The moment I found out that you passed away, I became my 20-year old self yet again, mentally opening that text message on a humid March morning telling me that inday Ana was gone. It was my very first encounter of having had my heart broken from losing someone dear to death that up to now, I am still in the process of fully accepting this scar of remembrance in my heart. And so when I got the confirmation from nanay that you too, are gone, I was sucker-punched right instantly in the chest.
My sobbing, or wailing is more appropriate, wasn't exactly caused by grief right at that moment. I know myself well enough to be certain that my grief would come a little bit later, when I can already fully comprehend everything. Or, can one really comprehend death and loss and grief up to its tiniest detail? My wailing was more of an instinctive response, more like a physical response---like crying when you realize that an appendage, regardless of how small it is, was cut-off from you. My initial response is likened to the initial yelp when one's bones are fractured but the real despair, the real pain that sears to your very insides comes after when one realizes that he or she is temporarily broken and could not function completely as a whole. And, although healing will eventually come, it wouldn't be the same. There would always be that scar, there would always be that mark that would constantly remind you that at one point, a part of you ceased to function, that you actually lost something.
And so, before the waves of emotions would come to engulf me, which would momentarily leave me numb but would then again come in unpredictable intervals, what came to me instead were the memories, those mental images which are actually fragments of the past, which played in my mind in reverse like a motion picture.
The reverse flipping of these mental images then stopped at the very first image, stopped at the very bottom of the pile of memories---my very first memory of you. There was this distant, blurry memory of you baby-sitting me and Malaika. I was about 3 or 4 years old then. I remember you holding this raggedy doll which was bigger than me. The doll's name was Jennifer. There are no sounds or conversations to this very first memory, only this image which is like a still picture kept at some cobwebby corners of my mind.
The next image was me in my first grade, coming home and being handed by nene Imas with a short-sized bondpaper which had a sketch of a carabao on it. This time, you are not in this mental picture.What I remember instead was that the sketch was made by you. What happened here was that my first grade teacher asked us to draw any national symbol as our project and I could not remember what came into my 6-year old mind why I chose the carabao. Wouldn't it had been easier if I had chosen the anahaw leaf, or the mango fruit perhaps? So of course, my 6-year old hands and artistic skill could not muster to connect decent lines which closely resembled a carabao. When nanay was finally fed up seeing a lot of crumpled bondpapers put to waste, she decided to simply cajole me into letting you do my project.This was not an easy task for her, I mean cajoling me to let others do the work for me. And so when I received the bondpaper with the sketch of the carabao, I gave nene Imas my usual grumpy face but deep inside, I was actually delighted to see the neat picture of the carabao on that piece of paper. This incident was forgotten over the years and definitely, there are some errors in the details that I am writing here. What is very clear to me instead is that zoomed-in image of that bondpaper with your carefully sketched carabao on it.
There were many images that followed right after that---it's like the fast flipping of a stack of still photos. But then another image that I clearly remember happened on a very hot April afternoon, 3 years ago, a month before I left for Thailand. I was in my old clothes, drenched in sweat and paint. I remember I had this red bandanna wrapped around my head to prevent paint from dripping all over my hair. Out of boredom, I just said to nanay that day that I was going to repaint a portion of our sala's wall a brilliant shade of green. Everything turned out well until I realized that I could not get the proper mix of colors to complete the job that I started. Almost to the point of frustration, you laughed and teased me to death the way that you all do when I am in one of my I'm-bored-let-me-do-something-out-of-this-boredom-while-everyone-at-home-are-crossing-their-fingers-that-it-better-not-turn-to-a-disaster episodes. After you got your share of laughing at me, you eventually helped me mix the proper shade----saving our poor wall from a paint disaster, and saving me from days of being picked on by the rest of the family.
What's funny about recalling memories is that even the most insignificant and ordinary incidents would turn out to be poignant. Like, how I would always give a funny face from the bus window if it happens to pass by in front of your house and you are by the roadside. How, you would cook us lunch with whatever we had in the refrigerator when we were younger and nanay was at work while tatay was deployed somewhere. When all of these memories are puzzled in together, I can only come up with one word which I haven't really thought of describing you when you were still alive---kindness.
It breaks my heart to know that you could've chosen better options in life had your nanay not died early. It breaks my heart to look at your last photo taken last December, showing you clutching inday Ana's picture and all I could see in your eyes is sadness for having had lost several dear people in your lifetime. I would like to think that up to your last breath, you had no regrets for however you lived your life because you lived it according to your own choices and decisions.
Despite all the losses that you had to witness and bear, and despite the not-so-good decisions that you made in your entire lifetime, you never failed to show kindness and generosity to me, to us your cousins. I had always seen the pride in your eyes every time you would get the chance to introduce us to your friends and just about to anybody. I wish that I could’ve talked to you more, I could’ve shared jokes with you more, I could’ve been more patient when you picked on me. I am sorry that when I was younger, there were times when I got irritated with the fact that we had to share nanay’s time and attention with you. There were times when I was in between amusement and unbelief when she would worry more about you than about us. Now I understand. She was giving you the opportunity to grow up not feeling that you had no mother to take care of you, making you not only a cousin by blood but a big brother that we never had.
Rest in peace toto Allan. You will always be remembered.
ahay..ksubo au .. Condolence !
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