Lights Will Guide You Home

Wednesday started as how normal Wednesdays do -- with the sun rising in the east and me sleeping soundly in bed and not being able to witness it.

It was such a coincidence -- a blessing in disguise -- that I decided to be lazy that day.  The night before, my head was throbbing and my nose was running, and I know it really isn't much of an excuse to be absent.  But I was.  I'll always remember the day fondly -- with my mom mostly lounging in bed, and me doing plates.  It was nice and easy going, just as how I like things to be.

But night time came, and so did everything else.   One moment we were about to have dinner, and the next we were rushing towards the hospital.  My mom couldn't breathe.  The darkness was suffocating, and for a moment it was a good thing, not being able to think through the panic.  At one point along the boulevard, we were stuck in traffic and there was nothing we could do.  A second of realization washed over me.  Was my mom still breathing?  Did she still have a pulse? A part of me didn't want to know because really, it was silly to think about my mom not breathing. So I checked her pulse, and checked her breath but I couldn't know.  I could not know.

We arrived. My Dad was shouting.  "Humihinga pa ba?" I held her face (her beautiful, beautiful face).  It felt wrong.  Flaky.  Almost cold.  Distant.  Forever and, finally, the medics took over. I knew.

I remember writing something that goes "Everything is a cycle in its own time."  The night was young at 8:00 PM or was it 9?  They got a heartbeat.  (Her heart stopped?!)  I went in.  Filled in paperwork.  Her name is all I remember writing.

I saw her, but couldn't really.  Not really.  Her eyes were gone.  Open, but gone.  My dad said something something something brain dead.  And I thought, no. NO. Brain dead is lonely movies and books that make you cry, and not your own mother who's supposed to be well and happy, and having dinner with her family at 7 in the evening.  No.  I kept telling myself, No... no.

I lost myself between that time and the time that was to come.  I lost myself in talking to my mom's mom and her sister and her brother.  Explaining through static and tears and breaths, everything that happened and everything that did not.  I lost myself in a 7-11 -- coffee and tissue because the night is long and the years to come... longer.   I lost myself while getting a room because I was thinking, why not?  Why won't I get a room?  We were going to stay, and did it matter if it was for months or years?  I lost myself in errands of buying this and that -- buying food for my dad who wasn't able to eat dinner;  buying Chowking for my lola who couldn't go hungry because of diabetes.  And I lost myself when while buying Chowking, I had to run back to the hospital knowing nothing.

Doctors, doctors, doctors.  Everywhere, surrounding my mom.  And when I was about to go in, the curtain was pulled to my face like they do in the movies.  And I did not understand.  Did not want to understand.  I looked around waiting for someone to say something, and no one did but my tito's arms that just grabbed me and then I knew.   Everything and nothing, at the same time.    We watched and waited as the doctors pumped her and for the first time in years, my dad hugged me.  And we held onto each other as we watched her fade away...

I love you, Ma.

1:50 AM
6 October 2011