Our thanks to Wellness Center in Philam Homes, Quezon City. That was our mother?s home for more than seven years, and the staff of nurses and caregivers there helped magnificently to make it feel like one. There were, if I recall right, only three or four occupants there, including our mother, in 2001 when it was just starting, but the number has since grown to a dozen or so.

Our thanks go as well to our mother?s companions who suffered from one affliction or another that went with creeping age but who bore them with patience and good humor. Certainly they never allowed their affliction to get in the way of civility or generosity, lavishing both as much on our mother as on her visitors. I remember the Christmas parties there, the simple repast turned into a feast by the extravagance of the goodwill and boundlessness of hope that swelled in the hearts of frail bodies. It was a resolutely Christian place, its occupants believing they were transients in a halfway house or passengers on a train station awaiting the bus or train that would take them to their more permanent dwelling place, passing the time as best they could in pleasant conversation.

Some of them I think went ahead of our mother. I can only wish them a pleasant journey.

Our thanks to all those who texted to express their sympathies. They are too many to name. Some wrote long messages, some short; some wrote eloquently, some struggled to find the words. But all sounded like they wrung the words from their hearts. Sometimes the simplest lines can say the deepest things, like ?I love you.? And like ?I?m praying for your mom.? Whatever your faith, or lack of it, you?ve got to be moved.

Our thanks to everyone who went to the wake, young and old, healthy or afflicted, friend or stranger. Our thanks to old friends whom we had not seen for some time and who stoked the embers of fading memories, of youth, of poetry, of dreams of changing the world. One friend of mine in particular was himself looking brittle, which startled me, knowing him only to have looked tough and hardy, like the place he hails from, which is the Ilocos region, despite the many exactions he made upon his body. He walked with effort and tired easily. I asked him if he had developed arthritis, albeit one worse than gout. He said, ?Nope, heart, and I think emphysema.?

I said, ?Ah, so you?ve joined the club of those who have given up smoking and drinking?? He said, ?Nope. The f--k should I want to have a lot more years and a lot less life?? A philosophical proposition I?m still mulling over.

My own thanks to musician friends who lifted up spirits with song, notwithstanding the impediment to it I posed by adding my voice in a moment of abandon to the harmony of angels. The sight of musicians made me wonder again about heaven?s mysterious ways. Last month, Anabelle Bosch, achingly young and achingly talented, succumbed to aneurysm while the world welcomed the new year with a bang, and Boggs Ambrosio, achingly talented if not as achingly young, had a heart attack a month later. I look at the aging blackguards of this country still alive and kicking ? Juan de la Cruz ? and truly I am at pains to fathom heaven?s ways.

Our thanks to Cory Aquino who arrived one quiet afternoon and talked about life brimming with life. She gave infinite comfort by looking well despite the ravages of her affliction and the even greater ravages of her cure. Nothing beats exchanging pleasantries, which the passing of a 96-year-old demands or sanctions, with someone who has become an authority on life and death, sickness and health, surrender and struggle. The last is especially impressive: Here is a person whose submission to the will of heaven is absolute but whose willingness to take up arms for the cause of life, including her own, is heroic. I can only hope her Lord will not make His ways so mysterious He will save the best for last when He delivers His earthly summons. We can do with people like her staying a little longer on this earth.

Our thanks to our mother who in life kept harping on the folly of greed and acquisitiveness with the constant admonition that you cannot bring your earthly possessions with you to the grave. And who in death drove home the point with the love that swirled around her more powerfully than the scent of flowers. Of course, the cynical or ?pilosopo? can always argue that, true, you may not bring your earthly possessions with you to the grave but you can always leave them to your kids. To which our mother might have retorted unyieldingly that the only wealth worth bequeathing is a good name.

Poverty is never an excuse to be graceless, or lack class. Wealth even less so.

Our thanks to the wordsmiths who added new words to our vocabulary: ?cremains? and ?inurnment.? The latter quite incidentally passes the Word Spellcheck. Stands to reason: I figure the ?ter? in ?interment? comes from ?terra,? or earth, which implies burying. The ?urn? in ?inurnment? speaks for itself.

Our thanks to technology that turned a small and fading sepia photograph into a large and luminous one. It is the wedding picture of our mother and father who were not altogether in the cusp of youth ? the Japanese did not just intrude into the country, they intruded into their lives, parting them for the duration of their stay, but that?s another story ? but still looking at a future stretched out before them with bright eyes. I wonder where our father got the suit.

Our thanks to heaven, such as our different conceptions of heaven are, which took our mother away one lazy Sunday afternoon after 95 long summers with the serendipity or blitheness of grace, sending her, or so we?d like to think, on quite another journey, where she might find at the end of it a permanent home.

Or a spot beside a gentle fire where she might put up her weary feet while a storm rages outside.