The outline of our next trip to Europe in 2017 was originally based on a selfish fantasy.
I know very little about my mother’s side of the family. I can only hazard that this obscurity is intentional; maybe some memories are too painful to recall. What little I have gleaned over the years I have woven into a fanciful tale in my mind.
I think my mom had once shown me a black and white photo of a man standing on a small mound of earth, supported by a retaining wall made of cinder blocks. Was this the beginnings of the house in the Philippines where I was born? The camera is at such an angle that it is looking up at my grandfather; he is dressed in a suit and appears tall and slender. My mother claims that the hair on her father’s head was tight and curly much like an African-American’s. I go along with her but my grandfather died when she was two or three years old. Is that a feature a toddler could even remember? Who knows? She also believes I got my 6′ height from him; she does not realize that the abundant intake of protein in American schools might have something to do with that.
I daydream that my grandfather died in World War II, when Japan brought the conflict to the Philippines. It makes logical sense to me. The United States became involved in the war when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. My mother would have been about three years old then.
Of my grandmother, I only have two recollections. One of her sweeping the fallen mango leaves off the concrete front yard of our home in the Philippines, an iit (coconut rib broom) in hand, hunched over, one arm neatly folded behind her back. Two young American strangers, my sister and I, staring at this elderly woman with the black splotches (liver spots) beginning to dot her forehead and cheekbones.
The other is an image of her laying crumpled in the center of an upstairs room in the same house. I was fifteen and my mother thought a visit “home” would somehow shake off my teenage depression. But instead a haunting image was burned into my consciousness. Two holes had developed on her lower back as she laid motionless on the floor. I assumed she was still alive as my cousins still brought my lula (“grandmother” in the Ilokano dialect) Sofia food daily or at least it seemed that way. Even now, I still have difficulty stomaching the sight: a line of ants marching in and out of those two punctures.
I hurt deeply for this woman that I barely knew. To have lost a husband so early in marriage and forced to raise three young children on her own. Her youngest daughter (my auntie Emerenciana or “Mering” as we affectionately called her) diagnosed with breast cancer and having to undergo a double mastectomy. Any hope for her betrothment gone in an instant. But the year 1975 was probably the most unbearable of all: the death of her only son and her eldest daughter moving away to the United States with her newborn child. I was born the year my uncle Nicanor died and the US immigration petition letter, after 13 long years, was finally approved. How much sorrow could one person bear?
