My celebration of All Saints Day is usually a day of recovery from all the Halloween parties I attended the night before. As far as I can remember, there was no day that I dared and braved the journey to the cemetery. Even when we were young our parents would take us a day before November 1 to our departed grandparents’ graves. They would be saying that it was better to be there earlier to avoid the chaos and the maddening crowd, plus this gave us the advantage to party during Halloween without the guilt of not honoring our departed love ones.
And to show you what made All Saints Day an All Day Rest for me, here’s a peek at two Halloween Thrillers, One Ghastly Dance.
Motorola took partying to a different level by simultaneously hosting two separate parties connected via live feed coverage. The events were highlighted by the Michael Jackson Thriller danceathon that benefited the Philippine Red Cross.
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Blame it on our fatalist beliefs, but Filipinos aren’t that scared of death. We believe that we die when we’re supposed to, “panahon na niya”, and there’s nothing we can do to prevent when and where. On the day we’re supposed to die, we are where we’re supposed to be. This is how we rationalize sudden death and accidents. Dying from an illness or old age, we have time to prepare though, and we expire when the body’s too tired and the spirit needs to be free.
My family doesn’t go to the cemeteries on Halloween. We visit them on another day, or another month, even. We like to celebrate how they were when they were alive. We talk about our dearly departed often, with fond and often funny memories: how my lola Nina had a boyfriend from every colonizing country that came to our shores (Go lola!), how my lolo Nene would twirl and slow dance with my lola every new year’s eve, my lola Biding’s matching shoes, bags and belts, and my Lolo Didong’s patriotic stories as a general during the war.
I remember how colorful and crazy my departed relatives’ lives were and these are the memories that we come back to. We don’t remember their death, we remember their lives.
My family and I don’t visit our dead on All Saints’ Day. We’re not heathens, just practical. We prefer making our annual trip to Lolo and Lola’s patch of green and concrete after the streets have been rinsed of the urban pilgrim crowd that manages to make a cemetery look like a Woodstock concert venue. Plus, there’s the traffic. I live in Alabang, and my beloved are buried in Sucat’s Manila Memorial. Sucat on a regular day is already a force of nature―and there are TWO major memorial capitals here enough to cause a jam. So we pay our respects during “off peak visiting hours.”
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It’s strange to me how some of my friends don’t go to the cemetery on All Saints’ Day. “Wala pang namamatay sa immediate family ko,” they would say. But death—morbid as it may sound—has always been a part of my life; it seems to be a recurring theme in my family. I’ve always been surrounded by it; even when I was in utero, I probably already felt the pain of losing a member of the family. We’ve had quite a number of tragedies, so much so that I’ve heard people liken us to the Kennedys.
We used to spend hours at the cemetery when I was younger—we’d pack up and leave the house at around midnight, brave the traffic, and sleep on the damp grass under a tent. We’d get up mid-morning and see other relatives visiting their own loved ones, then head back to my brother’s grave, pray the rosary, and eat fried chicken and spaghetti. As the adults packed up, my brothers and I would make balls out of melted candle wax.
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