In the loving memories of sleepless wakes and movie marathons.
My earliest movie marathon is a double feature of Casper and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my maternal cousins whom I rarely meet. I have a significant memory of my brother who, one afternoon he got home from school, called me into our kitchen to watch the Avatar movie adaptation. Many years after that, during the first months of the pandemic, my other brother and I had a couple of nights watching movies—also in our kitchen. Growing up, my brothers were the real movie buffs. One time I got home and they were watching with our neighbors in the living room. The memory is blurry but I couldn't be wrong that it was Apocalypto. My 6-year-old self got stuck in the doorsteps, fascinated with beheadings, cannibalism, and a drowning woman giving birth in a cave that was rapidly filling in with rainwater.
When I got into movies in high school, I became the "host" of movie marathons in my family, often with my cousins. I would bring my laptop and external hard drives outside and spend the whole night watching. There were times we would watch on my grandmother's terrace and she'd get mad at us for being too loud. The movie would get terribly interrupted once she turned off the light on the terrace. Movie marathons are special gatherings as rare as the wakes preceding a funeral, both of which I would sometimes wish to happen, more or less.
Belonging to a large clan, whenever relatives die, such un/fortunate occasions become not special gatherings but reasons for rare homecomings. For this rarity, wakes get extended until families from abroad and distant provinces arrive. What agitates me is the overwhelming rush of preparations prior to their coming and the hospitalities, dinners, and sleepless nights after that. And even though many of them are strangers to me or know only by face, name, or from the stories I heard of them, I delight in their occasional visits that never fail to animate our households.
It's in wakes that I also meet friends whom I have not been with for a long time. Before, my cousins and I would go to the wakes of dead people who we never really knew, let alone cared for. I don't know what we did back then. We go to nearby places, stand far from where the vigil is being held and from where the people gamble, and waste the time just being there, together. I guess for a desolate rural town, any "special" events—from movie marathons to funerals—have always been opportune rendezvouses. However, I don't know if that's still the case now where we can no longer afford to waste our time visiting distant wakes and watching crappy movies.
So, I would wish for funerals preceded by sleepless wakes and late-night gatherings for the same reasons that I would again host movie marathons to bring back time and company. If only we could have both without anyone watching and dying but just be there—once again, together— then perhaps, it wouldn't be as tragic as when we could only see each other in funerals and movie marathons.