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“This existence of ours is as transient as autumn
clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at
the movements of a dance. A lifetime is a flash of lightning in the
sky. Rushing by, like a torrent, down a steep mountain.”
— Buddha (c.563-c.483 B.C.)
On October 14, we buried our
88-year-old mother in Hagnaya, an idyllic fishing village in the
northernmost tip of Cebu, a few hundred kilometers from Cebu City.
She died two weeks earlier in Los Angeles, California.
After she suffered an
irreversible brain damage due to a second stroke, my siblings, four
of them in the US, and I decided that if she dies, she will be
cremated and her ashes brought to the place where she raised all six
of us almost single-handedly after the early death of our father.
Cremation was the best option,
the most inexpensive way of bringing her home, considering the high
cost and the big hassle of transporting her body from the US to the
Philippines.
After her stroke, my mother had
to be fed intravenously. The stroke had deadened her nerves and
numbed most part of her body. She could no longer swallow food, much
less talk. But she was conscious and could hear.
About a month ago, my sister
Anita from Chicago, who visited her in a nursing home in Los
Angeles, where my mother was a resident, contacted me by phone. She
passed on the phone to my mother and told me to keep on talking even
if I don’t hear any response. She said that mother could be just
waiting to hear from all of us and then perhaps it would be time for
her to go.
So, I talked to her. Being the
eldest, I told her not to worry about us, that we, including her
grandchildren, are all OK and that we all love her. My sister said
that she saw mother smiled while I was talking to her. That was the
last time that I talked to my mother.
All of us were actually waiting
for the final hour. I told my sister to call me anytime of the day
or night when the end comes. But nothing happened after more than a
month. Meanwhile my mother, who weighed more than 200 lbs before her
stroke, has shrunk. She was skin and bones although she was still
conscious.
On October 2, Daisy, one of my
nieces, whom she had cared from childhood, visited her Lola at the
nursing home. Daisy told my mother: “Don’t worry, Lola. If
anything happens to you, I promise to take you home to Hagnaya so
that you will be reunited with Lolo.”
Daisy swore that after she said
that, my mother gripped her hand as if to say, “Thank you.” A
few minutes later, my mother closed her eyes permanently. This is
probably what Edgar Lee Masters, in his poem, “Silence,”
referred to as the “silence of the dying whose hands suddenly grip
yours.”
I do not believe in superstition
but I remember that around that time, a black butterfly hovered over
me several times while I was reading the papers in our porch. I was
just wondering if that was my mother saying goodbye.
After the cremation plans were
discarded, came the frantic preparations for her journey back home.
As promised, Daisy and our youngest brother Gem accompanied her
remains from Los Angeles to Cebu while my sister Anita,
sister-in-law Diding, and my two nieces Anne Rose and Rhea flew in
from Chicago. I and my other brother Jesus in Cebu took care of the
preparations in our village where the burial took place.
So, on the second Sunday of
October, our mother had her last wish. We interred her in a simple
tomb at the Catholic cemetery near the sea, finally reunited with
her husband after a long journey that took her thousands of miles
away.
Full life
My siblings and I are thankful to
the Lord for giving our mother a full life. She lived to a ripe age
that most of us can only dream of having. There are those who are
plucked by the Giver prematurely because of extreme poverty, of
hunger or of circumstances beyond their control. The French writer
Simone de Beauvoir, in her essay, “A Very Easy Death,” described
them as the “dispossessed who often face the terror of the dying
of the light alone.”
I am reminded of the immortal
lines from the poem, “Elegy Written in the Country’s
Churchyard,” by Thomas Gray:
“Full many a gem of purest ray
serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is borne to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” 
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