IT was one year to this day when our Ate Naomi had passed on. Weeks before this day and days before that time in the hospital were tough. Her case was terminal and the certainty of death did not make anxiety a default although it neither did allow us respite from contending with her dying, and, predictably, being gone.
The pandemic was still around and protocols were rigid. Except for her son, my nephew, and a caregiver, there was no procession of wellwishers, of friends assuring healing. It was only when no amount of oxygen could aid her breathing anymore that a daughter braved to take the place of her brother to prepare for the long haul. Outside of an affliction marked by metastasis, there was the virus tremendously dangerous to all of us and eluding dissipation.
My assignment was to man the fort, to be in the house to mind the 3-year-old Julio and be ready to bring the boy into any transportation as we drove fast to the hospital when the day—or night—had come.
The day did come. Fast. My niece was on the phone at 9 or 10 in the morning. “Wara na si Mama.” Mama is gone.
It is the boon of human relations that we have at our disposal terms that make any kind of loss bearable. Gone. Passed away. Ellipses help. Face to face, the silent gestures work, the tearing up a bit is in itself a triumph of the spirit.
When death comes, the elements of time as caught by a day, or a sliver of an afternoon, can be monumental. The universe, not the blindingly massive notion studied by science but the reality of us being part of that which is indescribably infinite, embraces us. It offers a privilege for those in sorrow to gain access to a Being, which is otherwise unseen and unfelt through ordinary, regular days. In sorrow, your steps are big and the sole of your shoes or slippers create a thud, to which you listen if only to understand sadness.
All things mattered on the first day of passing: the way her favorite plants had bent with the breeze (were the blooms on that unnamed grass withering?); the winds were felt at windows, the air in the kitchen ceased; the stove where she busied herself for years to prepare feasts only mothers could realize had turned into artifacts of remembering. Then her room in seconds was a moment you avoided gazing at. The children knew there would be a time for it—walking into that space and hoping for what had become an impossibility, that she would be there, getting stronger each day. Recovering.
The words spread fast when one of us, a member of a huge human community, leaves this world. Observe that thought and conjure the scene: “to leave this world.” Then the outpouring of sympathy begins. Every consolation offered is both balm and bane—the words heal but they also remind you of someone being missed and being not here forever.
The little things also are with death and grieving. You feel the wreaths. You pray and, without knowing it, you transfer your petitions onto the flowers because their beauty and scent exude forgiveness and forgetting.
Pray, I’d say, that more candor comes out of the mouths of guests. Pray that no one says: “Grief carves a hole in your heart and no amount of time and space will ever fill that emptiness.”
And yet a year has passed. What do humans do in those intervening months? Like all human beings a thousand years before us, we survived death, as it was not for us then. The world has remained nurturing for us left behind. We looked at clouds and, mind you, felt assured our loved ones were just there watching over us. We read into the rain; we rested with the stars and the night. We surrendered to the absence. As for the little boy in the family, he seems to have accepted that her “Nana” is gone. It will take 10 or more years (and I certainly will not be around anymore) when this boy grows into a man who will make sense of a person that, one day, disappeared from the house of the living.
Death is Life’s meaning. The Japanese have their own way of addressing a binary that is more of a resolution: they have their “jisei” or “death poetry.” Note the characters or kanji of the term: the “ji” means “to resign;” “sei” refers to “generation” or “world,” making this poetry a farewell to the world.
Listen to Seiyu’s jisei:
Not even for a moment
do things stand still—witness
color in the trees.
Listen once more to this death poem that is a life poem, for while it is a paean to what should have brought about stillness, it lauds motions that are eternal and pays tribute to the hues of life no force on this earth can banish.
In the book, Beyond the Veil: Reflexive Studies of Death and Dying, Kalliopi M Christodoulaki (co-author with Aubrey Thamann), notes in an online interview, how “In the end, death is a biological phenomenon that is understood culturally and felt personally.”
In our home, my niece, Dana, could not bear to unpack the old Christmas tree her mother had always put up each year. She called me up to seek permission to retire the old tree. She needed no permission, perhaps, an assurance that it is alright to begin anew. “Go on,” I told her. “It is your tree now.”
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano