‘Daguro’ still matters

For years, I thought Daguro was simply a surname. I had encountered people bearing it, particularly in Iloilo’s Fourth District, and never imagined that the word carried another meaning in some communities. Then my secretary, Julius Ruger Hermano, explained how daguro figures in wakes and funerals in their town. What began as an ordinary office conversation suddenly became a lesson in Ilonggo culture: when death enters one household, it rarely remains that family’s burden alone.

Ruger described daguro as a community’s practical response to bereavement. Relatives, neighbors, friends, former classmates, colleagues, and even people who knew the deceased only indirectly come forward with money, food, time, labor, prayers, or simple presence. Some help prepare meals. Others receive visitors, arrange chairs, stay through the night, or accompany the family during the burial. Nobody submits a résumé. Nobody asks for a job description. People see what needs doing and quietly do it.

The conversation began, rather unceremoniously, with my own funeral arrangements. I mentioned that I had already secured a St. Peter life plan—this is not an advertisement; no commission is forthcoming—and that my daughters and I had discussed pensions, life plans, and cremation. Parvane Mae, who is a medical doctor and encounters questions of illness and mortality in her profession, regarded it as a perfectly normal and practical concern. Psyche Mae, a special education and guidance teacher, found the conversation rather fatalistic and sad. I understood both reactions. One daughter approached death as a reality worth preparing for; the other felt that talking about it made an already painful possibility seem too close. What I considered a matter-of-fact family conversation clearly did not feel equally matter-of-fact to everyone. Still, we managed to speak about death almost as calmly as families discuss insurance, tuition, or who had forgotten to pay the internet bill—almost.

What we had never discussed was daguro. Perhaps that is because our plan was designed precisely to spare relatives and friends from carrying the financial and logistical burden when my time comes. I do not want my daughters grieving while also calculating how many trays of pancit remain, who will buy coffee, or whether the monobloc chairs have arrived. Preparing for death, to me, is one final act of parenting: reducing the number of decisions one’s children must make while their hearts are least prepared to make them.

Yet daguro reveals something a contract cannot provide. A plan may pay for the casket, cremation, chapel, or burial arrangements. It cannot sit beside a grieving daughter at two in the morning. It cannot retell an embarrassing but affectionate story about the deceased. It cannot notice that the widow has not eaten or quietly refill the coffee without being asked. Money can organize a funeral. Only people can accompany grief.

This may explain why wakes in many Filipino communities are both solemn and strangely alive. There are prayers and tears, but also coffee, whispered updates, shared memories, and occasional laughter that surprises everyone—including those who feel guilty for laughing. In some wakes, people play tumbo, baraha/cards, mahjong, bingo, and other games through the long hours of the night. Depending on the community and its practices, part of the proceeds may be given to the bereaved family, turning an evening pastime into another modest form of assistance. These games may look like simple diversions, but they can also become another way of doing daguro: staying awake, keeping the family company, and helping, however modestly, with the expenses left by death.

Somebody remembers the deceased’s favorite joke. Somebody begins a story that everyone has heard before. For a brief moment, sorrow loosens its grip. People do not laugh or play because the death matters less. They do so because companionship—and sometimes practical help—matters most when the night feels longest.

Ruger also made an intriguing observation: the size of one’s daguro can be interpreted as a measure of the relationships the deceased formed. A crowded wake may suggest a life surrounded by relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is truth in that. People usually come because some thread, however thin, once connected their lives.

Still, we should be careful. A funeral is not a popularity contest, and attendance is not a final performance rating. Some deeply loved people leave behind small families. Others outlive most of their friends. Distance, illness, work, poverty, migration, and complicated relationships determine who can appear. A quiet wake does not mean an unloved life, just as a crowded chapel does not automatically certify a virtuous one. Even politicians can fill a room.

There is also a danger when mutual aid becomes social accounting. Help freely offered is beautiful. Help demanded because “we contributed when your relative died” begins to resemble an installment plan. Community traditions lose some of their humanity when generosity becomes debt and absence is treated as betrayal. The better spirit of daguro is not I came, so you must come. It is I know this is heavy, so let me carry part of it.

That distinction matters today. Families are smaller and more dispersed. Many children work abroad. Neighbors may share a wall without knowing one another’s names. Funeral services have become more professionalized, and life plans can settle expenses that communities once absorbed together. These changes are not necessarily bad. Planning ahead is responsible. Cremation is a legitimate choice. Professional assistance can protect a grieving family from needless stress.

But efficiency should not make us emotionally absent. We can outsource embalming, catering, paperwork, and transportation. We cannot outsource compassion. Perhaps the enduring value of daguro lies not in preserving every old practice exactly as it was, but in keeping its deepest message: sorrow should not be carried alone.

The Ilonggo is often praised as malambing, but tenderness is most convincing when it becomes useful. It is easy to say pakikiramay. It is harder—and more meaningful—to arrive, bring food, wash cups, make calls, contribute what one can, or simply stay when there is nothing clever left to say. Daguro turns sympathy from a sentence into an action.

I still prefer to prepare responsibly for my own death. My daughters should inherit memories, not unpaid funeral bills. But I now understand that preparation and community are not opposites. A life plan may settle the account; daguro answers a different question: when the lights are dim, the coffee has gone cold, and grief finally becomes real, who will remain in the room?

Perhaps that is the quiet wisdom of the tradition. We spend much of life convincing ourselves that our burdens are private. Then death arrives, and the community reminds us otherwise. In the end, daguro is not really a measure of how many people attend our wake. It is a measure of whether, while still alive, we learned to carry one another.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.