How the World Explains My Mother’s Illness

(Part One)

Nothing was more consoling than hearing the whirr of the stretcher's wheels on the tiled floor as it approached our room. She dozed with eyes half-closed, letting out breaths to assure us that her sleep meant survival. Four lanky men lifted her body to place her on the hospital bed. It was easier to carry her—down with a dramatic weight loss, skin on limbs wrinkled like the ones we see on a dried calamansi. The nurse handed me a small transparent jar with my Mamang's cut-out small intestine floating in the formalin solution. In front of me was a green wall, warm enough to shout of vitality and hope. Mamang’s desperate rhythms of air also seemed to say, ‘Nak, Mamang is okay. At times like this, it’s hard to say we could lose her anytime. Hard to say.

She had never been sickly before an intestinal obstruction. Papang thought her diligence slowed her down. She’d take her meals at nine, two, and half-past eight. After dinnertime, she’d head straight to the sink to wash the plates and glasses, wipe the dining table, and scrub its dark spots. Then at morning, she’d be found at our sari-sari store. I’d often see her accommodate all kinds of customers: ladies her age back-chatting their neighbors, men asking for a beer before midday and promising to pay before dusk, and Ilonggo kids who do not know what snacks were good for them.

I was convinced she was too busy that she forgets herself at times. Mamang would often complain about her ulcer. She’d bring a tiny White Flower menthol balm everywhere she went. I remembered how many times I would be woken up at midnight by her footsteps. She’d pace around the kitchen and the lounge room. I could sense she was trying hard to conceal her noise, but I could also imagine her eating snacks, and perhaps bearing the pain she’d had. Her favorite midnight snack is a biscuit so crunchy you could hear her teeth breaking it in two. Her spoon often hit her ceramic mug while she stirred her hot milk.

Despite all that, she was fit enough to have her belly cut open thrice. Mamang would cook vegetables. She cooked the best pinakbet. Slices may be of irregular sizes, but the okra and string beans were cooked to perfection. I might have not learned how to speak Ilocano, but she made sure we’d be known as one by the food we preferred to eat.

There was one dish of hers that I hated though: ampalaya with egg. She’d slice the ampalaya thickly, and wouldn’t bother soaking them in a bowl of water and salt. I’d much prefer them squeezed out of their green bitter juice, but Mamang disagreed. She said that that would remove the vegetable’s nutrients and anti-diabetes effects. She said I might as well eat eggs with garlic and onion, without the ampalaya.

Part of me wanted to say Mamang’s the reason I eat books. I learned reading at a very young age, around four years old, with Mamang as our reading tutor. I kind of impressed them once when I picked The Bible (the only book in our house then), and read it aloud. The first few pages by Matthew talked about the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah. I couldn’t remember how I pronounced those names like Amminadab, Zerubbabel, and Jeconiah, but what I remembered was their family friend sent me tiny stuffed animals as a reward for being a ‘good boy.’ Our neighbors knew about it that when I’d go near to them and listened to them, they’d quiz me. Months after, Mamang and Papang spent their savings to buy us a 12-volume Macmillan Encyclopedia with pictures of the solar system and a two-volume dictionary.

Mamang also taught me to collect dried leaves. She showed to me once how she used the dried leaves to mark the pages she last read on the health and home remedy book, and I was stunned by the anatomy of a leaf. “Ka-gwapo sa dahon sa bayabas, mang,” I told her, and pranced around to pick more guava leaves, and other leaves with different pigments, shapes, and sizes from different shrubs in the same backyard. Sometimes I would be impatient to wait for the leaves to turn brown, so I thought piling them with the heaviest dictionary and sitting on them would hasten the process. Sometimes I would stick thin leaves into books that as soon as they dried up, they’d break on my fingers when I picked them up. I asked Mamang why this happened to some leaves, and she said no two leaves are the same. Like people. Like lifetimes.

Soon my favorite dried leaf is a rose leaf. How romantic. They thought I was a good boy. Until she found out about the box of cigarette butts and ashes we hid under the cabinet. I had never seen her so angry. My twin brother, whose notoriety had not worn off after a bad scene when we were in first year college, bore the brunt. Mamang snapped at him and yelled: smoking doesn’t make one cool, it is very expensive, it makes you smell badly, it burns houses and it causes cancer! I was at the corner, and when my brother’s eyes met mine, I shrank. “Most of those butts are mine because my brother would bury them,” I thought. I knew I deserved my mother’s lashing too.

To satisfy my curiosity, I fancied preparing a long list of questions for her doctors. But when I had gone straight to her room after my day job, I just couldn’t catch them. In her unit, all that are left were the odor from the trash bins of tacky gauze, swabs, plasters, rubber gloves soiled with povidone-iodine, drugs, and perhaps, dead germs. While she was dozing, I held her swollen hands gently. She could not hold my hands back, nor flex her fingers. Without a doctor’s help, I tried remembering their words—inflammation, history of appendicitis, bacterial infection, bowel obstruction—to comprehend her sickness, and try to understand that maybe, it is a tough job to inform the sons of the patient’s illness. With every checking of her pulse and abdomen, I felt her doctors struggled not to feel.

When she woke up, I asked her if her hands feel a little numb when I touched it. She shook her head, and there was silence. It was always like this when I visited her. I ran out of words to say, but I was saved by the glass window with a view of the national highway. I described to her that the sun was going down, and the street started to get busy, and I lied that I saw children from the fast food restaurant waving at me. The tube of the respirator blocked her smile, but her mouthing was clear when she said, “Happy 21st birthday.” She didn’t know I heard her so she wrote with her fingers H and A on my palm.

-- Kloyde A. Caday is a faculty member of the Department of English Language and Literature in University of Southern Mindanao. He divides his time among Kabacan in Cotabato Province, General Santos City, and Koronadal City.