Memorial to equality

THE “Rolls Royce of Cemeteries.”

So crows the Angeles City government of the 1.6-hectare burial ground it developed in Barangay Sapalibutad, replete as it is with everything unobtained in public cemeteries like crematorium, columbarium and chapels.

The city cemetery has just been issued its operational clearance by the Department of Health. Earlier, the city council passed Ordinance No. 403, S-2016 “Establishing the Angeles City Memorial Park and creating the Angeles City Memorial Office under the city mayor and other related purposes.” Making all systems go for the full delivery of a campaign promise of Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan, a feat that took a little over four years.

No tale from the crypt is our piece of the public cemetery’s coming-to-be, published here on Oct. 23, 2012:   

Equal in death

DEATH IS the great equalizer. So it has been clichéd. The one sure thing none of us can evade, be we rich and powerful, poor and dispossessed and anywhere in between. 

But in death the great social and economic divide still obtains: the magnificent funeral and the beggar’s burial, the grand mausoleum and the common grave.

And never that twain shall meet?

Not in Angeles City lately. So it seems.

The impending closure of the over-capacitated Catholic Cemetery in the aptly named Barangay Cutcut – “bury” in English – posed a most serious situation to the city government, the sementeryong luma serving for the longest time as the city’s public cemetery.  

Times of necessity require ingenuity as much as serendipity, confluencing in the right direction toward a desired resolution. In the case at hand, this instanced in the unearthing of an over-two-scores-old city ordinance and the charity of a landed family to donate part of its estate to the city.

The unity of purpose and singularity of action among the principal stakeholders of the issue, capping, if not crowning, it all.

Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan tendering the Private Memorial Park Type Cemetery Ordinance of 1968 which gave the city government the mandate to seek from private cemeteries five percent of their land for charity burial.

EdPam heard about the ordinance in 1988 yet, when he was vice mayor, from his father, Alberto, who served as vice mayor to Mayor Eugenio Suarez.

The Most Rev. Pablo Virgilio David, auxiliary bishop of San Fernando and curate of the Holy Rosary Parish Church which has jurisdiction over the city’s Catholic Cemetery, brokering understanding between the city government and the private cemetery’s owner.

Robin Nepomuceno, long time public servant from vice governor to barangay chairman, representing the family that owns Holy Mary Memorial Park.

The end-result: a memorandum of agreement whereby the memorial park will provide the site for some 200 concrete apartment-type niches to be built by the city government along standards set by the Department of Health.  

Bishop David said the Catholic Cemetery would be finally closed soon as the niches at the Holy Mary Memorial Park are made available.

This, even as the city government fast tracks plans for the city’s new public cemetery in Barangay Sapa Libutad  – regarded as first “real” public cemetery, with the tiny one called patirik-tirik in Barangay Sto. Cristo, if I am not mistaken, in disuse for the longest time now.

“It will not just be a place for burial but a peaceful park where we will also have a crematorium," Pamintuan promised of the new public cemetery in two hectares of land donated by the Ayson family, owners of the Poracay Resort in the sands of Porac town.

The final place of rest for the city’s poor just like those posh memorial parks where the rich are buried. 

On hallowed grounds, equality comes to everyone.  Aye, death may then be the great equalizer.

In the aspect of being “the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another. "As Mitch Albom in Tuesdays with Morrie says.