Cemeteries: Paradise or hell?

Undas has come and gone. The yearly trek to pay our respects to our dearly departed was already difficult decades ago when the rains that always seemed to accompany the holiday turned unpaved cemetery roads into mud. Nowadays the roads in the cemeteries are paved but getting there requires jostling with 12 million other people living in the metropolis on crowded roads.

The hellish experience starts on EDSA, and the dozens of bus terminals that line the stretch. Hundreds of thousands try to leave in the three or four days before Undas and the few days after. These terminals already cause traffic jams during the rest of the year as none of them have any accommodations for their buses to maneuver except on EDSA itself. Come Undas (and Christmas season) the bottlenecks are even worse.

These terminals should really be consolidated and integrated with other terminals and modes of transport like the LRT and MRT system; aside from the airport. The NAIA complex, in fact, has more than enough space to allow for a provincial terminal. Imagine being able to get from your plane to a bus right in the same terminal. These types of facilities are normal in European cities. At NAIA it is also possible to connect to the LRT system, which has its depot nearby. In many countries abroad, even water transport is linked to airports and bus terminals.

The northern and eastern terminals of the metropolis could also be integrated and suitably located so as not to block traffic on EDSA or C5 while allowing access and egress from other modes of transport like FXs and in-city buses. Who is in charge of this infrastructure? No one knows. The DPWH, MMDA, DILG, the police and local government units seem to have overlapping jurisdictions and limited involvements in all of these issues, and no one seems to be talking to each other.

No one knows also what to do with overcrowding at all our metropolitan public cemeteries. All are filled to the brim with our dead. Today, even the living are among them as informal settlers (squatters) have made many cemeteries their barangays. Looking at these cemeteries from the air, it is difficult to make out which are the squatters and which are the cemeteries. The standard of living in squatter shanties are actually not much higher than that enjoyed by the dead.

Our cemeteries have resorted to multi-level columbaria but even the five or six stacked options are inadequate. If you look at the north and south cemeteries, it is possible to built much higher multi-level cemeteries or columbaria. This would lead to two benefits: 1) More of our dearly departed can be accommodated (especially now that cremation is more widely accepted), and 2) This would free up space that theoretically be turned into parks and playgrounds to benefit the living.

Parks from cemeteries? It’s not such a wild idea. Over a hundred years ago cemeteries were the precursor of our public parks. The population of the dead was small at the time, so much open space was available. Manila’s North Cemetery was in fact the city’s main nursery for street trees and de facto park for the district. A lot of these trees still fill our cemetery, with many dating over a century old (heritage trees).

Metro Manila is bereft of enough open green space. Cemeteries, if reconfigured right, could be adaptively reused as parks. Our dead could be accommodated even in high-rise columbaminiums! Color-coding for Undas could also be implemented over a whole month so traffic is significantly reduced. These parks could also have lagoons, which would make them flood mitigation elements — they can be used for rain water harvesting too.

For both the needs of the dead (cemeteries) and the needs of the living (bus terminals and parks), what is needed is a larger plan for the location, construction and maintenance of these public amenities. The only problem is that no one seems to be in charge, no one seems to have the political will, and all these proposals seem to fall on dead ears.

Enjoy your visits to the cemetery and keep safe! I hope some day we can turn this honoured tradition into something closer to paradise than to hell.

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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.