There are times I feel guilty that I forgot how it was when you were still around...and then it hit me, I just feel a lil odd these days and I want a safer ground. This is such an overdue. If I happened to be working in the Inquirer, I could have been kicked out of my job eons of years ago. Yet, sometimes, you need time, to linger with pain, to feel the absence, to be reminded of the memories. She passed away four years ago, that is, a long time already to get over a loss. Though it’s been awhile now since she left, I’d still wish she’s there, ready to listen and share her stories. I never really said good things about her, how she lived, how she was, how she influenced me and how she became the antidote to my oh-so-crazy life. Everybody knows she is no saint. She is just human, normal, ordinary, common with all the complexities of being a mother, a grandmother and more so, old and alone. I remember her stories, how as a young girl of 11 or 12, she went through the war. Eldest of the three children with only her mother by their side since her father would fight the war. They managed to live each day on those three dark years under Imperial Japan and just like all colonial Japanese period movie, she remembered it sad, a tender age to experience sleeping in the old church with just cardboard boxes to sleep on. She said it was probably the reason why her mother caught TB which took her life. She remembered marrying young to avoid getting married to a Japanese. She would remember a little of this and a little of that. Maybe, if I could have listen more intently or ask more persistently, I might be writing more than this or maybe, I should have written this a long time ago so that I can immortalize her even more. However, I cannot gloss the details of her. I cannot make her appear like St. Ines or make her look like Audrey Hepburn in her movies. Our life together is TV Drama, I know, but she is both the hero and the anti-hero of the film. Tomasa Sarreal Bedruz was born on the 18th of January 1930, that was what she claimed but some of her papers proved otherwise. I don’t remember the exact date of what her birthday should be since she never celebrated it like Catholics do. I grew up knowing she has a different religion than mine, not that I immediately figured what religion was. I just remember her God has a name and mine plays around the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.. Maybe, she doesnt have enough charisma to convince me with her faith, that is why I was never converted, or maybe, I am just plain stubborn. But we co-existed just the same. Inay filled up for the things my parents cannot deliver. My parents are separated, the only one in her brood of six. I never thought she was disappointed of Ama because of that. If she was, she didnt make me feel it. Probably because there were more reasons to be disappointed of my father, but that story needs more sheets of paper and even more years to write. You cannot say Ama was her favorite, it so happened that we were the one who lived with her in the old house when my mother went abroad. We changed address once in awhile, but still, we ended up going back there, at 399 J. Ambagan St.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 06:05:15 +0000
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