April 4, 2005 – Considering Mortality

April 4, 2005 – Considering Mortality

The Pope’s death put in mind that both my parents were devote Catholics and likely to be in mourning over the Pontiff’s passing. Certainly it was evident in the parking lot of the Catholic Church along the path of my run midday on Sunday that Catholics were grieving. Its parking lot was filled—a requiem mass in progress to be sure. I called my parents Sunday evening to find them going about their normal routine. I asked if they had attended Our Lady of Assumption today—their Church on Byron and Truman in El Paso. No, they both replied. They had said their prayers for the Pope on Saturday as is per usual for the two of them. “We’re Jewish Catholics,” my father quipped. The reality is church is far less crowded and you can get some serious worshipping done without the crowd, which is what the two of them did, I’m sure.

We then considered mortality at length. My mother’s older brother in the Philippines, MA, had died two weeks ago. MA’s daughter, AN, who lives in a suburb of Los Angeles—she lives with her daughter and cares for her grandchildren while her daughter works—called my mother and said she was going to The Philippines for the funeral. It was being held in Agoo La Union, where MA had a medical practice until he retired some thirty years earlier. My mother and father sent AN something to help with the journey. I asked my mother if she had wanted to attend. “No,” she said. “I’m getting too old for such long airplane rides.” The reality is that my mother has gotten tired of being cooped up in tight spaces for long periods of time. The train journey to New York she undertook with my father took two days but she had a sleeper that was just the right size for her to move about in privacy.

I asked my mother how many of her siblings were still alive and she said they were all gone: her older brother MA and her younger sister, MR. My father and I—I was on speakerphone—reminded her that she had at least eight other siblings. Surely some of them were still alive. My Filipino grandfather had three children by my mother’s mother, who died shortly thereafter. My grandfather then remarried and had eight more children, five boys and three girls. I asked my mother how many of them were still alive and she said there were two, SI, who lives in El Paso, and MY, who lives in Baguio, The Philippines, the summer capital of the Philippines so named because it is cooler than the lowlands. My parents and SI correspond with MY and provide some financial aid as is the custom among Filipinos living in the U.S. to their families in the Philippines.

Another death that had affected both my parents was that of our longtime neighbor, ER. Both ER and MA were in their nineties chasing the century mark. Their passing at such an old age no less eased the loss felt by my parents. ER and his wife BR came into our lives in the 1950s when both my father and ER were still on active duty in the Army, both stationed at Ft Bliss. ER was an Army cook and we loved whenever he cooked for gatherings. BR, a stern, headstrong, will-full woman had died about 20 years ago. After a long number of years being a bachelor and well into his early 80s, my mother and father had introduced ER to the estranged wife, NT, of one of my mother’s younger brothers. The separation was amicable. NT had followed her two daughters to the U.S.—both had immigrated to fill nursing jobs in El Paso. My mother’s younger brother, GE, like MA, was a doctor in The Philippines, and did not want to immigrate with his wife NT. GE did come to visit us once after NT had moved. Like all my Filipino uncles, GE, like his brother SI, was the kindest, most soft-spoken of men. He gave NT and ER his blessings.

NT and ER eventually married after NT’s divorce was final. I remembered seeing the two months after their wedding. ER looked like a much younger man. He had someone to make him want to be young again. NT was a good twenty-five years his junior. Still the two of them made quite a pair and they genuinely dotted on one another. “What had caused his death,” I inquired. “It was old age,” my father answered. “His body just stopped working, heart failure, kidney failure,… though he did die peacefully.” I asked what had been done for ER’s passing and my father said there had been nine days of novenas the home he shared with NT on Truman Street. Not a bad way to spend your autumn years, with someone you care for, easing into death, much as you did into life.