The Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead by Lareina Abbott

1400 words, ~7 minutes reading time
Issue 10 (Spring 2026)

It had been years since I’d seen my dad. He didn’t know me as a writer. When we were closer he knew me as a scientist and as a health care worker. So much of what I write is about family, I wanted him to know who I was, despite the hurt and loss between us. And so last year, I invited him to my reading event. Would he show up? I didn’t know.

What I did know is that there were cookies, and my dad loves cookies. It was a night time reading event at the Alexandra Writers Centre in Calgary. The Centre occupies three rooms on the fourth floor of an old sandstone schoolhouse that was renovated into studios, theatres and art collectives. The common room ceilings rise high above casement windows, clean and comfy mismatched couches invite you to sit. Writing tables, bookshelves, and chalkboard walls surround you and rugs warm the antique wooden floors. It is a place where you can conjure up your ghosts; and so, I attempted to use it to conjure up my father.

A microphone was set up by the windows, and some of the tables were cleared to put a few rows of chairs in front. At the back there were snacks, everyone had brought something. I made a plate for my dad, just in case; thumbprint cookies, some buttertarts. I was nervous, what if he did show up? What would I do then?

At the start of the reading I stood and gave a Métis winter solstice blessing, a prayer of sorts, gifted to me by my aunt, a working Métis elder. When I read, my body reactions take over, no matter how prepared I am. My head feels like I have a cold, the words echo and my heart sprints like a startled deer.

When I finished, I went to the back to watch the other readers and waited for my adrenaline to ease. I had forgotten about my father. But then, gradually, I noticed him. My dad has a quiet presence, it’s not that he is a quiet man, or a small man, it’s that he is solid, and he can draw you in with his seriousness. He stood in the back, behind the speaker, taking up a corner, listening.

I took a deep breath. I should have known that all it took was the promise of butter tarts, since his love of sweets were probably part of the reason why he had died so young.

When he was alive, we’d meet at truck stops and order pie, turkey sandwiches on white bread with gravy. He’d had at least three heart attacks, maybe four, but eventually it was the cancer that got him, in his 60’s. Actually most of my memories of him are around food, at family dinners and random diners, at the food hall in Three Hills where he met some old boys for gossip sessions. I hadn’t seen him for over twenty years, but now he was here, in the back of the Alexandra Writers Centre, because I had invited him with a spirit plate made from birch bark harvested from my husband’s family’s property. But it was definitely the butter tart that did it.

This year I am writing a ghost story, a Métis novel. I grew up in a Métis family, but because we were solitary and very religious, I have to research which of our customs were traditional Métis, and which were our own special blend of nutsobananas. The dancing, it turns out, is very Métis, the love of food and especially desserts, squares and sugared bannock, very Métis.

For this novel I also researched Métis folklore and practices around death and dying. I found out that the Métis relationship with our people doesn’t end at death, which is not something we practiced in my family. I didn’t know many dead people when I was young, and, since my parents had both left their families, we didn’t really talk about them a lot. I learned that in Métis culture, we include the dead in our daily lives. We gossip about them, and we don’t change our attitudes about them just because they exist in a different form. Tanya Ball, a Métis academic in Alberta, writes that, “unlike other cultures that refuse to speak ill-will of the dead, Michif do not transform into angels after their death. This is a sign of respect for the life that they lived.”

This is very comforting. I’m sick of grieving. I’ve had so many people die in my life that I may as well have been a ghost myself. In the early 2000’s, I moved to Phoenix, Arizona and found a brighter way to mourn in the Mexican celebrations of the Day of the Dead. I made sugar skulls of my little brother with his curly hair and jaunty hat, and my mom with her short hair and my dad with his trickster smile. I put up pictures of them with candles, painted myself with bones and made lanterns to walk in the Dias de los Muertos parades to graveyards. 

But my dead were still restless. I am not Mexican, I am Métis, and I am tasked with telling my family’s stories. These stories aren’t all good ones, they’re not the ones you'd read at night to help you go to sleep. What I write is called horror but it is really just family history. There are atrocities too wrong to right, and the resolution is not in the return to normal, but rather in the knowing, and the haunting.

Stephen Graham Jones, in the intro to Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, says that the reason so many Indigenous horror stories end inconclusively, is partly because" 

“... we tend to like our stories to end like that, with bleeding over, bleeding across, haunting us, it’s that it feels kind of fake and wrong and all too American to throw up walls between what’s real and what’s not real. So telling ourselves stories about the world being bigger than we thought, big enough for bigfoot and little people, that’s really kind of saying to the so-called settlers that, hey, yeah, so you took all that land you could see. But what about all this other territory you don’t even know about man?”

Are my dead in my kitchen to haunt me, or to warn me about what they went through? Or are they just there for the snacks? I have to admit, I have yet to perfect the art of talking to my ‘hanging around ones,’ perhaps because I am not a talker in the first place. I am much more likely to dance with the dead. That is what we did when they occupied their corporeal forms. The kitchen floor is my seance table and the dark crooked sounds of the Métis fiddle is my incense. Let us dance a mean jig to ward off the devil, and to, for a moment, forget what has happened to this land and to its caretakers.

What I have really been learning is Indigenous relationality, which Tanya Ball says extends from people, to the land, to the past:

 “relationality is broken up into wâhkôhtowin (Wah-KOH-toh-win) and miyo-wîcêhtowin (Mi-OH-wa-che-toh-win). Wâhkôhtowin refers to the interconnectedness of our relations — that we are all related. Miyo-wîcêhtowin is being in a good relationship. Relationality does not limit itself to human relations. Rather, it includes our relationship to the Land, the elements, and our ancestors (living and nonliving). With respect to the dead, we contemplate and relate to them as though they are alive. All of these aspects nurture our identity as Michif peoples because they inform us as to how to interact with the world. We reignite our relationship with our ancestors through Storytelling and visiting. Storytelling offers us a special space where time is no longer linear. That is, we exist in the past, present, and future where stories bring our ancestors back to life. This means that if we gossiped and laughed about them in life, we should do the same after their death.”

It is time to tell the stories of my family, the good stories and the ugly ones. The best place to do this is in the kitchen, where we are all the happiest. They are my grateful dead, happy to finally have someone telling their stories, and to finally, after all this time, be given a piece of pie.