DEATH is a natural cycle. It is normal as there is birth, baptismal, wedding, rejoicing or celebration; as regular as the night reigning supreme over the sun’s realm but only for half of the day. This is not a big surprise, since no one lives forever. Everyone who comes to this world has to leave. All of us will die.
But yet death can be so heart-wrenchingly shattering, especially when it happens in the family. It isn’t anything anyone wants to think about, yet it is part of our life. This is the bitter awakening of what we are fated for, what we should be living for. It’s a realization that when death knocks at our door, in spite of the fullness of life, we must give in, as a sleepy man must not, as it is useless, to resist sleep after a tiring day.
And to remember our relatives and loved ones who are dead, we light a candle for them, offer flowers and prayers at their grave. We now love them in their absence as we did in their presence. We mourn for losing them, but we can smile with the thought that there was rejoicing in heaven for having them now.
My own first experience of death came when I was about six. It was my first memory of a close relative leaving us. Minutes before his tragic death, I saw Uncle Erning enter the house that night just to inform my parents that he was going home to the barrio after closing their stall at the market. My mother invited him to stay and have his dinner but he declined. He said my cousins Edwin and Danny who were in the tricycle, were in a hurry to go home. But minutes after he left, he got into an accident that caused him his life. A van collided with his tricycle as they negotiated a junction just a kilometer away from our house. My two cousins were spared. I remember my Aunt Colling the next morning screaming, kicking and shaking, and wailing to high heavens “Why?” I felt sad that this was happening. My uncle was so alive when I saw him that night. This was unfair. I knew how hurt my aunt was.
But prior to Uncle Erning’s death, our own family had suffered two deaths. A brother and a sister both died when they were born (our youngest, my mother’s 10th child, was also stillbirth when she came out years later). When I was a boy, their graves were the ones we visited in the cemetery. I remember them only how they died, but not how they looked as I never had the chance to look at their faces or to hold them.
I was in elementary school when another death came in our family. And I was a witness how it came about. When my lolo sa tuhod, my maternal grandmother’s father, breathed his last on his death bed, I was with some of my cousins, aunts and an uncle who was especially summoned to Apong Casio’s side. I saw my uncle’s hand clasped with that of my great-grandfather, as the latter started to jerk, gasped and then he went off. There was a symphony of wailing around the house. The wake was held in our house, and it was more of a reunion than anything else because of multitude of relatives, most of whom my parents had not seen for years, some of them from Hawaii, to attend the wake.
But the saddest part was when my maternal grandfather died in 1990 due to a lingering illness. I received the news while I was in the boarding house near the university where I was a college freshman. My brother Romel and I were both stunned. Apong Angel was very close to all his grandchildren, as he was the very reason why we always had reunions during Christmas and some family celebrations. He was the venerable patriarch, enforcer of discipline, a referee in some fights with my siblings and cousins, but a storyteller par excellence. My brother and I hurriedly went to the barrio that afternoon and we were able to see our grandfather still on his death bed, as the coffin had yet to arrive.
I will never forget the two weeks that followed. The gloom hung like a cloud over everything, and whenever I think of that time, the gloom comes back to me (as when I was writing this blog, I felt a lump in my throat). My mother, aunts and uncles, my mother’s siblings, and my cousins were inconsolable, but everyone stuck to one another in grief. It’s all for our beloved apong lakay (grandfather).
Apong Ansang, my paternal grandmother, died when I was already married and working in Manila. She was bedridden for the longest time as she was already sick and old when I visited her during summer, in one of my rare vacations in my hometown in Ilocos. She was staying in an uncle’s house just a block away from ours. She found difficulty recognizing me. And when she got my name right, she requested for a pasayan (prawn) for her dinner, at least, as she told me, before death could overtake her. I told father about it but he replied that my grandmother was only acting out just to be pitied. In short, I must not be bothered about it. I know father was not close to her mother because when she got a second family after grandfather died, my father and his siblings when they were young were left with the care of their spinster aunt and a very stern grandfather. That perhaps started the estrangement, or aloofness, even when death beckons her mother.
A month after I went back to Manila, Apong Ansang passed away. I went to her wake with a heavy heart, not just for the loss, but for the prawns that I was not able to buy for her.
The death of my maternal grandmother, Apong Lumen in 2003, brought the same gloom as when Apong Angel, her husband, died 12 years earlier. Only that the whole Escobar clan had matured then, and we knew that death is inevitable for her advance age. And everyone accepted the fact that her death made way for my mother and her siblings to settle whatever differences and misunderstanding they had before, and for them to account for the estate.
But there’s one scene during the funeral that I will never forget. Milton, my eldest brother and one having the distinction as the unang apo (first grandson), was very silent during the wake and the funeral mass after that. After the mass, as it was the tradition, all of us relatives, went near the coffin for our final respect and for pictorials. Milton maintained his stoic stance unlike most of us who are either sobbing and moaning and gasping for breath. When it was time to close the coffin , my brother asked the procession to stop for a brief moment. He went near the coffin, embraced it, and it was only then that I heard his most mournful cry to date.
There were other deaths in the family, most of them close relatives, but rarely did I attend the wake or funeral. But I couldn’t cry as I did when I was young. Death would just come and go. And for this year, my mother’s cousin who was living in Hawaii died of stroke, and my paternal granduncle died of old age.
But the death early this year of my sister-in-law’s husband due to heatstroke was one of my saddest times. It was so sudden. Only a month earlier, Kuya Rudy was in our house to celebrate with his granddaughter who, with her mother, lived with us in Bulacan in the duration of the young girl’s daycare education. Our family had a good time with him in SM Marilao for my children’s recognition day. He had been very helpful in times of our need, like when we needed a repairman for our electrical connections in the house, or a helping hand during a handaan (party) for some important occasion.
But with his funeral, I didn’t cry for him, because I know he’s in a very peaceful place now. My stifled cry went for those he left behind. His wife, who was now left alone to tend for the family. A daughter and a daughter-in-law who were both pregnant that time, their unborn no longer have the opportunity to see their grandfather alive.
It was Kuya Rudy’s grave, along with my father-in-law’s, in South Cemetery in Makati that my wife, my three kids and I visited yesterday, a day earlier than the usual time for the observance of All Soul’s day. Only a year ago, in this same cemetery, Kuya Rudy was with us, so full of life, while the whole family lit candles for our dead. Now he’s on the other side, and the thought of it made me really sad.
But the melancholy will not last forever, I’m pretty sure. And our natural course is to live and then wait for our own time to depart this life. Why not, if we the living live deeply enough, then we have no fear of death.
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