The Lord’s gift
Twenty-two years ago, my mother passed away. She would have been 95 today.
She was and remains my father’s love of his life, so it was understandable that he wanted not to wait too long to join her.
They were soulmates, too, strong but yielding to the Lord. So, while my mother bade goodbye at 72, my father marked his 99th birthday yesterday.
“That girl,” he fondly refers to her. He looks at her picture on the wall, smiles and says, “I miss that girl.” Then his memory goes to that time in World War II. This Aloguinsan-born Cebuano was leading his troops on foot to Bukidnon while passing by her father’s orchard in Momongan (now Balo-i), Lanao del Norte.
There she was, sitting and chatting with friends under a durian tree. Yes, it was love at first sight. I learned and witnessed love and affection throughout their marriage. Despite my mother’s comfortable life in Lanao, she joined him in Cebu.
Both their parents were gone when they married. So I learned from the conduct of their lives that getting married meant being out there on your own, fending for yourselves, being financially independent. From their early years of marriage until their three children went to school, my mother was a stay-home mom.
Those were years of financial struggle. Only sometime later did Daddy know that at times, my mother had to forego with her meals to give preference to my father the sole breadwinner, and to us growing children. Each time he recounted these, he was misty-eyed and said, “That girl was brave and strong.” And there was no mistaking the love in his eyes and the pride in his voice.
My learnings on love ever strong and burning first took root the first time my father came home from Butuan where he was assigned as Court of First Instance (now Regional Trial Court) for Agusan del Norte. When PAL’s Butuan-Cebu plane door opened, there was my father heading the line, holding a long-stemmed rose for my mother. That would be repeated each time for the next four years whenever he came home. Only when I got married did they decide that my mother could join him finally in Bohol, his next place of assignment.
In those days the Department of Justice was quite strict about judges avoiding fraternizing, so the latter could never be assigned in their places of residence. Judges are constantly surrounded by temptations, particularly money or kind. But I stand proud of his record of non-corruption. I particularly remember a conversation between my mother and the governor of one of the provinces my father was assigned to.
She was a widow who always had her ears pinned to the ground about the judges in her province. To my mother she said, “Mrs. Echaves, your husband is very principled and clean; he is my idol. If there was another one like him, I would not hesitate to marry again.”
Yesterday, I again thanked the Lord for this gift of a father. I am grateful to him, too, for his health regimen all these years. And equally thankful to the doctors who help keep him at his best health possible.