18/09/2026
There are photographs that almost nobody in Europe would ever want to see on their phone.
And then, in the Philippines, I saw them on Facebook.
A photograph of a person lying in a coffin.
Then another one.
Flowers.
Family members gathered around.
Someone sitting nearby.
Someone crying.
Someone smiling while remembering the person who had passed away.
And I just froze.
I stared at the screen and thought:
“Wait…
Did they really post this on Facebook?
And is that actually a photograph of someone who has died?”
For me, it was a genuine cultural shock.
Because I grew up in Europe.
Where death is usually something we try to keep private.
We generally don't photograph the deceased.
We don't post coffins on social media.
Photographs from funerals usually stay within the closest circle of family and friends.
But here, I encountered a very different way of dealing with death.
And you know what is most interesting?
After several years, I no longer looked at those photographs the way I did the first time.
---
At first, I wanted to say:
“How can you even photograph something like this?”
Then:
“Why would you show it to other people?”
And then I started watching.
And I realized I was making one of the most common mistakes foreigners make.
I was looking at another culture and judging it by the rules of my own.
But that's like arriving in another country and complaining:
“Why isn't everything done the way we do it?”
Of course it isn't.
That's the whole point of another culture.
---
In the Philippines, a wake can become a place where people spend a great deal of time together with the person who has passed away.
Family members come.
Friends come.
Neighbors come.
People from the barangay come.
Some pray.
Some talk.
Some eat.
Some remember.
And sometimes, people laugh.
That last part can be especially difficult for a European to understand.
People laughing next to a coffin.
But if you listen to what they're talking about, you may realize they're not laughing at death.
They're remembering the person.
What they were like.
What they used to say.
How they joked.
Something funny they once did.
A story that happened years ago.
And suddenly you understand:
they didn't come only to mourn the person.
They came to remember them while they were alive.
---
And that's when the photograph starts to look completely different.
To one person, it is:
“A photograph of someone who died.”
To another:
“A photograph of my father.”
To one:
“A coffin.”
To another:
“The last moment when our whole family was together.”
To one:
“A funeral.”
To another:
“The day everyone who loved them came to say goodbye.”
One photograph.
Two completely different cultures.
And two completely different ways of feeling about it.
---
I'm not going to say that I now find these photographs easy to look at.
I don't.
I probably will never become completely comfortable with them.
But now I understand why you can't automatically call something like this disrespectful.
For some families, it can be a way of preserving a memory.
Showing relatives who couldn't make it.
Keeping a record of the final day.
Having a photograph of the person among the family's memories.
Saying:
“They were part of our family. We remember them.”
And there is nothing inherently frightening about that.
There is human pain.
There is love.
There is memory.
---
And you know what thought eventually came to me?
We photograph almost everything.
A first birthday.
The first day of school.
A wedding.
The birth of a child.
A trip.
Christmas.
New Year's Eve.
A family dinner.
The last day of a vacation.
We create thousands of photographs so that one day we can say:
“Remember when this happened?”
But somehow, we often try to completely erase the last days of a person's life from our visual memories.
Maybe because death is too frightening for us.
Maybe because we don't want to look it directly in the face.
Or maybe simply because our culture has taught us to grieve differently.
And that's okay too.
---
After several years in the Philippines, I realized something.
Travel isn't just about looking at someone else's beautiful places.
Real travel begins when you encounter something that challenges your own idea of what is normal.
First, you're shocked.
Then you're confused.
Then you ask:
“Why do they do this?”
And only after that do you begin to understand.
You don't have to adopt the tradition.
You don't have to do it yourself.
But you can understand it.
And perhaps that's the moment when you finally stop seeing a country as a tourist.
And start seeing it as it really is.
🇵🇭
Now I want you to be honest.
What Filipino tradition or everyday habit ever made you think:
“This is something I will never understand.”
And then, later, you discovered there was a completely different story behind it?
I'd genuinely love to read your answers.
Because sometimes one tradition that seems strange to a foreigner can tell you more about a country's culture than ten famous tourist attractions.
