The Philippines: Living with the Dead

Photo by Jeffrey Lau / The Toronto Star

I keep a growing list in my phone (and in my notebook) where I put everything memorable. It wasn't always so organized, though.

It's certainly an improvement - I used to just write things in the margins of whatever book I was reading, or I would maintain a current of post-it notes wandering in and out of my life for weeks at a time. This was inspired by a book I read when I was younger, where the protagonist's mother, a novelist, would hide notes throughout the house and use them as inspiration for her books whenever one happened to find her. 

I was browsing through my own collection today and read, "Filipino family, living in grave for shelter".

This is a misnomer. You can't live in a grave but, as evidence by the photo above, you can build your life around them. It's an interesting phenomenon in my home country, and has been written about in several places around the internet.

All of these articles discuss Manila. It's the capital, and it's the most densely-populated. (To wit, dense was not a word I understood properly until I observed it all for myself. Picture Hwy. 401, the busiest highway in Canada, quintupled. Then add a cacophony of noise and the lightning quick, though terrifying, reflexes of your father, a former cab driver.)

While we did travel to more remote places in the Philippines, we spent most of our time in San Pablo City, a metropolis a few hours outside of the capital. 

One morning, we set off to visit my Lola's (Tagalog for "grandmother") grave. The place was beautiful, with lush spanning green lawns and a smattering of headstones and mausoleums. There were palm trees, and a lot of interesting sculpture and details on the graves. I wish I took pictures. (Out of respect, though, I didn't.)

I was struck by a mausoleum a hundred meters or so away from my Lola's. Within the barred, glass-less windows of the memorial (presumably installed to ward off grave robbers), there was an entire family. They had hung clothes to dry and were sitting on plastic lawn chairs, simply hanging out around the stones that concealed their dead relatives.

It's a similar image to the photo above. It was a memory that was quickly replaced by something else not too long after - I only thought of it after passing a crowded* cemetery on my way to work the other day. 

It also brought itself to mind after reading this quote the other day:

“We think we no longer love our dead, but that is because we do not remember them: suddenly we catch sight of an old glove and burst into tears.”

- Marcel Proust, letter written to his wife in 1913

Grief comes in waves (think about going through a break-up and finding something small that sends you into a half-hour long rampage of Facebook creeping). I just wonder how you can weather that when you, quite literally, don't have anywhere else to go.

*I love the double entendre with "crowded" here. I should clarify - crowded with the dead, not the living.