Saturday, November 03, 2007
Roperos: Death and mourning
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics Also
WE, the living, when we celebrate the day of remembering our dead, approach it with mixed thoughts and feelings. We consider it as sacred and thus seek a sense of solemnity.
This is what the attitude of the living should be towards their dead, on the day our faith has designated for our remembering.
However, times have greatly changed. In the past two days, we read the pages of our dailies, viewed the Halloween shows on TV and listened to programs on radio for any touch of solemnity.
There was nothing that could draw from us a glow of respect for the dead we have left to rest in our cemeteries and memorial parks.
Our contemporary society has made our day of the dead a day for making material gains at the expense of our sorrows and pains, our sense of loss. Even the candle that now sells at P1 apiece have grown thinner and shorter by the year.
And, yes, the way to the cemetery in the countryside have become a vendor’s market, where items are sold, from dried fish to kitchen wares to inexpensive towels and women’s under things.
That poet who once exclaimed “Death be not proud…” may have seen how death had always steadfastly remained arrogant and imperious before the cowering living.
However, today, there is a kind of hardening in the heart of the living, a sense of que sera sera, to borrow the phrase from a song, and has taken the sting from death. It is now profitable to the living instead.
Truly, the day for the dead is like the living having a confrontation with death. The dead in graves or in tombs form part of the ritual of remembering—not just in the ebb and flow of the life but also of the pains and joys, the happiness and sorrows shared.
Death, certainly, is proud and arrogant, in the sense that it recognizes no compromise, respects no one, and simply means the end of something with finality.
Regardless of how one meets it, sees it, encounters it, in others, in close friends and kin, and finally in himself, death always signifies the same—the end of something good, bad, or in between.
Still there is the end, the sorrow, and the heart that mourns, the mind that recalls and suffers. The spirit of the living that is, somehow, immersed in the pain of loss.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (November 3, 2007 issue)
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