Life is but a series of deaths
I remember a childhood afternoon inside a kulambo with my mother and my younger sister. I was randomly tracing my mom’s face with my fingers — wrinkles to moles, moles to freckles, and freckles to laugh lines, connecting the dots like a constellation.
I forgot why I said it, but I told her this: “Mother, I don’t want you to grow old and die.”
She just smiled wanly. We all die.
I remember being afraid then, and I cried and hugged her so tightly as she laughed, perhaps realizing that she had unleashed that fact of life on me too soon.
But as I look back now, I realize that I am not so afraid anymore. Death somehow feels both strange and familiar. Because we all die. Not only once, but many times in our lives.
Someone died that April morning when I graduated from preschool. Our class danced to the tune of “Shalala lala,” our tiny, dynamic bodies strained by maong vests, the required attire.
My mom stitched colorful cartoon patches on mine so I would stand out, or at least be identifiable in the sea of washed-out blue.
I felt so mature looking forward to the big school and never looking back at that small house with the wooden playground and the colorful charts.
Seasons die. I spent a good year in the province when I was young, when days consisted of catching dragonflies, leaving goats to graze by the grass, taking baths in the nearby irrigation, lying down on straw sacks with cousins, whiling the afternoon away telling ghost stories.
If I close my eyes now, I can still remember the drone of a faraway tractor, the random conversations carried by the wind in Ilocano I could half-understand, and the din of chirping crickets like a daytime lullaby. I can still feel the heat on my skin, bronzed by the sun, and the smell of wild grass and freshly picked corn.
That summer came and went. Many summers happened after, but they never replicated that one.
Innocence dies. I dipped my leather-clad feet in the flood, as my classmates and I traversed the dirty streets of Taft Avenue to the jeepney terminal, them headstrong young who failed to heed the radio’s call for school suspension.
We ate Haw Flakes like the holy bread and smoked MikMik on straw like cigarettes, feigning bravado, as we talked about who went out with whom, or which teacher looked like the mutant from “X-Men.”
This was a guy content and full of confidence, as if life had promised him everything.
I passed by the same school recently while riding the train, the same building that housed me for almost a quarter of my life. I felt nostalgic, like I should be grasping at something. But what was I supposed to hold on to, really? The vehicle was fast, and the moment passed. Time did, too.
Connections die. We crammed seven to a four-seater car headed to Tagaytay on a school night, with the sole purpose of eating bulalo. We threw caution to the wind, never mind the exams the day after, or theses due that weekend.
The cool wind slapped our faces as we kept warm with a little weed, feeling invincible like in the movie. Never knowing that, soon, one of us will be married. Another will live abroad. And yet another will turn bitter and never speak to us again. But then morning came, we left sober, and everyone died with the night.
I see photos and videos of my former workmates. I see comments and well-wishes on my birthday or on a random post on a random day. But we will never be as close and random as those first few days at our first job, skirting through the tightrope of being promoted and fired.
That Tuesday when someone played an Aegis song to destress, and our high-strung corporate selves all sang along, unleashing our inner “jologs” and turning swivel chairs in an attempt at impromptu choreography. No, not in that way. Not in that moment, or with the same people. That died, too.
How many people do we meet, and how many stay for good? It’s a fistful of sand, pouring out of our hands, until only a few grains remain.
Love dies. That rainy evening in Sunken Garden, when love was young and the wind hummed with sweet promise, when my lips first felt another. Nothing mattered then but us, the rain, and that all-consuming fire.
But, of course, that version of me died. I have since been in various relationships, whittling my naïvete thin to maturity, my heart still on my sleeve, but now decorated with scars. The kisses I’ve had since then are neither less nor more. Only different.
Places die. That dormitory in UP. Our bedspace at Teacher’s Village. Our cramped apartment on Maginhawa Street. It will never house that same energy when we lived there, and even if other transients inhabit it, it will never be the same. Who we were then expired with the lease.
Dreams die. I pressed black ink on white paper, believing they were magic, not knowing the rules, and that I was breaking them. My first creation was a written material I foolishly considered a work of art then. The feeling of triumph increased as the printer churned it out, page by page.
We create because we want to preserve an imprint of ourselves, long after we leave the earth. That’s what I believed then. But what do we preserve, really? They’re merely echoes of a belief we soon forget, and that people interpret differently. We shout our truths, and the reverberance gets lost in translation.
I wrote many more after. They eventually stopped being dreams and just started being words. The print is just black ink on white paper, and nothing more.
Life is but a series of deaths.
We remember our firsts. We remember our lasts. But we also have those in-betweens, not as significant, but all deaths just the same. Why do we not mourn them as we do a corporeal demise? As if that’s the only one that tolls with finality.
Our past selves die naturally, and we move on—different versions of who we were before the fact. We all lose a part of us along the way, life thawing at our existence, shaving away people, places and things attached to us, and all of these will be lost, with us not knowing and feeling then that they’re gone forever. We ignore them, trapped in the irony of growing old and repeatedly perishing. Until the ultimate expiry comes, our departure from mortality, and the acceptance that these are the only things that wait for us in the end: earth, moss and stone.
Loved ones die. I stare at yet another coffin. I don’t know her that well, but it is a death just the same. That will be me. Soon. Maybe later. Maybe now. But not never. This is the truth: Wherever we are now, we are all just on our way home.
I look at the flowers, the pews, the candles, and her. And I wonder: How many summers had she whiled away? What’s the best bulalo she had ever tasted? Did she ever smoke MikMik and real weed, or dipped her feet in irrigation or a flood? How many Aegis songs did she sing on a random day, and what kind of dreams did she attempt to make happen? How many vest-clad dances in April, or kisses in the rain?
I’ll never know. Because all of that died with her. In a coffin, like a box we put our mementos in, never to be opened again.
When my time comes, I might be scared again like that kid who hugged his mother then. But, for now, I would like to believe I will not be afraid. Because I’ve stared death in the face, in different forms, at different times. Life has subtly prepared me for that inevitability.
We should not fear but we can ache, because a part of us is removed, like scab to a painful wound. We should not dread but we can cry. Not because of the bereavement itself, but because of time lost, never to return. No, we already know death, like an old and constant friend.
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Alpha Habon, 28, is a filmmaker/writer at ABS-CBN Channel 2.
