A CHILDHOOD PAIN: MY FATHER'S PASSING

A painful memory...

It was a humid Sunday afternoon in my beloved Katipunan.  The heat of the blazing sun nipped the very essence of my body as it penetrated my susceptible skin. It was on that very day while I was sitting at the veranda of Café Xocolat, a haven situated at B. Gonzales Street next to Burgundy Place building in Loyola Heights where people of different background spend time for various reasons; I was swept back in time on the day after my father’s funeral. In my solitude, buried in my own thoughts and ignorance of the people surrounding me, I was hauled by the vacuum of time on the very moment the first time I came face to face with grief. I was seven years old and considerably naive about the pain and the philosophical attributes towards death. In my innocent mind, I understand that death means losing someone or missing someone for a very long time. The thought of not seeing my father again and growing up without him consumed the totality of my childhood. The grief was something so vague for me to comprehend the emotion, the vastness of its intensity resembling the incalculable brilliance of the horizon, as it was infinite and beyond. It was then I realized that in childhood, you will never understand the extent of grief unless you experience it first hand.  I was in a sinking boat, drowning in my own anguished, suffering from a colossal physical pain of melancholic, yet no one was there to save me from my own dirges, no one was there to pull me from the perfidious river of unhappiness. The boat was sinking fast for me to call for help, to shout from the bottom of my lungs and the vigor of my soul that I was on board, that I was on my way to the abyss. I remember myself alone in my parent’s bedroom, sitting at the bottom left corner of the wooden queen size bed situated near the French window on the right corner of the room, in pain of the situation in which I am trapped at. The physicality of such twinges numbed the core of my miniature mortality as it was starting from the bottom of my feet and slowly mounting to my cerebral  and sending shiver to my spine yet the surface remains indifferent, ‘til I realized that I wasn’t far from being catatonic.

I remember vividly as it was like yesterday, caught in the moment as it happened the same time as I was sipping my cold beverages in this fancy café. Past three in the afternoon when the brisk wind was trying to take over and shoved the warmness of the ambiance. While our housemaid was preparing to create a flare out of the fallen and dried leaves from the mango and the coconut trees in our backyard. Everybody went out to unwind and enjoy the tranquility of the afternoon. It was a time to seized the moment to slow down from a hard days of work, a time to pack your belongings and go home, a perfect moment to breathe the fresh air and witness the sun as it set in the horizon connoted a promise for a better tomorrow.      

While everyone in the household was caught up in a typical provincial ritual and the men were busy playing mahjong and discussing politics with their hot coffee in the nipa hut, my mother and my aunts were at the veranda in front of the house talking about the future plans for the family since the man of the house who was my father passed away and was buried yesterday. I, on the other hand was in paralleled with everyone’s mood.

The melody of the zephyr as it entered the window of my parent’s room was my only comfort at that very moment. There was silence and a perfect stillness in the situation that I can almost hear my heart pounding in my chest, that I can feel my blood rushing through my veins, that I was talking to my brain commanding my limbs and my body to move. As I stood and conquered my numbness, I looked around the four corners of the room. I was eager to feel even a remnant of my father’s presence. Let me see you, let me feel you, let me talk to you; let me tell you how much I love you. I was mad with anguished and clouded with so much despair until I realized that my heart was aching. I was sobbing with the incalculable teardrops descending from my eyes, my face was all wet and I was in raged and mad of something I didn’t know. Lord what was I doing? I was talking to someone who’s already dead, wanting to see him, wanting to show himself and feel his embrace for the last time. I was asking, no, I was begging to see his ghost, to see something I didn’t even know existed. I was crying and crying until the river in my eyes was drained and I cannot cry anymore.

I stayed in my parent’s room until the sobbing of my heart stopped. I was relieved; I felt serenity and stillness in my being that I had been longing for a couple of days. I felt the coolness of the air as it entered my nostrils and penetrated my lungs when I inhaled deeply to clear every channel in my body. I felt better and recovered from the pain that engulfed me since my father’s passing. I was able to perceive myself ascending from the deep of the abyss, one stroked at a time until I saw the surface. The promise of a better tomorrow, a brand new day, a chance to smile again, a lesson learned from the pain. Despite of all the message of a new beginning, the knowledge of the truth that in this lifetime, I only have  one-shot of having a father, one-shot of having a mother, one-shot of having a  parents wedged in my brain until this day. Now I only have one parent left, my loving mother. It is imperative that I cherish every moment with her, tell her how much I love her, letting her know that the world is not a better place for me to live without her, that the world will stop turning if I lose her.

 As I snapped back to the reality of my own privacy in this crowded café, I was saddened by the thought of the flashback to the memory lane. It was a hurtful memory of my life but then the strongest memory I know that shaped me emotionally and psychologically and made me the person I am today. I am grateful and in a way thankful that even in the painful memory I found learning, that even in the painful memory I found my strength, that in all of my own struggles I am humbled. My memory defines me as a person and this definition told me that there’s nothing greater in this world than God and the value of a chance and a privilege to have a Family.