Day of the Dead

In honor of All Soul's Day: photos of the souls in my prayers, my beloved grandparents. I realize that All Soul’s Day is a day for praying for the souls in purgatory, but I’d like to believe that my grandparents shortened their time there with all the love they gave us. I couldn’t imagine any better grandparents.  They were all involved in their grandchildren's lives. They were generous to us and interested in us, and their homes were like sanctuaries, especially in our turbulent teen years, when we viewed our parents as our adversaries.  

All Soul's Day is a day of celebration here in Guam. A newly arrived neighbor commented with incredulity about the man buying $250 of ugly silk flowers at the Exchange. The cemeteries are all cleaned up and decorated with these silk arrangements, which really aren’t especially lovely, except that they represent the fact that someone took the time to go to a gravesite and say a few prayers. We went to Mass in the chapel, not in the cemetery on base, where the chaplain said Mass in the morning. It is a small town graveyard that got incorporated into military property after WWII, but the base is open to descendents of the people buried there on this day, and our priest mentioned how these descendents bring their folding chairs and sit next to their mom or dad or auntie during the liturgy.  Some of them will go on over to another cemetery for another Mass with another family member.  Not surprisingly, this is a tradition that may die out; few of the people out decorating graves when I drove by one of the larger cemeteries looked younger than 50.  But I hope it survives. There is something comforting in the thought of spending a little time with the bodies of our dearly departed.  I have to credit my grandparents for taking us to cemeteries on Memorial Day to decorate with peonies the graves of my great-grandparents, at least the ones who died in town. 

I scanned some of these photos last spring after my grandmother’s funeral. I love the peek into my grandparents' lives as young people, full of vim and vigor, which is how my grandmother described her own grandmother. I miss knowing them as they were then. I wish my children could have known them as I knew them. And I hope that my children view their grandparents with the same unconditional, overflowing love I felt for these four people.