OF DEATH, MIDDLE AGE, AND REALIZATION

 Death hangs over us. Youth may not know this. But middle age does – or should.

Our cousin, James Anton, just passed away. He survived a major stroke years before but this latest one was unforgiving. The clan just sent him off to Besao, Mt. Province where he served as an LGU official for his final resting place.

His mother, Aunty Lum-ay, went ahead less than a year before.

When relatives of the same generation as we are cross to the other side and we see them following so soon after the older generation, we are forced to take a reflective pause. The fact that earthly life is but fleeting sinks in.

We can count the members of the older generation in our Lugat clan who are still around to hold us together. They are a few and most of them are almost of the same ages as the older ones belonging to the younger generation. Manong James was among the oldest ones among us cousins. Yet, the death of someone we knew as manong or older brother hit, or should hit, too close to home.

The older generation is departing.

But so is the younger one - mine. And this is making me more aware of Death than I already am.

It is making me more aware I am middle-aged.

I had a discussion about middle age with Victor. Manong James' brother, who traveled to the Philippines for the second time in a year to bury a loved one. I think we are now more conscious than our younger selves, agreeing that the life we so far lived is longer than the years remaining for us. Words of wisdom we heard in the past truly hold meaning. When we were in the elementary grades, our teachers made us burn in our head the words, "Health is wealth." For years, I would hear that and I thought it sounded nice because of the rhyme. But what did it mean to a cat with nine lives who had no consciousness of Death?

When I got way older, I started spending a lot of money on my health issues. "Health is wealth" ceased to be a just a rhyme. It became a rhyme of truth, three words with 300 nuggets of wisdom.

The nine lives are now behind every person of middle age. We are standing on a bridge where the span of the distance we left may be way longer than what we need to walk on to get to the other side. This realization is more pronounced for people like me living second lives. I had a close brush with Death but was blessed with another lease in Life and now living on borrowed time. Time is ticking and every day could be my last. I prefer to spend my time on the profound that means something to humanity especially the less-heard ones. If we tarried earlier, now is the time to move faster. So much needs to be done and how much time do we have left?

And it is always good to review how we so far lived and draw lessons from them. I was grateful for a vacation spent in Baguio last December. I had occasion to clean my wardrobe and jettison vanity. Clothes I wore when my waist was merely 25 inches still resided in my shelves . Others were from when I was size 26 to 28 and that was over a decade ago. I always thought I could wear them again. When I was going through them, I laughed at myself for being either clueless or delusional. I gave them away to people who would have use of them. The ones with sentimental value, I asked Pro Art Belen to repurpose them. But with the time in the world I have left, would I be able to wear them? I hope I will so as not to waste Belen’s work.

It turns out I was not alone in clinging to old clothes. Victor said he kept jeans sized inches away from his current frame hopeful he could shrink and wear them again. Well, now - decades later, I think- he knows the difference between illusion and probability.

I was a collector of art works for years. "You will not bring your material things to the afterlife." I heard this a lot before in my younger years. I never disagreed. But where else would I enjoy material things if not in the material world? So I kept accumulating more things of beauty and I would shake off guilt feelings by telling myself I was buying from artisans and promoting social causes, not contributing to the profit of the already rich. Now that I am older, I realize our house does not look like a home. It looks like an art gallery. I still admire the art pieces. But I can only I hope the children will enjoy them when I am no longer around. Now, I have lost interest in accumulating more material things although I get compelled when I need to do it for a cause or to support people. I will just enjoy the ones I already have.

Yes, I am now more accepting that the earthly circle that enveloped us and endowed us with familial security cannot be unbroken. After all, Dad went away almost 10 years ago. Death began claiming members of my generation after almost ravaging the older one. Actually, my childhood best friend, a member of our clan, died 13 months ago. Life on Earth was never meant to be eternal. No one is immortal.

However, there is a promise of a heavenly eternal life. Death is an exit door. But it is also an entrance to a life that is everything described as utopia. All it takes to partake of this is faith in the Almighty who also goes by God, Kabunian, and other names. In the sweet by-and-by, we shall meet again on that beautiful shore and re-form the broken earthly circle.

See you in the next life, Manong James. But let this not be soon.

An Encounter With Dracula

From where I sit in a white monobloc chair,

Her face is pretty, sympathetic, calming as

Her white apparel. Between us are two people.

One moves closer to her. Suddenly, I see her

Eyes glint with mischief. She grows fangs; I

Sweat. Profusely. Dracula drops her disguise!

She draws fresh blood out of her victim. And the

Next. They do not die; but I will. And she is coming

For me. No escape. My feet get cold; my knees

Weak. This feeling of drowning after the boat

Capsizes…I am about to lose consciousness

In the belly of the ocean. Then Dracula calls

My name. She gets a rubber rope, tightens it

Around my left arm. Next she sticks out a long,

Pointed object. Like a snake’s fork-tongue,

My dizzied eyes tell me. Very long, very thick.

Longer than my courage, than the hours I spent

Bracing for confrontation with evil incarnate.

Deeper than my faith, the bottom end of the

Ocean will siphon my breath. The blood sucker!

With my heart in my throat, my sweat on my

Upper lip…My breath ready to escape me,

I plead for my sanity, for my life. Too late. Too

Late. The fork-tongue poked deep into my

Vein, I feel the prick. Then peace follows

As blood oozes out of me. I am in a boat peacefully

Sailing to sea, dancing to the music of the waves

Beneath, blending with the hum of the breeze

Above. I must be dead now. This is Nirvana.

Just as I slumber away, Dracula pulls out her

Fork-tongue. I feel like I stepped out of the boat

Ride- disappointed that it is over, emboldened

By the near-death experience. She wets a cotton

Ball with alcohol and presses it on the skin where

She buries the long, thick snake-tongue that is now

A short, thin syringe before my eyes removed

From fear. With the voice of a mother putting

An infant to sleep, she says, Come back on Tuesday

For the result of your blood chemistry, Ma'am.

cld/2006

0 Comments

Act

Green Dot

Reading mails, I face the computer screen
Again, the gray dot beside your name turns

Green as mine is. Available, our dots say
How can that be when you and I are both

Shackled to commitments in isolated worlds?
A high fence between: hindrance to treason

I could click the mouse and knock on your virtual
Door. You will surely open; we will chat endless

But it does not release either you or me; We
Are like prisoners talking through iron bars

Sharing fantasies that elude us in the real world
So proximate and yet so remote from each other

In pain, I watch as a gray dot evicts the green
Temptation departing with graceful, quiet footfalls./chyt2007

Watching Daddy Struggle to Read

(My parents and older siblings taught me to love books. But Dad was the one who told me that reading could be humbling. It expands your knowledge, but it reveals your smallness. The more you read, the more you realize how little you know.

In the years before he left us, it was so sad to see him holding his grandchildren's books, turning their pages, and unable to read the letters. I wrote a poem after watching one such incident in 2011 or 2012.

Watching Daddy Struggle to Read

You hold a book open on pages 44 to 45

But it is just a weight on your jittery hands

Your decades of alliance with the written word

Have been broken, or worse totally obliterated

Your unsure smile reveals the hidden helplessness

You used to have such a sharp mind:

Your high school classmates would say

A genius with numbers

An English grammar police

Despite the strong accent

Reminiscent of that rustic place

You were born in

Where forthrightness and truth

Are more important than oration

With a foreign accent

I remember everything:

“You say, ‘independent of,’ not ‘from’

‘Result in,’ not ‘to’

‘Comply with’, not ‘to.’” I was nine or ten

But never too young to learn

For someone who believed

So much that familiarity with correctness

Could lead his child to bigger things

Perhaps, a voice for the unheard

A defender of the oppressed

Now, at 75, like a baby taking her first steps

You struggle hard-

I can only imagine how much-

To make sense of the letters

Your hand used to write so beautifully

The words you wrote were always

Shaped like an artist’s masterpiece

Now they are jagged on the edges

Like your memories- fuzzy on the corners

I wonder, Daddy, do you have nostalgia

Of the days when it was not like this?

How I wish the vacuum in your memory

Did not swallow remembered love for us

And our obedience, however failing, to your edict:

"Always be something for others

All the good books teach that."

DADDY AND THE GLOBE

Last week, I saw a globe lamp in a store in Geneva and felt something tug at my heart. I bought it.

To me, a globe is less about geography than it is about memory. Every time I see a globe, my eyes well up with tears.

You see, the second to the last face-to-face conversation I had with my father involved a globe.

I went to my parents’ place to borrow a weighing scale. I was traveling to the US for an academic fellowship for a year. I had to make sure I would travel without excess baggage.

In the family area near the dining room, I saw the globe. It used to belong to my brother’s family who moved to Canada.

My daughter, Kathlea Francynn Gawani was then 9 and was fascinated with geography and the capitals of countries. I asked Dad if she could have the globe. Dad said yes so I brought it home. That day, I also gave Dad bread I bought from a bakery in Agoo, La Union where I had a court hearing.

Two days later, I drove to my parents’ house to return the weighing scale and to say goodbye. Mom was there.

Mom said, “So it was you who got that. Your Dad said a woman came and took the weighing scale and the globe.” I also learned Dad put the bread I gave him under the kitchen sink. Maybe, since the bread was given by someone he thought was a stranger, he did not want to risk anyone harmed from eating it.

That was amusing, although a bit hurtful. Mom and I had a good laugh.

Dad would die five months later. It was winter. I flew to the Philippines for his funeral. When I was on the plane, I withdrew from my memory bank my last conversations with him. I remembered the globe and sadly thought that I was practically circling Earth to be with Dad. I wrote a poem.

That was when my memory of the globe evolved from amusing to poignant. The sight of a globe now makes me sad and happy at the same time. Sometimes, it reminds me of my grief at its worst.

A few weeks after we buried Daddy, I returned to the US. My sorrow reached its pinnacle when I was alone in my apartment. There was a protracted time I who, by nature, draw energy from being with people, preferred solitude, turned off my phone, and shut the world out. I kept going back to that day I got the globe and, even if I was no believer in the existence of ghosts, kept praying that Dad would show himself to me. I would force myself to sleep, hoping I would dream of him. I alternated between sleeping with the help of tablets, and remembering the globe, crying, and grieving.

My friends got worried when they could not connect to me and decided to call 911. But they thought of doing a wellness check first. Of course, Kuya Judge Philip Aguinaldo and Desmond Kaunda found me alive but distraught. I told them about the globe, my last conversation over the phone with Daddy when he was struggling to remember me (“If you are my daughter, why are you not here?”) and my pain that he died when I was away from home. I was in another part of the globe.

Yes, Daddy had Alzheimer’s as did his siblings. He was a man of intellectual brilliance . Yet, in his final years, his brain shrank. Asking him what his children’s names were would make him draw a blank and, later, recognizing them was a wrestle he could not win.

I may suffer from Alzheimer’s when I get old(er), too. I may forget what a globe is for or what it means to me these days.

But for now, I will always cherish globes, even if they make me sad. They also remind me of my father’s smile on that day when he received me in his house and I assumed he knew it was me he was smiling to (It took some prodding for him to recognize me - or so I thought.) and not some strange woman whose bread offering was suspicious and should not be put on the family dining table.

That day, while I knew he had trouble remembering his children, I forgot that. He made me forget it with his welcoming smile.