June 6, 2006 – After the Rosary

June 6, 2006 – After the Rosary

It’s around 8:00 PM on Thursday February 2nd, 2006. The rosary held for my mother at Martin Funeral Home in El Paso, Texas on Montana Avenue has come to an end and most of those who came to pay their respects to Mom have bid their farewell and given the bereaved family their heartfelt sympathy. Of those remaining EA, the family housekeeper, is having the toughest time letting go. She and my mother had formed a very tight bond in later years with EA being the one my mother and father depended upon for not only the upkeep of their home but also for daily nursing the two of them: ensuring my mother’s regime of drugs were taken at the appropriate time, administering and recording blood pressure readings at intervals during the day, testing her level of blood sugar at different intervals… The list went on with my father who had depended upon her for help during his recovery from a hip and knee replacement as well as a recent broken leg. EA had become very close to my mother indeed. Now that Mom was gone, I wondered if EA didn’t feel a whole mix of emotions beyond the grief of loosing someone close—guilt that she had failed Mom in some way, fear that her employer of so many years would not need her any more… She among all of us displayed the greatest amount of emotional anguish—some of it no doubt attributed to the customs of Mexico where grief is much more publicly expressed than among the more restrained American.

As the last of Mom’s friends took their leave, we all had to face the same realization that EA had reckoned with, the prospect that the presence of Mom’s physical form on earth among the living was one day closer to ending; that tomorrow we would no longer have any tangible evidence of her presence with us; that we’d only be left with our memories. Those of our sister SY would be of a time and place earlier and different than any of us. My father would be next, knowing her as she struggled to provide for her family; knowing her as she made a new life with him in America. We siblings would have our own remembrances, each remembering different stages in her life as time changed her into the new person we each came to know unmindful of the earlier person that existed before we came into being. The finality of this night was something none of us wanted to contemplate, reasoning that we still had tomorrow before we had to completely let go.

We invite all the close and distant family members to join us at home where EA had so much food left over from lunch that everyone will have a choice of something to eat. Our half-sister SY and her husband BB, Mom’s brother SQ and his wife NQ, and Mom’s niece AQ and her nephew FY, my wife IM and our oldest daughter ME, as well as the immediately family: Dad, my oldest sister EV and her daughter CB, middle sister LC, and youngest sister DD. At home, everyone gathers around the dining room table while my sisters and niece stand and our out of town guests take seats around the table with Dad at the head. EA has brought something to eat and drink for everyone assembled. The talk in the room begins with the funeral tomorrow. SQ is a pall bearer and asks about the arrangements for the funeral tomorrow. The other pall bearers include my sister LC, my niece CB, my half brother DG (home with his family, he’s aware of tomorrow’s schedule), EV’s boyfriend PS an Army Sergeant Major who in the past several years has become part of the extended family, and me. The day will begin at 9:00AM when Martin Funeral Home will send two limos to Dad’s place one to carry the ball bearers and the second to carry the family members back to the funeral home. At 9:30 AM we’ll bear Mom’s casket at the funeral into the hearse for the drive from Martin to Our Lady of Assumption Church where the funeral service will begin at 10:00 AM. After the service, we’ll travel to the cemetery for the graveside service. At each stop, we will bear the casket to and from the hearse, ending at the cemetery.

Once the details of the memorial services are explained a silence settles over the dining room table. I interrupt the quiet to ask Mom’s sole surviving sibling, SQ, about my mother’s early life. To my surprise, he said that he never knew my mother in the Philippines; that he grew up knowing of her but never actually meeting her. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, when SQ had left the Philippines to work on merchant ships and in the oil fields of the Middle East he began corresponding with Mom and asked for her help coming to the U.S., which she and my father gave. My uncle SQ ended up working in El Paso first as a maintenance man at the airport hotel where my sister EV was manager, then with the City of El Paso, where he still works. He also married the nice Filipino lady MQ. She had been living in one of my parent’s rental properties with her son. At few years after SQ arrived and began working in El Paso, the two married with my uncle SQ adopting her son. If you were to look at him, it’s hard to see the family resemblance with my mother. He looks remarkably young for a man in his late 60s, though his bald head is ringed with salt and pepper hair more the former than the latter. His brown eyebrows still lack any gray and his brown eyes are surrounded by the wrinkled furrows of a much younger man. His characteristic flaring Filipino nose is a bit more pointed than typically found on the island. His high cheekbones broaden a face that tapers to a “U”-shaped jaw. When he smiles his brown eyes have a twinkle reflecting a soul that has seen the best and worst of life.

Like my mother, my uncle SQ is a complex man that I’ve not fully understood or appreciated. After the Second World War, his older brothers collected cigarettes on the U.S. Navy ships where they worked. Ten-year old Simone and his younger brothers sold them. The kids also made cigarettes that they smoked. Another source of income for the enterprising youngsters was picking up shell casing and unspent ammunition from the fields around Agoo La Union where the military would hold maneuvers. They would sell these for cash or other goods that could be bartered.

When my uncle had concluded his reminisces, our sister SY described another person in my mother’s life during the war who could tell me much more of the time before and after my birth. A cousin on my sister’s side, he was with my mother, her mother-in-law, SQ, and little Cora when they were all in the evacuation center during the American reoccupation of the Philippines. SQ said he was now in the Bay Area about to retire and that I should contact him when I return to learn more of these years in my mother’s life. I promised her I would.

Shortly afterwards, everyone seemed to sense it was time to leave and prepare for the busy day to come. Our guests depart and we all retired for the evening.