That’s obviously a Latin phrase. In English, it means “Remember you must die.”

We all have different mindsets about death. Some people fear the thought of one day dying, while others acknowledge the fact that it is something inevitable. Whether we like it or not, there will come a day when finally we will breathe our last. We’ll never know when it will be. Remember that death will come like a thief in the night.

“Memento Mori” seems to be the theme of my past 4 weeks. After celebrating my birthday on June 13th, the news of my Mom’s death greeted me the following day. It made me feel like my Mom died after giving birth to me. That day and the next were perhaps the busiest days of my life. I got overwhelmed by mixed emotions and had to accomplish many things before I could fly home. I had to prepare many things. Imagine this – It was the last day of the final exams for my students in South Korea, and the following day, I had to come home to the Philippines for my Mom’s funeral rites.

Needless to say, seeing my Mom go is painful. But I had to choose between dying in sadness for losing her or wrestling with sorrow seeing her suffer every day in that vegetative state – she could not move, could not talk, could barely open her eyes, and had to be fed through a nasogastric tube.

We had the remains of my Mom cremated. She wanted it that way. Her ashes are being kept by my sister while I am still having a mausoleum built in a memorial lot I bought. Construction started on July 1^st. The flooring and the walls had to be finished by next week to commemorate my Mom’s 40th day on the   24th of July. That day, we will have her ashes rest in that mausoleum. In the future, I will have the remains of my father and elder brother, currently resting at a cemetery in Batangas, exhumed and transferred to the said mausoleum.

One day, while monitoring the mausoleum’s construction, I saw a coffin pulled out from a tomb in a nearby memorial lot. It was already open, and I saw the skeleton of the dead person. While my companions would not even dare look at the coffin, I went near it to see clearly what was inside. I saw the skull and other parts of the skeletal remains not covered by the dead’s clothes. The lower jaw was already detached from the head.

I happen to know the person who pulled the casket from the vault. He told me that the daughter of that dead person died and would be entombed there. I presumed that the coffin would be thrown away and the skeletal remains would be placed somewhere else.

I saw how that man removed the dress, the shoes, and the underwear from the skeletal remains. I don’t know if it is proper to describe it this way…  “undressed the skeletal remains.” I also saw the condition of the casket. It looked expensive when it was new but useless after a few years inside the crypt.  Only the metal parts would probably still be of use.

Then I saw how the man gingerly put the skeletal remains inside a sack. Poor sack used to serve as a container for one of the staples of life—rice. That day, it became a repository for skeletons. After that, I saw the sack of (not rice) skeletal remains being placed in a smaller vault called a bone box.

What I witnessed that day — the state of the skeletal remains and the coffin — strengthened my belief that Filipinos need to embrace the cremation of our dead.

The day after my Mom’s final funeral rites, a brother-in-law died. That week was somehow heartbreaking. I had to attend funeral rituals again. A few minutes after his death, I went to his house and saw him lying lifeless in a reclining chair. One of our neighbors seated next to me discussed how fragile life is… that no matter how famous, rich, and powerful people are, they all succumb to death. To that, I added that what is ironic is that we can not bring to our graves the diplomas we received, the money we earned, the cars, houses, jewelry, and whatever other things we bought.

Unlike what we did to my Mom’s remains, my brother-in-law’s family did not have his body cremated. My family is one of the very few Filipino families that welcome cremation. It will still take time for Filipinos to accept the fact that it is more practical and convenient to have the remains of our beloved cremated.

“By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return (Genesis 3:19).”