Report by Alma Cruz Miclat
My Mother would have turned 85 last October 4.
She was a beautiful woman with a face still refreshing and looking young for her age, but showing steely strength and determination. She was the moving force in our Roque-Capuli-Cruz clan, the matriarch whom everybody looked up to and followed.
She left us in the afternoon of August 14, 2004 when she complained of chills while vacationing in our Antipolo home.
I was driving her to the Philippine Heart Center where she was just confined a month earlier, when I decided to drop by the nearest emergency clinic of the Antipolo District Hospital because I could not bear her sighs.
It was a wrong move.
The guard just watched as Mama's caregiver half-dragged her to the emergency room. The doctor on duty was out on-call, attending to a mother in labor and there was no other doctor left for emergency. When I asked the nurse on duty what happened to other patients who needed emergency attention, she curtly replied, "Tell that to the governor!"
When Mama needed a bedpan, the nurse said they had none. Not in the emergency, not in the wards.
"Nagkakawalaan ng gamit dito [supplies usually get lost here]."
I rushed mama out of that public hospital and drove like crazy in the pouring rain. I didn't bother about the other emergency clinic I would see along the way. I just wanted to get to the Heart Center where I knew my mother would be attended to with care. She passed out as we reached the gate of the Heart Center. Efforts to revive her proved futile.
Beijing, autumn, 1981
I felt the driver was going too slow taking my husband, Mario, our daughters Maningning and Banaue and the latter's amah Yang Aiyi, Mr. Liu Dazhao , the foreign experts' managing director, and me from our apartment to Beijing's Capitol International Airport.
I was overly excited and was not able to sleep well the previous nights. Mama was coming to China with my Ate Edna. We had not met since 1971 during the turbulent year of quarter storms prior to martial law.
As a young activist at UP, I left home without leaving a word, got married to a fellow UP activist in a secret underground rite, and left for China.
It was not until eight years later when we were able to communicate with our respective families. Only then did they learn that I now had a family and two children of my own, and working, together with Mario, as waiguo chuanjia or "foreign experts" at the Radio International of the Chinese Ministry of Radio, Film and Television.
Our mail exchanges coursed circuitously through a Bornean friend based in Hong Kong gave us a chance to bridge the eight-year gap, but were never enough.
Now, there was this direct flight by Philippine Airlines from Manila via Xiamen. Along the tree-lined avenue to the airport, I was overwhelmed by emotions of longing, recollections of our separation, and the prospects of reunion.
Director Liu showed some official papers to the airport officers and they let me meet Mama and Ate Edna at the immigration counter. Uttering not a word, I threw myself to Mama in a tight embrace, tears streaming out of our eyes wetting us both in that cold autumn day. Until I remembered I was supposed to give them the thick overcoats the customs officer allowed me to bring that they could immediately wear.
The ecstasy of seeing me in the flesh was, for my deeply religious mother, a heavenly answer to all her prayers every single day and every single moment during all those years of separation.
They were right on time for the two-week foreign experts tour of east China, which took them with Mario, Maningning and myself to the fabled cities of Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, Yixing, Wuxi and Suzhou.
We cruised the Grand Canal and crossed the Yangtze, and got lost in metropolitan Shanghai. In Beijing, our never-ending chats during our visit to the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Great Hall of the People, the Temple of Heaven, and walks in various parks and gardens including the Beijing Zoo, seemed just diversions to the more important catching up with one another.
Mama and Ate Edna talked about the years of agony while waiting for news about me, news that never came, or news of false sightings of me and Mario at different places in the country, or a highly exaggerated news about my death at a military encounter.
Bataan, September 2004
I lighted a candle and said a little prayer for my mother, and my father, too, who had passed away two years before.
The day was supposed to be their 59th wedding anniversary. They got married on Sept. 25, 1945 wearing their khaki uniforms. My father was a soldier of the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (Usaffe) fighting the Japanese in Corregidor and Bataan while my mother was a medical attendant working with her sister who was a Usaffe nurse.
With the anti-Japanese war just ended, my father took my mother to his home in Negros Occidental. There they planned to build a family. They used part of their Usaffe backpay of P4,000 to build a house.
Receiving a telegram that her mother was seriously ill, the young couple decided to go back to Bataan. The boat they were taking to Manila met with a strong typhoon and the passengers were asked to throw away all their belongings. They did, including their pasalubong of live chickens.
Mama would not want to ride a boat again. They stayed put in Bataan.
Again, with their backpay, they thought of opening a business. They bought some 10 bicycles to rent out. With so many relatives and friends who would borrow, instead of renting their rides, the business did not prosper.
Mama's father taught my father various crafts involved in fishing, including the use of various kinds of nets. Mama sold the catch.
Carrying baskets full of fish, various seafood and shellfish, I imagined how she dreamt that one of the oysters in her basket should carry a precious pearl. Surely, such find could be part of the happy stories we share on the family table each Sunday lunch?
As their fishing activities flourished, the family also flourished; not in wealth but in the number of children. We came one after the other, all eight of us, at the rate of one baby every two years.
As we were growing up, the earnings from the catch always seemed not enough, especially when they vowed they would send all of us to college.
Father thought of another business venture. Fishpond owners always needed fishnets harvesting milkfish, tilapia and shrimps. He made, rented out and repaired fishnets. His business caught up even when the fishpond owners started culturing prawns and crabs. Our neighbors respected this reticent Visayan so much, they voted him as barangay captain even if he didn't campaign for it.
Mother, for her part, put up a carinderia with the pork coming from pigs she herself raised at our backyard. She prepared the dishes and personally supervised her food stall.
Her business soon flourished. The family happily gathered around her various pork dishes every New Year's Eve.
But dealing in food made her dislike taking food on a regular basis. Unbeknownst to her, she was making herself a candidate for stomach ulcers. She realized it only when, one day, she started vomiting blood and choked on a big piece of clotted blood left on her throat. Father applied his first-aid skills he learned in the Army to get the blood clot and brought her immediately to the Veterans Memorial Hospital, where she was operated on.
Model family
Overcoming such a fearsome illness, Mama became active in Church activities. She helped organize women in Sunday school and bible study programs.
At the same time, she immersed herself in projects organized by the town's Health Center for mothers and children. She was also busy in village affairs as wife to the barangay captain, a position Father held for over two decades.
She saw to it that while she was doing her share in church and in civil society, she was molding her children, and now grandchildren and great grandchildren to become productive members of the community, mainly by being good students and church activists.
She herself read a lot: books, newspapers, and magazines. She could discuss with any youth current political, entertainment and international events.
Very much influenced by her, Mama's brood, my siblings, now includes within our rank, teachers, nurses, accountant, an engineer, an executive and a municipal officer. One of her grandchildren became the youngest vice mayor of a municipality in the whole country and is now in the provincial board.
Mama was so proud when our family was named in 1999 the first ever 'Model Family" of our town.
Mama remained sharp, witty and intelligent to her last breath.
As I entered the room in our Antipolo house where she stayed until that fateful day, I noticed on her bedside table her open Bible, the book "Teatime Stories for Women," which she had just finished reading, a Filipino novel with a bookmark at the middle, and some magazines.
Mama did not need to dream about a pearl in one of the oysters she peddled in town. I should have told her, she herself was a mother of pearl, if not the pearl itself.
Alma Cruz Miclat acmiclat2004@yahoo.com
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