I write this two days before All Saints Day. This is a rather significant time for me not because of the occasion — a commemoration of all the people who have died before us — but because it begins with my parents’ wedding anniversary. They were married on Oct. 31, 70 years ago. I was in my teens when I realized they had gotten married on Halloween. Why did you marry on such a macabre occasion? I asked my mother. She looked offended. She told me they didn’t have Halloween at the time. Today Halloween is the time when things begin to take a special color for me. I always light a candle to remind me to celebrate the wedding of my parents.
Then inevitably I remember my grandmother. The first time I ever went to a cemetery on All Saints Day was in 1966. Lola died on July 9 of that year. Four months later was the first All Saints Day after her passing. We went to Manila Memorial Park to pay tribute. The most moving thing for me was seeing the grave of a child diagonally across hers. It was tended by the child’s single mother and was surrounded by the child’s favorite toys. Her mother had brought and arranged them. I was deeply saddened. That was 46 years ago but I remember it still.
After that I don’t remember many trips to the cemetery. We lost most of our men to the Japanese during World War II. They took them from our home — my father, uncle, grandfather, a cook — and they never returned. We heard that they were shot at the Masonic Temple near enough our home. We never found their bodies. They had no graves for us to visit. So we did not go to the cemetery on All Saints Day until that one time after Lola died.
Nevertheless every year I remember how she died. I was the only grandchild who was present then together with my aunt and later my mother and another aunt but I might have been one of those close to her bed. My uncle, the Jesuit priest, arrived a bit too late. Lola woke up feeling well that morning and even had a conversation with one of the drivers who came to visit her. Then she started to cough and make a strange noise. The nurse ran to her with a kidney basin thinking she was going to be sick. I saw her. Her eyes were staring blankly into space. Something told me she was gone.
Everybody was crying. The nurse began to work to set her in order. I remember thinking — maybe this is what they mean by funeral arrangements. She put in Lola’s false teeth. Then she looked at me and asked if I had a handkerchief. I nodded and took two from my handbag. I always carried around five handkerchiefs then because I had hay fever every morning. She took them and tied them around my Lola’s chin to close her mouth. Then they sent me home to pick up her clothes, which apparently my youngest aunt had arranged.
That night at the church, after most of the guests had gone, I remember Tita Caring, my mother’s oldest sister, my grandmother’s oldest daughter, calling me. “I want you to open Lola’s coffin and break her rosary. I looked. It isn’t broken. It’s supposed to be broken, you know, or else one of us will soon follow. I want you to go and break it.”
I wanted to say — why me? Why don’t you break it? You’re her oldest daughter. I am only her granddaughter, not even the oldest. Why don’t you do it yourself? But I was a good obedient girl in my early 20s and pregnant with my third child. I went to Lola’s coffin and opened it. The smell of formaldehyde assaulted me and I held my breath, my heart broken. Then I tore the rosary apart, closed the coffin and went to a corner to cry. I never forgot that incident like I never forgot when my Lola’s youngest sister died. She was another surrogate mother to me. This time my youngest aunt asked me to look for material to cover her legs with because apparently she had chosen an all-glass coffin and the dress she wore lying in state was mid-calf.
I found pink chiffon and covered her. It is not easy for someone to cover somebody she loves after the person is dead. She feels cold, stiff. Suddenly I knew what lifeless meant and I never forgot. Maybe that’s why when my mother passed away I could not bring myself to touch her. I could not do it anymore.
By the time you read this, I will have gone to put candles on their crypts and cleaned the beaded flowers and butterflies I made for them. It is Nov. 3. I will be out of my house walking around a mall over my sorrowful memories. But they are worth revisiting because they make us remember the love we felt, the sorrow that brought us down, then eventually the joy we rediscovered after their passing.
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