Happy Birthday Jill

I think about death a lot. It’s not that I’m sick of anything and would die very soon… I almost died several times already- from surviving hemorrhagic to avoiding an accident. It’s just that at a very young age, I somehow forced myself to know about mortality. My lola Pat died years before I was born. I never saw my other sister because she dies few ours after she was born. Though I never really met them, I feel like I know them very well because my aunt would always say “our mommy likes to do this and that…” About my other sister, however, I keep on believing that she was killed by a barnacle. Do you know what a barnacle is? Funny, isn’t it? But the truth is she died because of a complication that “might” have occurred during my mother’s pregnancy. I just push myself to believe in what I always believed in when I was a kid.

This whole week, death was the center of my mood. I just don’t know why. I kept on seeing posters of “If Death were a Playwright.”  Meredith of Grey’s anatomy felt like she was going to die in this particular episode. I read an article in the newspaper entitled “Fading Memories” where the author tried to remember the memories of his brother.

…Just this morning while I was talking to myself, as always, I said “I’m excited to go to Cadena de Amor to eat my favorite foods.” I was talking about the menudo and piniñahan manok my “inang” always prepared during the thanksgiving celebration in February. Insensitively… I forgot that she passed away 2 years ago. Yes. It’s only two years ago and I could not even tell clearly if she’s still living or already six feet under the ground. I was quiet for a while and felt so dense when I finally came into a conclusion that she’s not with us anymore.

Inang is dead. She really is- just like Lola Pat, Jill and my beloved Lola Paj. Unlike the other three people I mentioned who are buried in private memorial parks in Manila and Zambales, Inang was buried in a public cemetery. Dirty, smelly and what can be classified as disgusting. I never visited her since her burial walk.

…What’s making me think about death? It’s not inang. It’s Jill. When I looked at the calendar I immediately saw 25. It’s already that 27^th and it’s just now that I looked at the calendar. January 25 was her birthday. We used to cook pancit every January 25, but it suddenly stopped. We also stopped visiting the cemetery every October 31. Nobody in the house seemed to remember that it was her birthday… the same day when she died. Maybe making me think about death these days is her way of reminding her family to remember her in these special days.

“Happy birthday, Jill. I’m sorry that we don’t cook pancit and visit the cemetery anymore. I made-up the barnacle story for myself, though I know the truth… What’s the truth anyway? Maybe it’s just another lie covering the real truth…”