Going home

I was in the thick of work last month when I got a call from home, telling me my mother was seriously ill and had been taken to a hospital. I immediately flew home and, as my mother always did, she waited for me, to the end. She was in comatose and passed away at a Philippine hospital intensive care unit in Las Pinas, our locality, two hours after I arrived there straight from the airport.

The pain of losing a loved one usually is lost in a flurry of social rituals that accompanies death in the Philippines –– the sad news is announced, friends and relatives, some traveling from afar, come for a long wake and an instant clan reunion, and finally a burial, or in my mother’s case, a cremation.

Then dawns reality.

On the day I was to return to Saipan for work, men were hauling away things from our house because we have decided that those who were left behind, a nephew and a cousin, would eventually transfer to my brother’s house in Manila after mom’s death. In the garden in front, the plants my mom used to shear and water were barely discernible in the pile of carton boxes and debris. Everything was changing overnight, walls were stripped of photographs and a large mural and a huge kitchen table were we used to chat on late nights was being hauled. It was apparent it was the last time I would see that house, where we lived for years. As I traveled in the
long road leading out of the village, I felt I was leaving behind everything permanently –– the bumps over the humps, the facade of old familiar houses.

I realized how unnerving deaths of parents are. You’ll feel like a boat that was let loose in the open sea. The imprints of my mother in me were permanent.

I remember the countless lessons from mom. She taught me the value of recognizing my own weaknesses to know my strengths. Unlike other parents, she did not cuddle her children by closing an eye on their wrongs. She was a disciplinarian in that way. I also remember the first letter she sent to me after I decided to take the plane to Saipan. She wrote that she would miss the time that we were shopping and eating out – the only times that we were really together because of heavy work schedule back home.

As we drove into Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International airport, I saw throngs of people on a wayside, blankly gazing at the planes their relatives boarded. I noticed most of them were poor and they may have been sending off a brother or a sister who were getting on jobs as domestics and construction workers in a foreign country.
I realized that for them, such parting is like death. They would be parted for years and years because the prohibitive cost of air travel for them doesn’t allow frequent reunions unlike wealthier ones and busy businessmen and the jet-set.

I was pretty much in the same boat, although my situation was a little different. I have plane fare money but the prospects of going back home often may have dimmed. The most influential person in my life is no longer waiting.