She was always against a blue Christmas tree. Maybe the word is not “against”; she was worried that the blue color dominating the usual red, silver and gold over the dark tree foliage of our tree will look gloomy. “Christmas should be bright,” she would say, a statement I dared not contradict.
She was our Ate Naomi, sister for a long, long time after we dropped the legalistic “in-law.” When my elder brother, her husband, died in 1999, she stayed on with us. I remember approaching her a day after the burial and, without consulting my siblings and parents, calmly assured her that we wanted her to stay with us but I, particularly, promised her she would remain part of us even if she opted to live away with us and her children. That I would be behind her, in all her new decisions, in her new life.
In our language, she talked of how she would feel “crippled” if indeed she and the children would go away. Thus, she stayed on; and thus, we transferred with her when a new house was completed. In that new place, we survived the loneliness of leaving a home of memories. We went through strong typhoons common in our region. While my siblings and I all moved outside the city and out of the country, she remained in that house. My parents were with her. She saw her three children grow. She saw them leave the city one by one. She witnessed them marrying off. She was happy when two of them came back to the city; she enjoyed months with the daughter abroad working.
In that house, my parents passed on. Ate Naomi was with us in that sadness. She was with us also in all our joys during fiestas and gatherings. In the absence of a big brother —a Manoy—she gently eased into the role of authority. It was her that we consulted when we were deciding what to prepare for special dinners and lunches. We allowed her to veto our choices ungrudgingly. She managed to learn the tedious meat recipe my father would always cook during special occasions. And she spoke the language of the Ticao Island, the island from where our side of the family came.
When the lockdown was announced, she was on her way to Manila for treatment. Some six years back, she had cancer but a series of chemotherapy brought her back to wellness. The lockdown prevented her from travelling but not in conducting classes online. She was a nurse and part of the Universidad de Santa Isabel and was retired already when the pandemic hit the world. Introduced to the tedious use of modules through the Internet that was either unstable from her end or totally bad on the side of her students, she became an eager student of the technology. She got a new laptop and every morning, she would dress up as if she were about to step out and teach regular face-to-face classes again. But her classroom was her cozy bedroom fitted with a smart table.
She would complain about how she was not sure if the students were learning anything. She was worried about the kind of nurses this “new normal” would be able to produce. She despaired over students who complained about the cost of Internet connections and the constant brownouts plaguing the towns in the province. Until one day, she began to complain of fatigue. We said it was from the long sessions online. It was time to stop, her children told her. But it was tough asking her not to teach anymore.
This year, her oncologist recommended chemotherapy sessions again. On one of these, she experienced bodily chills, the first time such a reaction happened. She had to stay in the hospital for a day. We would know much later that this time, her body was not responding well anymore to the treatment.
There would be more hospitalizations. She was home in bed, her bed propped up high against the headboard when I visited her. “It is progressing fast,” she half-whispered to me. “No one can predict anything, Ate Naomi,” I answered back. We were talking in ellipses, with me more terrified than her of the unsaid.
Two of her children were beside her that morning of the 25th of November. Another daughter was on her way back after the plane that was about to carry her back to the US met a freak accident: a vehicle towing the plane hit its nose. They were already inside the plane when they were told that their flight had been cancelled. The next morning, she would find out that the next flight was also not coming. This convinced her to return to Naga.
Ate Naomi was told of the good news that morning. An hour after or so, she passed away peacefully.
One day in September this year, I came to visit them and saw her in the living room. Beside her was our well-preserved artificial tree—royal in all the blue colors of the world. A blue Christmas tree. This gentle, kind sister of ours made sure she had an early Christmas. It was a celebration before her journey to the bright, blue yonder. This was a goodbye but not a farewell; this was a consolation that, where she would go, prayers pass through white clouds, and the sky eternally promises us the hue of Heaven.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com