It is well that at least once a year we the living should pause from our labors to pay homage to the dead. By practice, we do that on Friday, All Saints’ Day, although liturgically All Souls’ Day falls on Saturday.

We do not visit the dead only to spruce up their lonely graves. Nor do we go there merely to pray or to linger for a while to let our thoughts drift fondly back to the day when they whom we loved and lost once shared our sorrows and joys.

Going there and, for a moment, feeling close to them once more should also make us come face to face with the reality that someday we too shall join them. The thoughts is a morbid one, we must admit, but is here any other choice?

Perhaps, too, paying homage to the dead should afford us time to take stock of what we are while alive. And while pondering hard, somehow their questions, cropping up from the back of our minds, will beg for an answered.

By the manner we alive, will we deserve the memory, let alone the love, of those we shall leave behind?

This mad rush, this hectic pace, which have become our way of life, where will lead us to?

This lust for power, this inordinate love for self, this greed for wealth what are all these really for?

Stand silent and alone before an ornate tomb or a lowly grave. Think. The answer is there.

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