“It is no good thinking that the sensitive man is happier or greater. No one cares for your tragedy until you sing it, and you require peace of mind to do this.”—V. S. Naipaul in Between Father and Son: Family Letters
How does one grieve? How does one talk about death again?
It was one in the afternoon, an ordinary day in our home, when my mother’s caregiver announced to us that my mother was…perhaps, dead already.
No one waits for death. One slowly prepares for it, but no one sits the whole afternoon in anticipation of it. But the caregiver was blunt. She did not say, excuse me, Sir, but I think…. No, she stood there, and I apprehending her through my peripheral vision, turned at the same time she said those words.
When death comes, you cannot be angry at all. You cannot even summon the more august of anger, which is rage. Not tears and not sadness—you cannot command them.
The caregiver’s words brought my sister-in-law and I to my mother’s room.
During the last visit of my sister, Ebit, my mother was still strong enough to see her off. My mother was 92 then, but she managed to be there at the porch, to hug her youngest, her only daughter who bears half of her lovely name, Lily. My sister would tell me upon her return after our mother passed on that, in the car, that night, she cried, for no reason and for some reasons her heart told her not to confront.
“Ebit, amo na ini gad…,” I spoke to her through the phone using the language of the island of our birth. “This is it indeed…” Tokyo, where she lives, sounded so far that afternoon, the geography of her sadness beyond my reach. In a more ideal season, we could have hugged each other, and she could have embraced our mother. In the absence of presence, there is, believe me, good technology. When I sensed that she was able to get hold of herself already, I advised her that I would bring the phone close to the ears of Mama, and she could…talk to her.
Even for the most mysterious but ultimately quotidian of occurrences like death, we are at a loss for words. We speak of people being gone, of people embarking on a long journey that will bring them to infinity. We write of loved ones going on to live a life after death or, more positively, life after life. Even those who find it a task to hang on to transcendence will find it, suddenly and for consolation, wiser to believe that there is indeed something beyond the fact of a human being who stops breathing and is declared dead.
“What is the use of all this” is, therefore, a question that could be the most prosaic and yet more gripping than all poetry about the eternal.
If one wants a sense of the power that reaches out there, of the semblance of the generally inscrutable divine, then standing before a loved one who is there but, in the words of our belief, whose soul has gone away, is the closest to having that knowledge.
We stop fearing death when, finally, death of any of its act is now in front of us. We, in fact, deny death when it takes over life as we define life. We did that as we looked at my mother. My sister-in-law, Ate Naomi, who is a nurse, was already taking Mama’s blood pressure. The device was registering error. I looked at Mama and started calling her, waiting for her to respond, to move. I touched her forehead. She was warm. I gently moved her legs and covered them with her favorite blue blanket, in anticipation of the coldness of the travel she was about to have. And yet, the blanket was meant for us, and the chill of sadness left in her wake.
On May 28 of this year we commemorated her first death anniversary. We planned to have a grand event. During the last night of her wake, we asked a friend, a very good singer, to sing her favorite song. For this anniversary, we wanted again to request the same singer to sing another of her beloved song, Jo Stafford’s “You Belong To Me.” Because we would not be able to hear again the voice of Mama, we wanted, at least to hear the lines she loved: See the pyramids along the Nile/Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle/Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle/Just remember darlin’, all the while/You belong to me.
I even thought of inviting two Tango dancers; my parents loved to dance the Tango.
In the end, we opted to have a simple, small gathering of relatives. That day, her best friend, a colleague when she was still teaching in a public elementary school, came all the way to Naga City from Bulacan. Tita Ampy Ferrer and her husband, Tito Alex, brought back pleasant memories. They reminded us not of Mama’s passing but of her life and that of Papa when they were young and happy, and we were all together. That night, we once more lived in the universe of happy home—of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins all at one dining table, sharing food creating the past, which, as the Irish writer John Banville, “beats inside me like a second heart.”
That morning of the 28th, I went alone to the memorial park, and placed on her grave marker a bunch of white roses and lilies. I prayed a bit and looked up. It is a naïve act, this looking up, when we are visiting cemeteries, because we know that our loved ones are not here buried deep, but somewhere there, up in the skies, with the clouds, with the signs of Heaven.
Well, I would like to think that, wherever she is now, Mama is having fun looking at the origins of pyramids along the Nile, as she watches forever and ever sunrises on the most splendid tropic isles and, every now and then, saying a prayer that says, “Just remember when a dream appears/You belong to me.”
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano