All Saints’ Day

By Jing Montealegre

We’re unlike the West in the ways we treat our dead, or more importantly, how we’d like to be treated when we’re dead. Think about it: if today’s human population is eight billion, the population of the dead - in crypts, urns, or six feet underground - is so much larger. Through the ages we’re most of the time dead than alive. (This fact alone should inspire the National Statistics Office to conduct a census, albeit, a creepy census.) 

We celebrate and remember our dead on All Saints’ Day. In my hometown when I was younger we went to the cemetery to pay our respects and pray over the graves of family members. I also went there to meet friends who were also visiting, an occasion for a reunion of sorts once every year. 

But the last time I visited, none of my friends were there. I wondered a long time what had happened to them, when a tiny voice tickled in my ear: Hey, buddy, maybe your friends have departed, croaked, hit the bucket, bit the dust, or other mode of permanent exit?  Ah! So they, too, had joined the ranks of the majority! 

Of course cemeteries aren’t the same as before: we now have people living in them. Entire families set up permanent quarters over cemetery lots, making tomb and crypt part of the furniture and living areas. These settlements are called Crypt-O-Homes, and they blur the lines between the living and the dead - between them and us - eerily reminding me how interchangeable our positions are. 

The recent surge in cremation and columbaries should help ease the volume of people visiting cemeteries on All Saints’ Day; it’s a welcome development but hardly a guarantee that we don’t get to spend most of our time on Earth six feet underground.

As we troop to the cemeteries on All Saints’ Day, Westerners celebrate Halloween. As we honor and pray over the dead, Westerners revel and play, goading the “undead” to scare them silly. 

But, like them, we now “trick or treat” like any fool on the block.

Well, not nearly that much in our case: the Halloween binge may be prevalent in many upscale neighborhoods, gated subdivisions and elite communities, but most of us still prefer the old-fashioned cemetery picnic. 

All Saints’ Day here is probably closer to a Westerner’s Thanksgiving Day Celebration, where family and friends get together, partaking turkey and wine in their case, and chicken, Coke or Gin in ours. All in all, it’s a day of warm celebration, bonding with family and kin, with the living and the dead. 

So, off to the cemeteries we go on All Saints’ Day. But the volume of stuff we haul there on that day - food, drinks, lamps, mats, tents, tables, chairs, beddings - gets me wondering if we’re there to stay. I hope not.