In a society that entertains itself with fictional death, what does real mortality demand of us?
Key points at a glance:
- Modern Halloween replaces serious thought on human mortality with commercial entertainment.
- The original holiday was a season to honour the departed and reflect on personal virtue and legacy.
- Comfortable daily habits in Singapore easily distract us from finite lifetime limits, causing us to waste much of our limited time on earth.
- Honouring departed lives requires actively practicing goodness toward the living today.
All you that do this place pass bye
Remember death for you will dye.
As you are now even so was I
And as I am so shall you be.
Inscription on the tomb of Thomas Gooding
Norwich Cathedral, c. 1600s
Singapore loves scare theatre, if Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights is anything to go by. And it has plenty of competition around the island, as everyone from the Science Centre to your neighbourhood CC organises its own haunted house. But lost in all this is the true meaning of Halloween itself.
The name ‘Halloween’ points towards something more serious. It is a shortening of “All Hallows’ Even”: the evening before All Saints’ Day, when the church remembers the people who lived with holiness and courage. On the following day, All Souls’ Day, the church remembers the faithful departed, whose lives still have something to teach the living.
Together, these observances place death within a larger story. All Saints’ tells us that holiness is formed in humble living, and that the church is a people sustained across generations. All Souls’ enables hopeful grief and thanksgiving for the lives of those who have gone before. Death no longer has the last word.
Remembering the dead also confronts us with our own mortality: memento mori, “Remember you must die.”
Before modern medicine, people saw visits from the Reaper as a part of daily living. Medieval stories and images used encounters with the dead to confront the living with their own mortality. As the Latin aphorism puts it: “Media vita, in morte sumus.” (“In the midst of life, we are in death.”)
We must all answer the question of how we will live before meeting death. Although our bodies and minds still lose capacity as we age, we sadly spend months, years and even decades wasting the limited time we have.
What Makes a Life Worthy of Honour?
Today’s Halloweens have become extraordinarily good at enjoying and laughing at fictional death while leaving real death to one side.
The commercial version just gives us the chance to purchase a fright, but not the idea that a human life has a purpose. In keeping Halloween but losing All Saints’ Day, we’ve turned Halloween into just another reason to play dress-up.
A life does not have to be accomplished, nor its deeds spectacular. Halloween gave us the chance to remember someone who kept a difficult promise, cared faithfully for a loved one through years of decline or refused to pass cruelty down to another generation.
Such things don’t make the news often or earn public applause, yet they may be the most important things a person does. Remembering such lives helps us distinguish what deserves admiration from what merely attracts attention.
So should it be said of us.
Secularisation, Bread and Circuses
Have we as Singaporeans grown too privileged to think on death? One might look around and conclude that our amusements, like travel, the food and the scroll, have become a refuge from serious thought. We’re perpetually distracted from the very life that offers us a chance at a legacy of service or even notability.
The Romans called this effect of distractions blocking the ability to ask the right questions ‘bread and circuses’. We’re not that different from the throngs of ancient Rome. When work ends, entertainment is ready for us, in our pockets. We surround ourselves with activity, consume an endless flow of novelty and train ourselves to avoid silent contemplation.
Halloween exposes how we’d rather caricature death than reflect on our own mortality. We enjoy skeletons, ghosts and gravestones as mere seasonal decorations, stripped of the questions and contemplations they once represented.
Yet death remains the great leveller. It puts our worldly concerns into perspective by reminding us that our time on earth—and our opportunities to care for those we love—will not last forever.
‘Later’ Is Carrying Too Much
When the larger questions do intrude, we assign them to our future selves. Someday, we say to ourselves, we will read thoughtfully, visit our loved ones regularly and become a more patient listener. ‘Someday’ rarely comes.
All the while, we remain in the midst of life and in death; ageing does not politely wait for us to get ourselves sorted out. Our children will grow, our parents will become frail, and our friends will drift apart.
The Halloween of old used to call us to live mindfully; to notice pleasure, beauty and precious company while they last.
So let us remain in the midst of life and death, and ask, “Who receives the most attention from me? How are my habits teaching me to love and hate? Do the people we consider most important to us actually feel important?”
Give Remembrance Something to Do
Halloween is when all of us can be recalibrated to the reality of time. Anyone can use the season this way, with or without the costumes and games. The dead cannot add another chapter to their earthly lives, but something of their goodness can remain active in ours.
If it is to be effective, remembrance also must change how we treat the living.
A society that remembers also honours those that came before us, by making their good qualities our own.
One day, we too will run out of tomorrows. But will we be worth remembering?
