When I was a kid, my father steered me in front of the altar at home, showed me a jar on top of the table, and told me it was my sibling.
Side by side, we stared at the brown jar. Something that has to do with me was dead but when I looked at, it I felt nothing. Can something be dead when it was not born? My tiny brain couldn’t comprehend. In childhood, what mattered were summers, birthdays, and school assignments.
The only memory I had related to the unborn baby was a golden afternoon months ago when my parents told my brother and I the good news. I remember going over to the bed where my mother was lying and pressing our heads on her belly while giggling. We waited for the kick.
But in front of the altar, the memory didn’t stir anything inside. I only remember thinking how perverse it was to display a fetus at the end of our hallway. My mother was not with us. She says she never saw the jar.
Every November, we visit the dead in our town’s public cemetery. Remembrance of the dead was never a sad affair but a time when family got together, with packed food and noisy children to boot. The road going to the cemetery was lined with carts and stalls selling LED headbands and toys, flowers and candles.
At the public cemetery, the tombs are stacked. My cousins and I used to walk over them to get across the cemetery. We were careful not to step over lit candles and white chrysanthemums. To pass time, we made wax sculptures.
My father kept the jar in a small box right in the middle of two tombs, which were all on top of a bigger tomb which housed more dead people. The tiny box was a good seat where I could see the rest of the cemetery.
For the rest of the year, when death would come, familiar arrangements played out. A tent was put up outside the street where men and women would play cards. Someone was always constantly cooking hot meals. Two lamps lit up the gloomy living room and the coffin stood at the center. Names were written on ribbons attached to the interior of the coffin cover. Usually on the third or fourth day, the family would walk in sweltering heat toward the cemetery. Neighbors and passersby would know because of the sudden crawling traffic and the blast of somber songs through speakers.
These were rituals, performed and abided by. What true loss was supposed to feel like, I didn’t know. I thought it meant crying loudly because that’s what they usually showed on television. So when the choir sang on the last night of my great grandmother’s wake and everybody else, including my cousins, cried, I panicked because my eyes did not sting. The song was over and there was nothing.
The year before the pandemic struck one of my aunts was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was probably the first in my family to be diagnosed with a serious illness (or at least the first time someone had a serious illness and actually had doctors put a name on it).
Before she got sick, we knew her as a woman full of life. She loved the outdoors and hiked mountains. She never had children of her own so she played both mom and cool aunt to us, the one who gave the most money away during the holidays. She took care of dogs and grieved when they died or got lost. She took our family places with the Mitsubishi Pajero she called Charlie. She didn’t smoke.
From my apartment in Diliman I would visit her at the hospital in Taguig. At first I was thrown off at how much she had changed. Her rosy complexion was gone, which I remembered much because of her photo near the summit of Mt. Pulag. Her cheeks were taut and her hair that was cut short, wiry and thinning. She was all skin and bones, yet her humor was still intact.
There were often many other people on my aunt’s bedside including my mother. When I visited, I was at best the errand girl who got the food or filled the empty pitcher from the pantry. I didn’t have any real responsibility like finding money to pay the bills or making the hard decisions when doctors said everything we did from then on was just buying time. When death arrives, there’s no stopping it.
One time my mother or any of my aunts couldn’t stay at the hospital during the night. My mother told me to stay and gave me simple instructions. I had to mix her barley drink and open the door for nurses doing their rounds. That night, alone in the cold hospital room, my aunt asked me about how I spent the past four years in university. When it was time to sleep, she told me to lie beside her on the bed. Only then did I realize how small she’d become. In old age or in illness, the human body shrank. I fell into a fetal position beside her. So close to death, I was embarrassed of my youth. Suddenly I was seized by the very real possibility that I might wake up the next day and find her dead. And that it would all be par for the course. I moved closer to her and felt her warmth. My heart was in my throat. There was a strain in my chest.
The foggy window blurred the lights of the business district outside. The air conditioner in the room whirred. We were tucked in the same bed, talking quietly, like scrawny birds nestled in a cupped hand. If only I could sing her a lullaby.
The next morning I woke up in panic. I looked at her and saw her chest rising and falling. That day my mother returned and I went back to being the errand girl.
She didn’t last at St. Luke’s. Staying would not prevent dying. The last time I saw her before she died was on a weeknight. I was in the office at my new job when I received a text message. She asked me why I stopped visiting. I clocked out at 4 pm and rode the UV Express from Makati to Taytay. I sat beside her bed, surprised that death could still be so adamant in claiming her body, in revealing itself by further decay. Her skull jutted through her skin. We didn’t talk much. She couldn’t speak for long without tiring herself. I held her hand. It was still warm.
My aunt, who was full of life, climbed mountains, and had a car named Charlie, passed away one morning as the world went into lockdown. My mother was in the kitchen when she received the call. She didn’t scream; she didn’t cry right there. When I heard her panic-stricken voice through the window, I knew right away what the news was.
In her final moments, my aunt shed tears. She did not utter a cry. She was 47.
We buried her in the cemetery along the highway, where the ground was flat and the tombs were not stacked. Below the earth rest many things. And the living gets a glimpse of what’s beneath, when the coffin is lowered to the ground and the mourners murmur their final prayers, throw in flowers and mementoes. Then the gaping hole is once again covered with dirt.
Maybe if one presses one’s ear onto the ground, as one does on a swollen belly, one may hear a cry, a bird’s lullaby, or a silence that could pierce the long, dark night. – Rappler.com
