A Buddhist blog says, “We are alive, therefore we will die. This is the simplest, most obvious truth of our existence, and yet very few of us have really come to terms with it.”
I think I have, after witnessing five deaths in the family. I know my own time will come, but hope it won’t be until I’m 80, until I finish my current projects and put my affairs in order. Meantime, I pray to be able to enjoy a good quality of life. I cringe at the thought of becoming senile as my mother had been.
It’s actually the process of dying that concerns me. I don’t want tubes inserted all over my arms and feet, my chest heaving as a contraption assists my breathing. I’ve decided I’d like to go quietly and tranquilly in my sleep, if the Almighty would only will it.
Of course my children, and especially my grandchildren, will be terribly shocked, but that’s all right. They’ll get over my sudden departure soon enough. My daughters will say, “Oh, it’s best. That’s how she would have wanted to go—painlessly, with no fuss. Anyway, she lived a full life.”
Door of darkness
I sit at the dining table during breakfast, looking out on the garden outside the room’s nine-foot-high glass walls. There are three hardy clusters of Chinese bamboo, grown tall over the four years that I’ve lived here in my daughter’s new house, on this plot of land where my husband Beck and I built our house in the late ’60s.
To the left of the bamboos is our 43-year-old santol tree, a giant cilium plant beneath it, stalks spread outward toward the sky to catch the dappled sunlight and the refreshing drops of rain. To the right is a huge spider lily in bloom. These plants and trees will continue to thrive after I am long gone.
More frequently now, I think about how the end of my life will come because, odd as it is, we begin to die the moment we are born.
I have witnessed five deaths in the family. Five loved ones have passed into the world beyond. I wonder what it’s like to be in that world.
“Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who/ Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through/ Not one returns to tell us of the Road,/ Which to discover we must travel too!” (Omar Khayyam, “The Rubaiyat”).
I once made a pact with my friend and counselor, psychologist Dr. Matilde Valdes, that whichever of us goes first, that person will come in a dream to the other to reveal where she is at that moment. She passed away two years ago but has not kept her word to let me know where she is. She is surely in that “undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveler returns.” (William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”)
A million rosaries
First there was my mother-in-law, in the ICU of Makati Med, my sister-in-law fussing and weeping, and my husband Beck fidgeting, telling her not to create a scandal by crying too loudly. His fellow doctors had told him there was no way of saving her, that her time was up. Their beloved Ima was dying.
Because they were both distraught, it fell upon me, Catholic that I am, to pray in Mama’s ears. I wish I had known how to pray in Pampango, for that was her language. She spoke Tagalog, too, but prayed in either Pampango or Spanish. I recited the rosary into her ears and ended with the prayer I always end with at bedtime: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul…”
Ima must have prayed a million rosaries in her lifetime. She had a collection of these hanging from the slender posts of her curving staircase going all the way up to the second floor in Angeles, Pampanga. In her old age, all she and Papa did was to sit in their living room. They never went out, not even to go to Mass, though they were very religious.
Stentorian voice
I could understand why—it would have been a big production. My mother-in-law was very heavy and had the obsessive-compulsive habit of washing her hands for something like 20 minutes.
And she was fastidious about her attire. When I had first met her, on my wedding day, she struck me as the “big Alii” in James Michener’s “Hawaii.” And what a stentorian voice she had! It was loud enough to rouse the dead. In the next world she would have no need of her voice to convey her wishes, which were her children’s commands when she was alive. Ah, but we are all beyond wishing and desiring in that world.
My father had an acute asthma attack that had compromised his heart. He was resuscitated at the Manila Doctors’ Hospital, which was close to the Grand Boulevard Hotel, where he and my mother were staying. When Beck’s best friend and UST College of Medicine classmate, Dr. Ben Magsino, a urologist, came to visit, he told me I should not have let them resuscitate him. I was aghast. “And why not?” I asked.
Ben said my father had lived a full life at 84 years, and that it was kinder to let him go rather than have him endure the discomfort of all those needles and the respirator that covered his face, making him look like a man about to travel to outer space. Come to think of it, he was, after all, going to another world.
Ben made me promise to not order the hospital staff to resuscitate him the next time he suffered a cardiac arrest. However, the hospital was staffed by nuns who served as nurses. Their mandate was to keep a patient alive at all cost. It goes without saying that the next time my father had a cardiac arrest, he was subjected to heroic measures—pumping the chest, even applying electric shock to stimulate the heart and get it beating again.
Not the praying type
He died anyway. It was his time. And I didn’t even get the chance to pray in his ears because he was surrounded by doctors and nurses trained to do their thing in such cases. Had he been able to talk as I prayed, he would have said, “Sya, sya, tama na ’yan,” for he was not the praying type.
I never saw him accompany my pious mother to church. He said there was no need to go to church because God was everywhere, therefore he could pray to Him under the tree if he wanted to.
I was consoled by the look of peace on my father’s face. He had seemed to welcome death, unlike the first time he was taken to the ER of Manila Doctors. He looked so frightened then, telling my mother, “Trining, ayoko pang mamatay!”
Papa had always feared death. Every year that he celebrated a birthday, he was so thankful because he thought he would die young like his parents did, in their 50s and early 60s, from stroke. He couldn’t imagine himself living to the age of 80.
However, he did tell my mother and me once: “Pag namatay ako, balutin niyo ako sa banig, at ibaon sa lupa.” To which my mother had riposted, “Sus, are you crazy? We’ll never do that! We’ll put you in a nice expensive coffin. In fact, when I die, I want the best, a bronze coffin, if available, because I have worked hard all my life. I deserve it!”
Very fragile
My mother had been staying at home with me with 24-hour nursing care from full-fledged nurses. Despite the care, she had contracted pneumonia. After recovering, she came home from the hospital with a stomach peg for her to receive food direct to the stomach. She was okay for several months but became progressively weaker. The doctor said she was very fragile and could go any time.
On the evening of Oct. 18, 2006, she began to have labored breathing. She was struggling and gasping. I wonder if the devil was trying to claim her because she seemed to be fighting someone. My mother was a strong-willed woman who was a daily Mass-goer when she was still healthy and mentally fit.
I prayed the rosary with her and all the prayers I knew. I tried to will myself to stay up, to be with her as she clung tenaciously to life. But I was tired and sleepy, so I went to bed. There was no one in the house with me except my maids and the nurse on duty. At around 6:30 a.m., her nurse called me to say she was gone. She was 97.
Resilient lot
I telephoned my trusty doctor friend Louie Rivera, whose wife Gin came regularly to play mahjong with me on Sunday afternoons. I told him the sad though not unexpected news. I reported further that I had called the Loyola Memorial Service to pick up her body. He said he would come over with Gin because someone had to sign the death certificate, otherwise Loyola would not take the body.
I told the cook and the maids to prepare breakfast for us three, and to serve it on the dining table in the family room just outside my mother’ bedroom. Louie welcomed the breakfast after he had signed the death certificate.
We were still eating when the Loyola van came to take my mother’s body away. We told them to wait while we finished up. It seemed insensitive of us to be eating while my mother’s body was still warm, her nurse sobbing away by her side. It was her first patient to die on her. My friend Nening Manahan offered, by way of explanation, that when the heart is wounded, the body must be fed.
We humans are a resilient lot. We learn to accept and cope, no matter how long it takes. Then we move on, for there is still a whole lot of living to do.
Kahlil Gibran advises to “open” one’s “heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”
