To My Father

Starting at around 2 weeks before my father’s death, I started noticing changes in his behavior. It was initially very gradual. Unless you knew him well, you wouldn’t notice it right away. It started with the loss of his sense of time.  He became erratic. He would demand to be released from the hospital one day only to ask to be returned to the hospital the next day. He was in and out of confinement four or five times in less than a month. His liver was failing and it was having a detrimental effect on his brain. It got progressively worse to the point that nothing that he said made sense anymore. He was interchanging words. I had to write down some of the things he was saying so I could figure out which words meant what.

Up Until his last 2 weeks, he had a very sharp mind and he took great pride in it. He used to always say something along the lines of: I could lose my arms or my legs but if I lose my mind, that’s it” He often insinuated that he’d rather die than have a diminished mind. It was a painful thing to watch. The thing that he feared the most, next to death probably, was happening to him and he wasn’t even realizing it.

His warped sense of time was particularly stressful for me and my mother. Minutes became hours for him. He’d accuse me of prioritizing other things over him or not spending enough time at the hospital when almost 90% of my waking time was spent at the hospital. I started resenting it after a while because I was practically chained to the hospital room for more than a month and I had to suspend everything else. I’d leave for 40mins to have lunch and I’d get a text message asking me to come back because I’d been away for too long. That resentment was one of the things that I regretted after he passed away.

2 or 3 days before he passed away, he went into a coma. I remember having to leave the hospital because my car’s starter was starting to fail and I had to get it fixed. I was away for more than 2 hours and I didn’t get that text message that, just a few days prior, caused me so much stress. I remember thinking that at that moment, there was nothing that I wanted more than to get that message demanding that I go back to the hospital. The message never came. He never woke up from the coma. He finally succumbed to the cancer that he fought for years. That clichéd saying about spending as much quality time as you can with your loved ones especially in the twilight of their lives, it’s so obvious but it can also be easy to forget when you’re in the situation.

The last month and a half of my father’s life was an emotional rollercoaster for all of us in the family. There’s one particular memory that stands out for me. I think it was night time or early in the morning. I woke up to the sound of him calling out my name. I got up from my makeshift bed on the floor of the hospital room and walked towards him. He looked at me in the eye and, as if he was lucid for the first time in days, he said “My son”

Today’s your first death anniversary, papa. You had your doubts but I think you’d be happy to know that we’re doing fine.  Your business is doing fine.

You will always be missed.

When the Lion shed its mane

As if pressing the fast forward button on the remote, one moment you’re in a doctor’s clinic for a check up, looking at other patients in the queue in more advanced stages of the disease and getting a glimpse the immediate future through them. The next moment, you’re there, in your own future, seeing what you saw then but this time from a more intimate perspective. The transition from the then to the now is so abrupt that the mind seems to have omitted the in-between stages. It almost feels like I had time traveled.

It's december 27th, just two days after christmas. I’ve been staring at this bed for a while now. It’s a standard hospital bed with a cream colored frame draped in white sheets. It’s an otherwise ordinary bed but it is of particular interest to me because there’s this question that’s been lingering in my head. Is this going to be the bed, the one that he will last lay down on? The “death bed as they call it.”

It was almost 4 years ago when he was diagnosed with cancer. He was only given 6 months by his doctors. If you saw him a month ago, you’d think that he was openly mocking his death sentence. Apart from a fist–sized lump that was growing on his abdomen, he looked healthy. He was mobile, He went to the nearby mall regularly to buy his supplements. It almost seemed as if time was of abundance.

The decline of his health in the last few days was so sudden that I didn’t realize what was happening until it hit me in the face -It felt like being slapped out of a dream where cancer was nothing but an overgrown pimple that won't go away and waking up to reality, staring down cancer's unmasked face. Its grotesque features in plain view. His long period of good health has lulled us into a false state of security. It is like how you see it in the movies after all. I first realized that something was wrong when Christmas eve came and he wasn’t at the dinner table with us.  We always spent Christmas together having noche buena at the same table. We don't have a lot of traditions. This is one of the few and we never missed a single one. I didn't realize how bad it was until the day after Christmas. He was very weak. He wasn't eating, His face was gaunt, his muscles have wasted away. I'm not sure if he really lost that much weight in 2 days or i just didn't pay that much attention bef

The Beauty of Melancholy

Happiness has been put on a pedestal, often described as the ultimate goal in a human being’s life. Depression has been demonized endlessly by thousands of internet quotes. So it may surprise some that there are those who find appeal in melancholy. I for one, can’t imagine what my life would be like if I had not lived through it. I speak from the vantage point of one who was once almost always depressed and alone to someone who has come to terms with his own skin and isn’t as lonely anymore.

All throughout my youth until my early 20’s, I was perpetually depressed. I wouldn’t call it clinical depression because I had plenty of good reason to be depressed. It was mostly because I didn’t have a lot of people around me, also because I wasn’t living up to my high expectations of myself. My self esteem was incredibly low and it severely affected my interaction with people. It was also during this time when I was at my creative peak. My creative outlets were visual art and writing –most of this blog was a product of that particular time in my life.

 Now my life is quite different. I now know what it’s like to be valued by another person, which I’ve discovered, is the biggest self esteem boost that one can get. I also have come to terms with myself, so to speak. The downside is I no longer paint and I rarely write. When I was depressed, all I wanted was for the depression to end but now that I’m quite settled in, I look for it. I’d listen to sad music, watch tragic films. Weird as it may sound, I occasionally try to induce sadness but It doesn’t come as easily as it used to.

The appeal of melancholy is difficult to describe. One sees beauty in it though it’s hard to determine if you actually feel pleasure or satisfaction from that beauty. It feels like viewing the world through a different lens. You see things that you wouldn’t normally see if you’re in a jovial mood, in the company of others. It makes one introspect more. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that most artists and thinkers also tend to be depressive. Marcel proust once said that Happiness is good for the body but it is grief that develops the strength of the mind.

Perhaps everyone is drawn to sadness to a certain extent. We watch depressing films, listen to sad music, we try to induce tears when we’re perfectly happy and it feels good, I think.

Or perhaps this isn’t something that everyone can relate to. But to the artists, the musicians, the writers, the couch philosophers out there, I think you know what I’m talking about -to look at the world, desaturated of color with a slight tint of blue, to appreciate the soft shadows cast on a cloudy day, Maybe it does take a keen eye to see beauty in gloom

On the Litol Prince and cuteness in general

Let’s say you were walking along a bridge and you saw the puppy in the picture above. It's immediately obvious that there's a high likelihood that the puppy would be facing a dismal fate as a stray dog or a sumptuous dish in a buffet sometime in the near future.

What would you do?

1. Walk past the dog if you saw nothing while pondering in your head how you came to be a heartless husk of a human being.
2. Using a voice that’s a few octaves higher than your regular speaking voice, talk to it using nonsensical word-sounds like ”anununununu”, “ajooeyjooey”, “moooooeee you’recominghome withmeajoojoo” and proceed to take the dog home.

I was faced with such a conundrum a few years ago while I was passing through the bridge connecting MRT north station and trinoma. I was walking along, blissfully minding my own business when I saw a man with two puppies in the corner of my eye. I stopped to absorb the scene. The man looked homeless. The puppies looked like they were barely a month old, one male and one female. The man was giving the puppies away… in exchange for a little money of course, as capitalist tradition dictates. The dogs were cute so he didn’t have trouble attracting positive attention. A woman passed by, went with option 2 and promptly left with the female puppy, leaving the male puppy behind.

A took a good look at the remaining puppy. A number of thoughts went through my head. With each passing thought, the prospect of brinigng the dog home with me became more and more tempting.

As with every decision involving the heart, I tried to justify the idea in my head until eventually it made so much sense that it was as if the universe itself was telling me to take the dog home. I thought to myself I’d be helping this man, I’d be helping this dog, the man would finally leave the bridge thereby easing the flow of pedestrian traffic, I’d rid the world of one more stray dog and its future progeny, the world will be a better place to live in and therefore peace for all mankind will inevitably ensue. It just seemed like I was making a decision for the betterment of everyone in the immediate area and the world in general.

And so I made my choice. I didn’t say “mooeee you’re coming home with me ajoojoo” … audibly. I did it within the confines of my own head, as all proper men should.

It was after I gave the man my “donation” that it struck me that taking care of another life form that would be entirely dependent on me was like plugging in a USB device in one try.  I had done neither in my life and both required skills that I did not possess.  In my excitement, I also conveniently and intentionally forgot that my family hated animals profusely. Either I had to upgrade my puppy hiding skills to ninja level or the introduction had to be made as perfect as possible

To ensure the highest level of success, I made sure that the little prince was as presentable as possible before I brought him home. I brought him to a veterinarian friend who gave him the appropriate shots. I bought him a cute little collar with bells on it. I think I may have paid more for the collar than for the dog. Written on the collar was the name “Prince”. I’ve never been good at giving names. I’ve come up with names as uninspired as “Pussy” for a stray cat that used to visit our house often,  “Browny” for a dog that was brown and “Blacky” for another dog which was “coincidentally” black.  I probably would’ve named the puppy “white-with-brown-spots-y” if left to my own devices. As creative as a claim to be, my brain just shuts down when it comes to coming up with names. Rather than be blamed in the future for coming up with a very lame name, this time I let the collar decide so it can take the blame instead of me. The dog was gonna be named Prince. Not everyone liked the name but it’s not like they gave me suggestions…  Also, it was the collar’s fault.

The initial reception for prince back at home was less than tepid. The reaction ranged from shock to disgust. I didn’t tell them right away that I picked him up near the MRT station to limit the disgust factor but that didn’t help much. It's good that he was already toilet trained when i got him otherwise he probably would've been kicked out of the house without my knowledge. They didn’t want him inside the house. They didn’t want prince to get near them at all. That wasn’t a problem for prince as he was a very shy little puppy. He avoided all contact with people whenever he could. He hid under one of my book shelves for most of the day and made no sound at all. For the first time in my life, I officially had a pet dog. It just so happened that he was invisible for most of the day. One of the aspects of dog ownership that I was most looking forward to was seeing that wagging tail waiting for me upon getting home. I started thinking that I was gonna be missing out on that with prince.

I’ve always had a soft spot for non-human mammals. I find them easier to like than humans on average. When I was a kid, I’d secretly adopt stray kittens that wandered into our house. I didn't get to keep them very long. I wasn't very good at hiding stuff. It’s a little embarrassing to admit because adopting little kitties is not among the manliest of activities. But I believe that even the manliest of men have a little soft, vulnerable spot that an innocent, wide-eyed stare from a juvenile canine or feline should be able to penetrate, given enough time. Even Hitler, the very face of evil himself, kept and loved animals. I think that some of us do need a dose of cuteness in our lives.

It may be an aberration of evolution that a member of one species would raise an individual from another species but I’m willfully playing along knowing full well that my biological need to nurture is being fooled by one of nature's little tricks. Cuteness is indeed a powerful tool for survival. I shall illustrate the power of cuteness below:

I had to photoshop the tears in because they were nonexistent in the original photo but replace Puss with a puppy and the Dawson's Creek guy's mug with my awesome-albeit-douchey face and this is pretty much a reenactment of what happened when i first met Prince.

It's now been quite a while since I first met the Litol prince. He's not so litol anymore. Some might say that he’s also not as cute but I think that he’s no less amazing.  He shed his shyness after a few months. He's now an uncontainable ball of energy. You leave for a few hours and he greets you like he hasn't seen you in weeks. He's not a big dog but he'd knock you down if you get him excited enough. I didn't quite miss out on the "dog experience" like I thought I would.

Prince wasn't our last dog. A few months after I introduced the litol prince to the dog haters club (my family), my sister brought home Rambo, a pomeranian puppy.  Rambo had it easy. By the time that he came along, everyone in the house was a dog lover or at the very least a dog tolerator.  So even if Rambo was an indiscriminate defecator and urinator he was loved right off the bat. From the time that I brought prince home to the first time he elicited a smile in the face of a nonbeliever, he won every heart in the house one by one. It’s quite amazing to see people who were once animal haters talk to dogs as if they were their own kids; talk about dogs as if they were the staunchest of animal rights advocates. The local dog haters club was eventually abolished. Rambo helped a lot but it was prince who first tore the walls down. Such was the legacy of the litol prince. He changed hearts, minds, he got himself a home and a family without even trying. He now even owns a little bit of internet real estate through my blog. Not a bad life for an “askal”. He's living example that overcoming hate is sometimes only a matter of spending some time with the subject of your hate... and that a little bit of cuteness goes a long way.

Anatomy of a Car Accident (fiction?)

 

Diffused by the pouring rain, the beam from our headlights bathed the scene with an eerie white glow.  There was an overwhelming atmosphere of dread.  The air smelled of pain, fear, panic and confusion.  The scent seeped from the capillaries in my nostrils to my brain where it built up pressure until it felt like my skull was going to explode. Near our vehicle was an overturned tricycle.  Scattered around it were 7 badly injured people, most of them moaning in pain.  I say most because one of them wasn't.  The driver of the tricycle lay underneath his vehicle, silent.  His head was bloody, his limbs were contorted into unnatural angles.  It was a scene straight out of a twilight zone episode.  All that was needed was a grayscale filter, which would've been particularly useful to hide the blood and the gore.  I didn't have that grayscale filter though.  The colors around me bombarded my eyes in the most unwelcome fashion.  For a few minutes, I was paralyzed. Thoughts blazed through my head at lightspeed.  The scene was right before my eyes but the mind would not believe that it was real.  As I tried to make sense of what I was seeing, the immediate past, the present and the future all tried to squeeze themselves in my head at the same time.  Through all the confusion, I tried retracing what had happened a few minutes earlier.

It was almost midnight and there was a slight drizzle. I was making a left turn from Congressional Avenue towards a perpendicular road.  It would've been a sharp, right-angle turn across a 3-lane highway which curved a little bit.  In between my side of the road and the other side was a center island strewn with trees which slightly limited the visibility of the cars coming from the other side.  I approached the turn. I looked for oncoming vehicles.  I only saw one vehicle which was still quite far away so I decided to take the turn.  I had already occupied one lane of the road when I saw a tricycle with its lights off speeding towards us.  It was moving along the lane closest to the island. It was travelling at a really fast speed so I had very limited time to react.  In another split second, it hit the passenger side door of our vehicle.

Being on the driver's side, I didn't feel the impact as much as my passenger did. Immediately after the impact, I stepped out of the vehicle and I cursed at the driver, telling him that he didn't have his lights on. That was before I saw his body lying face-down on the road and the carnage that surrounded him. Whatever I was thinking or whatever I was saying came to an abrupt halt and everything froze.

Before that night, I had never been in an accident that resulted in anything more than a minor dent and I wasn't at fault in any of them, save for one.  I had never seen a wound that exposed anything underneath the skin.  I had never seen a broken limb, I had never seen an exposed eyeball.  I had never seen a dead body.  I lost my innocence that night and I lost it in one of the most brutal ways possible.

After a few minutes, I was able to partially collect myself.  I tried to comfort my companion who looked like she was in shock and asked her to go back inside the vehicle.  I tried to get the tricycle upright again so it wouldn't rest on top of the driver.  At this point, the moans were getting louder. There was a certain grogginess in their moans that made them sound almost ghostly. It was just another unwelcome addition to the barrage of sensory inputs that I was getting.  I was panning around the scene trying to absorb everything when I saw that the driver was still moving.  It was more instinct than anything else when I thought that something had to be done. I thought in the back of my head that he shouldn't be moved but at that point I didn't know which number to call and no one among the gathering crowd of onlookers seemed to be doing anything.  Rather than wait for nothing and let him die on the street, I decided to lift him up myself onto another tricycle which carried him to a nearby hospital.  I had blood all over my arms and hands.  At that time, I thought that it was true both figuratively as well as literally.

My passenger was driven to a nearby hospital to have her head checked as she hit it pretty badly during the impact.   Police officers escorted me towards the nearest precinct.  I was broken and humbled.  All my pride had to be surrendered.  It felt like my brain had shut down and my body was being moved by outside forces, almost like a puppet.  It was at the police station where they told me that the driver had expired at the hospital. I expected it but the news still hit me on the chest with a dull thud.

I must've been in a daze because it took me a while to realize that a security situation was starting to develop.  The relatives of the injured started arriving at the precinct.  Some of them were probably still emotional and were looking for the driver of the vehicle their trike bumped into.  I was texting people with my blood-stained hands in front of them. Good thing none of them noticed.  The officers escorted me to an isolated room to hide my identity and so I wouldn't do anything stupid in front of the relatives again.   There was fear but I was mostly surrendered. If any of them came at me, I don't know if I would've defended myself.

They say that your life flashes before you right before you die.  I don't know what the tricycle driver saw but I saw flashes that night.  In my mind, I saw scenes in my future that scared me.  But what scared me more was what I couldn't see.  I saw my life end before my eyes that night. In my mind, my life would never be the same again. In my mind the, tricycle driver and I were in the same boat.  I stayed the night at the police station.

A lot of those who go through a traumatic experience such as this end up talking to themselves a lot.  There's that inner voice that constantly berates you, questioning everything that you've done.  Most people call it conscience.  I call it my pessimistic little half brother.  I relieved myself of some of the guilt by saying that the tricycle was driving recklessly.  That it was speeding without its headlights on.  That it was way overloaded and it had no chance of stopping on time if ever it needed to.  The support of friends and family helped as well.   Gradually the voice got muffled enough that I no longer heard it.  I wasn't at fault.  I came to terms with what had happened - that this was real and this is something that I would have to live with - something that I can live with. After 18 hours of detention, I was released.  No charges were filed.

It's now been 6 days since the accident.  I'm back home.  The atmosphere here in my room is starkly different from the chaotic mess of that fateful night. The airconditioner hums silently.  I'm sitting on a reclining chair, having coffee while typing on my keyboard. I am uneasily relaxed.  I am coping. To be able to live with yourself after being directly in the collision path of another human life, one must develop a certain coldness.  The coldness helps me get by but it also colors everything I see with a slightly darker tint, including the image that I see in the mirror.  You don't quite see yourself the same way after something like this.  At least not for a while. It's midnight as I'm writing this. There's a slight drizzle outside.  That section of Congressional Avenue should look uncomfortably familiar right now to a few eyes.  Memories will be replayed there over and over in the minds of those who saw.

Things are no longer as they seemed.  When I was at the police station, I thought that my life had ended. But it didn't really.

I'm writing this now wishing that it was a work of fiction but it's not really.

Her Name was Katherine

The internet has become a record keeper for all sorts of personal information, from the most trivial to the most intimate. Wittingly or unwittingly, almost everybody has left a left a trace on the internet open for google to find. If a person mattered then there might be an article created for him/her by those whose lives he/she has affected Or he might be a subject of an entire article on wikipedia if he affected the lives of a lot of people. If a person wants to matter then he may create a dent on the internet himself by creating a blog like the one you’re reading right now.

Every year, my family gathers in a small patch of land somewhere within the forest of crosses and tombstones of manila north cemetery to commemorate the life of a person we lost 11 years ago. Her name was Katherine. We called her Kathy. She was the 2nd youngest of us four siblings.

She had a lot of things going for her. She was pretty, she was smart, she was studious and she had the gift of gab. She was too young to have decided on a career path but my mother used to suggest to her a lot that she be a dermatologist (I think she had expressed some interest in the idea as well). One, because it’s a lucrative career. It’s common knowledge that dermatologists are professionally trained to suck every peso out of their clients’ wallet. Two, so she could cure her own skin problems.

She had a lot of infectious and unique mannerisms. I think she started the trend of babytalking in the family. Both of my other sisters do it now quite extensively. She also was into the habit of inventing words. A habit which I think I may have picked up from her. Whenever she would watch TV, she had this weird mannerism where she’d face the tv sideways and she’d watch from the corner of her eye. Whenever I would try to access an image of her from my memory, the image of her watching tv always stands out as the clearest. It’s funny how the habits that I used to think were annoying are the ones that I remember the most.

She was born on the 6th of December, 1984. She succumbed to asthma on the night of September 17, 1997. She was just about to turn 13. I remember waking up to the sound of commotion. My mother was panicking and Kathy’s struggle was quite audible. My parents tried to calm her down (because stress would just aggravate her asthma) and then they rushed her to the hospital
I tried to ignore it but at the back of my mind, I had a very strong feeling that she wasn’t going to make it. I also had suffered from severe asthma attacks in my youth and I knew the feeling of fighting for every breath to the point where you feel like you don’t want to anymore.

It was like drowning but, in some ways, more torturous. When you’re drowning, your ordeal would just last for about 10 or so mins and then you’d pass out and die. My worst asthma attacks lasted for almost a month and the apex would last up to 5 days, during which I’d be bedridden and any attempt at exertion would leave me close to losing consciousness.
I saw what she went through and I knew that it was worse than anything I had ever experienced. That night, before my parents rushed her to the hospital, I heard her say “ayoko na” (I don’t want to anymore)

I think the call came at around midnight. I think It was my mother who delivered the news. I remember vague details about what happened exactly.  My youngest sister was playing jackstone. I was on my bed. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events but I think I slept again after I heard the news. Maybe because I wanted to wake up and realize that it was all just a bad dream or maybe because I wasn’t quite sure how I would react yet and I wanted to postpone it till morning.

It was strange because I felt sad but I didn’t feel as sad as I expected to be. I got a bit teary eyed but I don’t remember crying. The full impact of what happened didn’t catch up with me till much later.

I used to call her “bispringe” (bestfriend). Kathy and I were quite close when we were much younger but we weren’t in good terms when she passed away. I think we weren’t speaking for more than a year. It was a long time ago so ¬I don’t exactly remember what started our fight but I remember calling her “ketong” (leper). Kathy had allergic dermatitis which caused certain areas of her skin to form scabs. We were calling each other names at the time. She brought up some of my insecurities so I thought it was a fair trade. But of course it wasn’t and it was really insensitive of me. She cried so to say that she was affected would probably be an understatement. I never got to say sorry. We never got to make up.

She was already a young lady when she passed away but my clearest mental image of her is when she was much younger, when we were still quite close. She didn’t have a lot of pictures in her latter months and we didn’t get to interact much so it’s hard for me to remember clearly what she looked like. I remember that she grew her hair longer, her skin improved and she got slimmer. (she was chubby when she was younger) but it’s hard for me to assemble a full picture in my head. There’s very little to remember her by.

I never got to know what kind of life she got to live in her latter months. She kept a diary but due to a misdirected gesture of sentimentality, we never got to read it and we never will. Her thoughts and secrets were buried with her literally.

She passed away before the internet went mainstream here in the philippines. She never had a friendster profile, no myspace, no facebook, no blog. You won’t find any picture of her online. There’s no record of her thoughts, no record of her hobbies, her favorite movie, no record of whether her status was “single”, “in a relationship” or “it’s complicated” when she passed. No information about her will appear in any google search.

There is no significant record of her existence outside the memories of her immediate friends and family. I’m not even sure if her friends still remember her. She may just be a tiny speck of memory to them now. All we have left of her are the very few pictures that she left us and memories that get more and more vague as time passes.

When I first created this blog, I wanted it to be a shrine to me. A record of my existence that exists outside of the people who know me. A depository of my thoughts at different stages of my life that I (or anyone interested) can look back to someday. It doesn’t matter if anyone cares to read it. It’s for me.

I write this entry now for her so that the memory of who she was would not just exist in our heads and in our old photo albums. So that if you’d search for her name, it would appear somewhere within the deep recesses of google. As a record that she existed and that she mattered! …a humble shrine to her existence and an apology that is 11 years overdue. It doesn’t matter if anyone finds it or cares to find it, it’s for her.

Her name was Katherine M. Zosa and this is her online memorial