A COUPLE of years ago, I watched the Disney-Pixar animation Coco, based on the Mexican Dia de Muertos: the Day of the Dead. The premise of the film was that the dead survive in the afterlife and return to us once a year as long as we remember them. But, if we forget them, they disintegrate.

In Latin-American culture, the Day of the Dead appears to have combined weirdly with Roman Catholicism. More recently, it has crept into our own observance during the remembrance season, in skeleton shapes on Babygros, and grinning skeletons in shops and cafés.

I have no problems with remembering the dead with affection and lit candles. I have no problem, either, with Hallowe’en as a riot mostly aimed at children, which is swept up into the glory and hope of All Saints’ and All Souls’. But I am worried by the implication that the dead depend on our efforts to remember them.

In Roman Catholic theology, there is surely a mutuality: we pray for the departed, for the souls in purgatory. The saints, meanwhile, pray for us. The Day of the Dead, though, seems to encourage not a prayerful interdependence so much as ongoing guilt and fear. If we fail to remember our dead, they are simply annihilated.

The relationship between the living and the dead is complex in all faiths, and it remains so even in our secular society. Many of the Protestant reformers tried to cut through the complexity by denying the possibility of any ongoing relationship. In Reformation Calvinism, the dead were buried not only without ceremonial, but without any prayers or words at all.

The Prayer Book burial service is simple and general — open to resurrection hope, but non-specific about the fate of individuals. All judgement is left to God, and, in the end, we are not to enquire, but to trust. In spite of all this, many bereaved people do report subjective experiences of the presence of the departed, although, for most people, these lessen over time.

I remember having a conversation with a devout Christian who was heartbroken when her husband died. She was partly consoled by an ongoing sense of his presence. But, after some years, she had a dream in which he simply told her that he would not be coming back. I remember asking her where she thought he was. Her reply, “I haven’t the slightest idea!”, was said not with sadness, but with a strange relief. I don’t think she thought he had been annihilated, but simply that she no longer needed him to be around.

Grief has its stages. Perhaps the dead need to be freed from our concern as much as we need to be set free from them. Liberation is for the living as much as for the dead.