FIRST VISIT

I VISITED Manila South Cemetery for the first time since the funeral a little less than three months ago. I went there on Sunday, October 30, two days earlier than the actual date of the nationwide commemoration for the dead (November 1 or 2), with my three children, my mother-in-law, and a sister-in-law in tow. I just wanted to avoid the mad rush in the area and the unnecessary festivities and maddening commercialization of the memorial day.  
 

It was a beautiful afternoon, bright and windy, unlike on the day of the funeral where it was gloomy and dark with rain. But the first time I went to her grave I felt like the day we put her to rest. No doubt, the overall grief and all it's triggers and nostalgia were there. But unlike some months before, I didn’t allow myself to be overwhelmed by a paroxysm of grief. My eyes, though, were dried. Well, it just felt so weird, like it was not happening again, but I must accept, just like the way I accept all the realities that came into my life now. No more self-pity or misery, that is, if I can.

I did not come to my wife’s grave to grieve for her loss, but to communicate with her. Visiting and speaking with her reinforced this feeling that she is still here in my heart. It helped a lot to say all the things that I wish that I had said to her during her suffering, especially my regret about my helplessness to save her. Rosalie’s death was so sudden and unexpected that I find the need to talk with her, to have such harsh reality finally sink in and try to bury this sadness in the graveyard. 

I’ve read a story about a man who would take a beach chair to the cemetery every morning with his coffee. There he would sit, drink the coffee, and have a lengthy conversation with his wife. This might sound crazy but, yes, the man had a good purpose: to express himself out, albeit in the quietude of his grief. But I couldn’t be like this man. I just wanted this day, this very first visit, to tell my wife all I wanted to say. I repeated over and over in my mind how sorry was I, and how much I love her and really miss her.  

I could feel her while I was at her graveyard (which she shared with her father and other departed relatives), blankly staring at the depressing headstone with her name on it. I wanted to believe she actually heard me say those unspoken words for her. That she is watching over me and my children not only during this visit, but wherever we are and whenever we think of her. The visit to the cemetery was just a manifestation, or you might say a public way, of remembering her—isn’t it good to express or to draw out your grief?—,of how her family misses her, not only this day but everyday of our lives.

A line from Robert Frost came into my mind when I was in the cemetery. They were the first four lines from one of his popular poems “In a Disused Graveyard.”

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.

Yes, the living will always come to honor their faithful departed even though they are long gone. No one is being buried in the memories of the living. The graveyard, which is a metaphor for a full stop or the ultimacy of everything, is also an everlasting shrine to the living that people are not immortal, and in the fullness of their time, they would be joining their dead in the same gravesite.

I just wonder how long it would take to remember your dead after you have died. So who would remember my wife when I was gone, and then finally all of our children and relatives had to leave this life, too? Will her gravesite no longer be "disused"? Or was it only then that Death would finally bring the dead or those who are forgotten to oblivion? 

We stayed in the cemetery for more than two hours, or just as soon as the last stick of candle started to dim its light. We left the melted wax and the flowers behind, but we brought with us the same love for my wife, and the same memories about the love she had for us.

LUCKLESS CHARMS

HONESTLY, I don’t believe in lucky charms, amulets or superstitions hinged on luck. But right now I got a pair of “lucky charms” tucked in my wallet.

They were two miniature figures of animals made of paper. They were origamis of a fish and a bird in green art paper made personally by my son Nathaniel as simple present for my birthday last September. He gave them to me with a note bearing this message: According to Japanese tradition, an origami heron/bird means long life while the other (fish) means money/wealth. Put the fish in your wallet always.

Just like what he wanted me to do, I thrust them in my wallet, and stayed there ever since, not so much for good luck, but rather for their sentimental value, like any special gift from some special person.

But I don’t capitalize on his heart-tugging wish for my long life and wealth, but for what he felt or thought about me after his mother’s death. There’s no question that he has insight into my big lost, or perhaps sees me now as running out of luck. To him, I’m Superman just downed by a kryptonite, or Samson who lost his seven locks, or a Jedi who lost the Force within him now suffering series of setbacks. I need help so badly, I must hang on, no matter what, and to overcome everything from mighty odds to terrible misfortune and even mind-boggling tragedy, and become my son’s hero again.

That would take a lot of heroic guts, of course. And my son is more than willing to help with his good luck gift.

Before the tragedy, some people were emphatic about the luck our family had then, that is, for being happy and complete. I remember them saying that we are so blessed. They say I am lucky (or blessed, as some people use to mean the same as lucky) for having a regular job, a pretty wife and three bright kids. They say we are lucky with the house we are living in right now, a fact attested by a friend of my in-laws in Malate, who is believed to have a third eye or gifted with an unusual skill on magic spell, when she visited our house. The plump and mysterious woman told me that there were no bad spirits or elementals residing with us in the house, but what we only got was a harmless gang of white duwendes (elves) occupying some corner in the front yard.

A former yaya of my daughter would attribute these elves for the luck that brought about the quick recovery in our finances from the loss we suffered after we were swindled by our real estate agents, and why, after our pricey mistakes, we got our own house from a clean title. It might not be true, but who am I to disagree to another person's belief?

In fact, my late wife grew up in a family believing all those luck and, like most Filipino families including ours in Ilocos, theirs was practically prone to idiosyncratic superstitions. I don’t have any problem with superstitions, as long as they would do my family no harm. So when my family transferred to our new abode in Bulacan almost ten years ago, I allowed myself to be involved in those little rituals associated with such occasion. I brought in a jar of salt, a bottle of water first, and a cup of rice, before we entered some of our things. And going back farther to the past, during my wedding, my wife and I did almost everything or followed superstitions for good luck which our elders said that were connected to the conduct of the wedding, other than those required of the traditional rite in the Catholic church. Otherwise, they warned me, some bad things would befall the marriage.

But somehow, deep inside, I also joined other people who desperately need to believe in luck. I have this clandestine hope that something good may happen to our marriage and the whole family with every luck that I could get.

My wife even had these “charms” she kept during the last few years of her life: a medallion, a rose petal from a blessed shrine, a tissue with a blood of a saint, stampita, a prayer booklet with a piece of a cloth from an image of the Nazarene, and a cultic symbol of an eye inside a triangle. She might have kept them for their charms, or the miracles they promised evoke or for sentimental reasons. But she died just the same.

Part of the many questions of my grieving mind that I desperately looked for answers upon her death, is why these lucky charms, or such incantations of miracles, didn’t help her at all. Now that my wife’s gone after almost 15 years of marriage, and our family no longer complete, does it mean that our luck had expired or we are not lucky after all, in spite of the rituals, charms and those thingamajigs involved in evoking luck? Is it our bad luck that we have to suffer this way?

My mother, just days before my wife’s death told me that a man in our place in Ilocos with an otherwordly power against witchcraft whom she solicited for an unusual opinion, told her that there were two women—both from the Visayas—who were very envious of my wife, who went to a mangkukulam (witch) to harm my wife fatally. I knew a couple—both Bisaya—who were envious of my wife for some reason only the couple or my wife knew. But I am not the kind of person who can easily believe this kind of implausible report, even if it comes from my mother.

Putting witchery or magic into the picture is beside the point. I am referring to the malas—the “negativity” that had befallen us. But I still can’t get my head wrapped around the idea that our fate was really preordained, and we could just wait when and how it would happen, just like how the Greek tragedians portray a man, as a helpless creature borne along by destiny, so he had no right to whine or pity himself, or complain about indeterminable events caused by a combination of unpredictable forces.

My wife’s devotion to Mother Mary and lately to Divine Mercy is unquestionable. She was a very prayerful person, especially during the last stages of her illness. I could feel her resolve to live a little longer for us, that she must hold on to her faith for the last time, but somehow, God must have known what is best for her.

I am not as religious as my wife, but I always believe in a Supreme Being, and luck had nothing to do with what He did for us.

Now whenever I look at the origamis in my wallet, they remind of the thoughtfulness of my son, and my commitment to be with my three children during their own inexplicable grief, rather than the luck these paper charms may bring. I believe that it’s only through prayers that I will be able to get a remarkable confluence of elements all working together for our family. What is important is not the tragedy itself, but how I must respond to it. Hence, with or without any lucky charm, I must look for a way to make things better in my family.

Just wish me luck, if you may!

CINQUAINS

august night at p.g.h.

m.d.’s,

carers, interns,

zookeepers and vultures

in a labyrinth of melding

colors.

zombies,

whirling about;

my world, peripheral,

like zebra stripes off a huge wall:

lifeless.

framed sky

abysmal black

blank stares, Janus-faced fate,

in calloused hands with flawless gowns

amen.

thin line:

vanishing twitch…

green strip on black, soundless!

a pink-less rose, withered and stiff

aground.

*  * *

I first encountered cinquains during my college days, and this time around is a sort of rediscovery or a revisit of this relatively quaint format in poetry. For those who are not familiar with this form, a cinquain is a class of poetic forms that employ a five-line pattern, similar to the Japanese tanka. The style I used here is from the modern version invented by American poet Adelaide Crapsey, using 22 syllables distributed among the five lines in a 2-4-6-8-2 pattern.  

I used to write snippets of verses. The activity, albeit brief and spontaneous, can be an excellent source of freedom and a tamed arena for releasing tensions. When I am inspired I scribbled maybe just a line or two that might relate personally to my experience or emotions at that moment. My lines don’t necessarily employ the conventional use of meter, and no rhythm scheme or pattern but bespeak rather of things that I am extremely interested in or passionate about. But this is my first attempt of writing cinquains. 

The above samples are products of random thoughts on verses originally “written” in my cellphones and saved as SMS during the two-week confinement of my wife before her death and the succeeding days when I was in the hospital to accomplish some important documents. The fragments included here are stray thoughts in separate occasions; I just let my thoughts flow and did a couple of drafts after that. And I discovered that some of them are very near to the cinquain format. I only have to revise of them a little, and picked a set of four to complete a single thought.  

So there, and you just to look closely how some unrelated words relate to each other for an imagery. They are so brief for so much commentary!