If only bodies can occupy space, then, space must mean emptiness. Space must mean absence. Perhaps this is what happens when people die: Although their bodies remain present, our human consciousness affirms their absence.
“Wala na siya (he/she is no longer with us),” we say.
The vacuum demands to be filled, and, oftentimes, all we can do is to flood it with tears and ashes. But that gesture never seems to be enough. Filling that void makes us empty. It makes us hollow.
I’ve been told that the French have a beautiful way of capturing this phenomenon: Tu me manques — I miss you — or, in its literal sense, you are missing from me.
The person who feels the emptiness experiences the lack as if something of him/her has been taken, like a limb or an organ. Nothing can ever replace it, and perhaps some even live on with phantom limbs.
And yet what doesn’t make sense to me is that, despite “witnessing” the death of my Lola and of Daddy, I never found myself moved to tears.
I distinctly remember how I even forced myself to feel sad while my Lola’s coffin was being lowered, and that I had done this because I could hear my relatives wail and cry.
The gift of tears was in short supply. The same thing happened when Daddy died. I remember approaching his mortal body — just before it was lowered — and even gave him a goodbye kiss. It was cold. It was empty — I dare say nothing — and yet the lack did not make me feel empty enough to shed tears.
Come to think of it, is it not perhaps wrong to think of burying a dead person as one of the greatest act of charity, as it makes use of sheer faith and will to see some “one” — not even some “thing” — in what I perceive to be nothing?
It was immediately after the burial of my father that I felt the need to ask my spiritual director about my lack of empathy.
Why wasn’t I sad? Was there something wrong with me? Or was it possible that, with us being too caught up with preparations, there wasn’t really enough time to grieve — like Mercutio who only moans of the stab some moments after the deed has been done?
Sadly, there was nothing to be felt. I couldn’t understand.
But maybe it was also because of this: There was no need for tears for Lola and Daddy, because I had tasted something that death could never take away.
I had tasted love with the very little time we had. I have fond memories of when I was still 6 years old, and Lola trained me to deliver the welcome remarks to the town mayor; or how we would run around her old house because I refused to take my afternoon siesta.
I fondly remember how I told her that she should be the one to follow me, as I had more teeth while hers were still growing. “Kumpleto na ngipin ko ikaw kulang pa.” It was my comical wit that usually saved me from the rod.
I remember how Daddy used to still feed me despite my being in the fifth grade. I remember how he even sewed back my face mask when he unintentionally tore it; he is the only lawyer I know who repaired his kid’s face mask. I remember how I used to sleep next to him when I had gotten used to siesta, and I even remember his smell.
It is perhaps because we never wasted a single day of our lives without reminding each other of this bond.
The space that death leaves only makes those memories more alive and more important to keep. It is death that keeps
Lola and Daddy alive. And just because someone we loved is no more doesn’t mean that love wasn’t real. It doesn’t cease to exist; rather, it mocks death, because the past is something that death can never take away.
Perhaps this is why I do not grieve. Because death is nothing but an “empty” space that only proves it was once filled. And if it’s any consolation, the laws of physics seem to prove that we never really die, just as how energy is neither created nor
destroyed, but only changes form.
And so does our existence. I find consolation in the fact that the air Lola and Daddy breathed is the same air I breathe, and that their laughter and “I love you” assurances echo in the whisper of the gentle breeze.
What I do experience as emptiness, and what I believe we should be wary of, are the spaces we consciously create, when we “choose to end a conversation, or terminate a contract; close an account, or even put a period at the end of a phrase” (from “Waiting,” by Jason Leo G. Asistores)—as if people cannot change, as if people remain stagnant, as if people are dead.
What spaces do we create?
* * *
Kim Valladores, 25, is from Angono, Rizal.