Feast of the departed

Today is All Saints' Day, a holiday originally dedicated to honor all the Saints, particularly those who had not been assigned a particular day in the church calendar. All Souls' Day was added years later to include all men and women who had already joined the Saints in the spiritual world. In the Philippines, however, All Saints' Day just marks the start of All Souls'. In these two holidays, Filipinos, as a community, pay homage to their dearly departed. We say "as a community", because individuals and families also commemorate the death anniversaries of their deceased relatives and friends. But it is on All Saints' and All Souls' Days that practically everyone goes to the cemetery. It is a feast celebrated in the spirit of our traditional fiestas. So it’s fiesta time in all our cemeteries.

On these two days, all roads leading to the 53 private and public cemeteries in Metro Manila will be clogged. Seven of these cemeteries are in Quezon City and starting 4 a.m., Quezon City Mayor Feliciano Belmonte had to instruct the Central Police Office and the City’s traffic enforcers to ensure a smooth traffic flow in all major roads to the cities cemeteries. The Central Office Traffic Management Unit has "Oplan Kaluluwa 2001", a traffic plan that is valid only for the present two-day holiday. Manila has four cemeteries and Manila Mayor Lito Atienza deemed it expedient to close all gates of the four cemeteries to traffic and starting last midnight, all four cemeteries could only be reached by foot. The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority is deploying 4,000 traffic enforcers to avoid congestion to all 53 cemeteries.

The four-day break will allow people who ordinarily cannot travel to their distant towns to do so during this All Saints Day. So Transportation Secretary Pantaleon Alvarez has warned transport operators to refrain from overloading their vehicles with countless people who will go home to their respective towns to pay homage to their departed loved ones in their cemeteries.

There will be a lot of joy in all cemeteries today. But one thing we don’t have is humor concerning the dead. In many countries, you find humorous epitaphs and they deal with all sorts of people. A gravestone of a child who died at birth in Cheltenham, England had this inscription:

It is so soon that I am done for,
I wonder what I was begun for.

A dentist had this epitaph:

Stranger! Approach this spot
with gravity!
John Brown is filling his
last cavity.

And we hope that motorists on their way to the cemeteries today, do not end up with this valediction:

This is the grave of Mike O’Day
Who died maintaining his right of way.
His right was clear, his will was strong.
But he’s just as dead as if he were wrong.

A cook in London had this on his tomb.

Peas to his Hashes

Poet John Gay wrote his own epitaph:

Life is a jest, and all things show it
I thought so once, but now I know it.

A recent find is this in Erosburg, Vermont on the grave of Anna Nopewill:

Here lies the body of Anna
done to the death by a fresh banana.
It wasn’t the fruit that laid her low
but the skin of the thing that made her go.