In keeping with the theme, I rummaged through one of our cabinets and unearthed my earliest account of my mother’s death. I had brought it here after I moved out from QC to Makati, perhaps thinking it was time I had re-read it. It was handwritten, dated Dec. 20, 1997 and severely stapled on the edges. It had an extra blank page that I must have used in lieu of an envelope. I must have written it while on Christmas vacation during my first year in high school, and then, re-reading it upon finishing, I must have gotten scared my parents would clean my room and chance upon it so I stapled it up, thinking it would be safer that way.
That Christmas was horrible and we wanted to do everything we could to not remind each other of the tragedy; this four-page journal entry, if discovered, wouldn’t have done any good to any of us. I must have had this thought when I tore the pages from my spiral notebook journal and stapled them close, taping the “package” with clear tape against the inside of the back cover.
As a 12-year-old, I seemed to have had a lot of foresight. (This despite the fact that I kept on repeating in that note about how I did not see it coming, did not see my mother’s death coming so quickly.)
Looking back, the whole attempt (of stapling and taping the bulky thing) wasn’t at all inconspicuous, but seeing its preserved, untampered state about a decade later, I guess dad and auntie hadn’t strayed into this journal, or into any of my journals, for that matter.
It had a lot of the details that I had been repeating, time and again, whenever I came to writing about mom, usually during her death anniversary in November, birth anniversary in January or around Mothers’ Day in May. Sometimes I worry if I am too repetitive, but then again, I figure, this was a way of keeping her memories alive, for when I am older and when that time comes that I would be too far away from that day. I guess, I’ll never tire of writing about her, basically because I feel like I owe it to her to remember, always.
But then, it was also quite striking how my younger eyes had in fact taken note of some other things that I must have edited out of my later remembrances. Like how I had in fact written that I should have taken the fact that I had left my wallet and lunch money at home that morning as a sort of omen. I had written about how we had come home from school that day: I cut class half-day, Auntie came to get me and Krista with her shades on; I was called to go to the Prefect’s Office via the PA system, something that just doesn’t happen at all since I wasn’t the kind of girl often called into the principal’s office to begin with, or at least, not at the time.
At the time, there was no text messaging; I had called home via payphone, asking Auntie to look for my wallet and bring it when she attends Krista’s math contest that morning. That should be in time for recess, I said. I was on my way back from the contest venue, which was already empty when I got there and everyone I ran into all told me the same thing: I was being called into the Prefect’s Office. The fact was that I didn’t hear myself being called. I could only imagine how more harrowing things would have been, had I not fled the lounge, had I heard my own name myself. Maybe it was meant to be that way.
I wrote about how when we got home, we found that the living room had been re-arranged. I was amused to see how my 12-year-old self had written, “There was a plain white curtain hung by the wall.” Two reasons: One, I had completely forgotten this fact. Two, while there were many cringe-worthy, ill-constructed sentences and fragments in the whole thing, this one seemed to stand out. I wanted to take my 12-year-old self aside. I would have told her, Nice sentence kid. Now, if only you would remove all these annoying ellipses.
I should have saved that paper I had written my mother’s eulogy on – yes, I delivered my mother’s eulogy in that last Necro before the burial. But then, it wouldn’t have survived my sweaty palms. All that’s left of it is the first line, which I remember until today. I had started with, “When I came to know about my mother’s death.”
* * *
By way of ending, I had written, inexplicably within quotation marks, about how death was both a sad and joyous thing, depending on where you’re coming from. There was no attribution, so I think that I must have used the quotation marks more as aesthetic devices than practical ones. In the succeeding, “non-quoted” paragraph, I talked about perspective briefly, a sort of analysis of what the whole ordeal has taught me. I had written it the way students usually ended their essays – “Through this experience, I developed a better perspective about death.”
Have I, really, at that moment, so quickly “developed a better perspective?” At 12, I must have been faring well with b’s-ing my way through school papers with this kind of language. Thinking about it, this thought really made me smile.
Incidentally, by way of going back to Didion, the page I am on is Page 192:
“People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as ‘dwelling on it.’ We understand the aversion most of us have to ‘dwelling on it.’ Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. ‘A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,’ Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. ‘But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.’”
If I were to try to write down everything that strikes me so closely about this book, I think I would end up quoting pages of passages. But I’m not ruling that effort out entirely.
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