On passing away

In the quiet of this long holiday, our thoughts turn back to the days when the people who mattered most in our lives have long passed away. I suppose everyone of us have memories of our first experiences of seeing someone dying, of families bereft over the death of a father, a baby, a cousin. Death has a sobering effect on people, and a void exists where once there was laughter, and always questions arise for which there are no answers: why did Mama have to go, why did my friend’s husband take his own life, why would God take away what he gave, when will I go myself?

The first time I saw someone being killed was when I was seven. A boxing ring had been set up in a corner of our barrio. The event was a big one, as big as the showing of a Tarzan and Jane movie in the open space in front of the office building where my father worked as a lumber company accountant.

One of the boxers was hit so hard so many times that he slumped to the floor, bloodied and moaning, and then everybody said he was dead. I could not remove that picture off my mind for a long time.

The deaths of my father and mother, occurring two decades between each other, make me stop in my tracks, to wherever I am going or whatever it is I’m doing, like reading a book or cooking a meal.

My father was only 54 when he died. He had gone under the knife for cancer of the lungs. (And everyone who knew him asked why, when he didn’t smoke at all?)

I went home immediately after my mother sent a wire saying Papa would go anytime, so would I go home and see him while he was still conscious? I did, and there were many moments when I sat in his bed, looking at the shriveled figure which had once been swarthy and dark, who had taken me to a party and danced with me, and accompanied me on the boat ride to Silliman where I would enroll as a freshman.

It was perhaps unfeeling of me, or because I thought he would listen and pray for me, that I whispered to him the object of my heartache. There had been times in the past when I asked him young college-girl questions like, "If my boyfriend asked me for a kiss, would that mean that he is not serious with me?" He would smile and say of course not, kissing is a sign of caring and loving.

I told him that when I married, it would be to someone who had his traits – he did not smoke, did not drink, did not curse, and was very thoughtful of my mother each time he went to Manila or to the barrios some kilometers away and bring her a bag of goodies.

I remember how surprised and happy I was when two clothes cabinets greeted my sister Louella and me in our bedroom. Papa had ordered them for us growing teenagers. Of all the pasalubong he brought us, too, from his trip, I would remember the bottle of cologne and the Websters dictionary that were intended for my birthday gift.

I think, as I write this, of the nights we sat in the living room as he tinkered with our old radio set so that we could listen to a symphony and of how proud he was, grinning from ear to ear, as he pinned on me the ribbon for fifth runner-up in our high school commencement exercises.

He died one early morning when I was in the kitchen and I heard my sister Abigail screaming from his room. It was Abigail who could not contain her sorrow, weeping loudly as men came to begin the process of embalming him. The whole town, it seemed, came to pay their respects to Papa. The wake was held in the living room of our house, as there were no funeral parlor then.

I flew back to Manila a couple of days after he was buried. Back in the newsroom, memories of Papa would be obliterated, to be revived only upon remembering his death anniversary, or when a friend of his who had not known that he has passed away asked how he was.

I guess it was five years after Papa’s death that I learned that he had made an appearance in the parsonage of the pastor at the UP Los Baños Protestant church. This story you would not believe ever took place.

Julieta Orteza, the pastor’s wife – she and her husband had been close friends of my parents – told me the story a few weeks after I arrived from the US for graduate studies and dropped in on the Orteza family. My mother had stayed in the parsonage while attending a conference by a well-known evangelist. A day after she left for Manila, then for our hometown, Gingoog, the Orteza children were having a snack in the kitchen when they saw a man come up the stairs. He asked, "Where is she?" One of the kids thought he was asking for Mama, and she said, "Oh, she went home already." Then she offered him a glass of juice. He thanked her, said good-bye, and went down the stairs.

That evening, after the family held their prayers, one of the children said someone had come looking for my mother. He had not told them who he was, and prodded by a sixth sense for which she was known, Mrs. Orteza took out an album of photographs and showed the kids our family picture. Yes, the children said, this is the man who came, and he was even wearing the same barong tagalog. The Orteza couple looked at each other, and the children asked, why? And Julieta said, "Why, Mr. Torrevillas died many years ago." The kids shrieked in fright. That night the couple prayed long and hard so they would be able to go to sleep.

It’s a story that’s hard to believe for people who do not believe in the occult or in mysteries. When Julieta told me the story, I was frightened. But looking back now, I am inclined to believe my father did appear to the Orteza children. There are mysteries that we cannot fathom. I tell my friends that it is impossible to believe in the Virgin Birth, in the Resurrection, and the Holy Trinity, but we believe because we have faith in their being true.

And then, there’s the story of my mother. She had been what I could never aspire to become. She was everything rolled into one. A superb dressmaker who sewed the gowns of fiesta queens. A forever-trying violinist and pianist. She sang in church. She grew roses and African daisies, traveling long distances for their seedlings and seeds. She knitted and crocheted, and made fruit preserves. She delivered homilies in our church and conferences. She was president of the national women’s association of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines. And she had a beautiful penmanship.

In her later years, Mama even turned up more surprises. She became a younger version of Grandma Moses, starting to paint flowers and landscapes with oil, at age 78, writing two novellas, and making bed quilts.

She lived with my brother Nell, a medical doctor, in Blacktown, New South Wales, Australia for some years before she died. She planned to come home for good, she said in her letter to me. She bought some gift items for each one of us children and her surviving relatives. Her plan was to fly first to Iriga City for a reunion in the home of a sister who would not be able to travel to Manila, then proceed to Gingoog. Days before her scheduled flight, she succumbed to cancer of the colon.

My sister Jocelyn, who also lives in Australia, related that in her final moments, with the hospital doctor, the church minister, our brother Nell and her looking on, Mama opened her eyes, stretched her arms upward, and said, "Jesus." She was prepared to meet him.

It’s a story that catches at my throat and always makes me wish she were around, and I could wrap my arms around her and say, "Mama."

The other day, I was fixing the contents of my cupboard, and came upon the gift item that she had bought for me. A set of crystal salt and pepper containers. How I love this gift.

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