They Call Our Funeral, Home

Lolo passed away on January 2. The noxious fumes from New Year’s Eve’s fireworks were still wafting through the Metro Manila smog. After a day of celebrating rebirth, life flung us back into the harsh realities of death. For my mother and her siblings, my grandfather’s passing was their first major loss. For me, it was my first true encounter with death. Almost three months later, I still remember the paralyzing details of that terrible day.

The day began like any other. After eating the previous day’s leftovers for breakfast, I walked in on my mother frantically calling someone on the phone. I didn’t know who she was talking to. Even now, I still don’t. I just knew something was wrong.

After the call, she wasted no time. “I need to go. Your lolo was rushed to the hospital,” she said, frantically looking for the car keys. (Lolo means “grandfather” in Filipino.)

If we lived in the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Mom would have made it to the hospital in time, firmly grasping Lolo’s hand before he closed his eyes forever. Or: Lolo would have made a full recovery, his family forever thankful for the second chance to celebrate his life. The End.

Unfortunately, real life never works out as smoothly as it does in the movies. We didn’t even get to say goodbye.

Before she could find the car keys, Mom got another call; this time, from my grandmother. She confirmed the inevitable, the one thing we never wanted to hear. Lolo didn’t make it. On his way to work (as an accounting professor at a local university), he just collapsed on the street, surrounded by strangers. He died from his first heart attack. He was 75.

What happened next will forever haunt my memories. Without even hanging the phone up, Mom fell to the floor, wailing. “Wala na akong tatay! Hindi ka man lang nakapagpaalam!” (I don’t have a father anymore! He didn’t even say goodbye!)

Until then, I never saw her in such a state. She was always the toughest person I know, never backing down, never shedding a tear. At her most fragile, my family all cried with her, helpless. The stalwart pillar of our nucleic family finally fell, leaving us in the same state of stupor.

After what seemed like an eternity, she finally calmed down, regaining her usual composure. “I need to go see your lolo. Please just get food delivered for lunch. I won’t be able to cook anymore,” she said before she and my dad left for the hospital. Meanwhile, my sister and I stayed behind, tending to the house and
other errands originally scheduled for the day.

Of course, despite busying ourselves with errands, we were all distraught. My sister tried contacting our estranged uncle, Mom’s brother who moved to Canada. Meanwhile, I sat frozen on my bed, staring at my phone. I needed to call my girlfriend, Ysabel. I couldn’t.

This story is not about my deceased grandfather. This story is not about my grandfather’s expansive list of accomplishments. This story is about that phone call.

*

My girlfriend’s family owns one of the Philippines’ largest death care companies, St. Peter. Named after the guardian over Heaven’s gates, St. Peter offers funeral services, memorial packages, and Thomas Lynch’s favorite, pre-need funeral plans.
However, despite being owned by a single family, calling St. Peter a family business is an understatement. The company was founded by Ysabel’s great grandfather early in the 20th century. Since then, St. Peter moved from generation to generation. Now, the company’s ownership extends throughout different families and in-laws. Its branches cover the entirety of the Philippines’ approximately 7,641 islands. St. Peter wasn’t just a family business; it was a dynasty built on the deaths of Filipinos.

When Lolo died, I had known Ysabel for around a year and a half. By then, our relationship was already coasting into serious, long-term implications. Questions started popping up. How will her family’s company influence our relationship? Will they ask her to take over in some capacity?

Of course, I was just an amateur, a tourist passing through the death care industry. Before Lolo’s passing, I hadn’t experienced death within my immediate circle. The death care industry was a necessity, but one that I didn’t need to see first-hand.

“We can’t get married until you buy a life plan from my dad,” Ysabel would say. Funerals became a running gag, an ultimatum before a wedding. Still, a single phone call loomed in the distance, the one that would change everything. I saw it coming. That’s the trouble with being intimate with a death care expert. Eventually, I will call her without the usual social pleasantries, without the sweet nothings, without the intimate “I love you.” Instead, the call will be a plea for help, a talk of business, and quite a lot of awkward silences. I was sleeping with the enemy, so to speak.

Sitting frozen on my bed that petrifying day, I was staring down the barrel of the gun that I always knew was coming. The call made it real: that Lolo was dead, that Ysabel and her family will ultimately take him away from us forever. Yet, it was a call that I needed to make. There was no escaping that truth.

And so, I dialed. The phone rang for an eternity. Too short, but too long. I wanted to stay in that stasis forever, the limbo between life and death. She picked up, knowing immediately that something was wrong. Maybe it was my voice. Maybe it was because I never called that early in the day.

“Are you okay,” she asked.

“No, I’m not okay. It’s about Lolo. He’s…” I paused, unable to complete the sentence. As if never speaking it into existence would reverse the events of that day.

“He passed away,” I finally said, carefully staying away from the word, “dead.” Too late. It was out. It was real. The tears started flowing again. Condolences were shared.

“Do you want me to call my dad,” she asked. There it was. The question. Can I interest you in one of our lovely caskets? While you’re thinking about it, check out our wonderful catalog of flexible life plans. It was the world’s most intimate sales pitch.

“Yes,” I answered. Minutes later, we were in a three-way call with her father. “I’m so sorry to hear about your loss, Luigi,” he said. It carried on like a normal conversation. No talk of caskets, life plans, or gritty funerary details. Of course, I wasn’t in charge of anything. “Can you pass my number to your mom? I’d like
to help her,” he said.

I did. Thankfully, I was spared the meticulous planning for the wake. Still, the long week ahead was just starting.

*

Thomas Lynch, the poet-slash-funeral-director, ponders frequently on the intricacies and ethics of the death care industry. In his essay “Funerals-R-Us,” he writes: “When someone dies, they call our funeral home.”

It was an innocuous statement. It wasn’t even the point of the essay. It was just a fair description of how every funeral home works.

Strangely, reading this one statement, I had to give pause. What does he mean? Lynch is a poet at heart. Knowing that doesn’t help. “I’m in awe of Thomas Lynch’s way with language: the plainspoken honesty of this poet’s prose,” a review by Elmore Leonard reads.

The mystery: do they call the “funeral home” or the “funeral, home?” It was the inner grammatist in me. Was Lynch’s funeral home just another business to the locals? Or did it create another home for both the living and the dead? Was the funeral home?

Thinking about my grandfather’s funeral today, Lynch’s poetic prowess resonated a lot deeper. Through that one phone call, I called the funeral home.

*

The next day, the real work began. Lolo’s body finally made its way to St. Peter’s prep room. While Dad took care of the necessary paperwork elsewhere, Mom and I took care of the preparations for the wake. First thing in the morning, we checked over Lolo’s embalming and funeral make-up.

It was my first time seeing a corpse up close. Before, I took only quick glimpses at wakes and funerals. Sometimes, I even refused out of fear. Seeing my grandfather’s body was a huge step. Again, it was a step that I had to take. Mom needed my help.

Thankfully, there were no chills running down my spine. If it weren’t for the ornately white casket, one would think he was just sleeping, dolled up in light make-up. As promised, the funeral make-up artists gave his body a strange life-like quality. I knew he was dead. It was surreal to see him up close.

Coincidentally, I had read Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory a month prior. Amidst vivid details of embalming and cremating, the gritty memoir spoke of one truth: that death isn’t as glamorous as funeral homes and crematoriums make it to be. Doughty’s words echoed in my mind while looking at my grandfather’s body. I knew he was a corpse, drained of blood and bloated with formaldehyde.

“I think the lipstick is a bit too red,” I said. I remembered my Lolo’s mauve lips. These were lips that opened only to impart wisdom drawn from seven decades’ worth of experience. These were lips that only occasionally joked, letting loose the most guttural, wheezing laugh. And they were too red.

The corpse in front of me was “just a shell.” In his first book on funerals, The Undertaking, Lynch writes of (and ultimately, criticizes) the “just a shell” theory: that corpses are just empty fragments of their former alive selves. “That’s not your grandfather,” the theorist would say. Yet, according to Lynch, the deceased are more than mere shells. They have evolved into something else: an ethereal entity built on memories.

Lolo’s lips were too red. My request for lighter lipstick drew on my own memories. “Let me recreate a truer memory of my grandfather,” I seemed to say. The grandfather I knew didn’t wear that much makeup. When he was rolled out into the viewing room, the makeup artists lightened his lips to its “natural” state: mauve.

*

Like old Western traditions, the Philippines believed in home funerals. Before the rise of funeral homes, wakes were held in the home. To some extent, the practice continues today. Under a tarpaulin shade, the open casket was displayed outside the deceased’s house. Mourners sat on cheap Monobloc chairs. When the day was done, the residents retreated to the comforts of their own home. However, the funeral home drastically changed everything, dragging the funeral from a home to an external location.

Regardless, tradition never completely leaves Philippine culture. Like other death care companies in the country, St. Peter offers rudimentary living accommodations with every viewing room. Our own viewing room came with a bedroom fitted with a queen-sized bed, air conditioning, a small kitchenette, a dining table, and a private shower room. It was our own private suite, fitted with a 24/7 janitor and convenient food establishments nearby.

The funeral home literally became a home for us, the grieving. However, my family never enjoyed the accommodations. We lived only 15 minutes away. Traveling to and from was easy. Instead, the room was reserved for my grandmother and a few close relatives who helped.

My grandmother treated it like a home. “Can you tell them to turn down the air conditioning? It’s too cold,” she asked me one time. “Ask a janitor to clean the bathroom.”

Besides a temporary home for the dead, St. Peter became a temporary home for the living. My deceased grandfather rested in a cushy metal casket. Separated only by a thin wall, my living grandmother slept next door on a temporary mattress. It was their last chance to sleep beside each other.

*

As early as the first day, everyone came: uncles, aunts, cousins, distant cousins, in-laws, friends, neighbors, students, co-professors; people we didn’t know but shared in our grief. They cried. They shared in the food that we prepared for them. They remembered happy memories. They celebrated his life.

The wake had its fair share of surprises, too. On the first night, Ysabel’s family made a surprise visit, paying their respects to a man that they never met. The undertakers arrived to see their departed client. By then, my family had never met her family. My grandfather’s wake was the first time that both parents met the other.

The first meeting between both Filipino families is often a revered tradition in Philippine culture. Traditionally, Filipinos celebrate the first meeting through a pre-marriage ritual called pamanhikan. Before marriage, the bride’s family hosts the groom’s family for dinner. After the meal, the groom formally asks the bride’s family for her hand in marriage. Afterwards, both families discuss the marriage plans: what happens, where it will happen, who will foot the bill. The pamanhikan is an elaborate way to gain a family’s blessing.

I’m not the most traditional person. One might even argue that this generation shuns tradition like the plague. Yet, the strangely morbid irony was apparent: our families’ first meeting happened at a wake.

Before the harsh reality of death seeped into my maturing mind, I always imagined my grandparents attending my wedding in the unforeseen future. Naturally, my grandfather’s death complicates this dream, irretrievably pushing it into the realm of impossibility. Lolo was gone. He will never see me at my happiest,
except from Up Above, if such a place does exist.

Given the situation, it was perhaps a huge swing of divine intervention that, in his permanent state of death, Lolo granted one final wish: to bring two families together. I don’t know what the future holds; no one does. Is this his blessing on an eventual marriage? Is it just pure coincidence? No one knows.

If anything, the undertakers have shed their ghastly roles. In paying respects to my grandfather, Ysabel’s family revealed them for what they truly are: human beings taking care of fellow human beings, whether alive and grieving, or dead as a rock.

*

Days passed. Throughout the week, more guests came, stayed, and paid their respects. Still, as is tradition, the last night is the busiest. Everyone who visited before comes back for a final Mass and a memorial service; a final chance to say goodbye before lowering the casket into the grave. The viewing room can hold around 50 people at a time. More than 50 came to the service. Some people were standing. Some people huddled outside the room. Everyone came.

As part of their service, St. Peter offered a video package: a simple montage of photos taken when my grandfather was alive. Initially, we refused the offer. My grandfather was a simple man. He shied away from cameras all the time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile for a casual photo. Additionally, he hated all the frills, all the bells and whistles. He lived a simple life. It seemed unlike him to have a grand funeral. Even if it was just a simple photo montage.

Despite our refusal, his students still created a video using the paltry photos available. They played it during the memorial service after the Mass. While the video played, they reminisced on their experiences with my grandfather as their professor and their mentor.

Of course, my family never knew him as a professor. To us, he was a husband, a father, and a grandfather. But hearing the tremendous impact that he had with his students touched us greatly. He was a great man. A day before we laid him to rest, we discovered his secret life: a tough but inspirational man, touching the lives of his students.

And in that moment, amidst tearful recollections and a too short video that looped four times already, a photo pops up: my grandfather laughing at the camera, surrounded by his peers at an unknown gathering. He was sitting down at a table, wearing his usual short-sleeved polo and slacks. Whatever he was laughing at, I’m sure it was funny. Yet, in the silence of that photo, a realization hit me, that accursed punctum: I will never hear his laugh again. His laugh, frozen in time by the click of a shutter, will forever remain silent, never revealing the joke. The photograph’s funniest joke is that it never told the joke, only the punchline.

At first, we waved off the video as an unnecessary contraption invented by the funeral industry. In the end, we recreated my grandfather as he should be remembered: that wheezing laugh echoing across a hall forever lost to time.

*

Right before we closed his casket for good, a few relatives requested the immediate family to gather in front. “Let’s take one last photo,” they said. Around half of us didn’t want to. It seemed weird to pose for a photo at a funeral. But who were we to refuse our guests? We posed, arranged like a traditional family
photo; my grandfather behind us, the patriarch that he was.

As far as post-mortem photography goes, our final photo was relatively tame. We didn’t focus on his body. We didn’t pose him as if he was alive. He was just there, waiting for us to lower him down to his final resting place. Despite our hesitation, the photo encapsulated what the funeral did for us.

In that photo, my grandmother stood in the center; the surviving matriarch surrounded by her estranged children. The eldest: my headstrong mother, holding back her tears. The middle: my long-lost uncle who immigrated to Canada, begrudgingly cutting almost all contact with his parents. The youngest: my spoiled
40-year-old aunt who still relied on my grandparents’ money to live. In their adulthood, they never got along with each other. After the funeral, they would go back to their individual lives, away from each other.

Meanwhile, I stood in the sidelines: the only attending grandchild. (My sister went back to New Jersey for her classes. My only cousin had a Canadian passport, unable to secure a visa before the wake.) Alone, I felt out of place, an outsider looking in.

My grandfather was dead; he was a beautified corpse laid to rest in an ornate casket. At the same time, he became an ethereal entity, recreated through hundreds of different memories. In that final photo, my grandfather (or rather, his memory) unveiled his final act: to bring everyone together. His wife, his
dysfunctional children, his dozens of surviving relatives, his meager grandchildren, his forever-inspired students, his respectful colleagues, and his potential granddaughter-in-law.

“A corpse doesn’t need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn’t need anything anymore—it’s more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse,” Caitlin Doughty writes. From his family to his colleagues, my grandfather’s corpse brought everyone together. Within that cramped viewing room, we found a home. Even if it was only for a week, it was a home.