Youngblood
Losing Mom
May 4, 2008. It was the first Sunday of the month. The pastor in our church welcomed the people with a smile. When everybody was settled and comfortable in their cushioned chairs, the pastor referred to the Sunday’s bulletin and first on the list was the upcoming event the following Sunday. I knew it was coming. Ah, yes, the second Sunday of May. How could I forget, Mother’s Day! I braced myself in the chair, looked around and observed the reaction of the congregation. I saw the smiles, heard the applause, felt the excitement inside that room, yet I sat there feeling all alone. The feeling of not fitting in had haunted me for several years.
I lost my Nanay six years ago on a Mother’s Day. It took me three years to get used to the hallowed emptiness of celebrating this special day without a mother. I could not stand the sight of children kissing their moms, giving them flowers and greeting them on this day. I used to break into tears, refusing to embrace the fact that Nanay [Mother] had already left us.
I can still clearly remember that fateful Saturday. Like on other ordinary days, we were waiting for Tatay and Nanay to come home for lunch. I was looking over my grandmother, when Tatay [Father] arrived alone, rushing inside the house. I wondered where Nanay was. I felt weird and I sensed something was not right. I immediately followed Tatay to their room and saw him hurriedly packing pillows and blankets. He was freaking out so I stopped him and asked what was happening. “Go dress up, you’re mom is in the hospital. She is sick,” he said.
I fixed myself right away, dismissing serious thoughts. “Hypertension or high blood, Nanay will be all right,” I told myself. But before I even got into her room, a bunch of nurses and doctors already swarmed around her. They were hasty in their movements, attaching oxygen, tubes and instruments to Nanay. These are things I see only in the movies. I started to get nervous, yet I clung to that thin strand of hope that everything will be all right.
Later, a doctor and a heart specialist showed my father and me the CT-Scan result. I am not a doctor but seeing the blood all over her brain and while listening to the doctors, I realized Nanay would be leaving us soon. My heart sank; I still could not believe these things were happening. My father agreed to have the operation anyway despite of what he heard from the doctors.
On that fateful day, while my friends were celebrating, I was in the hospital, doing my best not to cry. When others were busy preparing something for their moms, my two younger brothers and I were by Nanay’s bedside, quietly waiting for her to wake up from her coma. I tried to be strong and hold back my tears for the sake of my siblings and Tatay. I closed my eyes and prayed so hard that night. I pinched myself a couple of times, hoping that this was just a bad dream.
May 2008. As I sat inside the church, listening intently to what the pastor was saying, my mind wandered to Nanay when she was still alive. I never knew her completely until she was buried, until relatives, friends and strangers started sharing the life they had with Nanay. They told me how wonderful and generous Nanay was. How she dealt with patients in a public hospital who worried seriously about their billings as much as their health. I remembered how Nanay squeezed every decent opportunity to make a living for us. How I saw the boxes in her office, filled with apples, mangoes, dried fish and cosmetics for sale. How she sold those Tupperware sets to her colleagues. Nanay really worked hard to make both ends meet, so we can go to the best schools, don decent clothes, eat good food and attend to our other needs, material or otherwise.
That day in May 2002, my back already hurt from sitting in the passenger’s seat of our old car. Tatay and I were driving all over the city looking for the drug the surgeon prescribed for Nanay’s operation. We searched in each and every drugstore to no avail. I prayed and prayed asking the good Lord to lead us to this medicine but we went back to the hospital empty-handed.
Back in the hospital, a nurse, a friend of Nanay, asked me to come and see my mother. With tears in her eyes, she ushered me to the room where my mother lay quiet. There, I saw Nanay almost lifeless, with tubes in her mouth, needles in her skin and a shaved head. I could hear her breathing through a respirator, the only thing that indicated the life within her. Her life now hung on this cold machine. Then my younger brothers burst crying from what they saw. I tried to hold back my tears, I clinched my fist but the tears fell freely my cheeks. I cried with them.
The next day, Mother’s Day, when we came back to the hospital, I could already see the door of Nanay’s room from afar as if beckoning me to rush in. Then I heard the screaming, the wailing and loud cries. As I stepped inside the room, the long and sharp beep was all that I could hear. Nanay was gone.
When everyone else went out, I came close to her, I slowly kissed her head, hands and feet, and for the first time I whispered to her “I am sorry. I love you, ‘Nay. Happy Mother’s Day. I will take care of our family.” As if to remind me of this tragedy, my cellphone kept beeping. My friends innocently sent text messages “Happy Mom’s Day,” for me and Nanay.
Losing Nanay was the most painful thing that happened in my life. But it made me realize how fleeting life is on earth. In the blink of an eye, we can lose someone so important to us that before we know it, they are gone. Say sorry, say thank you, or I love you, savor the moment with the woman who brought you to this world for we will never know the last time she will celebrate the day, when we pay tribute to the greatest woman in our lives.
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