Annual cemetery gatherings mix celebration, sadness

THE LIVING VISIT THE DEAD Hundreds of thousands of people plod along the main road inside Manila North Cemetery on their way to visit the tombs of their departed relatives on Sunday, All Saints’ Day, in an annual pilgrimage that ends with church services on All Souls’ Day, observed today. MARIANNE BERMUDEZ

MILLIONS of Filipinos made their annual pilgrimages to cemeteries on Sunday in a tradition that combines fervent Catholic faith with the country’s penchant for festivity.

The overwhelmingly Catholic nation has long celebrated All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1 as an occasion to gather at the graves of loved ones, light candles and pray for their souls.

While many people in Metro Manila’s sprawling cemeteries treated the event like a giant picnic, in the Eastern Visayas city of Tacloban, which is still suffering the devastation of Supertyphoon “Yolanda’’ (international name: Haiyan), the mood was mournful and somber.

Mass grave

Many of the mourners had to visit a mass grave where more than 2,400 bodies were buried after Yolanda, the strongest typhoon ever recorded to hit land, ravaged the city in November 2013.

The city government has covered the mass grave with scores of small white crosses and families have taken to labeling the crosses with the names of their deceased loved ones.

Rebecca Gonzales Daa, 56, was among the multitude who brought flowers and candles to the mass graveyard for her late husband, Raul, one of more than 7,350 people left dead or missing by Yolanda’s tsunami-like waves.

“We had evacuated, my mother and other siblings fled to my uncle’s apartment but my husband went home. He was worried about our pigs and our belongings,” Rebecca recalled tearfully.

“We found his body with a large wound on his head later. He must have been hit by a piece of floating debris,” she told Agence France-Presse.

In the aftermath of the disaster, with funeral parlors destroyed and piles of bodies lining the streets, Tacloban authorities resorted to burying the dead together.

“We used to visit the graves of my father, my brother on All Saints’ Day. I would bring snacks. It wasn’t so sad because I would see my family. It was like a reunion,” Rebecca recalled.

“Now, it is a sad occasion. I tell (my husband), we are left alone with no one to watch over us,” she said.

Missing mother

Ricka Joy Quisay, 17, lit candles in front of the Tacloban cemetery because she isn’t even sure her mother is in the mass grave.

Ricka fled to an evacuation center before Yolanda struck, but her mother, Rebecca, 59, did not believe the storm would be that strong.

“The next day, we saw her body just placed alongside the road. It lay there for two weeks till it got bloated and was finally carried away by a truck,” she said.

“Before, All Saints’ Day wasn’t sad. My mother would light candles in front of our house. But now, my mother is the one we are lighting candles for,” she said.

The mood in Metro Manila, which was spared the worst of Yolanda’s fury, was more lighthearted. City officials even had to ban loudspeakers, loud radios and even decks of cards from cemeteries to maintain a modicum of solemnity.

Family reunions

Housewife Alidia Cecilia, 72, said she visited the cemetery every year because it was a chance for her extended family to bond together.

A huge tree gives a welcome shade over her family’s cemetery plot, and many of the country’s fast-food franchises have established booths to feed Alidia’s hungry grandchildren.

Retired accountant Rely Reyes, 61, said she came not just to visit the graves of her relatives, “but also to commune with the living.”

“This is a chance to see all the members of my family. It is all a potluck gathering. The family understands we all need to bring something to be shared. That is the Filipino way,” Rely said.

Teenage visitors at her plot chatted animatedly while nibbling on snacks, casually using the huge stone tomb as bench.

“We all pay our respects in our own way. We maintain the continuity among the generations,” she said. AFP