Grief
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(Source: Pixabay)
Now that the pandemic is over (although probably not for some countries), life is returning to normal. But we’ve dealt with perhaps one death too many. Facebook announcements of people leaving us, not only because of the virus, have been a normal turn of events. I don’t know of anyone who has not had a loved one die, under one circumstance or another. And as they pass away, I feel an era disappearing, to give way for a clean slate, or we may mess up yet again with lessons we’ve failed to learn. It hasn’t been easy to say goodbye, but those who have gone, those I had been close to, left a certain kind of trust for a future that we are still free to craft with the privilege of living a fuller life. I think of them, collectively, in this season of Lent.
Marisa de los Reyes-Hospital (1944-2022)
For two months in the hospital, her two daughters took turns looking after her, as she neared death from lymphoma. A Catholic priest came by every day for prayers of extreme unction. Her daughters felt that was more than enough in their last private moments together; they couldn’t bear prolonging the pain of loss with a longer funeral service.
Two days before Marisa was cremated, we sat around the dining table for a breakfast of croissants and cheese – just as we’d do on a Sunday during my monthly visits. It was as if she was still with us.
A little more than a year ago, in Manila, my own mother died of liver cirrhosis. She had been ill since the start of the pandemic, and we had rented a studio for her daily care instead of confining her in a hospital, where she would have been more at risk.
Myrna Joan (1940-2021), the author's mother.
A series of lockdowns banned gatherings – a traumatic turnaround for Filipinos who, even for the deaths of loved ones, could make a party out of mourning. A funeral service is a combination of singing, eating, talking and sometimes gambling; long nights and days, an outpouring of eulogies that are often superfluous, and long corteges under the heat.
It was just us, my siblings and I, who had gone to the funeral house for her cremation. The mortician had made up Mom rather nicely. I slipped a long letter into her pocket, believing that in her journey elsewhere she’d be able to read my words of love and regret.
We have begun to defy centuries of Philippine customs and traditions by default, thanks to the alternate universe wrought by the pandemic. I am beginning to find meaning in the choices we’ve made for the departed. We see them off quietly, and most importantly, in peace.
The French doctors had infused Marisa’s body with a series of chemotherapy. None of them worked. She had decided it should stop, to allow her to leave from what she called “the departure lounge.” In our country, I have heard a few doctors say that the quality of life did not equate to prolonging a vegetative state.
I was greatly relieved that my mother died peacefully. She breathed her last when we told her we might finally have to take her to the hospital. She didn’t want any of that rigmarole, and I was proud of her for making a choice – a choice that we followed in solemnity. We learned to mourn in peace as well.
Just weeks before her death, a nun who was also like a mother to me, died peacefully in her sleep when she was tested positive for Covid, as if that alone had given her permission to go after all the months she had had to stay put in a convent. She didn’t fight the virus; in fact I think she welcomed the opportunity for an end.
Sister Jeanette had been sending stunning photographs of rare birds and flowers to all of us, her flock, on Facebook Messenger. It was a kind of viral spirituality that reminded us of beauty in life and the inevitability of death that one must not resist. I was not able to see her except on video calls when she was helping me cope with my mother’s illness.
Sister Jet (Jeanette Rimando) - 1940-2021
In a span of a year, I have lost three mothers, in effect. Each one gave purpose to what we had had to deal with in the pandemic, during which our Facebook feeds churned out news of deaths, marked by photos of candles in the dark. There were Zoom masses every so often.
Marisa would not have liked the priest’s remark when a Zoom mass was held by her relatives in Manila, while her daughters attended to her cremation at the Père Lachaise in Paris. When the priest found out about this, he quipped in Tagalog, “sosyal!,” a somewhat negative connotation for the upper class to which Marisa’s family belonged.
It was the expectation of how things should be done back home that Marisa had managed to escape, and she did so when sleep took her at last. Her daughters will keep her ashes until they decide when to bring her urn to Manila, the link to a home country.
My mother’s ashes are interred in a columbarium by a church. When I came for a visit to tell her I was leaving for France, a young man in the next row laid a cassette player by a tomb. Disco songs erupted in what was otherwise a quiet, secluded place. We smiled at each other. We understood that that was how our loved ones would have liked it.
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist based in Manila. Her most recent books include Crying Mountain (Penguin SEA) on the 1970s rebellion in Mindanao and Broken Islands (Ateneo de Manila University Press) set in the Visayas in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
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