Pagpánaw: The Solon House Deaths, Wakes, and Culture of Grief

Solon-Villaneza, Kathleen

Pagpánaw: The Solon House Deaths, Wakes, and Culture of Grief

James Alexander Gordon on 27th November 2025

Author Information

Kathleen Solon-Villaneza, Global Educators Network, Inc., Thailand

Abstract

A journey through three generations, Pagpánaw answers the question: How does a family hold space for grief and construct meaning around death? Tethered to cultural memory theories, the paper examines death and grief in the smallest unit of society—the Solon House, also a structure in the village of Mabolo in Cebu City, Philippines. Through autoethnography and phenomenology, the exhumed data in the form of written reconstructed memory evocative vignettes and narrated lived experiences gathered from chat and interview transcripts are analyzed and coded to extract and name grief and its many faces and describe the spaces it inhabits. The collated data reveal the rituals and cultural beliefs not only limited to the family, but also part of a larger death and grief culture. A belief example, mind the sumpa (counterspell) when arranging the funeral in the house to avoid successive deaths—the coffin placement of the recently deceased family member must not be in the same spot as the earlier held funeral. One of the offshoots of the Katingaláhan study, the paper also lightly touches on the curious connection between ghost sighting or katingaláhan manifestation and the family’s concepts of grief and death. It informs other area studies and disciplines including Asian studies, thanatology, memory, and vernacular language heritage.