. It is reading the room from a distance, which is harder, and kinder.

Lines for a parent or grandparent who is remembered

Write these to the living person, and let the remembered person enter in the middle of the line, where they would have entered a room. Keep one detail per line. Two details crowd each other out.

• Thinking of you as you put your father's photograph up this year. I still hear him correcting the radio announcer, word for word, from the kitchen.
• Your mother's place on the altar should have something green beside it. Nothing in her house stayed unwatered for long, including the neighbours' plants.
• I hope somebody makes your grandfather's coffee the way he liked it, too strong for everyone else, and that somebody drinks it for him slowly.
• For your grandmother, who fed any visitor within four minutes of the door opening: may the bread be warm and the stories be the long versions.
• Sending love for the days ahead, and for your dad's chair, which I expect will be argued over and then left empty on purpose.
• Your mum taught half the street how to fold a proper corner on a bed sheet. Practical to the end, and missed in practical ways, daily.
• I will be thinking of your family on the second, and of your grandfather's terrible jokes, which we have all started telling in his voice.

Notice what none of these lines does. None of them explains the festival back to the family keeping it. A family building an ofrenda does not need the marigolds explained to them, and a card that lectures on tradition reads as a card written by somebody watching from the pavement.

Lines for a partner, friend or sibling who is remembered

The register drops here. You are often writing to somebody your own age, about somebody your own age, and the card can sound like a person talking rather than a person composing. Short is fine. Unfinished is fine too.

• Thinking of you this week. I have saved the song he always sent me when it rained, and I will play it on the second and think of his awful dancing.
• For your sister, who labelled every leftover container as if the fridge were a library. I miss being fed by a system.
• Sending you love as you set a place for him. He would have eaten the bread first and asked what it was for afterwards.
• I remember your wife laughing in that photograph from the beach road, hat in her hand. I hope that is the one that goes up this year.
• No big words from me. Your brother was my favourite person to lose an argument to, and I still rehearse my side of them.
• Thinking of your family, and of her hands, always busy, always mending something that belonged to somebody else.

One caution for this group. Do not write as if you knew the remembered person better than the person you are writing to. You did not. Share the memory you actually have, hand it over, and stop. A borrowed intimacy is easy to spot and hard to forgive in a week when feelings are already close to the surface.

Lines when a child is remembered, written with both hands steady

Only send a card in this section if you are close, or if the family has told you that cards are welcome. Keep it under four sentences. Name the child. Do not use the word celebration anywhere near it, and do not describe what the child would be doing now, at an age they did not reach. That sentence, sent kindly by many people, is the one parents in this position mention dreading.

• We will be thinking of you on the first, and saying her name here at home, the way you taught us to.
• For your boy, whose cars are still lined up in our memories exactly where he left them. We remember him with you.
• Sending love for a hard day inside a busy week. There is nothing you need to reply to in this card.
• We lit a candle for her last year without telling you, in case it was too much. We will light one again this year.

If you are not sure whether you are close enough, you are probably not, this year. Send nothing in writing. Go to the family's house during the week if you are invited, wash dishes, hold a ladder, carry chairs. Usefulness is a language too, and in this one case it says more than any line in this article.

Lines if you were invited into a tradition that is not yours

Say where you stand. A card that names your position, a guest, a friend of the family, somebody learning, reads as honest. A card that performs belonging reads as costume, and people can tell the difference in one line. Gratitude is your strongest material here: for being asked, for being fed, for being told the stories.

• Thank you for making room for me at a week that belongs to your family. I will be thinking of your father's photograph, and of the story about the boat.
• I am a guest in this, and grateful to be one. Sending love to your house, and to your grandmother, whose soup I still talk about.
• You told me her name and how she took her coffee. I have remembered both, and I will say her name on the second.
• Thank you for trusting me with the small jobs last year. I can carry chairs and candles, and I can listen. Put me to work again.
• Sending love from our house to yours. We know just enough to know this week is not ours, and that being thought of still counts.
• I will not pretend to understand all of it. I understand that you miss him, and that the table is set for him anyway. That part I can honour.

Bring something as well as a card, and let the family tell you what. A dish they ask for, flowers, candles, ice, folding chairs. The card says the words. The carrying says the rest.

Short lines for the ofrenda, for flowers, and for a dish you bring

Some cards in this week are not really letters. They are labels with feelings. A card propped on an altar, a note tied to flowers at a grave, a tag on a dish you made because it was his dish: these need ten to twenty words, a name, and nothing that wilts into vagueness at a distance of three feet.

• For your father. Bread, coffee, and the photograph where he is laughing before the shutter finished. From all of us on the street.
• Her name, said out loud in our house this morning, with love. The flowers are from the garden she told us to cut back harder.
• Abuela, your soup, made badly by me and eaten completely by everyone. We are learning. See the empty bowl.
• For the first, with love, from the neighbours who still wave at your gate out of habit and are not stopping.
• His favourite, made on the second, as instructed by three different aunts. Any errors are mine and were eaten anyway.
• One candle, one name, one story told properly at the table. Ours is lit.

Write these on a card that can survive a kitchen. Thick stock, pencil or a pen that does not run, and no glitter, ever, near food or candles. Practical advice sounds unromantic until you have watched a card slide off an altar shelf into a bowl of water put out for the souls, which happens in somebody's house every single year.

One line of Spanish is enough, and some lines to leave out

If Spanish is not your language, use one short line, get it checked by somebody who speaks it, and let the rest of the card be in the language you actually think in. One accurate line carries respect. A whole card run through a translator carries errors, and the errors are what gets remembered. Two lines that are safe in most houses, set here the way you would set them in a card:

Feliz Día de Muertos. (Happy Day of the Dead.)

Siempre en nuestros corazones. (Always in our hearts.)

If the family keeps the week in Spanish, matching their greeting matters more than variety. Use the line they use, spelled their way. And leave the famous quotations about death alone. A line written by a poet, however beautiful, tells the family what a book thought about death. They are not short of thoughts about death this week. They are short of hands, chairs and time.

Leave these shapes out altogether, however warm they sound in your head:

Have a great Halloween weekend! At least he is not suffering any more, so keep things light for the children, and send me a picture of your funny face paint when it is done.

Every clause in that card does damage. It treats the week as a costume party with a Mexican theme, it hands a grieving person a cheerful instruction and calls it comfort, and it asks for entertainment, a photograph of painted faces, from a house that is setting out photographs of its dead. If a sentence in your draft tells the reader how to grieve, cut the sentence. The card's job is company, not instruction.

Turn it into a group card

A street, a workplace or a far flung family often wants to send one card between many people, and for this week that shape has a real advantage, provided the card still names one addressee and one remembered person. Twenty signatures under a line about one man's coffee and one woman's garden is a strong card. Twenty signatures under a general blessing is a petition.

Organise it early, because a group card for November 1 that starts circulating on October 30 will not happen. A group card with room for many signers lets each person add their own memory in their own words, which is exactly the material this week runs on. Set it up in the middle of October, give people a deadline of October 28, and you can create a card online in a few minutes rather than chasing a paper card around an office. Ask each signer for one detail, not one sentiment. Details stack. Sentiments blur.

Two shipped guides will help you keep the register right once the group gets large: what to say when someone dies covers the lines to avoid when a death is recent, and what to say on the anniversary of a death is the closest cousin to this week, because for many families the second of November is an anniversary that comes with food, photographs and company instead of quiet. Read them for the boundaries, then write warmer than either, because this card is allowed to smile.

The clay dog whistle I bought in a market in Oaxaca that same week sits on my desk at home, between a chipped mug and a stack of unpaid parking paperwork I keep meaning to deal with. I have never once got a clean note out of it. Lucero can, instantly, using a technique she showed me twice and which left my hands the moment she stopped demonstrating, and some evenings I still pick the thing up and produce the same damp squeak, and think about buying a second one for reasons I could not explain to anybody at the market stall.