Remembering our dead

When we celebrate our dead, we acknowledge our own transience and mortality. When we offer flowers, candles, and prayers to their memories and tombs, we make the offering actually to ourselves. We weep over the thought that we can never truly know -- because we cannot inherit -- what our ancestors have seen with their eyes, touched with their hands, loved with their hearts, and come to with their minds. It is the greatest tragedy that memory cannot be transmitted, that knowledge cannot be inherited. We and the future generations always have to learn by ourselves. Because whatever could have been passed on to us through genes, our ancestors have taken with them to their graves. So what lay in the grave are not only our ancestors and their bones but the lost potential for greatness.

Long live the dead! Tears for the living!