Remembering the dead

Life is a precious gift one cannot afford to ignore or squander away because once it passes though the gate of eternity, there is no recovering what had been missed in one's lifetime. What makes All Soul's Day a heavy moment of reflection is the magnitude of recollection that comes with remembering the dead. As we honour our departed loved ones, we contemplate on the richness our lives have once been when they were part of the living and mourn the joys lost with their departure.

One experiences many kinds of death in one's lifetime. The unexpected ones are the hardest to accept because they catch us off-guarded, like when a close family member is murdered, or dies in a car collision or plane crash, or was hit by a suicide bomber, or simply fell down unconscious. We die a hundred times more than the death we mourn because we are caught unprepared for the loss.

Some deaths are expected, especially when an illness has taken an irreversible path of no return. We count the days, the hours, the minutes left for us to hold on to the bare thread of life that ties us to the person we don't want to let go. And when the inevitable happens, we hold the hands of our loved one for as long as it takes until they become cold and lifeless. Even an expected passing away is difficult to accept, and we somehow die ourselves.

Each time we honour the dead on All Soul's Day, we rationalise on their dying and on their departure from the sphere of life they once shared with us. Some deaths take a longer time to accept because they leave behind a deeper hole of emptiness. Maybe the heart has been shattered into tiny pieces that mending it is near impossible. Maybe the emotional destruction caused by death is the same magnitude as the ruins left behind by a world war where the possibility of becoming a whole person again is almost impossible.

As we light candles for our dead, we also seek the same light for our darkness, so that we might find ourselves safely out of the tunnel of sadness. The empty heart is difficult to fill again because it seeks the same purity of emotion that had once inhabited it. That is why happiness is elusive for those that have lost a great love.#