Festival founder returns to walk among the dead

 Dancing across Higgins Avenue, a man wearing a skeleton mask and brown fedora waves a sign above his head. Yellow ribbons hang from the sign, contrasting against the deep blue sky.

One of the two founders of Missoula's Festival of the Dead, artist Michael deMeng, attended the event for the first time in eight years Wednesday. In the intervening years he has traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, where his love for Day of the Dead began.

He remembers a cemetery there being the "most beautiful thing" he'd ever seen. He remembers seeing a "sea of lights."

"There were families gathered around each grave," he said. "They spend the evening. You know, they play. They sing songs."

They brought personal items of their relatives, the dead's favorite meals and other things that would remind visiting ancestors of life — and remind the living of the deceased. And he remembers being moved by these people celebrating around gravestones and by kids who weren't afraid, having fun.

He said the point of the Day of the Dead is to remember family members who died and to acknowledge the cycle of life and death.

"To me, it's about breaking down those barriers between the living and the dead and remembering all the footsteps that came before us," deMeng said.

That perspective attracted him particularly because of the way it contrasts with many Americans' view of death.

"We've made (death) into an unnatural occurrence," deMeng said. "We typically pretend that it only happens in movies."

He said a part of the event is mocking death. With the knowledge of its inevitability, people can celebrate that they've survived another year — despite their human fragility.

Seeing that discrepancy, deMeng wanted to bring the Day of the Dead to Missoula — and he did in 1993, with the help of a friend he made when he attended the University of Montana, Bev Glueckert.

Missoula's Festival of the Dead — complete with crowds of people standing on tiptoes behind rows of other parade watchers along Higgins — has changed a lot since its inception. Some people were wary of it in the beginning.

"Initially, everybody thought we were devil worshippers," deMeng said. "It took a lot of effort to explain to people."

But after radio interviews, talking to teachers and other outreach efforts, people began to warm up to it. About 100 people came to the first event.

Now children with painted skeleton faces watch the parade without a trace of fear and dance alongside older people in Caras Park, where the parade dissolves into a dance party. And though deMeng handed the event over to fresh blood in 2003, he still keeps track of it.

Like many people who celebrate the day, he celebrates it with a certain person in mind. Every year, deMeng thinks of Don Bunse, a print-making professor he took courses from when he went to UM. Bunse had inspired deMeng to travel to Oaxaca, where Bunse had planned to retire, but he died before settling there.

"He's dead, but he's perpetually affected me through all these years," deMeng said. "Is he watching? I don't know, but I can still feel him in my life."

rebecca.calabrese@umontana.edu