Landscapes of Grief

Hangers are all that dominate my sister’s closet.  They hang there desolately, like sentries with no one to watch.  Cynthia departed two days ago and headed back to California.  It was her final visit to my mother’s home.  Back in transit at Taipei airport, she found the same quiet spot where she sat a month ago, soaked in the sadness of my mother’s death.   She called me.  Her voice broke as she recounted the pain of disbelief that my mother didn’t have enough breath to last until her arrival. 

I watched her fuss around until 4 a.m. on the day of her departure.  It seemed she could never tidy up my mother’s belongings.  Always, there were matters to finalize, even if the finale never came.  Grief is just that way, an emotional infinity circle that never fully closes.

The same story repeated itself in my brother’s room.  Boyet left a few days earlier than Cynthia, almost as quickly as he arrived a month back, hoping to catch my mother’s final moments.  He left behind nearly nothing.  Just two white towels, crumpled linens and deformed pillows, a half-empty bottle of shampoo, a squeezed-out toothpaste tube, discarded combs, and brushes.  The beds stood like displaced furniture in a forlorn space made more somber by the painted blue walls.  Back in Seattle, reunited with his family, his experience of my mother’s home and us, the remaining siblings, is now only through Zoom.  We’ve been reduced to pixels.

My mother’s room is like a page in an architectural magazine: stylish, color-coordinated headboards, daybeds, and matching nightstands. The oxygen concentrators, transfer chair, commodes, wheelchair, humidifier, organizer box of pills, capsules, and swabs—all the hospice paraphernalia of two years ago—are gone. A television monitor stands at the center table. It completes the picture of a room where her spirit has flown out of this material world. 

She has left us.  Permanently.  The air is thick and heavy with the weight of material belongings that now belong to the past.

Her photographs still hang on the walls.  Her oil portrait done by a gifted artist in the northern city of Baguio some seventy years ago, stands at the far end of the corridor leading to her bedroom.  She is the cynosure of this hearth and home. 

As children, we would be terrified at how we imagined her eyes would follow us everywhere.  As adults, we let her gaze comfort us and believe in the possibility that her life still resides in that portrait.  I fantasized about waking up one morning, and her portrait speaks to me about my hairstyle and the appropriate earrings.  Mom was always fussy about how I should physically present myself, not sporting the “forever marching activist” look, as she would amusedly describe me.  

At every turn of the house is her imprint:  a two-seater gallinera at the entrance;  a trellis of yellow flowers plunging into the pool right outside the patio;  decorative wrought iron gates and sliding glass doors;  a multi-colored painting of slender Balinese women balancing water jars on their heads.  Sepia photographs of her parents (my grandparents) in pewter frames, a warm portrait of her and my father at the house blessing twenty-four years ago.  The icons of Jesus and Mary.  She was as elegant as she was prayerful, seamlessly blending the sacred and the secular. 

Everywhere I turn, whatever time of day or night, my tears fall in this desolate home.  At times, I feel the emptiness of a vast, soundless ocean, the burning of a scorched desert, the coldness of frozen waterscapes, the tangled trees of messy forests. 

Showers are best for crying.  Vital water flows mute my sobs.  Between my eyes and the shower head, fluids mix and meld into a small waterfall.  I push the tiles with my palms and sink into my sorrow.  When the tears stop, the claws of sadness are temporarily loosened.   I feel my grief revere my mother yet again.  For the rest of my life, wrote the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there. 

Every day since she passed, I have wandered about in landscapes of grief, which the celebrated writer C.S. Lewis described as a long, winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.  I encounter her while meandering through long-forgotten memories, now revived through her absence. 

Only now did I realize that we both suffered from midnight cravings for biscuits.  She endowed me with her nocturnal urges to binge-eat.   In two different countries for over five decades, we may have eaten the same midnight snacks.  I’ve stopped munching a month ago.  I have lost my midnight biscuit partner.

I learned plenty from her tutorials on playing mahjong.  She was razor sharp on the mahjong table, quick thinking on discarding the tiles to produce a winning hand.   Her daily quorum of three other women marveled at how, even in her 90s,  she could so easily beat them.  Until COVID struck and the mahjong-mates disappeared, along with the clinking of tiles and the joyful chatter.  Her world shrank as she fought against any opportunity for the virus to enter her home.  She triumphed even as she courageously endured a two-year lockdown.  That’s my mom: committed to life, fiercely, ferociously, feistily.

I loved her tenaciousness and how she persisted in obtaining a degree in architecture during the turbulent years of World War II.  One lazy afternoon, when we indulged in sugary snacks, she recounted the evacuation from her home province with her parents.  Along with her five other siblings, they ran with just a small suitcase each because of a rumor that the Japanese would carpet-bomb their province.  Then the Americans under General Douglas MacArthur returned in 1945.  My mother resumed her studies, finally completing her architectural degree after nine years and two foreign occupations. 

She graduated from the University of Santo Tomas as the first female graduate and was recognized by her university in December 2010.  I watched all the female students in the audience rush onstage to have their pictures taken with my mother, the rockstar of the school of architecture.  She held her plaque and her flower bouquet.  She was speechless, and I cried like an idiot.  To be the daughter of a pioneer and a trailblazer, someone who did not yield to any of life’s difficult circumstances but pushed against the tide to define herself, was her ultimate gift.  She left a legacy.  She reminded me in innumerable ways that I should make something of myself as she did.  I would not want to be anything less.

We gave a farewell lunch to the nurses and caregivers the Sunday following my mother’s inurnment.  A few have gone to other homes nearby to repeat the ritual of gently ushering someone out of their tormented bodies into a more peaceful realm --- that unknown place where we believe and hope souls have found rest.  They said their goodbyes to my mother.   They told us stories of her as their patient:  the sufferings she endured, the multiple physical inconveniences,  her courage and steadfastness to hang on for yet another day.  She fought bravely, they all said.  She wanted to see all her children surrounding her before she made her final bow.  

In the evenings, before I sleep, I invoke the ho’oponopono prayer, a Hawaiian mantra of love, forgiveness, and gratitude.  I love you; I am sorry;  Please forgive me;   I thank you.

 I offer it to my mother for everything I wish I could have told her if Time had been a bit longer and kinder.  Mom, I could still be a better daughter.

And then she spoke to me from the divine realm of the unknown through a poem that I found serendipitously during a long layover at Bangkok airport.   Henry Scott Holland, an English clergyman and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, delivered a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral following the death of King Edward VII in 1910.   I imagined my mom gently taking my face into her hands as she delivered the same words from Henry Scott Holland:

Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away into the next room
I am I and you are you
Whatever we were to each other
That we are still
Call me by my old familiar name
Speak to me in the easy way you always used
Put no difference into your tone
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes we always enjoyed together
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was
Let it be spoken without effort
Without the ghost of a shadow in it
Life means all that it ever meant
It is the same as it ever was
There is absolute unbroken continuity
What is death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you for an interval
Somewhere very near
Just around the corner
All is well.
Nothing is past; nothing is lost
One brief moment and all will be as it was before
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!