Day of the Dead

Yesterday was Day of the Dead in the Catholic calendar. Hungary is a Catholic country. By this I mean more the mentality and the traditions of my people than the actual number of church-goers.

Each year I get the uncomfortable impression that we celebrate this day with more fervour than celebrating life, birth or marriages. Our cemeteries get flooded with people in their best Sunday suits lighting candles on tomb stones and covering every inch of the marble with flowers. I for my part tend to stand in embarrassed silence, kicking dust, thinking when the appropriate moment arrives to say: "Time to go home folks" and all this without really dedicating a thought for the relatives whose long-gone existence is recorded in faded black-and-white film in my head. That's because there is so much to see in a cemetery this day it distracts me completely.

I find it disturbing that there seems to be a competition to win the title: "Best Mourner of the Year". Flowers, candles, photos of dead people, wreaths - symbols of loss and remembrance, but in such great abundance reduced to symbols of hypocrisy. I get angrier year by year just as the symbols get more and more. Wouldn't one single white rose mean the same as a bouquet of 100? In my opinion it would.

I always wish I could persuade my family to all just light a candle at home. To remember where we come from, who our ancestors were, why we are thankful to them. Simply, quietly, without making a showcase out of it. Without getting into cheap theatrical scenes.

It also seems very contradictory to me that a Christian culture should hang onto the earthly remains of their beloved with such desperation that even the poor save up small fortunes to buy big, shiny, fashionably flashy tombstones for their family. We grow up believing that our bodies will disappear and unite with Mother Earth and only our souls will survive up there in cloudy Heaven or down in fiery Hell - and that is without the help of coffins, tomb stones, wreaths, flowers, Day of the Dead candles. As for myself I definitely don't wish for any better for after my death than my ashes to be scattered around into the muddy waters of the Danube or Lake Balaton. I'm hoping I'll live a life worth remembering independently from a special day in the calendar or from a hole in the ground somewhere in an overcrowded cemetery.