Ten years ago, the neuroscientist David Eagleman released a collection of 40 short stories, each of these exploring a different idea of the afterlife.
In my favorite story of the collection, which is called “Sum,” an individual truly dies when someone speaks his or her name for the last time.
It occurs to me that I can’t remember the last time I said my father’s name aloud.
My mother and I visited his grave last Saturday morning, in part because I had to be at work the day before but mostly because we wanted to avoid the crowds. We have visited a cemetery in Liloan town for 17 years now. In the first four years or so after my father’s death, we went every Sunday afternoon—not to pray (because that is not what our faith prescribes) and not because we were in denial.
My mother and I went because the visits were comforting and gave us a chance to catch up. These visits never felt strange, except for one occasion when we stayed late and realized, only as we were about to leave and dusk had started to fall, that we had a flat tire. I have never been more thankful for the kindness of strangers and vulcanizing shop owners than I was on that day.
In the year my father died, there were 396,296 other registered deaths in the country. Last year, the government’s statistics office reported, there were 585,798. We have seen the changes, though of course less precisely, in the graveyard that has long become part of my family’s list of familiar places.
Where there used to be empty grassland, there are now family plots where large clans arrive in early November, bearing food, coolers filled with ice and beverages and tents. On our first All Saints’ Day, just three months after my father Ely died, we shared some badly needed comic relief.
The young men in the family had assumed that setting up the tent would be their task and they hopped to it with plenty of confidence and enthusiasm, but not quite as much planning.
Thirty minutes later, they were cranky, sweaty and surrounded by plastic poles, thin metal rods, and a disorganized heap of canvas. My mother and I finally asked them to locate the illustrated assembly guide that had come with the set, helped them sort out the materials, and talked them through the assembly process. Fewer than 10 minutes later, we were sitting in the shade of a sturdy tent.
Comic relief arrived along with another family, who had a striped tent just like ours and, just like the men in our family had done, promptly tried assembling the thing without reading the guide first.
We let them try to sort things out for 15 minutes or so (with more muttering than real progress, which I’m sorry to say was fun to watch) before we went over and suggested that they consult the guide first. Within minutes, their tent was up and they began eating lechon in peace.
We didn’t see that family this year. A few families heard Mass in the chapel on a hill, and others sat under tents that had weathered the elements for another year. The caretaker remarked that some of the plots had not been visited at all. Maybe their families were overseas? I preferred to think that their families were just visiting other graves in other cities and would make their way north before the day’s end.
At noon, after our visit, we went home for lunch and listened to a broadcaster’s report about how other parts of the country had marked the holidays. In one province in Luzon, some people flew kites on All Souls’ Day because of an enduring belief that these would help the souls of their departed find their way up to heaven. My mother shook her head.
Yet apparently those people were not alone in that practice. In the Guatemalan town of Santiago, the Reuters news agency reported, the same tradition has survived for more than two centuries. I imagine that families have kept the ritual alive, no matter how irrational it now seems. And I say a quick prayer for more years together, for a much larger sum of days both special and commonplace when we—sometimes in exasperation but more often in affection—utter each other’s name.