Day of the Dead

"The world of dead exceeds the living one."

There were 46 names on the Remembrance list of Transfiguration Parish's All Souls Liturgy. So members of the 46 families remembered their dead with prayers, a rose and an inscription of the name of their loved one, permanently written in a book for all time. The living assume to know about permanence, but only the dead can know what everlasting means. Our concept of eternity has one end rooted in life and the other end stretched out into the numbness of the unknown. The dead, though, are already at that terminal which has no other end. Maybe that's why, as in the lore of All Souls' Day, they return out of hunger and passion for the life they remembered to haunt, or at least occupy for a single night, the warmth of the living. Graves grow cold in November.