For the previous year-enders, you may click on the links below:
2021 - "Anticipating 2022 and Potentially Moving On"
2019 - "惊喜 (Don’t worry. This is an English blog entry.)" Part 1; from old blog
2019 - "惊喜 (Don’t worry. This is an English blog entry.)" Part 2; from old blog
For the last part of this blog series, click here.
Every day is a struggle, and thus peeple must face it with strength and courage. It seems to be the formula all of us have to take to solve the struggle we face on a daily basis: deciding to follow the alarm or snooze for a bit, thinking what clothes and shoes to wear, dealing with the seemingly never-ending workload, choosing between meeting friends or going straight back home to rest.
And of course, 2022, with the easing of mobility restrictions, those daily struggles mentioned above became part of our lives once again. Over this pandemic, we chose courage to live with COVID-19 and to be back where we used to be three years ago.
That is the story common to every one of us this year.
But to some, 2022 has been, on a neutral sense, an eventful series of 365 days.
As for me, it's more than that. Because this year, I was given the biggest challenges yet.
Here I share with you the extraordinary instances when I gathered all the courage to face the struggles of 2022.
(Trigger Warning: Death, Loss of a Loved One)
FATHER'S DEATH. Just a brief background, my father was already diabetic in his twenties. Aside from this, his health, in general, was not always at its best and I can say, he endured a lot: pulmonary tuberculosis (he was a smoker), numbing of his extremities, wounding and scarring of his limbs, partial hearing loss, and gradual slowness of his movement.
Despite all these, he still regularly went to work. Of course, he was advised to just file for early retirement, but he declined.
In the middle of the year, my family decided to pour in our resources to renovate the extension of our humble home. It started early July. With this development, we had a very hopeful outlook for the months to come.
Not knowing that in a matter of weeks, our lives will be changed forever.
20 July, my afternoon sleep got interrupted. At that time, I was working graveyard shift, so I needed more hours of sleep, else I will not be at my best to perform at work. The second sleep that day came with two images: the family is in mourning; the one in the casket is my father.
I woke up and ignored the images, because none of my dreams has ever come true before.
The next day, my father was not feeling well, but he stubbornly went to work, despite my mother's advice to take a day off and rest. That night, he was found lying on the ground in a very helpless state. He cannot stand up and was reluctant to go home but was able to do so since my mother, brother, sister and a family friend all went to the bodega (warehouse) to collect him. All we thought was he just had a severe fever.
Before I went to work that night, I left an instruction to my siblings to call me up if there's an emergency. I bade my father goodbye as he lays on our couch, but he did not say a word.
That time, my work hours is twelve midnight to nine o'clock in the morning. There's one hour break in between, that is four to five A.M. During the break, I constantly check my phone to see if my siblings had left messages. There's none. I felt confident the rest of the day would be alright. So I proceeded to the next half of my work bearing that assumption, I did not check my phone again.
The end of shift came, as I was preparing to go home, I turned the mobile data on, and a surge of peculiar messages came in. They are all messages of condolences. What the heck just happened, I muttered.
I frantically read through my siblings' messages, which I received not until that moment, it became clear to me that my father was brought to the nearest hospital and has indeed passed away. Based on the timestamps of messages and posts, he has died for more than two hours already by the time I saw them.
It was during the second half of my shift all these things transpired. At about six o'clock, Papa was rushed to Gat Andres Bonifacio Memorial Hospital; some thirty minutes later, he breathed his last.
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| from Wikimedia Commons by Gaurav Dhwaj Khadka used under Creative Commons Attribution International |
Then I remembered what I saw in my dream two days ago. "Lord, nagkatotoo nga. (Lord, it came true.)" I said to myself as I shook my head in disbelief.
The first thing that came to my mind was I need to be with my mother immediately. Guys, my workplace at that time was in Ortigas and our residence is in Manila. I did not care how much it will cost me, I grabbed a taxi outside and sped as much as the driver could towards the funeral home where my father's cadaver was brought.
From the taxi doors, I went straight to my mother who was standing outside the funeral parlor, gave her a very tight hug and we wept. This is the most hurt I felt in my life. I cannot believe that in an instant, she's become a widow. I cannot believe we just lost our father. He's alive when I left the house for work, not knowing that I would be coming back to Manila the next day to see myself planning for his funeral arrangements.
I don't know how much courage I mustered to face all these. I was still utterly stunned by the quick sequence of events when I reached the funeral home, but it didn't take long before I accepted the reality that the pillar of the house is really gone, that is when we had to choose a casket for our father. It felt surreal but it is unbelievably real.
It was all unexpected, aside from the vision I had two days before, which I ignored, virtually none in the family saw this coming. We were simply not mentally prepared. According to my mother, Papa was giving some weird statements to her just days before he passed, but she was also ignoring those. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, it's his way of saying his goodbyes.
At the funeral home, important decisions had to be made, especially what comes next after the wake. Taking into consideration the suddenness of all that happened, I suggested to have my father's remains cremated and his urn be brought home, so that all of us, especially Mama, can still have some "sense of Papa's presence." Papa's ashes are still in our home since his cremation last 30 July.
Since then, celebrations at home were toned-down. Christmas? It just flew like a regular day to us. In speaking of regular days, we do our duties and functions as normal as possible. My brother and I now hold the responsibility of being the top men in the house, my first two younger sisters also contribute to the financial stability of our family. The youngest siblings continue their studies, my mother still devotes herself into assuring our well-being. I believe all of us have accepted Papa's death, however, the subtle vacancy my father had left is just so hard to fill.
On a personal note, of course I have a couple of questions in mind, like, had I taken the vision seriously, will this event be averted? If I chose to be absent from work and stayed home that night, what difference would it make?
I want to search for answers, but again, what difference can it really make?
INSERT: On behalf of my family, I would like to thank once more all the peeple who reached out to us and sent their condolences. I'm not a superstitious guy but I was forced to follow their rules not to offer thanks to those who helped us go through those difficult times. I was upbraided by one of my aunts when I thanked her for being with us at my father's first day of wake. This explains why I sort of rephrased my replies to you peeple in Messenger and in text messages.
(This blog post has a continuation...)
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