Deathly lessons

Millions of Filipinos will troop to cemeteries across the nation tomorrow and on Friday to celebrate one of the world’s most festive All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day celebrations.

As we look forward to graveside family reunions we join the government in its counsel for people to take travel safety precautions and the Church in their call for these days to be spent on prayer and reflection.

We also look back on some of the deaths that occurred in 2012 so far for some lessons that we can imbibe as we journey in time, lessons that, to borrow from the poet Kahlil Gibran, are clearer to us “as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.”

Music lovers mourned the passing of Whitney Houston in 2012 due to accidental drowning in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub precipitated by a heart condition and drug use.

Her death is a wakeup call for the families responsible for drug addicts, especially celebrity ones, to be sterner in their interventions to save the life of their kin.

Jesse Robredo died in office as secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Government following a plane crash in the sea off Masbate province.

The moral in the subsequent outpouring of grief and gratitude by Filipinos from all walks of life should not be lost on anyone in public service: Their actions, good or bad, will mark their clients and constituents. The people hunger for genuine service.

The astronaut Neil Armstrong died due to complications stemming from blocked heart arteries.

Armstrong had much he could have bragged about and could have wielded great political clout. But after becoming the first man to set foot on the moon he spent  most of his life as a humble university professor.

Up to 50,000 people have been killed in the continuing civil war in Syria.

This and the fact that at least 120,000 lives were claimed in the Philippine government’s war with Moro rebels since the 1960s are emphatic deterrents to any attempt to sabotage the creation of the autonomous Bangsamoro region of Mindanao, poised to be the biggest peace legacy of the presidency of Benigno Aquino III.

Beyond the spotlight, the deaths of our own loved ones can shed light on how we can better live our lives and improve the lot of our neighbors, especially the ones who have experienced death all their lives because of want, fear or despair.

In these days that ought to be of quiet, let us remember a thought from the great scholar of death, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: “It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth—and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up—that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.”