Bear with this rather early article on the dead. I was planning an article on the US elections, which will be held next week, but figured it would be even more premature to have it out today.

I’m going to wear my anthropology hat today and ramble a bit, taking you on a tour of different cultural practices around the dead, with a focus on the Philippines and some of the changes taking place around wakes, burials and cemeteries.

Simply burying the dead is considered one mark of humanity. Among other animal species (we are, after all, animal too), only elephants seem to have something close to burials and mourning. The oldest evidence of burial among humans, or at least our closest relatives, dates back to a Neanderthal site about 70,000 years old, with a skeleton found with pollen grains from flowers. (Physical anthropologists can be a quarrelsome lot, and there are still debates around the Neanderthals’ classification—most anthropologists agreeing now they are separate from Homo sapiens, while a minority says they are a subspecies—as well as some physical anthropologists disputing the “burial with flowers” interpretation of the Neanderthal site.)

No doubt though, humans have practiced burials since time immemorial, and that has been interpreted to reflect many aspects of our humanity: a respect for the dead, a deep sense of grief and mourning, even a notion of an afterlife.

Wakes

I’ve been using the word “burial” so far, but not all societies bury the dead. Cremation is widely practiced, but, until fairly recently, was unpopular in the Philippines because the Catholic Church disapproved of the practice. Today, many Catholic churches offer a columbarium, a place to store ashes of the deceased, the niches neatly lined up like apartment rows.

Besides cremation, there are all kinds of other mortuary practices, all the way to leaving corpses to vultures. Burial practices are also varied. There’s the “six feet under” variation, as well as the tombs built above the ground.

Muslims bury the dead on the same day of the death, in austere rites. Filipino Christians, on the other hand, go through a long mourning period, especially in this age of Diaspora where relatives have to come home from every corner of the world. Wakes and burials are noisy, almost festive, and become ways of demonstrating one’s social status, from the type of coffin to the food given out.

I participated in a very different Filipino wake last year, when the mother of my Zen teacher passed away. My teacher, Sister Rosario, is a Catholic nun so her mother lay in state in their convent chapel, which meant a relatively solemn and quiet wake, made even more contemplative by Sister Rosario’s Zen visitors. Meditation cushions were provided for us, so we could sit, in lotus position, facing the chapel’s walls, almost half an hour for each session followed by a few minutes of “walking meditation” around the coffin. I can imagine we looked rather strange, but that just shows how, in the Philippines, we are becoming more varied with our practices around the dead.

Our culture is still adjusting to cremation, with many Filipinos still having reservations about the practice. If cremation does occur, there are still many awkward moments especially when it starts. In a burial, the moment when the coffin is put into the tomb sparks off hysterics and drama from the women mourners, “Take me with you!” and “I’ll go with you!” and the usual comedians on the side going, “Push her, push her.” A cremation doesn’t quite allow that kind of melodrama.

Cemeteries

We associate the dead with cemeteries, but here again there are variations. In some societies, the dead are buried in unmarked graves. In other places, including some of our rural areas, the dead are buried in the backyard.

Cemeteries came about partly with urbanization, and concerns with public health. Can you imagine Metro Manila residents still burying the dead in a condominium complex’s common area?

The cities of the dead reflect those of the living. Visit the North Cemetery in Manila for a taste of Philippine society’s tremendous gap between the rich and the poor. There, you’ll find the mausoleums and mansions of the rich alongside the tombs of the poor that are packed shoulder to shoulder and, even more shocking, on top of one another, replicating the urban-poor slums being a stone’s throw away from the “villages,” or subdivisions, of the rich. The graves are arranged chaotically and people move around sometimes by hopping from one tomb to another.

Ethnic divides are also replicated, the Chinese having a separate cemetery in many Philippine cities. The one in Manila is a tourist attraction (visit oldmanilawalks.com for schedules of walking tours) with the mausoleums built much like homes for the living, some complete with air-conditioning and toilets. Note though that the gap between the rich and the poor also exists among the Chinese. Thus amid the opulent mansions are also paupers’ graves.

Times do change. The dead have followed the move, among many Chinese families, away from Manila’s old Chinatown. Reflecting the Chinese’s integration into mainstream Filipino society, you find Chinese families using memorial parks and columbaria.

There is an American cemetery in Makati City, mainly for those killed during World War II. With bereaved families based in the United States, the graves are rarely visited, but the grounds are well kept. It has also become a popular site for bird-watching. (That reminds me to apologize to readers about the bird-watch tours in the University of the Philippines last weekend organized by the Wild Bird Club. I had announced in my column that there would be 6 a.m. tours on Saturday and Sunday but there was a last-minute change of the Saturday tour to 3 p.m. Some people apparently showed up that morning though. Don’t worry, there will be other tours in UP, and the American Cemetery, but do make sure next time to sign up first with the Wild Bird Club.)

The bird-watching is, I think, a nice way of keeping the dead company. It also tells us something about the environment: There are few refuges left in the country for wildlife, and for the birds, the cemeteries do offer a last secure site.

I am not that sure, though, about the dead finding a final and secure resting place. Many of our public cemeteries are congested; in fact, I passed one cemetery (I think it was in the Cordillera region) where they actually posted a sign saying “No Vacancy.” Again, it’s poor families who are the main victims, a housing shortage in life and in death. The rich have the luxury of space in memorial parks, sometimes buying up several plots because these make good real estate investments.

One thing I do find sad are the neglected, even abandoned burial plots. This usually happens when a family migrates overseas. Eventually, these abandoned graves are dug up and the bones sent to a common burial site. I’ve seen the bones piled up in these sites, and wondered if those who have left the Philippines, and their dead, at least bring memories with them.