Since childhood, we visited the graveyard to place candles and flowers on the tombs of our loved ones who went ahead of us. But for quite a number of times, I also asked myself why the designated day of November 1 was called “All Saints’ Day,” followed by “All Souls’ Day” the next day.
A simple answer is that the departed that we go to honor were family members known in our communities. Whether saints or simple souls, we remember them and pray to them to continue watching over us for we love them, and they occupy special corners in our hearts.
I did not care to look further for answers aside from considering straightaway that the day is celebrated to remember saints and martyrs of the past, and that the second day or All Souls’ Day is observed to honor and pray for our loved ones, family members, relatives, and friends who have passed on.
Of course, the November visit to the cemetery is seldom missed because it serves as the venue for a reunion of family members, friends and relatives who come home to visit their dear departed, and have an instant party with “pasalubong” food and drinks. By the way, liquor is no longer allowed during these events.
My memory during these celebrations goes back to certain burial processes, especially after the 1990 earthquake. I am reminded of the process of cremation as a way of burying the dead which is preferred for personal reasons, instead of the normal burial in the ground or aboveground.
The process disposes of the body faster than through traditional means. Cremation was later opposed by Christians who preferred to bury the dead because for one reason, Christian churches said “cremation weakens the faith about the resurrection of the body after death.” The belief was that what was taken from the earth had to be returned to the earth.
But even with the opposition, cremation was practiced in situations where there were simultaneous deaths occurring during wars, famine, and fear of diseases spreading from corpses.
We were not spared from this experience during the 1990 killer earthquake where thousands died instantly, so that the cremation process had to be done on hundreds of corpses that were burned all together at the Baguio Public Cemetery.
The practice of cremation goes back more than 20,000 years ago as shown by the archaeological record of the remains of a cremated female body somewhere in Australia. Nobody can imagine how long ago that was.
After the burning is completed, the dry bone fragments are pulverized and become the “cremated remains” that are kept in a decorative urn and placed in the living room of a house, stored in a columbarium, buried in the ground, sprinkled on a mountain, or in the sea.
The ashes of my Uncle Ismael Lubos Fianza who spent most of his life on a Japanese merchant ship were scattered off the coast of La Union. But according to his Japanese friend, in Japan, the bones are not pulverized, instead, these are collected by the family and stored in a vase.
The most common method employed was to entomb cremated remains while there are claims that wealthy families in Europe have successfully converted the cremated remains of their kin into synthetic diamonds.
In some parts of Benguet, Ifugao and Mountain Province, a unique burial process called “sangadil” was practiced not so long ago. There were few testimonial accounts about the deceased whose remains were tied to chairs and raised above fires to be smoked. This process lasted until the body liquids of the deceased had dripped dry.
The corpses were then bathed with herbs, then preserved in carved-out wooden coffins and inserted in cleavages of rocks on high mountains. This was last practiced in some parts of Mountain Province and by some families in Benguet.
Today, indigenous communities in the Cordillera bury their departed loved ones within family plots while the new Igorot chooses to bury their departed in communal cemeteries. However for other IPs, they have learned to accept cremation as a practical alternative.
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Everytime I visit the Baguio Cemetery on All Souls Day, I pass by the burial grounds of former Mayor Eusebius Julius Halsema and his wife Marie Boesel Halsema as they are just a few meters away from the graves of my folks.
Except for some Baguio old timers who are aware, the graves of the first American mayor of the Charter City of Baguio and his wife go unnoticed and regarded by passersby as ordinary burial grounds.
Engr. EJ Halsema was no ordinary mayor considering that he volunteered for the Bureau of Public Works, then served as city engineer and district engineer of Benguet at the same time, while being Baguio’s first colonial mayor from 1920 to 1937.
He developed many parts of the city during its infancy, gradually transforming it from a sleepy Ibaloy community to a small city of more or less 25,000 people, with paved roads and an airport at Loakan, Tuba, Benguet.
As mayor, he made sure that the city allotted budget subsidies for the establishment of the Mountain Province High School (now Baguio City High School), the construction of the Burnham Park city auditorium, market, and numerous elementary schools.
Somewhere in a forgotten spot just a few yards from the center section of the Baguio Cemetery, one used to read the original epitaph “Baguio is his monument” etched on the cement slab of Mayor EJ Halsema’s grave.
For no good reason, somebody changed the epitaph to “The mayor who engineered Baguio City.” This alters historical fact because the original epitaph were exactly the words that his family wrote on his grave.
I urge our city officials that the epitaph be returned to its original text. Indeed, and in honor of the best mayor Baguio ever had, beautifying and redesigning EJ Halsema’s graveyard into a more prominent area will not hurt the coffers of the city.
