HERE IS a memory:
I am home for the holidays. She is in bed. The bed is made of old wood, mahogany with woven rattan instead of a mattress in the middle. The varnish is chipped in some parts. The bed is old, but no older it seems than when I first climbed into it as a child. The air in the room has begun to participate in the process of aging, musty with a hint of urine.
It is curious why the image of the old wooden bed and the smells are more vivid in my memory than that of my grandmother who lies there, staring blindly at the ceiling, the cataract hopelessly thick in her eyes.
I enter her room and I am fascinated by the resilience of material objects. The furnishings are the same. The bed in which she lies has remained basically unchanged. An there she is, with all of her hair now white. Not silvery-white, but soft. Her mind now is less than lucid, her speech is slurred from what I imagine to be a pool of saliva in her mouth, her legs shriveled from disuse.
She was born on Feb. 1, 1913, when the Philippines was still suffering from a hangover after years of military struggle against the United States. But children of that era lived a happier life than historical narratives would have us believe. She was born into a large family, which was not quite wealthy but owned tracts of land in which family members had picnics and rode horses, while the older boys hunted for wild pigs. She lived through two world wars; she met my grandfather after the first, and lost him because of the second. That she would outlive her husband, a Filipino soldier in the US armed forces, was expected—wives after all, tend to do that—but that she would outlive two of her children was not.
My uncle, her eldest child, suffered from epilepsy and a heart condition. My grandmother found him dead in his bed one morning in 1991. I was told that she had entered his room to wake him up for breakfast, but when she touched his feet (she had the habit of tickling our feet when rousing us from bed), she found that they were already pale and cold, the nail bed blue. Her cry was guttural, primal, a wail that could only come from a mother who has lost a child. It would be a long time coming before she tickled our feet again.
In 2008, she lost her youngest child. My aunt suffered from schizophrenia, and she died from an overdose of antidepressants while sleeping on the kitchen floor. (Why she chose to die there, instead of in the room she shared with my grandmother, is uncanny and deserves another story.) So we had to move my aunt back to her room while grandmother was not in it.
But moving my aunt was no mean feat because she was fat. It took two maids and both my parents to drag (not lift) her from the kitchen to her room.
Grandma saw this anyhow, as she probably heard the grunts and puffs we were making. She cried and tugged at the hem of my aunt’s house dress. We told her she had just fallen asleep from the medicines she was taking. But the tugging was feeble. She knew.
Alone in her room and with no sick daughter to tend to, my grandmother slowly lost interest—in what, I cannot say exactly. I think it was my aunt and her failing health that gave her life a sense of purpose and meaning.
After my aunt’s death, my grandmother would often be moody, her silence impregnable. She does not talk about my aunt’s death; she has never liked talking about things that pain her. She stares into space, her eyes more moist than usual. She never talks when she cries, and when we comfort her, she just holds us. Her grief is her own.
* * *
People’s lives sound tragic when told in summary. But in her lifetime, my grandmother has taken everything in stride. She has a good sense of humor. When I ask her, “How is everything?” her answer is, “Everything is fine and dandy, sweet as candy.” Of course, by everything I mean her health.
Even before my aunt died, I would take my grandmother around town to see the sights. This was our Sunday morning ritual. She enjoyed seeing new places. And people; she was happiest when she was around people. But we didn’t get out of the car anymore; she was much too old for that. No longer the woman of long ago who rode her horse confidently in the presence of Japanese soldiers, she was still strong for her age, and during our car rides she would joke, “If you ever get tired of driving, tell me so we can swap seats.”
This was her state in June of 2009, when I was preparing to leave for law school in Manila. After that, we could only have our drive around town when I was home for the break or the holidays. It was obvious to me that her health was deteriorating because I saw her only after long intervals.
Once in the summer of 2010, I found her in the living room, hunched over and trying to read a newspaper. (In reality she was not hunched over: age had taken its toll on her body.) It was the last time I saw her trying to read.
A few weeks after I left for school again in June, my mother told me my grandmother had gone completely blind. Since then every time I came home she always looked a little different, and there was always some basic human faculty she had lost. After she lost her sight, she refused to walk and just stayed in bed. She then lost the concept of time, and the sense of where she is.
One Sunday morning in October when I was home for the break, I asked if she wanted to go out for a car ride. “Maybe tomorrow,” she replied.
On Christmas Eve, as I was getting ready for church, I heard her calling out to us. She was groping through the things she could reach, as if she had no idea where she was. She begged us to take her back to her room, promising to keep quiet if we did. There was no convincing her that she was in her room. “I am not home,” she insisted.
These days she always keeps her slippers on, even when she is lying in bed. She stares at the ceiling, trying to figure things out. I think she means something entirely different when she says home, but what do I know?
“This is where we are,” I would tell her when she is in this mood, and it takes a few minutes before she recovers. (Although, what is it that she recovers, or recovers from?)
Last Feb. 1, my grandmother turned 98. This is what I would have told her, if I were with her: “This is where we are, and this is home.”
John Philip A. Baltazar, 23, is a sophomore at the Ateneo Law School.