33 years later

Six a.m., September 21. I am awake and staring out my window at a grey sky. Rain speckles the glass top of my terrace table. Suddenly I hear the telephone ring and my significant other answers it. It is so early in the morning, earlier than this. We are at the Hong Kong Hilton. We have been here a few days shopping for the new home he has bought for me. The hotel suite has boxes full of crystal and china and wallpaper. The phone call is from his PR man in Manila who tells him that martial law has been declared. No more media, he reports, no newspapers, no radio, no television, nothing. He reels into some kind of panic, tries to sleep again, gives up, gets up. I get up, too. We are both young. I am 28, he 35. That was 33 years ago. Why am I thinking of this now, I wonder. It has all passed. Life has changed so much. I am old. He is dead. We broke up 28 years ago. Why am I remembering this now? 

I called up my mother who was staying with the children. "There is no radio, no media," she complained. "I wonder what is going on here." I told her martial law had been declared. It filled my British stepfather with dread. Eventually they moved out of the Philippines. He feared martial law. He was in Germany as a young student when it was declared there. So that very year, they left the Philippines.

Thirty-three years ago. These double numbers are always significant to me, I don’t know why. They always bring me to a place barraged by memories that I see so clearly, as if I could step right back into them and be there again.

Mother and I have not lived together in 33 years then. This is important because I’m an only child. Now that she needs care, there is no one but me, and yet today, at age 83, she is belligerent towards me, blames me for everything that happens in her life, most of which is invented. She is so nice and charming to other people but never to me or her sister. It’s hard to take, even if I tell myself this is no longer the mother I used to know, that she has changed so much because of the senile dementia she has been diagnosed with. I told her she was coming home on September 15, weekly I called her to tell her this. On the day itself I called to tell her this. She seemed to understand but the minute she entered the apartment I had rented for her, she insisted on returning to Vancouver, to the place she had grown to hate and pressured me to take her away from. Now just like that she wants to go back.  

I suspect sometimes that what I used to joke about – Alzheimer’s – has come to take over her brain. This is why she is suddenly belligerent and mean. I want to take her to the doctor. She refuses to go. So I don’t know what to do because I recovered from a stroke that left me with a short temper. You annoy me, I get annoyed and tell you so but it passes quickly. I cannot face her, cannot be in her presence. We used to be such wonderful friends. Now I stand a few minutes in her presence and she turns me quickly into nothing, into finely powdered dust. 

Thirty-three years ago today we proceeded to Kuala Lumpur where he was going to make a speech. I shopped for long batik gowns and wore them for what felt like forever. I wish I had not gotten tired of them and given them away. I wish I had kept them, I would wear them still to recall, to feel again the wonderful times they brought.

How strange life is – first so happy, then so sad. First so good and then so terribly bad. Then suddenly we are old and everything around us has to be seen with new eyes. Our parents age, they change, fill us with fear. Our sons are grown and they are so different from their fathers. We are grateful. Our lives have changed and they are so different from what we would have wanted or what we thought they should be. But we are grateful to be alive. 

I sit and watch the photographs in my mind’s eye, shots taken of me when I was 28, tall and slim, wearing a long batik dress and clogs, posing in front of one of the monuments in Kuala Lumpur. She never thought she would age this way, I think, as I continue to gaze at the grey sky.  

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Romancing the Tree at Ricco-Renzo today, 1-6 p.m.