Accents
In loving memory
(Kindly bear with me on this week’s column, a tribute to my brother Geronimo Rivera Carreon, 65, who passed away June 17, 2009 after a fall and a failed brain surgery.)
It’s summertime here in America, and the buds of spring are in full bloom. I’ve just picked a rosal, its petals lovely white and sweet. I’ll place it on the altar—an offering for you, Toto Ronnie. I gaze at the flower as I write this. I’m getting misty-eyed again.
Yesterday while your Manong Rudy and I were talking, I couldn’t help the tears. I cried because we can’t be with the family to see you to your final resting place. Your Manong Rudy hurt his big toe—so serious, it had to be operated. Being diabetic, he is under careful medication.
Friends email me words of condolences and that they came for a visit to your wake. Me? Here I am on the other side of the globe—breaking tradition for not coming home. A kind of noblesse oblige: to come home and be with the rest of the family. A responsibility, a moral responsibility I cannot fulfill. Sad. Very sad.
I look back. I philosophize. I try to catch some comforting thoughts. I sift the past for grains of gold. I sift through mounds of memories that have accumulated with the years—memories of experiences, events, decisions and actions taken that made us what we are, what you were.
You were that handsome little boy, not yet ten, running home in pain because you hurt yourself in play. Nanay was in the store then, but Tatay was around to do what needed to be done. You were that agile little boy in “shot-bong,” “entren,” “lagsanay,”—games we played with children of neighbors and relatives. And there were Sundays at the beach, or a swim any morning or afternoon in the river nearby. Simple joys so different from that of today, yet so rich in fun. The song says it beautifully for me: “We had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun/But the hills that we climbed were just seasons out of time…” Childhood pleasures of long ago, seasons out of time because then the computer was a strange word and the digital age belonged eons away to the future.
There’s a picture vividly etched in my mind: Toto Ronnie, you were kneeling and praying. I couldn’t recall where I had been, but when I arrived in the house, I saw you in earnest prayer, and I asked why. You said Nanay and Tatay just received news that Manang (who was then in Manila, taking up pharmacy in the University of Santo Tomas) was “hemorrhaging.” Hemorrhage? That meant blood! Gosh, it was actually a case of hemorrhoids. You, innocent lovable tyke, it was nothing serious. (I laugh, yes, I’m laughing now. I need laughter to ease the grief that death brings.)
Soon it was goodbye to the days of innocence. We grew up, children no more, but always you were the kid brother who stood by me no matter what. We moved on—each to his/her own separate life in near or distant places, carrying within us the unbreakable bond of sisters and brothers. We pulled through. We continue to pull through the ups and downs of the winter-spring-summer-and-autumn cycle of our lives. Life goes on. It has always been like that since the dawn of history.
The human rights activists of the Iloilo Legal Assistance Center wrote that they came to visit, and I wasn’t there to receive them, to thank them for their thoughtfulness. I know members of SELDA, Gabriela, Bayan Muna, the staff of Panay Fair Trade will also come. Some will be there for a vigil. Warm gestures I can only imagine from afar. They know you passed away with social consciousness ever strong—possessed with heart and mind in step with the call of the times.
We all differ in our answers to the big questions: Kung hindi tayo, sino? Kung hindi ngayon, kailan pa? We dream of a tomorrow shining in liberte, egalite, fraternite as the French revolutionaries would have it. With our all too human inadequacies—individual failings and flaws—we differ in degrees in the pursuit of that dream. But you tried, as we do try to make a difference in ways big and small.
Manang said I should write, must write—something to be read when the final Mass will be officiated for the repose of your soul. I will write, but words can never take the place of my presence.
I remember how I wallowed in sorrow days after Nanay breathed her last, finally succumbing to cancer. Then, in some suspended moments, it was as if I could hear her say in the softest voice, “I only went ahead.” Toto Ronnie, you only went ahead. I must comfort myself with that thought while keeping alive fondest memories of a dearly loved brother. Find comfort in the thought that “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.”
We must accept God’s will.
Manang Julia