A YEAR AFTER THE LOSS

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed  

TODAY is the first anniversary of my wife’s death. My wife of 14 years passed from this life exactly a year ago at PGH-Manila due to breast cancer.

The fateful scene in that August night is still fresh on my mind. Eight hours after I left my wife in her bed in the hospital, I received a text message from Joan, her niece, pleading me to go back to my wife’s bedside at the soonest possible time. I went to work that day because I knew she’s fine when I left her.

I knew right away that the day I feared so long has finally come.

Please, Lord, not now, I kept on praying while I hurtled out of the office up to the nearest bus stop. When I called up Joan again, her words were drowned by her sobs. I had to calm her down. She insisted that I should hurry up, assuring me though that her aunt is still breathing, as the doctors are trying all their best to keep her alive.

It was Friday, a day Jesus the Nazarene devotees flock to Quiapo church. There was a monstrous traffic along Quezon Boulevard, which is a major road midway to my route from my office in Quezon City to PGH in Ermita. I was stuck. In 5 or 10 minutes interval, I called Joan for update, trying hard to keep myself from crying.  

From my bus window I hold on my eyes to the opened doors of the church, where I had a glimpse of a number of devotees praying inside. There are so many of them packing the church every Friday, beseeching the Lord, telling Him of their myriad of intentions. They were so calm now, so confident.

I’m here, Lord, please listen to me…!

At this approach of death, there are two conflicting thoughts that had occupied my mind with equal power: one is to consider the possibility of losing her and learn to accept the truth with equanimity; and the other, to consider the impossibility of forestalling a natural course of event so I rather disregard what is painful and depressing till it finally comes. It was with the second thought that I reasonably held on to my hope, however slim that is, that my wife will survive this one, even this night. I wanted to talk to her first, to tell her many things, and to say how sorry was I for not taking care of her with the best I’ve got.

Please, Lord, not now…

I arrived in her room at 9:15 p.m. She lay motionless in her bed, unconscious but breathing. The life support machine was on standby, ready to be used again if my wife had another gasping attempt for dear life. But the doctors gave me the sad truth: should the electrocardiogram monitor slow down to flat again, it would be their last chance to revive her. To revive her for another try, they said, that would be her third for the night, would be fatal to her internal organs, that is, if they continue pumping beyond the standard time, it’s good as dead.

My wife's family and some friends started crowding around at her bedside (our three children were left in our home in Bulacan and a relative was already on its way to fetch them). All their downcast, glassy eyes mirrored fear of forthcoming death in the family.

My wife’s hand was still warm yet stiff when I held it. I tried to wake her up; I kept on talking to her, telling her I was with her right now and how I love her so much. Then I felt a slight movement or a jerk from her, and I saw an almost imperceptible thin line of a tear flowing slowly from a corner of her eyes. That was the last movement, the last tear I saw from her, the last sign of her life. After a couple of minutes, the green line in her heart monitor slowed down going to flatline, then everyone was frantic of calling the doctors again.

And that was their last attempt to revive her.

What is painful, what is unbearable, and what is depressing befell my life that instant, like wayward rocks from a cliff. And it is still a mystery that I was buried by the avalanche, so helpless and unprepared, and still I was alive.

But my world would never be the same again. I learned how people really feel when they say life is not worth living.

So what I have done during the past twelve emotionally difficult months of my life? How do I go on after losing someone whom I loved so deeply?

I’m doing fine, or trying hard to be OK, as what my friends have wanted me to be. To be prayerful and to be strong. To place loss into a perspective that is tolerable, like saying that “It’s God’s will” or “God doesn’t want her to suffer any longer.”   

Honestly, I’m having a tough time working for the whole twelve months, and I almost didn’t finish law school. I’ve noticed I made a lot of effort when I interact with other people. It’s no longer that easy, I always wear a mask, though tears don’t come easily to me. As if there is a barrier now between myself and my world before the tragedy. I want to let go and be free in the same old world. But I can’t.  

Solitude helps me concentrate to do what I love to do. I write and read a lot. I have to divert my mind from this gnawing guilt, sorrow and even anger. Even during my review for this coming bar exams, my effort to unburden things out of my chest made me read more fictions than my own law textbooks and review materials just to calm myself.

I have decided to revive this blog a week after her death and now I have been posting something about how I cope to help me and others who may be going through the same situation as I have. It’s that sort of a release, or some emotional catharsis. I am very open in telling and retelling what happened to me; like what I did with the first few paragraphs, writing about my wife’s last hours on that August night.

Healing, I was told, starts by telling others about the loss of a beloved partner. As if it’s a requirement for the bereaved to subscribe to this ancient Turkish proverb that tells us that the one who “conceals his grief finds no remedy for it.”

But when I am at home, I always try to keep myself busy. I have my kids to keep me going every day.

It is not that I’m lonely. I just seem to have an extreme sadness that will not go away. I cannot end my grief, it’s true, and I only have this choice: to accept it or to resist it. I would rather now learn to accept whatever it was I needed to accept. Only time will help me make it through.

Yet it will be a heart wrenching journey and I have a long way to go. But the loss might never be fully over.