The day of the dead

Days and nights and holidays for journalists are sort of distorted because, as one newsroom says, “hindi natutulog ang balita.” News never stops indeed, which is why people in the media work on Sundays and holidays and most days in between.

The day of the dead is no exception. Most of us work on this day with hardly a chance to visit the cemetery or the columbarium to honor our dearly departed.

Our dead, I hope, understand that duty calls. In lieu of a visit to the cemetery, some just whisper a prayer or two.

As for me, I write this piece as my way of honoring the dearly departed; after all, as someone once said, your work can be your prayer.

And so with words, I hope to honor the loved ones I lost during the pandemic and long before; the men and women leaders or public servants gone too soon; my brave colleagues murdered for doing their jobs; the activists and rights workers; the victims of Rody Duterte’s bloody drug war. My thoughts are also with the growing number of people, the men, women and children – especially the children – killed in the still ravaging Israel-Hamas conflict.

In real life though, grief knows no days or hours. Anyone who has lost a loved one knows this.

The pain doesn’t come only when your mind is blank. Grief overwhelms in the most unexpected moments, like a dam that suddenly breaks and it hits even in the busiest of times – in the middle of an interview; in a press conference; in a dinner with some source or while staring at your computer.

Sometimes, you miss your dead so much you start talking out loud in that empty space around you like a lunatic, pretending he or she is listening.

My first experience of overwhelming grief was not even over a human being. It was over a dog – the dog of my childhood who I thought would live forever. One day, he got hit by a speeding car, languished in pain days after and eventually breathed his last. The kids that we were at the time, my brothers and I didn’t know how to grieve over a dead dog.

There were no dog memorial parks yet back then, no place to send our departed pets, no send-off ceremony, no closure. We didn’t know how to say goodbye to a dog that brought us so much joy. He was always there, giddy with excitement when our school bus arrived to drop us off at our gate at the end of each school day. He would carry our bags around his neck the whole stretch of the long driveway to our house.

It’s true what they say: “Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day.”

That death broke my heart and I don’t think it ever got fixed. I never got another dog since. 
The first human I lost was my grandfather. And then there were other losses – a grandmother, a favorite aunt, a childhood friend, a heartbeat.

Through the years, I learned that the first death doesn’t make the succeeding ones more bearable.

Each being – human or otherwise – after all, has had a role to play in our lives that when his or her death comes, your life splits into two and I’m not even talking in metaphors.

When I say split into two I mean it literally – there is your life when that loved one still existed and there is the next chapter when that person or dog is no longer around. You start from scratch because that life you knew is over. You steel yourself to go on every single day, putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don’t but almost always, the world thinks you’re all OK.

Life is never the same. Love and death are conjoined after all and the pain of death is as intense as the love you shared.

Perhaps, this is the reason why among old couples, the surviving spouse dies soon after the other one passes.

Grief also does odd things to the mind. There are the could haves and should haves – pangs of guilt and regret. We torture ourselves thinking we could have done more for them when they were still alive.

We tell ourselves: should have booked that trip, should have answered that call, should have uttered those words; should have been there.

At times, we comfort ourselves that the loved one we lost is still with us – the vividly yellow or blue butterfly that appears all of a sudden, or that big bright star in the evening sky.

And then that moment flees and we realize once more, that the loved one is gone. Forever. It is what it is. They’re not even in those lonely graves in the cemetery. We can only hold them in our hearts because in the end, all we ever have are memories.

I end this piece by honoring not just the dead but the living – those left behind.

Grief never really ends and those who have lost a loved one just learn to carry on even if the heart and the mind come to a standstill; and even if there’s that gaping hole inside us with our departed loved one’s name that never quite heals.

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen (Iris Gonzales) on Facebook.