Faithfully

In September 2009, my father Frank Mayor underwent a life-threatening operation called a Whipple in connection with his cancer of the pancreas at the UCLA Hospital in Los Angeles. If successful, the procedure would give him five years. But there was always a chance that he wouldn’t make it through the risky eight-hour operation. After all, he was 77. But Dad the fighter took the malignant beast by its horns and opted for surgery.

The operation took only two hours. It was successful in the sense that Dad awoke  from it. But it failed in excising the tumor from his pancreas because by then, the malignancy had spread to his liver. It was, as some folks call it, an “open-close” procedure.

That afternoon, Dad, no longer groggy from anesthesia, gave us the thumbs-up sign when we visited him in his room. He didn’t know. 

But used as we are to his strength and fighting spirit, one of my sisters told Dad the grim news. Dad, hindi natanggal ang cancer. He pondered on the disclosure for a while. If it was a bombshell, he wasn’t reeling from the explosion. There was no fear in his eyes. Neither were there tears. He was moving on, thinking of the next plan of battle.

But that night, as we were about to kiss him goodbye in his hospital room — as a matter of procedure, US hospitals normally don’t allow bantays overnight — his voice finally betrayed a softness, a weakness even.

“I want Mommy to stay with me,” he asked us. So we requested the charge nurse to bend the rules a bit to allow our mother Sonia to stay by our father’s bedside that night. In the quiet darkness of the antiseptic hospital room, my dad was finally going to confront his fears, his pain, his future.

And he wanted the woman he loved to be by his side, for better or for worse.

My mom says she and Dad never talked about death. When he was in robust health, he bought insurance to prepare for that day. But since he found out his illness was terminal, death was a topic they avoided even if it hung like fog in the air.

But on that fateful night in the UCLA hospital, when he found out he was nearing a point of no return, it was my mom he called out for. She gave him strength and comfort.

In the end, even the strongest men need soft clouds to cushion them from life’s hardest blows.

My father died 10 months later — peacefully, bravely. Mom, as always, was by his side.

***

Love (from Mom, his daughters, grandchildren and siblings) made my father strong during the toughest battle of his life.

Love made my paternal grandfather Nazario B. Mayor forsake his American Dream in the late 1920s to follow his heart — from Kansas to a remote island in the Philippines called Palawan.

His love interest was Mary Loudon, born to an American father and a Spanish-Filipino mother. After studying at the St. Theresa’s College in San Marcelino where she was an interna, Mary was sent to the US for further studies. There, during a party of the Filipino-American students association in Kansas, she met a war hero, Nazario.

Mary accepted Nazario’s proposal on one condition: that he take her back to the Philippines. Here was this young couple with a promising future in the US (she was an American citizen and he was with the US Army). But even then, even before Conde Nast and Travel and Leisure declared it so, Palawan was already a paradise for Mary. In fact her father Thomas Loudon, a hero of the Spanish-American war, had made Palawan his home.

Though they had a beautiful beach house in the island of Bugsuk in Palawan, it had none of the creature comforts of Kansas or Illinois, where the Loudons hailed from. But Mary followed her heart, and because he loved Mary, so did Nazario.

Mary reciprocated Nazario’s devotion in full measure. When he became a guerilla leader during World War II, Nazario, according to the book Eight Survived by Douglas A. Campbell (Yup, a book has been written about my courageous Grandpa Nazario and the survivors of the USS Flier, the only downed World War II submariners to survive and evade capture).

“When the Japanese attacked Manila, Mayor left Bugsuk and boarded a ship headed for the battle lines. A Japanese plane bombed the ship, which was traveling close to the coast off the northern Palawan island of Araceli, and Mayor survived by swimming ashore. He made his way back to Bugsuk, but soon received orders to report to Brooke’s Point to recruit guerillas. He left Bugsuk and later wrote a letter to Mary, which she read to the children one night at supper. Their father told them he was being hunted by the Japanese. If the enemy came after Mary and the children, he wrote, he would not surrender to free them because to do so would jeopardize the resistance movement.”

Mary accepted her husband’s fidelity to duty. Honor was what he would bequeath to his children (They would have eight children, five of whom — Nellie, Bobby, Maryanne, Coney and Lorraine — are still surviving and in good health today). She remained faithful to him by accepting that just like St. Ignatius de Loyola, his first duty was to do battle for his cause. And she took it upon herself to take care of their children, to bring them to safety when the enemy was near so as not to compromise her husband’s mission.

Col. Nazario B. Mayor died at age 92 on Valentine’s Day in 1993, exactly 20 years ago. He was interred at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. His faithful wife, who died in 1967, enabled him to be the bemedalled war hero that he was.

***

Finally, another love story from the family baul. My husband Ed’s parents were married for 60 years (they got married four days after Valentine’s Day) and it was and still is an inspiration. I once asked my father-in-law Carlos what the secret of his marriage to my mother-in-law Lutgarda was. And he told me without a second thought, “There is no secret.”

 â€œMarriage is about understanding each other. We are but human, we are not perfect, we each have our failings and idiosyncrasies,” he added.

He believed that for a marriage to be near-perfect, husbands and wives should be tolerant of each other’s imperfections.

Mommy Garding, a great cook, echoed Pappy’s advice. “There should be give and take in a marriage.”

A pious woman, she would hear Mass every day when her health permitted it, walking from their home on Arellano St. in Manila to the nearby St. Scholastica’s College chapel. She told me that God should always be in the center of the family.

Mommy Garding believed that in order for a marriage to be successful, one should make sacrifices. I suppose that meant that each partner must give up something displeasing to the other, or offer something to the other and to the children that is obtained with some hardship. In the end, sacrifices bear fruit.

Mommy Garding started feeling stomach pains in November 2010. The first doctor she went to thought it was just indigestion. In January 2011, two months after Mommy started feeling the stomach discomfort, Pappy just collapsed suddenly in the dining room of their house. He had just come in from the wake of a relative, where he prayed with his sisters. In the sanctuary of his home, within a few feet from his beloved Garding, he went home to his Father. Swiftly, mercifully. He was almost 85.

Shortly after Pappy died, Mommy Garding was hospitalized because she had completely lost her appetite. The diagnosis was grim: she had cancer and it wasn’t in its early stages anymore. And though she continued to put up a fight, her heart longed for something else.

In April 2010, three months after her beloved Carlos died, Garding followed him to that place where they would be together forever.

To both of them, that was no secret.

(You may e-mail me at [email protected].)