The grandniece at home is out on the porch. Her “Nana”—the name she has given to calling her grandmother—has allowed her to cut the ferns and the grasses that would go with the flowers.
It is November. The air is balmy, or I like to think it is. The world is perfect, in other words. The flowers have been readied by the soil for this day. Forget the pricing in the cities or ignore how the lowly and regular daisies have become precious commodities. Today and tomorrow will be the day for flowers. As for the candles, they are all over the place —twisted and tortured to assume curls and curves; colored in purple and pink for those who find “white” ordinary; red for the many who think of auspicious days as time for wealth accumulation.
On Wednesday, while I was being driven around the city by a cousin, on our way to picking up flower arrangements created by a lawyer-friend, we saw on the dark streets men and women masked as ghouls and ghosts.
Children of those parents with surpluses are dressed as monsters or masters of the universe. Mothers who may not have experienced Halloween (the tradition is a recent import) in their youth have ingrained in the minds of their daughters that on the last day of October and the first day of November, they can be beautiful princesses.
The informal settlers near our home in the subdivision has a way of dealing with holidays. Whether it is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, National Heroes Day, or All Souls’ Day, any hint of a holiday seems to push them to bring out—or rent—a karaoke machine. While I write this column and trying very hard to put myself in the presence of death and life and immortality, the old voice of that old woman who, I believe, has incurred the regrets of the century, is filling the air. As usual, she laments and wails: O, tukso, layuan mo ako (O, temptation, stay away from me). The line, however, cannot be easily translated but I can understand her. She is the laundrywoman who has fallen in love, fell with a thud out of love nd fallen in love again. Her song, however enervating, is the only sincere and real sound this side of the anxious Earth.
All of us are not certain about our sorrow on the Day of the Dead. It does not matter what the Church teaches. It has been learned since long ago that this institutional Church does not influence anymore the many crucial decisions of its followers or faithful. If it does, we would have a more spiritual attitude to death and the life after death, or life after life.
If we believe in this Church or any gathering under the Christian denomination, then we would not be dressing our children in horrifying costumes. If we do believe in the spirit and the release that our bodies go through when its physicality dies, then we would not be decorating our offices with bats. Ghouls not benign gods rule the festivities for the dead. Our notion of death and, for that matter, our thoughts about those who had gone ahead are thoughts about the terror of not being alive. I do not think we are ever assured how beautiful death is for as long as we find allure in cobwebs and condemned souls graciously gilding our walls and doors.
Perhaps, as a hint of the more rabid and frantic preparations we will put ourselves into when the birth and not the death of a Savior is remembered in the month of December, these first two days of November are symbols of our search for assurance.
Out there in those graves and tombs are the residues of those who lived with us. We sang with them once; we cried with them all the time. They knew our good deeds; they had listened to the poems we wrote about them and this world. We wondered with them the mysteries of Life when they were alive. They are now in cemeteries and memorial parks—destinations that are not and will never be natural to the quotidian, while we are in our homes, in the world of the alive.
Each day as we live, we skip thinking about these places. We only remember and visit these places, we gaze at tombs and epitaphs when they who, we assume, have their birthdays or death anniversaries. And, on the designated days for the world to think about the dead, we become one with the crowd, with the flood of people rushing to submerge these quiet places with our foods, noise and presences.
Strange, how we conjure the significance of the birthdays of those who have ceased their living. Strange and sad how we memorialize the death anniversaries of those who would never really care about
their passing.
But we care, we want to remember, we do not want to forget.
We bring these flowers to the grave and we light the candles for the beloved. And yet, the flowers and the candles are really for us. We pray about those who we cannot see anymore and that prayer is for us, that they may not forget us, that they may see us wherever they are.
Most of us would be looking down at the grave and musing over how badly painted the names of our loved ones when we should be really looking up, counting the stars innumerable as, each day, each month, each year, more loved ones join the clouds and the distances.
Out there in the porch, Leona, my grandniece, is finishing her flower arrangement. I could hear her grandmother telling her how she would, how she should continue to make those flowers. And they would be for us.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano