When my father dies

My father is going to be 95 this month. He comes from a bloodline that has exhibited remarkable longevity. He was the runt of the litter, being only two years older than his first niece. It is the family yarn that his oldest sister practiced her child weaning skills on him first before having a child of her own. That niece now lives not too far from my father, and the guessing runs on who is going to blink into eternity first. The odds are even. When my father goes, that ends a generation.

I visited my father over the Christmas holidays in Honolulu. He had renal collapse, I was told, and my nurse sister suggested I hightail it over paradise if I wanted to see him in a relative state of health and well-being. He was healthy, all right, his body recovering remarkably well, but the mind had since migrated south. When asked by my mother if he recognized who I was during a visit to the nursing home, he said, “Of course, that’s David!” Duh-bid, not Day-vid. David is a first cousin a good 25 years my senior who became an accomplished educator and local politician in Ilocandia. He has since retired.

After a couple more visits, it became clear to me that my father doubted who he thought I was, and he was at pains trying to recall who I really am, particularly in relationship to him. More than 30 years before, I led a six-week leadership training institute up one of the Philippines’ mountain resort town where my father was one of the participants. In a reflective session, we read a portion of Nikos Kazantsakis’ book, The Saviors of God. Kaz wrote of a nomadic Crimson line that jumped from one generation to another, where offsprings supersede ancestors. In a biblical tone at the end of the session, my father stood up and declared to some 75 participants that “this reading had come to pass upon your hearing this day!” I mark that day as the beginning of my father’s conscious journey into death.

Kaz in the same reading describes the obvious. The first day into the journey of life begins also the corresponding journey into death. Death and dying is simply the flip side of life and living. It has been humanity’s universal state to approach death with foreboding, and the function of religion through the ages has been to allay that fear and appease the trepidation. Homo sapiens have discovered the manageability and predictability of human existence, most of the time, that is, but death is the country of the unknown unknown, best approached in dread and fascination.

Two events of late ground this reality for me. A colleague just lost her son who fell short on the self-care department. The poise by which she has carried herself through this happening gives credence to the possibility of human sanity and grace. That holds true to others on island within the last 12 months whose offsprings preceded them trans-Helios domain. A teacher colleague yesterday left for the Philippines upon delivery of news that her father passed on when his heart suddenly gave in. Dead and dying remains the complement of life and living.

This morning in half of the planet, and tomorrow on the other half, countless of communicants in a particular life understanding have their forehead marked with ashes in the form of a cross, with the following words uttered to them: “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed is the name of the Lord!” These are religious code phrases for the reality long ago realized by the Egyptians in the Nile, and the Chinese in the Huang He, that the force of the river floods, which brings so much destruction of life and property, is the same force that leaves the silt which brings nutrients to the soil for the next agricultural crop. The giver of life takes it away, as well. One decides whether to curse this reality, or celebrate it.

The painfully though profoundly narrated story of Job in the Jewish Biblos ends with a cosmic stamp of approval on life, however it comes. In this case, the narrator felt the grievous ignominy of having to look upon Zion from the rivers of Babylon, in a strange land. But the psalmist dared to sin, and L’achaim remained the toast of choice.

That teaching contained in the liturgical formula parsons worldwide pronounce annually on Ash Wednesday reminds the followers of the Christos that life journeys from the celebration of one’s specific and personal incarnation into history (Christ-mass) into the vocation of Galilean service to humanity (mission), with the ignominious but merciful self-surrender of Good Friday (cost of discipleship), into the final triumph of the empty tomb on Easter (personally consummated apocalypse).

The Egyptians created their calendar to predict the Nile’s annual flooding. This tool for reckoning the seasons of time is still with us. The pyramids they built accurately pointed to the points of the compass even before the discovery of the magnetic poles. They cannot be faulted for their sense of direction. Sino wisdom symbolized in the Yin-Yang affirms the meaning of existence as locating the pivot point which affirms the paradox of two opposing forces in the same entity. Applied in the diplomatic front, this might very well save us from the worldwide conflict and conflagration that afflict society in the first quarter of the 21st century.

Which brings me back to my father. It may seem inappropriate for one to think in terms of a beloved one dying, when that person is still very much alive. But taking stock of one’s inheritance, not unlike figuring out what it means to be of Marianas descent with regards to land and suffrage, is a natural inclination, and though I no longer line up for my share of the palm ashes to rehearse and dramaturgize a spirit understanding of the flesh, the wisdom remains a deeply embedded heritage in my soul.

My father went to graduate school “overseas” when I was 10. He returned when I was already 16. Being the eldest male in a family of five children, I was railroaded into adult responsibilities at an early age, plucked out of innocence and rushed through puberty into head of household without the requisite introductory teenage experimentation and adventure proper to my age. When he returned, one of the first things he did was to take me to a restaurant and asked if I wanted to drink beer with my meal. He thought it was time for me to choose whether I liked imbibing the malted brew, the Philippines’ vaunted St. Michael’s bottle, though he himself was a teetotaling Methodist. Like a dutiful son, I pretended it was my first!

But the lesson was not lost. “The only real estate I will leave you children,” he used to tell us, “is the soil that happens to stick on the sole of my shoe.” Thus, my siblings and I were spared the common experience of family members fighting over precious land in rocky Ilocandia. What he did bequest on us is a refined sense that life is about the freedom to decide. The liberty afforded by choice is the inheritance my father leaves us. “If you are to be an extension of your parent’s personality, then your choices will be our choice,” my father wrote while still away in graduate school. The children did learn that in fact, born free is in the nature of things, affirmed constitutionally in the country of my choosing.

Mourning is the socially prescribed response to death and dying. We might add that another venerable tradition knows it to be blessed!

(Strictly a personal view. Vergara writes a weekly column for the Saipan Tribune.)