Here is a memory. I am home for the holidays. She is in bed. The bed is made of old wood, mahogany brown 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 seemed than when I first climbed into it as a child. The air in the room had begun to participate in the process of aging. Musty with a hint of urine. It was not yet stench. But it was there. A lingering hint.
It is curious why the image of the old wooden bed and the smells are more vivid in recent memory than that of my grandmother who lay there, staring blindly at the ceiling, the cataract thick and hopeless in her eyes. I enter her room and I am fascinated by the resilience of material objects. The furnishings were the same. The bed in which she lay was significantly unchanged. But there she was, with all of her hair now white. Not silvery-white, but soft. Her mind now less than coherent, her speech slurred from what I imagine would be a pool of saliva in her mouth, her legs shriveled from disuse.
She was born in February 1 in 1913, when the Philippines was still suffering from a hangover after years of military struggle against the US. In point of fact however, children of that era lived a happier life than historical narratives would have us believe. She was born into a large family, not quite wealthy but they owned tracts of land in which they had picnics and rode horses, while the older boys hunted for wild pigs. But after that, she had to live 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 a soldier for the US, 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 bead one morning in 1991. I was told that she entered his room to wake him for breakfast, but when she touched his feet — she was in the habit of tickling our feet when rousing us from bed — she found that they were already pale and cold, the nailbed 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 any of 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 which she shared with my grandmother, is uncanny and deserves another story altogether.) And 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 all of two maids and both my parents to drag, not even lift, her from the kitchen to her room. Grandma saw this anyhow, as she might have heard the grunts and puffs we were making. She cried and tugged at the hem of my aunt’s housedress. We told her my aunt was just asleep from the medicines she was taking. But the tugging had been weak, feeble. She knew.
Alone in her room and with no sick daughter to tend to, my grandmother slowly lost interest. In what things precisely, I cannot tell. I think it was my aunt and her failing health that gave my grandmother a sense of why she is there. After my aunt’s death, my grandmother would often be in these moods, a kind of silence that was impregnable. She did not talk about it as she was not in the habit of talking about things that pained her. But she was more wont to stare into space, and her eyes were more moist than usual. She never did talk when she cried, and when we comforted her, she just held us. Her grieving was her own.
***
Lifetimes inevitably sound tragic when told in summary. But in point of fact, my grandmother took this all in stride. She had a veritable sense of humor, and every so often I would ask her, How is everything, and she would answer, Everything is fine and dandy, sweet as candy. Of course, Everything meant her health.
Even before my aunt died, I had taken to the habit of driving my grandmother around town to see the sights. This became our Sunday morning ritual. My grandmother enjoyed seeing new places. And people. She was happiest when around people. But we never went out of the car anymore; she was much too old for that. No longer the woman of long ago who rode her horse surely in the presence of Japanese soldiers. But she was strong for her age, and during our car rides she liked to 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 would leave for law school in Manila. And the driving around town only happened when I was home for the break, or the holidays. But her deteriorating health was most obvious to me, because I saw her only after long intervals.
Once in the summer of 2010, I found her in the living room, hunched over, trying to read a newspaper clipping. In reality she was not hunched over, this was just the shape she was in. This was the last time I saw her trying to read. A few weeks after I left for school again in June, my mother had told me my grandmother was then completely blind, the cataract had taken its toll. Since then, every time I came home, she was always a little different, and there was always some basic human faculty that she would lose, one at a time.
Shortly after she lost her sight, she refused to walk. She stayed in bed. She had lost the concept of time, and the sense of where she is. One Sunday morning in October 2010 when I was home for the break, I asked if she wanted to go out for a car ride. Maybe tomorrow, was what she said.
On Christmas Eve that year, while 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. These days she likes to keep her slippers on even as she lay in bed. I had wanted to take them off, where was she intending to go, anyhow, but she refused to let me. She begged us to take her back to her room. I promise I’ll be quiet, she said. But there was no convincing her that she was in her room. I am not home, she said. She stares at the ceiling, trying to figure things out. I think these days she means something entirely different when she says home. But what do I know?
This is where we are, I would always tell her when she is in these moods, and it takes a few minutes before she recovers. (Although, what is it that she recovers, or recovers from?) This is what I would tell her, on a Sunday morning. On Tuesday, February 1, she turns 98, and I would love to be able to tell her that this is where we are, and this is home.
