A LETTER TO MOTHER

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.

I was looking outside the window, but seeing anything. I was contemplating the lost when you suddenly came to me, held my shoulder, and sobbed. “Anak, your father’s gone... It shouldn’t be today; I’d wished for more years with him.”  

There are simply no words to say to a woman like you who have just lost a husband. But then I smiled, not in an attempt to comfort you, but it was a silly effort to understand my situation out of your words.

“Inang, it’s good you had father, your husband for almost 50 years. And I had my wife for only 13 years of my life.”

You got a jolt of realization. While earlier you wanted to be comforted by one of your children, now you wanted to comfort me, your widowed son.  

So I embraced you, real hard, not only to show how I appreciated you for understanding my situation, but also to hide from you the tears that started to well on my eyes. I looked up and said no more.

Honestly, it may sound so sentimental or childish to you, but I still find in so many situations that all I want is my wife, the mother of my children. I want to live with her, and to grow old with her.

And until now, I still grieve for my three children who are motherless at a very young age. They could no longer have this privilege of having a mother like you to comfort them. In case they lost me now, they no longer have a mother to comfort with, to pay back her love.

And my children would never have the chance to give this kind of letter or note telling how they appreciate profoundly their mother at anytime of their lives.

I’m glad I still have you at my age. I might have said this before, but I love to say it again: I admire you a lot. You are the strongest person I ever knew. You're a pro when it comes to taking the hard road for your loved ones. Despite the hardships you had with father when we were young, and the persistence, heartache and hard work to raise us and to bring us to school, with a little help from him, you never gave up. To make ends meet, you went on with your dressmaking job at home, opened a grocery store for a time, and went about town knocking at every door for loans to finance our schooling.

And look what you’ve got; you have been rewarded with the joy of having all your seven children with their college degrees, and seeing your family intact and complete. Until today.

You’ve been a miracle worker, a healer, a superwoman. But time has taken its toll on you, and now I see how old you have become, how vulnerable you are with this latest trial, how deep is your lost. I have observed the decline since last year, when you lost young Ram-Ram, your favorite grandson, the lovely boy you and Father took care from infancy to the time that my sister brought him to Bulacan where he died of a freak accident.

I have reservations giving you this advice, as you yourself have given me this one three years ago. But I have to say it, just to go on with this letter. As you’ve said, God will take care of us. With Him, we will overcome the cause of our grief, and its effect, like to suffer the first anniversary of his death, or some special or family occasions without him. Life must go on and death is just another lap of our journey. See, we expect a reunion (with my wife, Father, and Ram-Ram) to look forward to when we leave this world. As they have been saying, we are forever connected to the people we love. Death takes the physical person from our lives, but there is so much death cannot take from us.

So, Inang, I apologize for this. Instead of a love note, or a word of love and concern for the occasion that you can easily read in my Facebook posts, this is all you got from me.  

My siblings and I are also imbibed with the traditional Filipino family value that the children have to support their parents when they get old and couldn’t support themselves. So, though we all have disabilities in some aspect of our lives, and now crippled by grief with father's death, we're here to take care of you now.

Belated Happy Mother’s Day.

Your Son