Beltran's friends never gave him rest

Crispin Beltran, the leftist partylist representative who truly lived his pro-poor advocacies ( he died from a fall while trying to fix a leak in his roof ), was laid to rest last Wednesday.

That close to 20,000 people attended his burial came as no surprise. His advocacies can always count on the masses to provide enough warm bodies for a cause. Besides, when the true details of his life emerged after his death, many clearly changed their minds about the man.

Unlike some who shared his advocacies but refused to live them in their private lives, Beltran was shown to have lived the life of a poor man. Photos of his home did not suggest a congressman lived there. And his wife, she was as plain as they come.

But when he was taken to his final rest, his cohorts in his causes could not take it upon themselves to leave the man in peace as he went to meet his maker. They still needed to turn the burial into a political spectacle.

Photos of the burial showed his leftist colleagues in Congress marching with the funeral cortege with clenched fists raised high up in the air. Was this the way they want Beltran to meet his maker? In an atmosphere of agitation and anger?

What a  bunch these people are. The honor and the dignity that Beltran surely must have earned in his life did not necessitate angry displays of political sloganeering. Beltran has done his share of fighting. He was on his way to get his just reward.

But look at the faces of the likes of Satur Ocampo and Liza Maza. They looked angry, as they always have been. It seemed beneath their dignity to give up their colleague to his God who knew everything that must be done from hereon.

It was as if they were telling God what he might have missed and only the leftists recognized. Thankfully, God, in his infinite wisdom, did not choose to strike them with a thunderbolt.

Death always signifies an end and a beginning. For Beltran, it was the end of his worldly concerns, his earth-bound struggles, his temporal desires. His death now moves him to another phase that we, the living, can never hope to fully comprehend.

Whatever death means to people, some will always view it with dread while some see it with a sense of resignation. Whatever it is, it is a release to the eternal will of the one true God who has dominion over us all.

So why the heck can the colleagues of Beltran not see that? Why did they have to turn his burial into a political statement as if they knew better what to do with him than the God who, at the moment they were expressing their anger, was waiting for Beltran in peace.

 Perhaps this is the reason why normal people are turned off by their movements, because they could never learn to show respect for the dignity of others, including those who have passed on to their maker.

Death, as a process of transition, is no longer the time for continued anxieties born of or rooted in the previous life. As a preparation for the next phase, death should be attended with solemnity and grace, of quiet dignity and peaceful respect.

If the friends of Beltran need to continue their struggles, by all means they are free to do so. But they should not have turned his burial into a platform from which they can continue to agitate for their own interests.