The man who loved atis, mango and chico
We had hoped he would still be around by Christmastime. Instead we looked on in agony and disbelief as his life slowly ebbed away from him, from us. For several hours on the night of his departure, we gathered round his bed to hold his bony hands, touch his white-haired head (a thinly skinned skull with all the cranial hollows showing) and whisper words of love and desperate encouragement. We doubted that he could still hear us, but we kept on talking to him anyway, even as his fully dilated, unblinking eyes merely stared blankly into nothingness. We promised him another trip to Cupang, for the annual harvest of chico from the trees he planted many years ago. We pressed his hands, but he no longer was pressing back.
His mouth agape, he breathed laboriously, even with an oxygen tank helping him through a feed through his nostrils. The two nurses in the house, my niece Rona and sister-in-law Lai, and my doctor cousin Ruben, were monitoring his life signs. A pulse oximeter clipped on his finger showed decreasing oxygenation in his clogged lungs, and his heartbeat was getting fainter by the minute. For weeks, he had been slowly turning into a bag of bones. Unable to swallow food, except for tiny quantities of milk and porridge, his once-powerful muscles had atrophied into a thin layer of wrinkled flesh. Inserting a gastric feeding tube through a hole in the stomach was ruled out because of his frailness, and only in the last days of his life was a nasal tube put in to get some nourishment into him. But it was the state of his lungs that was finally putting an end to his 92 years in this world. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease must have begun taking its toll the day he learned to smoke in his youth.
Sometime in 1999, soon after turning 80, he suffered a stroke and fell into a coma. Ferried by ambulance from Baguio to the Philippine Heart Center in Quezon City, a timely shunt in his brain saved his life, but it signaled the decline of his health and physique. At the age of 50, he could still dead-lift and hoist on his shoulder a cavan of rice. As a boy, he had toiled in the fields of his hometown in Batangas, and as a young man he walked kilometers to and from the neighboring province of Quezon, carrying cans of husked rice on a bamboo pole (pingga), his share as an itinerant farmhand. He also carried heavy lengths of bamboo on his shoulder and walked barefoot on the rough, pre-war road from Cupang to Lemery, there to sell the merchandise for a few centavos apiece.
A year after his stroke, we thought he was on his way to a full recovery. Together with my mother and a sister, he even managed to visit London where I was then posted. We all attended the Millennium festival at the Millennium Dome, where thousands of Filipinos living in London had gathered. Proud of his kinship with Igorots (after all, a son-in-law was a Bontoc), Itay posed with members of the Igorot-UK, a barong-attired tourist in the midst of men, women and youth clad in their Cordillera costumes. During Christmas breaks, I would come home and join him in his daily walks around our subdivision. Then his health began to deteriorate. He was diagnosed with emphysema though he had stopped smoking a long time ago brought to the hospital several times for pneumonia, and was found to have developed diabetes, partly because of his previous addiction to sweets, chocolates and sugar-rich fruits (atis, mango and chico being his favorites).
A few minutes before 11 p.m. of Nov. 30, 2010, our sobs got more anguished until Inay and my sisters and the rest of us were weeping unabashedly, still unbelieving, as life flickered out of that once-handsome face and muscular body. At the stroke of midnight, an hour after Itay breathed his last, we were quietly observing Inay’s 85th birthday, which should have been a cause for celebration. She cried as we very softly sang the saddest birthday song.
At the memorial service in Baguio on Dec. 7, six of his 17 grandchildren read from a eulogy to which they had all contributed. Excerpts:
“Lolo loved food, but he loved to feed and nourish those around him, especially his grandchildren, probably even more. Perhaps it was because of the hardships he endured growing up that he made it a point that food would always be in abundance for us…”
“Summers in Baguio were a time of joy for us grandchildren who could only be there when school was out. It was a cherished, all-too-brief time when all the cousins could be together, sometimes camping out on the floor in Lolo and Lola’s bedroom. We could watch TV well into the night, and then wake up to the aroma of Lolo’s garlicky sinangag, often served with platefuls of sunny-side-up eggs and tuyo. Niqi recalls the crispy hipon. Dinners were capped off by mangoes or chico lots and lots of mangoes and chico. Lolo would buy mangoes by the kaing, and he elevated the eating of mango to an art form from the diamond incisions that popped the flesh out so you could eat the pisngi without a spoon, to the thorough job of sucking the flesh from the mango pit. It was a sweet and messy way to end our lazy summer days…”
“I remember one particular summer vacation when Lolo got it into his head to buy a whole box of sans rival from Tesoro’s bakery every day. He indulged us grandchildren, but he didn’t abide idle minds. All of us got our turn at being quizzed by him on general information. ‘What is the highest lake in the world?’ Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. ‘What is the highest waterfall?’ Angel Falls in Venezuela. ‘What is the distance between the earth and the sun?’ 93 million miles…”
“Christmas and New Year was the pinnacle of Lolo’s doting on his grandchildren. We would all sleep earlier than usual so we could wake up for noche buena. After a lavish spread that barely left room on the dining table for people to sit down and eat, all the grandchildren would line up to receive their aguinaldo from Lolo. Crisp P500 bills for each apo. Christmas gatherings have changed over the years. New grandchildren and great grandchildren arrived, older ones departed for faraway lands. But through all these changes, the ritual of the aguinaldo had remained the same…”
“We have long outgrown our summer vacations, and Christmas and New Year have been steadily changing long before you left us, Lolo. Now Christmas and New Year will never, ever be the same. But in our hearts we hope that a part of us will always remain the little grandchildren who spent our summers in Happy Glen, went to bed late and stayed in our pajamas all day, or as long as we could get away with it, shared your chocolate chip cookies, and sat with you marveling about the distance between the earth and the sun.”
“All of us bid you farewell, our beloved Lolo: Len, Utoy, Niqi, Rona, Dennis, Raoul, Daniel, Bea, Pia, Carlo, Ansel, Lira, Duday, Chaya, Mutya, Nina and Dos. We bid you goodbye with these words from Utoy: ‘What we know of living is how it dissolves and congeals endlessly. As you melt back into the ineffable universe, Lolo, we give our deepest thanks for the moment of tangibility that you were given and through which we knew and loved you. It was brief, but it was it will have to be enough.’
“And these words from Duday: ‘I hope heaven is full of atis, chico trees, and old friends. We love you.’”
