It’s been 202 days since your grandmother passed away and my last entry on this blog. She is always in my thoughts, what she would probably think a constant factor in everything that I do. I miss her a lot. I still dream of her regularly and wake up in the small hours crying out to her.
The dreams vary. At times, I see her in the sad state she was in prior to her leaving us, a faint shadow of her vibrant self. Other times, I see myself lying down next to her as was my custom during the early stages of her ailment that slowly but surely drained her vitality over the years. I used to make her tell me stories of her younger days. We would sometimes mull over and laugh at her own dreams which were made vivid by Sinemet, her maintenance medication for Parkinson’s Disease. She would always ask me to pray the Rosary with her before she slept, a ritual that was later rendered impossible by the impairment of her speech and memory.
The happiest dream of her I’ve had so far harks back to my second year in the minor seminary, at that year’s celebration of Parents’ Day. Accompanied by your grandfather in his polo barong and beige pants, your grandmother was at the receiving area, dressed in a floor length dress of varying sizes and shades of green and brown paisley. As was her custom, she had no make-up on – lipstick was her only concession to vanity, her sole adornment a pair of golden camachile earring similar to what your great-grandmother, Petra, wore in her lifetime. I was going down the stairs when she spotted me, smiled and waved amidst the crush of seminarians welcoming their parents. I kissed her on the cheek and, in the blush of her subtle floral perfume, told her, for the first time, how beautiful she was. She rewarded me with a smile that lingers in my memory to this very day. That’s where my dream ended, but I remember how your grandparents won one of the games devised for the parents that day. The fathers were asked to go up the stage with their wives’ purses and were asked to produce items from the emcee’s checklist. Your grandparents won because your grandma’s bag contained almost all the novenas asked from the competitors.
You’re never really an adult until you become a parent or lose both of yours. You go through the motions of work and duty entailed by maturity but there’s nothing like responsibility for another life and your very own in forcing you to face up to reality. With your grandmother, I always took comfort in the thought that there’s always someone I could come home to if all else failed, who would always accept me for what I am, no matter what. One would suppose that your grandma’s protracted ailment would have already prepared me for her passing, but it still feels like getting the rug pulled off your feet.
Unlike the time your grandfather passed away, I was mostly dry-eyed when we finally laid your grandmother to rest. Grief, it seems, has many faces and about as many ways of appointment. Most times it is a dull, persistent ache you almost miss when it goes away, other times it's a predator lying in wait when you turn a corner completely unaware of its menace. After striking a note so faint you have to strain to hear, it becomes a demanding child who regards itself the center of a universe. The public variety you go through with the ones you love is mostly ritual, the rest that is legion you have to confront on your own, behind a happy mask you wear for the day and the day after that.
