My Father and the Gift of a Holy Death

By Guest Contributor Yeshe Meryemana Matthews Robles* 

Ever since I was a small child, I remember my father telling me how he wanted to die. His refrain, every time the topic came up, was, “When I die, I want to just lay down, go to sleep, and not wake up. Peacefully. In my own bed. Just like that.”

Many of us come to Santa Muerte as devotees because she has saved us, or has saved someone we loved. In my case, I became a devotee because she gave my father the death he asked for.

In 2006, my dad came from New York to visit me in California. My father loved orchids and bonsai, so we went to some beautiful nurseries and gardens during his visit. He bought me a little deciduous bonsai tree. I’ll never forget him sitting serenely in the alley behind my apartment repotting that tree in better soil and a beautiful ceramic planter. I tended and cared for that tree over the next decade plus. Every winter it would lose all of its leaves and in Spring it would burst forth with fresh greenery. This little bonsai survived two moves, several curious cats, and my own wild life where I wasn’t always around to water it. It was a survivor! So am I. Over the years, as I grew and matured, the tree did better and better as I learned to care for it, and for myself.

In Spring of 2018, the tree didn’t come back. There were no leaves or shoots, and the trunk became brittle. After trying for over a month to revive it, I had to accept reality. It was dead.

I told my husband, “My father will die within the year. I can feel it in my bones. The tree didn’t come back.”

My dad and I had a deeply loving and also deeply challenging relationship. He was a fierce protector, an opinionated Catholic Deacon, and a high school guidance counselor. I was a rebel, a witch, and a professional tarot reader. I did not turn out to be the daughter my parents wanted, and it’s taken me a long time to not feel badly for disappointing them. I know they love me, but I also know that they had very different expectations of me, and I have not fulfilled these.

On that visit in 2008, my father let me know what he thought of my life choices, as he had many times before. And, just as before, I got defensive and reactive. We had a big fight. “Love and arguments” would be a fair short phrase to summarize our relationship as I grew into adulthood. When I was a child, I was his little buddy. We loved to go on adventures together. He took me to see maple sugaring, he took me to rock concerts, we went out in nature to find arrowheads. But he found it increasingly difficult to cope with me as I got older, more willful, more eccentric, and less conforming.

It was hard on us to go through this individuation. We both wanted better for our relationship, and over the years we both did our part, though there were some serious rough patches. We became more patient, more tolerant, more compassionate, and we reached certain milestones of restoration and understanding. 

I’ll never forget when my parents and their best friends came to visit me at my metaphysical shop in Oakland in 2011. They made big handwritten signs that said, “Catholics and Crystals” and waited for me outside when I arrived for work. I loved it! I was so touched by that gesture. And for my part, I stopped fighting with him about things I knew were not going to change: politics, the Church, and a lifetime steeped in patriarchal views. I just focused on loving him for who he was.

In the summer of 2018, my dad was selling his car and I decided to buy it. So I readied myself to fly to New York and drive it back to California. He called me, “Hey, what if I drive back with you, we see some sights, and I’ll fly home afterwards?” 

YES. I knew this was it: our last grand adventure, and a chance to make up for the hard years of pain between us. I vowed that, no matter what, I would not have one single argument with him, about any subject at all. My mom told me later that he made a similar vow, on his own. We both had a sense that a great healing could come from this trip, and it did.

We had so much fun on that ride! We saw Mount Rushmore (meh), Crazy Horse (amazing), Yellowstone (gorgeous), and several epic thunderstorms. We sang along with the radio, talked about our lives, spent a lot of time on his childhood reminiscences, and laughed a whole bunch. It was so great! So healing! 

I noticed how frail he seemed. I saw the specter of death hovering over him. There’s a look. If you’re psychic, or a medical professional, you know what I mean.

The day I dropped him off at the airport and said goodbye, I cried hysterically. I called my husband. “I’ve just seen my father alive for the last time. I don’t know what to do with this feeling.”

Over the last 30 years, I have been studying the female divine and her unique manifestations in many different cultures. Of course, along the way I encountered Santa Muerte. She is so entirely unique: a synthesis of Catholicism and Indigenous belief, patron of both the colonizer and the colonized, a Soteira (savior), an angel, an avenger, a friend to humanity, ally of the dispossessed, a magical protector, and a warrior. She resonated so much with my own beliefs, with my particular mixture of Catholic upbringing and Goddess culture. But when I first encountered her, I felt that her worship was maybe a closed practice, and I was not sure if I had any right to worship her. Instead, I studied her at a respectful distance, reading Devoted to Death and other books.

When I met my husband in 2010, he brought Santa Muerte with him. As a person of Mexican descent who has long held his own practices and beliefs related to death and dying, he opened the door to my experience with madrina. In fact, when we were married in 2013, we each created and decorated papier mache skulls and placed them on the altar. A few weeks before our wedding we had realized what “till death do us part” really means. We fell asleep holding each other, weeping. In our home, the most prominent feature you see when you walk in the door is our large ancestor altar, and above it, our shrine to Santa Muerte. She has watched over us, and our love, for more than a decade.

Before our wedding, my dad took my husband aside for a chat. I was a little worried. My dad was a tough guy with a history of being slightly menacing to the guys I dated. But they came back in a good mood, talking and laughing. Later, I asked him what he said. He said, “I just told him how precious it is to be loved by you.” To be cared for by both of these men, in their own ways, has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, and as time goes on, I’m only more and more grateful for it.

In addition to being a devotional priestess and witch, I am a healer. Specifically, I’m an herbalist and energy worker. In the last decade, I’ve ventured into working seriously with teonanactl, or psilocybin, for transforming trauma. I worked with a trained Maya Aj’ki’j to learn this modality. In early October of 2018, my maestra was visiting and during our journey, I foresaw the approaching death of my father. My teacher is Kablajuj Kame in the Maya calendar. Twelve Death. Her ability to perceive and facilitate journeys across the veil is unmatched. After our mushroom experience, I knew what was coming, and I knew what I needed to do. 

On November 1, I went on my knees before Doña Queta’s shrine of Santa Muerte in Tepito, with candles and offerings; I said, “Maestra, when my father’s time comes, make it quick, make it painless, make it perfect. He wants to die in his own bed, as if falling asleep. If you do this, if you grant him a good death at his proper hour, I will become a death midwife in your honor, and I will serve you for the rest of my life.”

On November 26, 2018, my husband came home from work in the middle of the day. He sat me down and told me that my mother had called him. My father was dead. He had been sitting on his bed, folding laundry. My mom left the room for about 20 minutes, and when she came back, he was lying on his back, and he was gone. It was quick, it was painless, and he was in his own bed. It was as perfect a death as one can hope for in this crazy world where people often suffer for years in nursing homes with no visitors, or die in exhausted dread after lingering illnesses, or die from violence.

That very night, I had THE dream. When someone dies, it might take weeks, months, or years before their spirit fully lets go of this world and they truly cross over. They show me in a specific type of lucid dream when they go. This has been a reliable way for me to know someone has fully made the crossing since I was in 4th grade and saw my grandfather cross over. In my father’s dream, he was standing outside of his church. He was smiling and greeting people as they entered the church. Once they had all gone past him, he went in. He paused at the door, then looked back over his shoulder, as if he heard something, or sensed someone was there. Then he turned and went in. And I knew he was free.

I’m not sure how to end this writing, because the story goes on. My dad and I still have a relationship, albeit a different one. He is still my teacher, protector, and critic, but in new ways. I am now a Death Midwife, a grief counselor, and a mushroom healer. As per my promise to Santa Muerte, I do my work with the dead, the dying, and the grieving in her name. When it is someone’s time, I offer my prayer to her for them, “May it be quick, may it be painless, may it be perfect.” And I am her devotee for life, maybe even thereafter. We’ll see when I get there.

*Yeshe Meryemana Matthews Robles is Mandala Priestess & Sibyl of the Mount Shasta Goddess Temple. She is avowed and ordained in several different Mystery Traditions, including Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, plant and spirit shamanism, Ifa, Mayan Cosmology, and Goddess Spirituality. With a Master’s degree in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College, she has studied women’s mysticism and matriarchal communities for over twenty years and teaches in the Temple’s Priestess and Sibyl Training programs. She co-owns, with her beloved husband Albert, The Sacred Well metaphysical shop where she offers Readings, Ancestor Guidance Sessions, Sibyl Sessions, and more. You can learn more about Yeshe’s projects by visiting here.