BY DOMINIQUE SHAW

If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s how easy it is to take things for granted.

Around this time last year I was somewhat travel weary as I stepped onto yet another flight, this time bound for Oaxaca Mexico. It was a place I was certainly looking forward to exploring, yet, after a year that had seen me become a little too familiar with the limited gluten free selections of certain airport food-courts I can’t deny that as I sat down, plastic wrapped chocolate brownie in one hand and passport in the other, a big part of me was longing for the rather less adventurous folds of a fluffy blanket, comfy sofa and some mediocre offerings on Netflix.

14hrs later as I settled in to a hastily arranged hotel room in Mexico City Airport after my connecting flight was rescheduled for the fifth time, I confess that I began to wonder whether the “Day Of the Dead” that I had flown out to experience was in fact merely a description of the journey to get there. Another 10hrs after that, fighting for a taxi in torturous heat after a 6am flight finally dragged us through to our destination, death, I briefly pondered, might have felt like a welcome release.

But oh how I long to be standing in that queue right now.

What followed was one of the most sensational, heart-warming weeks of my life. A week that changed my perspective on our relationship with lost loved ones and that reminded me why I love to take photographs so much.

The Day of The Dead (or Día de Muertos) is nothing short of spectacular. Spectacular not just in the literal ‘spectacle’ etymology of the word (though the site of hundreds of people parading through the narrow winding streets wearing colourful painted white face-masks or over-sized skulls; balloons and lanterns waving merrily above their heads would certainly fit that description), but spectacular in its approach - in the kinship between fellow citizens as they remembered their lost loves not in somber tones but in the most beautiful way imaginable.

Indeed it was not only the parades that drew the gaze of my lens but those more intimate, almost ‘behind-the-scenes’ moments - the real heart of what has grown into such huge world-renowned festivities. The colours, the connections, the people themselves as they celebrated their family was truly beautiful to experience and was such an inspirational ideology towards that most feared chapter of the human condition.

In a year where travel has been an impossibility and my usual journeys, camera in hand have begun to feel like a distant dream, the lessons of Día de Muertos come to mind: don’t mourn what you have lost but celebrate what you had.

And maybe, just maybe, one glorious day it will return to you.