THERE WAS STILL ENOUGH DAYLIGHT MONDAY afternoon as we made our way towards the Jimenez family plot at Loyola Memorial Park in Marikina. The atmosphere was more picnic than Day of the Dead as families joined us in a casual parade, like us in search of their dead’s resting places. Elsewhere, clumps of people gathered around markers set into the ground, while children ran about, enjoying the fading rays of the sun.
The day before we had made a similar pilgrimage to the David common burial ground in La Loma Cemetery. It was Nov. 1, the traditional day for families to visit the graves of their loved ones. News reports the night before said the number of visitors to La Loma and adjacent North Cemetery, the largest cemetery in Metro Manila, could easily reach three million. But we had left our home early in the morning, and though vehicles were no longer allowed through the gates, we weren’t confronted with the promised congestion.
It was, given past experience with All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day, a rather benign experience. Perhaps the days for honoring deceased members of one’s family should always fall on a long weekend, spreading out the days of obligation for cemetery visits.
Because Typhoon “Santi” was expected that weekend, we had planned our outfits for rain. And though we left home with the sun high and clear in the sky, we still took care to tote along umbrellas and jackets and slipped on rubber shoes to cope with muddy ground. But the day proved warm and brilliant, and we used the umbrellas instead as shade against the sun.
Well, in Loyola last Monday, the rains did come as we were walking back to our vehicle. I had left behind my jacket because it had proved useless the day before, but now I wished I had the foresight to bring it along. Good thing my sister Joni brought with her a huge golf umbrella, but even then, we frantically dodged raindrops, cars and people, since everybody apparently decided it was time to head home.
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THERE is a picture in an old family album taken on the day of the burial of a great-grandmother of ours. The deceased had place of honor, right in the center of the grouping, the casket upright the better to show the corpse within. Older relatives are shown clustered around the remains, including my mother who was but a little girl then, scowling at the camera.
The picture held great fascination for us when we discovered it as children. There was of course the ghoulish pleasure taken at the sight of a corpse, even if by then our forebear looked more or less like an Egyptian mummy, unwrapped, of course. But it was also the sense of kinship it generated, the knowledge that we were all linked by blood to everyone at that funeral, even to someone who had died many years before any of us were born.
At that time, the rituals of dying were full of pomp and solemnity. The church bells would toll out in slow, mournful cadence, informing everyone in town that someone had just died. The body would then be transported by cart to the “Campo Santo,” or literally, the Camp of Saints, just on the outskirts of town. Mourners would follow on foot, and if the deceased was moneyed, the group would be preceded by a brass band playing sad, solemn tunes.
In Manila these days, funerary bands have been replaced by recordings (“Ave Maria” seems a favorite) blaring from the funeral car. Even the slow, careful pace of the cortege of the past has been replaced by a fast-moving motorcade, often headed by motorcycle escorts who deploy sirens to cut a swath through traffic, as if the mourners were in a hurry to get it over with. The dead certainly don’t have appointments waiting for them.
Increasingly, even the funeral car is dispensed with. With the growing “popularity” of cremation, the family members simply transport the urn with them in their vehicle, to be buried in the ground or else placed in a tiny niche with a small viewing window. One family I know simply thanked those who condoled with them after the Mass, then brought home the urn, placing it atop a TV set.
While I, too, prefer cremation to a public viewing (my flesh creeps at the thought of people commenting how young and healthy I look inside my coffin), it took a while for me to get used to wakes where the only proof that there was a life we are mourning is a container atop a table. But then, as is fashionable at wakes these days, we are reminded to “celebrate” a life, and not grieve for its loss.
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IN AN essay in the New York Times, theology professor Thomas G. Long wonders if this distancing from death is really all that healthy. It seems, he writes, that in our determination to make light of one’s passing and remember only the casual details of a person’s existence, we somehow trivialize loss, grief and remembering.
A scene from the HBO series “Six Feet Under” comes to mind. A family is burying its dead patriarch and the survivors are given a metal container to “sprinkle” the coffin with earth, a symbol of mortality. One son is deeply offended by this, grabbing a fistful of dirt and throwing it into the grave. “Are you afraid to get your hands dirty?” he demands of his kin.
Long quotes William Gladstone, a British statesman: “Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people.” In making light of death, and keeping it as sanitized as possible, are we not in fact making light, too, of our obligations to them and to each other?
Or as Long puts it: “People who have learned how to care tenderly for the bodies of the dead are almost surely people who also know how to show mercy to the bodies of the living.”
