Every fall, I make a pilgrimage to the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen. In the early 1900s, the area, on the near south side of Chicago, was where immigrants from Eastern Europe settled. It’s now a largely Hispanic neighborhood.

Colorful murals are painted on the sides of buildings. Upscale restaurants and places for craft cocktails, and bars that might be featured in Time Out, abound.

I go to the museum each year around Halloween for their Day of the Dead exhibit.

Visiting the Dia de Muertos exhibit is like witnessing the Disney/Pixar movie, Coco, come to life. The exhibit features altars (ofrendas) arranged with photographs, paper flowers, diary pages, favorite foods, and personal effects that honor dear ones who died.

In the movie, a young man seeks his great-great-grandfather in the Land of the Dead. He hopes to understand the ban of music in his family as he aspires to a career in music but wants to honor family traditions.

In the course of his adventures, he is reminded that people live on in the hearts of those who honor them. Walking through the exhibit invites you to experience this.

It’s a strange path, walking through the exhibit, seeing the altars composed of relics that are intensely personal while never making you feel like you’re intruding.

You needn’t have known the departed to feel like you know them or someone like them.

Looking at the baseball cards someone collected or finding out that a person’s hero was an uncle who, as a firefighter, died saving twins trapped in a third-story walk-up is both chilling and comforting.

All our lives mean something, even if that is just to a small circle of friends and family.

Wandering through the galleries, and seeing love and loss expressed so naturally was especially poignant in this year’s exhibit. There were special prints and installations on the death of children.

I don’t have children but I do know how the death of a child can affect a family. I lost a sister in a car accident several years before I was born. In some ways, I don’t think my family ever recovered.

It’s often been referred to as the worst thing that could happen to a person, the death of one of their children, but everyone loses something when a young person dies.

The death of a child represents the death of innocence and hope, something we all crave. The death of a child also represents a serious crack in our belief in the natural order of things. Old people are supposed to die before the young, right? We can easily lose our ability to trust life.

There was a colorful ofrenda to honor the nineteen children who were gunned down at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Desks, like you’d see in any school, sat in front of a blackboard where the words of poet and actor, Mardonia Carbella were displayed in Spanish and in English. Butterflies stood out against the teal-colored classroom wall and small skeletons hovered over the scene.

“One never leaves completely. There is an invisible thread that unites the butterfly to its mother.”

I never experienced the curiosity and openness of Layla or Maranda, Xavier, Jose Manuel or the other ten- and eleven-year-olds who lost their lives that day in a mostly quiet town in Texas, but I lingered in front of this altar and piece of art. School shootings have become too common.

Reports on the massacre in Sandy Hook in 2012 shocked me. Now, the statistics on the Sandy Hook Promise web site don’t surprise me. Guns represent the leading cause of death among children.

Somehow, the fact that so many came together to mourn the loss of children that they didn’t know personally provided some level of comfort for me and, I suspect, others.

That art can be a powerful reminder  that everyone knows and shares grief .

Incredible to think that, when children die, we are all mothers of butterflies. Everyone serves the world by remembering.

When “I” becomes “we,” it is no small thing.