A Day for the Dead and the Living

We plunder gardens to get flowers and we again gather around graves to light candles. We paint the crosses that mark the tombstones of our loved ones and we pinch the cheeks of the solitary angels by painting their faces as they hover over the final destiny of those who have gone ahead of us.

It is the day for and of the Dead and we who are alive are running about to remember ourselves remember them.

The lyricism of the day or the days when we troop to cemeteries begins and ends with the graves and the memories that we allow ourselves. Away from the grave, and when we stop to think of those whose corpses are found underneath, the observance of All Souls' Day and All Saints' Day, two festivals conflated as one as if we mix holiness with passing away, is really about ourselves.

I remember the first time I heard of memorial parks. A friend of the family came over to the house. He was the son of the friend of my grandfather. He came to introduce himself as the head of an insurance company that also assured people that there would be assistance when the time of bereavement came. The man also happened to be a poet, or, at least, at that point, someone who used to be interested in poetry. Otherwise, he would not have joined a firm that found certainty in the times of grief and was too sure about the preparation regarding death.

Death is the ultimate poetry, and the uncertainty about it is not only natural; it makes us human. Like good poetry.

Anyway, a few years from that visit, so-called memorial parks sprouted like living signs about the commerce of death. That birth of memorial parks and memorial plots spelled also the death of cemeteries.

Cemeteries used to be part of the planned spaces of the town or city. It was planned insofar as it was part of the geography of the place. Its plan, however, stopped there in its location. Cemeteries did not plan for dying. It was there for death that, for a long time, remained one of those phenomena families never talked about.

In my hometown, San Fernando, in the island of Ticao, there was only one cemetery. I did not know it was a Catholic cemetery, until I witnessed the funeral of man who committed a suicide. He was not allowed to be buried in the cemetery that we knew; his body was placed outside the wall of that ancient repository. He was buried in the Cementerio Civil.

It was a forlorn place, even now. No one, I believe, ever wanted to be buried there. The plot in that cemetery outside the blessed final resting place appeared to be a default site for those whose death was sinful or tabooed enough for them to be allowed in the regular cemetery.