AS the eldest of eight children, my wife, Aurit, had put it upon herself the burden of caring for her mother, a widow, in her declining years. She was then living next door with my wife’s two other siblings.
During that time, she chronicled her mother’s day-to-day condition by way of e-mail to her two brothers and a sister living in California. Similar to writing a diary, she extemporaneously related the latest happenings regarding her mother’s circumstances as well as her feelings about it directly on the keyboard.
So that she would have a ready hard copy reference to what she had previously written, my wife then asked me to print all her correspondences at the office where I had a printer. One day, as I was flipping through my wife’s letters and her siblings’ comments and responses, I began to see a thread of an interesting story. The letters made me laugh, angry and cry in frustration. Some letters filled me with rage, sometimes joy and understanding. They contained the varying colors and nuances of ordinary life as experienced from day to day. For a while I was suspended, as if witnessing and observing another family. No story of a mother and her children had moved me like this since I saw the movie trilogy of Satyajit Ray, the Indian filmmaker. Except in this story I was part of it. For I lived the joys and trials she wrote about.
Writing with unadorned candor and without her knowing it, my wife was writing a chapter of her life story. Her simple, direct and spontaneous style revealed a natural flair for clear and persuasive writing. I realized that she is really a gifted writer, unfolding right before my very eyes, a raw talent being polished with each passing day.
And I could see then that she was having a blast. When she was in front of our old Macintosh, she seemed to be in that altered state which psychologists termed as “flow.” No one could pull her away from it. She couldn’t wait to open the computer early in the morning as soon as our kids were out, either off to school or to work.
In an article I read somewhere, a novelist said that the true purpose of writing is above all else “to develop a form of communion with our inner life.” The article was sort of saying that writing is a way to know ourselves. What we think. What we feel. I believe that’s what my wife was experiencing.
At the same time, chronicling allowed my wife to reach out and share her experiences with others. For one, her e-mail reports from the “front” had enabled her to reconnect with her siblings, especially with her “prodigal” brother who seemed to have detached himself from the family for years. Now judging from his eager queries, he couldn’t wait to get updated on the latest happening from the Philippines and about his mother. And my wife was only too willing to oblige. She was now mining her memories of the past, relating stories from her childhood, particularly about incidents previously unknown to her brothers and sisters. Ironically, now that they were distant from each other, the siblings were becoming a close “family” once again.
I now know what that novelist meant when she said, “Writing is worthwhile, because it gives us to ourselves, and then to each other.”
My wife’s mother since then has passed away. Technology has moved on. My wife is now active on Facebook where “friends” not only give of themselves and to each other, but also give away so freely about themselves, putting their privacy at risk, which is another story.
Realizing it then, I learned a lot from my wife about what good writing should be. I am supposedly the more accomplished writer in our family. Writing was and is still my bread and butter. But it took her daily e-mail chronicles of her mother’s fading life to help me see the essence of what good writing should be, as stated in the lines of a poem by Langston Hughes:
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.