Death in the Diaspora

Dawn. Somewhere in northeast Thailand.

I’ve been awake for most of the night. Birds outside have started to chirp, several calling each other to awakening. A chorus of cicadas joins in the early morning serenade.

I’m thinking of my mother. Now bedridden for almost two years, she lives mostly horizontally. Eats pulverized food. Her hair a handful of white strands, her scalp exposed. She’s thin as a rake, but her belly is swollen with accumulating fluids that threaten to invade her lungs. Her heart works nonstop to fight off the liquid invasion.

But it’s a struggle that will eventually end with the inevitability of physical mortality ---- anyone’s, everyone’s, mine, hers, all of ours.

I ponder these thoughts in the early morning while the crickets continue their rousing songs. The birds have flown further down the estate. Mortality matters nothing to them. They leave the forest, die, and perhaps reincarnate (as Buddhists in this corner of the world believe) as doves, eagles, swans and gazelles. The forest will still be here when we, and they, are all gone.

But my mother remained steadfast. She fought for one more breath every single day.

Until yesterday. It was her last fight. Her breath didn’t hold; neither could her heart. And then it was over, and she was gone.

Boyet, my ever-vigilant brother, called me in the very early morning to tell me that she was finally at peace and her physical suffering was over. Mine just started. In disbelief, my breathing narrowed as though inhaling through a straw. A pinch in my chest and a thousand needles pricking my heart.

She vanished into the ether. I called out to her silently, “Where are you, Mom?”  I felt like a four-year-old all over again going to kindergarten class on day 1. Looked for her firm hand and her facial chuckle while I crumpled with anxiety. Kaya mo ‘yan (You can do this), as she nudged me into the playroom, my little fingers disentwined with hers. One never outgrows a daughter’s need for motherly succor.   Said the novelist Maria Semple, “Mom (always) plugs into this supreme calm.” 

Six siblings, five of us scattered across three continents, congregate at my mother’s home. We are a diasporic family of over 20 years when we packed our bags to conquer a piece of this immense world. My oldest brother braved an 11-hour layover at Haneda airport while my older sister scoured the Taiwan airport to find a chapel for a silent conversation with my mother. Another sibling rushed out of Brussels and landed in Dubai for a few hours to marvel at the glitzy globalism of a world-renowned hub and hit the skies again for a midnight flight to Manila. Another brother navigated the Seoul airport for a smooth transfer and change of planes. Whereas I am the last to arrive. The shortest distance to Manila takes the longest for flight connections. I am vainly maintaining my patience to accept the delay of my plane, which will only land at 3 am in Manila. Death has a way of throwing up these contradictions. 

Yet we all return to my mother’s home. To her purple bougainvillea trees and the kamuning shrubs, the oversized seagrass sofa and armchairs where we race to collapse into automatic comfort. The scholar Karen Wilson Baptist called it “death with a landscape.”

A rather fitting term, I thought, because my mother was herself an architect:  the first registered female architect from the University of Santo Tomas, built by the Spaniards in the early 17^th century, the first in Asia. She trailblazed while she mothered the six of us. 

She dwelt in the home she designed. There, too, she expired as she had wished. Not in some impersonal sanitized hospital ICU. —tubed up, syringed, force-fed, intubated.   Not from a glass window from which to view her like a wounded animal. Not another name on a doctor’s clipboard. 

She had earlier given instructions about the funeral clothes that she had purposely chosen: “Wear white, look beautiful. No one should be ugly at my funeral. And please don’t forget your earrings,” she sternly told me a year ago when the Angel of Death seemed to be closing in. She wrote the terms of her own demise. She designed her own landscape of passing.

Diasporic families like ours are consigned to fleeting luxuries such as a permanent home address that we scribble in our disembarkation documents. No such thing. Not anymore. The home she built for herself will soon be empty. We are left with nostalgia. And two urns in St. James Church, some five kilometers from her home. She will lie next to my father’s ashes. We are left with a landscape of memories.

But for now, we own her still. A gorgeous body dressed in turquoise blue. Her red lips are whole again.   Her eyes seem like those of Snow White waiting to be awakened with a prince’s kiss. She lies in peaceful repose at the Santuario de San Antonio --- an elegant resting place for a few days.

“The joy of seeing a huge crowd of nieces, nephews, cousins and significant others from the far corners of the world, bonding for my Mom’s service in rural North Carolina, forever afterward to understand the meaning of family,” wrote Win, my long-standing friend and landlord in Chiang Rai. Molly, his older daughter, peppered me with loving messages. Lisa, the younger one, dropped by with a vase of fresh flowers and her two lovable poodle dogs, both tucked their tiny feet around my ankles as they watched me cry.   Eric, our hotel manager buddy, spoke lovingly of his mom, whom he cared for with his brother Stefan for two months until she returned to Stockholm. Alex in Milan will call me soon. Florin in Oman sent his love and sympathies. Caroline, my peripatetic friend currently traipsing in Riyadh, Dubai, and Benin reminded me of my courage and strength. Ashley in Singapore marveled at my mother for living over a century, with style and elegance. Holland in Jakarta prayed for me for God’s loving embrace. Tim in Bangalore offered his daily Mass. My loving Archbishop friend blessed my mother online from his parish in Cotabato province in southern Philippines. My siblings and I are all bracing for the arrival of a slew of friends and well-wishers at the Capilya de la Virgen until the doors close at midnight. WhatsApp and Viber never stopped beeping.

Indeed, death removes material geographies of our grief, but never our sentiments for human connection. If anything, death restores and strengthens them.