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PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 5 November 2008 Issue (Page E-3)

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In my earlier years, All Saints’ Day didn’t strike me as significant by itself. What gave it value, if there was one, was coming to the province to spend time with my cousins and enjoying a change of scenery. But I saw no point in visiting the cemetery. Why should I have to be dragged there to pay my respects to people (granted, they were relatives) whom I had never even met, and quite possibly, had never given a damn about me?

I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer, but I continued to come along on these visits anyway, if only to observe tradition.

Then when I was nine, my first pet, a poodle named Tanny, died. Her death caused me so much sorrow that I refused to have her buried. Burying her would mean that I would never see her or hold her again. We eventually had to, though. So it was that the days for the dead came to hold its first real significance for me: it was a time to offer a prayer or a moment of silence in honor of my beloved Tanny.

In the years that would follow, I would be provided with more reasons to commemorate it: a pair of rabbits and lovebirds; my grandmother, who endured two years of recurring strokes and heart attacks; my dear grandfather, who died while I was abroad. Most recently, there was my other grandmother, who died on All Saints’ Day last weekend.

It is on occasions like these that I wonder whether there is a point to honoring the dead. What good does remembering really do to them? It’s not like they’ll be brought back to life by it. Nor, if we are to talk about heaven and judgment, will it alter the way their lives played out or the choices that they made. Or, if we were to take it from the opposite spectrum of belief: they’re dead anyway, they can’t care. No, I still don’t see how it benefits the dead to be remembered by those still living.

But if that’s true, why do we spend our lives trying to leave some mark, brand, or impact—in other words, a form of remembrance—on other people’s lives? Why are we so obsessed with remembering and being remembered?

I’m no philosopher, but the answer I came up with is this: our individual lives are but one single, infinitesimal speck in the infinitely boundless dimensions of time and the Universe. Thought of in another way, this means that our lives are meaningless and insignificant. If this is the case, then there is no point in living. Like the stars, our lives will burn brightly for an instant, die out in a blaze of glory, and finally disappear, as if we had never existed.

But just because we are hopelessly small does not mean that we have to be resigned to our own insignificance. Our lives may be tiny, negligible dots against the backdrop of the infinite cosmos, but at least we can make a mark on our fellow dots, however small or fleeting that mark might be. This is where remembering takes significance: we indelibly leave our marks on the lives of the people we have touched. Also, we remember so that we, too, can be remembered. It may be a small consolation, but it is a small (and important!) consolation nonetheless.

Honoring the dead might not do much for those who are already dead, but they do much for those who are still living. It is through those who have run the course of life that we learn how to live ours, and through them that we find the heart to keep on running.

Finally, we can also think about it this way: if all human beings have souls, and souls essentially consist of a person’s thoughts and identity, then what is a soul but a collection of all the memories we have gathered during our lives? Memories, then, are the only things we can bring along with us in the next life.

They are also the only things we truly get to keep of loved ones who have just passed away.

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