I'm afraid they are stirring in their graves
Since April 2020, I think I’ve been in a state of perpetual mourning. There was a series of deaths in the early pandemic and I was terrified that I had run out of words to say to comfort the bereaved. Everything was happening on Facebook and, try as I might to say what I truly felt, I found myself just saying the same things over and over because what else was there to say when everyone else is saying it?
Truth to tell, I’ve been wondering whether or not I should unfriend the dearly departed on Facebook, as there is no way I could mark their accounts in some way to separate them from the living. Even before the pandemic, there was a time I was making a list and I came upon names of people whose departures I had forgotten. It’s possible, you know. They still seemed so alive on Facebook, especially if they had no one to curate their account as a memorial. Don’t feel guilty having to unfriend the deceased, that is, if memories hurt you or others tagging him or her with posts that show up on your wall proves unbearable. Which reminds me, I should stop tagging Manong Frankie (the national artist for literature F. Sionil Jose) and Cherie Gil when I post about them because I shouldn’t impose upon their friends and family undue reminders of their absence.
But I can’t unfriend those with whom I have had meaningful interactions with on and off Facebook when they were alive, the same way I can’t push their memories into a corner of my mind where I never have to face them ever again. So they stay with me on Facebook and they show up every now and then in my Facebook memories and every time a common friend posts about them—and sometimes it makes me go through my grief again, even for a moment, or sometimes it puts a smile on my face or sometimes, though very rarely, I learn something about them that I didn’t know before. My psychiatrist, Dr. Lourdes Lapuz, whom I had not seen since 1990, died in 2017. It took a stranger, reacting to a post I made on Facebook about how she saved me in every way a person could be saved, to inform me that Dr. Lapuz had died in 2017 and it was thanks to Facebook that I learned so much more about this doctor who set me in the right direction as I exited my teens.
It’s mayhem every time someone dies on Facebook. Everyone’s trying to be the first to announce the death. Everyone’s trying to post about the dead as if they would be on the front row at the funeral or that they would be asked to deliver a eulogy. Everyone’s scouring memories to post a photo of themselves with the dead, replete with captions that highlight their importance in the deceased person’s life. That’s why, sometimes, especially when it hits you at a vulnerable moment, a death on Facebook is infinitely sadder, less elegant, less profound.
Death is not extinguishing the light. It is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come. —Rabindranath Tagore
Even the obituarist has lost his dignity now that these so-called journalists have taken over, reporting on death with nothing further in mind but to be the first to announce it in order to harvest the numbers. Never mind if they have unverified sources. Never mind if they have incomplete information. Never mind if it’s ripped off somebody else’s post on social media. Never mind if it’s against the golden rule of letting the bereaved family take the lead in making public such sensitive, personal, private news as death.
In my book, no such thing as the dead stirring in their grave. I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, but I believe there is more to us than our life on earth. I interpret the biblical passage “and to dust you shall return” as a tribute to nothingness, the vessel in which everything—the universe, the sun, the moon, the stars, every plant and animal, every mountain and ocean, you and me—exists. Nothing is the cradle of everything, the womb of creation, the platform of all that takes form as solid, liquid, gas. It is what remains when everything is gone, pretty much like the darkness that doesn’t vanish in the presence of light. Remove the light and the darkness is there. I’d like to think that nothing is the form that God takes in order to be all-present, all-knowing, all-powerful. There is nothing in everyone and in everything—and so when we return to nothing, we return to our original, higher form, unconstrained by physicality, free from gravity, weighed down by no thought or memory, with no ties to ephemeral things.
So the dead won’t mind, will they? They won’t mind that you share something too personal that you are in no position to share. You can showboat all you want, mining the death for all its worth, without fear the dead would claw themselves out of their grave to ask, “Hey did I even know you when I was flesh and bones?”
But in the world of the living, you are still subject to these rules. At the very least, you need to give death the respect it deserves, as well as the bereaved.
I’m not sure I believe in hell. But I sure do know what hell is like. “The world is a hellish place.” Was it the American musician and artist Tom waits who said it? It sure is, but, as if it’s not bad enough, Tom Waits said further, “And bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” I agree. If you can’t write about the dead in a way that honors their lives, if you’re writing about the dead for reasons other than the desire to honor their lives, please don’t. Do not besmirch their memory with bad writing. Leave it to the obituarist.