Dear Inang,
I’m sorry this comes late for Mother’s
Day. During that day, I couldn’t write a single note for you. I tried, but
all I could remember was that morning in the kitchen a month before.
It was the most poignant scene,
the one I could easily remember; though at that time, I didn’t realize its
effect on me. And I think of it now, like a reader flipping through pages of an
old photo album, turning back to that event in just one glance.
It was the morning I arrived with my
brother and two sisters from the hospital in San Fernando. Tatang, whom we fetched with a hired ambulance, was lying lifeless, now half
covered with blanket on the wooden bed at the sala. While everyone around me
was crying and groaning, I was frozen from where I stood. And my heart was in ecstatic pain.
