When Mama was fighting through life, in my quintessential write-up to her entitled Coming Home, I promised that she can rest in the knowledge that no matter what happens at THIS life, we’re going to be okay—that we’re going to stick together and be okay.
But the promise of being okay seems hard when the changing landscapes of my compulsion towards the inevitable end of my life seep through the surface.
Though I feel dislodged, for a few months I was at peace because I felt like I needed to stay in Antique because it was where Mama stayed for a third of her life. It was where she breathed the gentle breeze of the sea and the azure waters that crash on the sand and the shore.
But, I guess in life, “movement is life” as per a famous World War Z line, a zombie movie. I relate to the line from that movie because in the last 35 years of my life, our family has moved from Davao del Norte, Guimaras, and Antique (mine included Metro Manila). And for Mama, those moves, she considered as travel. She would always testify, when she was alive, that she was thankful that the Lord brought her to Antique so she could meet the people that became her family, and ours too.
I’ve always loved Mama’s optimism about us moving from one place to another. She felt like, as much as she had every choice to stay where she was comfortable, she decided to follow where the Lord led her—even when it’s uncomfortable, painful, and heartbreaking.
But death really changes everything, I suppose. Because I notice that my reference point towards every memory that I have from now on was from the time she was fighting the Big C and then to her funeral and burial—everything that happened before this point in my life’s axis was a distant past. I remember them in a frosted glass.
I felt like Mama was one of those who held my universe together, and now that she’s gone I had nowhere to go to, to crash and burn—only to go inside my heart and suffocate myself from the noise and the hurt.
How do I say I’m okay when I’m not? How do I consider movement as travel? And how do I say I’m ready to face death?
I can’t. Because I am not my mother.
I can only weep in moments where I could no longer carry the weight of that promise—that we’re going to be okay. I hope someone could release me from that promise so I could declare to the universe that I’m not okay and I tell the winds that I hate the universe for taking the very same one who holds her up.
Because to be perfectly honest, as much as my roots are meant to nourish my growth, I’m tired.
But I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful that someday, when I finally totally understand what it means to face death head-on, be optimistic at movement, and keep my promise of being okay while feeling not okay—I will consider the very own life that I lived abundant, and fully-lived.
There may be tears, hurt, and noise, but in the grand scheme of things, I need to remind myself this from David Foster Wallace:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
A reminder that what I need is already in front me. What is “real and essential”, is where I’m already living at. I just have to take it for what it is and to savor the now—because tomorrow is never promised and death is a thief.
Life is brief. Home is where you build your heart with. What matters is today. The rest is noise.
The Prodigal Kid 