The ghost from cyberspace
MANILA, Philippines – First there was the baby who clung to me as an oyster does to a rock so that he couldn’t be pried from me by his
yayas
my grandson whom his parents nicknamed “Ziggy” because his perfectly round head with a cowlick sticking out recalled a so-named cartoon character. He’d hug my neck tight with his chubby arms and wrap his fat legs around my midrib desperately afraid of being separated from me and cry out with inconsolable woe whenever I had to leave him to return to my home in mist-shrouded Tagaytay. I therefore grew to cherish the little tyke, but there would come a time when I would wish he or I had never been born.
I felt bad whenever I had to leave Ziggy and I begrudged the hours I had to spend away from him, for I knew he was growing up by the hour and would soon be leaving the baby behind like outgrown clothing. But he never outgrew his affectionate nature and developed a caring attitude besides. After he got his bachelor of science degree in biology, a manager at Genentech, a biopharmaceutical committed to improve life with breakthrough medicines, chose him from among hundreds of other applicants after one interview. When asked why he wanted to join the corporation, Ziggy replied, “Because like Spider-Man, with great powers comes great responsibility.” The simile made the manager smile to himself. Ziggy was only 21 years old then, not so far removed from the world of Power Rangers and other such fantasy heroes of his childhood.
Because of his loving nature, he could stay cuddled for a long while without feeling restless as other children would. When he was a year old he stood on a table for more than an hour while I held him close to shelter him from the whining, dusty wind one morning in a furniture shop in Balanga, Bataan where we were left to wait for the return of his grandpa. For me, that was a time of happiness, so clear in my memory. So was that Christmas season when I held him up in the car when his mother, my daughter Melanie, drove us around Merville Park, where I live part of the time, to view the Christmas décor put up in rivaling splendor by the houses there. Christmas lights seemingly more numerous than all the stars in the galaxy twinkled and pushed back the night darkness. At each display I couldn’t help exclaiming, “Ang ganda ng isang ito!” And Ziggy kept echoing, “Danda din isa ‘to, Mommy ‘no?” And because he thought they were meant to be blown out like candles to prevent fires, he kept puffing in the direction of the lights as we passed them.
Too soon he outgrew his baby shoes made of blue canvas striped with red that now, browned by age, I keep on a shelf in a glass cabinet together with his toys like the red plastic duck with metal pellets in its tummy that is rattled to amuse Baby Ziggy in his crib. He would say, talking about himself in the third person, “Ziggy run” and he’d run away in the Nike sneakers he was so proud of.
When he was three years old he and his parents left to settle in San Francisco, California. My husband and I flew to visit them every year. Although we didn’t admit it even to ourselves, Ziggy was the main magnet that drew us to fly over oceans and continents. On our first visit we took him to a big toyshop. On the marble floor a mechanical basset hound was yapping and prancing about. It looked real with thick brown fur, long droopy ears and pleading eyes. This kind of robotic toy was new then and I could see Ziggy was entranced by its antics. I asked for the price: Fifty dollars. I turned to Ziggy and asked him if he really wanted the toy. I meant to buy it for him should he say yes. But what he said was: “Hindi masyado.” He had heard the salesman quote the price; and the four-year-old didn’t want his grandma to spend too much. He grew up an impish, rollicking boy who, when he was five years old, practiced his jujitsu hold on his granny whom he called “Mommy,” and, taking me by surprise, wrestled me down to the thickly carpeted floor. How was I to know, newly arrived, that after only a year of absence I’d find not the tot I left but a sumo wrestler wannabe? Then, on a subsequent visit, it was a video game addict I found. Ziggy maintained his number one ranking in his elementary school class, but he spent all his time at home before the computer that his uncle, my son, had given him. He developed a tic that jerked his head spasmodically and that really worried me. The sweet little tyke had turned into a cranky meanie. Only his Papa could make him leave his computer games to clear up his bedroom strewn all over with paper, books and clothes. His behavior improved in his 10th year, when he got a sister to love. She was born big and strong. And in my mind I cheered, “Bravo!” when, small and thin, a runt of a boy, he carried around to show off to his classmates his baby sister who looked even bigger than he so that he could barely clasp his thin brown arms around her hefty form and her feet almost dragged to the ground as he struggled across the elementary school grounds with her. He played less at the computer in early high school. But with his slanting, brown eyes, he’d leer sidewise at me as I stared at the TV screen while he played. Even though I tried not to show it, he knew I was horrified and worried that he should take the part of the demon in the game and not the hero. He had shot up by several feet by my next visit the following year and had metal braces on his teeth. He was much nicer this time, having hurdled the negative period that all children have to go through. He now had his first girl friend Kelly, whom he met on the tennis courts, pretty and warm with waist-long honey blond hair and who loved Ziggy with a love that is felt only when it’s for the first time. Her parents would drop her off so that as she’d tell them she could study with Ziggy.
Ziggy came to excel in tennis and was most valuable player for two years of the varsity team at his high school. His paternal grandmother would have reason to vehemently curse this game of tennis, eight months after his college graduation. When only six months old Ziggy was taught by his yayas to raise his chubby hand whenever anybody asked him, “Sino ang guapo?” Once, my husband interjected, “Ang lakas ng loob mong magtaas ng kamay!” But I’m sure modesty prompted this sarcasm, for Ziggy had my husband’s Chinese or Japanese eyes. But when I saw Ziggy at his paternal grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary, when he was already in college, I was impressed by his appearance. His shoulders and chest had widened and he had gained some more in height. And he didn’t have braces on his teeth anymore. He had Richard Gere eyes and, according to his girl cousins, when he went shopping with them, people thought he was a movie star. This happened even in Bataan. People gawked at him everywhere he went: as he stood on the balcony of the house or on Mt. Samat at the foot of the giant cross. I would no longer feel wrenched seeing him with my half-French grandson, who even as a baby when taken for a stroll in his pram along the Croisette Boulevard in Cannes evoked exclamations like “Comme une poupeé!” (Or, “Like a doll!”) However, Ziggy himself didn’t feel a twinge of envy when walking in the malls of San Francisco, where American girls would find excuses to talk to his handsome but shy cousin, while ignoring Ziggy, the thin and brown Asian. His cousin was five years older and he had idolized him since meeting him for the first time when he was but three years old. One asset Ziggy had: he was outgoing and warm and loved people. He gravitated to other children when he was little and would press his nose against the glass or whatever separated him from them and with longing eyes watch them play. And he had a native inclination to help others. When he was only four years old, he knelt on the stony ground to tie the shoelaces of a little black boy. In day care centers he took upon himself to amuse the other children and keep them from destroying the furniture and each other. Parents of playmates would write letters to my daughter expressing their appreciation of Ziggy and how they would welcome him always in their homes. The last time I saw him was when he came with his father and sister to my house in Tagaytay. He was already a senior in college. As he came up the red-tiled stairs of the sun deck, he greeted me as he had always done since he learned how to talk “Mommy!” with the same old intonation of eagerness and affection. Standing outside the louvre doors I couldn’t help exclaiming, “Dumating na ang pinakaguapo kong apo!” He was now almost six feet tall. He was very manly in bearing, but his facial features still had the sweet expression of his childhood.
He also came to the Philippines this year in July, but he didn’t come to Tagaytay, because his mother had told him I was with her in my husband’s ancestral home in Pilar, Bataan. He drove there unannounced. So when he got to Pilar, I was in Tagaytay with my other daughter who had a lunch date with a friend. I will never stop regretting with bitterness having missed Ziggy on that day. Because several days after, having flown back to San Francisco, Ziggy played a hard game of tennis, felt a tightening of his chest and lay down to nap. Bryant, his best friend since second grade, was the only one present when Ziggy’s breathing grew loud and labored. He tried to do CPR on him even while calling 911. But the paramedics and the hospital where they rushed him failed to resuscitate him. Ziggy was only 22 years old. With a daughter physically supporting me, I flew at once to be able to view his body in the coffin in the church where his graduation ceremonies had been held. But upon getting there early in the morning after the vigil, in spite of the gentle urgings of his high school sweetheart who met me at the church door, I refused to even approach his bier that stood before the altar.
Through the Mass, the eulogies, and the final viewing, shuddering with stifled sobs, I could hardly stand, much less walk.
Ziggy’s manager approached me and whispered, “All his co-employees are here.” In a seemingly never-ending single file they came up to the coffin to bade final good-bye to the boy who was always happy and who sincerely cared for the patients. Each one, after looking at Ziggy, turned to go with a face contorted in grief. I was asked to go to the coffin to say good-bye to my grandson before the lid was secured. His paternal grandmother urged me to do so: “He is, as when he was alive, smiling that’s why they refer to him as the smiling boy.” I know that even in death Ziggy would be beautiful. But the sight of his dear face in the coffin would black me out with grief. I didn’t want to create a scene. Then we walked down the church aisle after Ziggy’s coffin. I had imagined walking down the aisle after him and his bride, but here I was walking behind his coffin on its way to the crematorium. Ziggy, beloved grandson, is dead, and nothing can bring him back. The lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s eulogy on Keats echoed in my mind: “I weep for Adonais he is dead! He will awake no more, oh, no nevermore! Oh, gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, why didst thou leave...”
This was the time I wished Ziggy or I myself had never been born for then this greatest of miseries would have been averted. Back in Bataan, for 30 nights we said the traditional prayers for the dead, but I mouthed them with resentment because they were litanies. On and on it went the dronings asking for forgiveness for the sins of Ziggy of Earl de Leon Espinosa. What sins? As if they were praying for an inveterate sinner! And who are these old women, paid to pray for Ziggy, that they should mediate with God and the saints to forgive Ziggy who is surely now an angel? Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” kept reverberating in my consciousness: “Tell this soul with sorrow laden if within the distant Aidenn it shall clasp a sainted young man whom the angels named Earl?… Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’” But Ziggy reached out to let me know how dreadfully wrong Poe is in his grim disbelief in the afterlife. Ziggy had manifested himself to his parents in several ways. His father reported that whenever he would smoke in the garage, its roll-up door would rise a few inches from the floor by itself. Ziggy, when alive, would often remind his Papa of the danger of smoking in a closed garage and would open the door a little. And even as Ziggy lay in state in church, when my son, his uncle, went into the room where he had died, he felt goose pimples prickle on the top of his head simultaneously he felt his chronically blocked sinuses clear up. He surmised that Ziggy was just thanking him for having paid his tuition fees for one year and gifting him with his first computer. And because his mother kept lamenting and asking Ziggy why he wasn’t reaching out to her, the advisory “No Phone” suddenly appeared on her car’s dashboard screen while she was driving to work.
Humor is very typical of Ziggy, she told me, as she reminisced about how he could make her laugh she, who was most of the time busy with work at home and in the clinic as a single mother. And she concluded that souls retain the character traits after the body is discarded. And to me who until now wakes up crying in the night because Ziggy is no more Ziggy sent a message on this computer on which I’m typing this essay. He made it clear and irrefutable that it was from him. The message came up on my computer exactly two months after his death, when his Papa arrived in my house in Tagaytay to take my husband and I out to lunch. When he came up the stairs to the sun deck, I was seated at the computer in the process of e-mailing an essay to the Manila Times, but when I clicked the “Open” icon to get to my files, what came onscreen was a strange file box with the heading “ZIGGY” linked with the icon of the OpenOffice.org Writer the program I use to type my manuscripts. The file name indicated at the foot of the box was “ZIGGY.” Where did it come from? I didn’t have such a file. It can only be Ziggy who flashed it on my screen. He must have come with his Papa to make up for not finding time for Tagaytay in his last trip to the Philippines. And now he’s telling me: “Write about me, your grandson.” He knows of my sorrow and wants to assuage this by intimating that he is not truly dead, but transformed into an incorruptible and eternal form. He feels practicing my craft is much better than lamentation. My daughter is right souls retain character traits.
Just after his cremation, while I had sat melting in sorrow in a car parked before the house where Ziggy died, my eyes lifted to the tall trees beside the swimming pool where he used to swim. I saw the treetop leaves dance as if moved by a rollicking spirit, and something prompted me to think: That is Ziggy rejoicing in his new power of flying wherever he fancies, just like the heroes of his childhood Spider-Man, The Power Rangers. I immediately checked myself for what I thought was purely wishful thinking. But after receiving his computer message, I am convinced that it was indeed Ziggy up there among the foliage, trying to tell me, “Don’t despair, I’m still around and enjoying myself!”
Shelley is right: “Mourn not for Earl, for he is not dead. He had just awakened from the dream of life, outsoared the shadow of our night.” Ziggy lives, it is Death that is dead.
