All Saints Day. Todos Los Santos. Undas: A Celebration of Family, Love and Life

This post is lovingly dedicated to our Filipino tradition of Undas/Araw ng mga Patay.  To dissect this holiday: 

Araw is a tagalog term for Day.  So we are celebrating a day event. Patay literally means Dead.  Araw ng mga Patay is our commemoration of All Saints Day, Nov 1st, when we celebrate the lives of our departed love ones. 

Growing up in an extended family, there are family traditions that my late grandmother instilled on us.  I remember when we were children, she would take us with her to the cemetery to visit the grave of her father (my great grandfather).  We would offer foods in our altars, we would hear mass and we would offer a family prayer, that kind of prayer where everybody in our home kneels down and we follow our prayerbooks.  

My father also shared with us the family traditions that were part of his province upbringing.  During the All Saint´s Day, he would open our gate, light a candle in our gate area and put a bottle of beer and cigarettes.  He would do that to welcome our departed love ones (my father lost his father/my  grandfather when he was barely 12 years old and he lost my grandmother when I was 12 years old). 

Since 2002, the year my father passed away, our commemoration of the All Saints Day has been stronger than ever.  There´s never a year that we do not spend the All Saints Day in the cemetery.  We manage our schedule work our way out on the heavy Manila traffic to be able to visit our dad, our paternal uncle and maternal grandparents whose final resting places are in different cemeteries.   A visit in the cemetery is indeed a family gathering, we build up our tents, stay there for the whole day (some spend overnight), bring our radio, some bring their guitars and we have food galore!! We usually cook the favorite foods of our love ones! As always, a novena prayer is dedicated to them. 

Since I moved here in Spain, I do not have the luxury of time and resources to yearly go home on All Saints Day.  In my own way, I commemorate their lives and I share our tradition to my son. All Saints Day here in Spain is spent in the church saying our prayers, cooking their favorite food, offering food and lighting a candle in our altar and of course, saying our prayers!! 

Death ends life but it does not end a relationship which struggles on in the survivor´s mind toward some resolution which it may never find...