The day of the dead

Days and nights and holidays for journalists are sort of distorted because, as one newsroom says, “hindi natutulog ang balita.” News never stops indeed, which is why people in the media work on Sundays and holidays and most days in between.

The day of the dead is no exception. Most of us work on this day with hardly a chance to visit the cemetery or the columbarium to honor our dearly departed.

Our dead, I hope, understand that duty calls. In lieu of a visit to the cemetery, some just whisper a prayer or two.

As for me, I write this piece as my way of honoring the dearly departed; after all, as someone once said, your work can be your prayer.

And so with words, I hope to honor the loved ones I lost during the pandemic and long before; the men and women leaders or public servants gone too soon; my brave colleagues murdered for doing their jobs; the activists and rights workers; the victims of Rody Duterte’s bloody drug war. My thoughts are also with the growing number of people, the men, women and children – especially the children – killed in the still ravaging Israel-Hamas conflict.

In real life though, grief knows no days or hours. Anyone who has lost a loved one knows this.

The pain doesn’t come only when your mind is blank. Grief overwhelms in the most unexpected moments, like a dam that suddenly breaks and it hits even in the busiest of times – in the middle of an interview; in a press conference; in a dinner with some source or while staring at your computer.

Sometimes, you miss your dead so much you start talking out loud in that empty space around you like a lunatic, pretending he or she is listening.

My first experience of overwhelming grief was not even over a human being. It was over a dog – the dog of my childhood who I thought would live forever. One day, he got hit by a speeding car, languished in pain days after and eventually breathed his last. The kids that we were at the time, my brothers and I didn’t know how to grieve over a dead dog.

There were no dog memorial parks yet back then, no place to send our departed pets, no send-off ceremony, no closure. We didn’t know how to say goodbye to a dog that brought us so much joy. He was always there,