Post by dredpooh on May 14, 2006 21:24:52 GMT 8
Celia
CHAMBERS By Korina Sanchez
The Philippine STAR 05/14/2006
"… I swear I love my husband and I love my kids. You know I wanted to be like my mother… But if I hadn’t done it as soon as I did…there might have been time to be me… for myself… There’s so many things that she wishes…She don’t even know what she’s missing. And that’s how she knows that she missed.." "Sandra," Barry Manilow
I wrote the eulogy for my mother the night before her burial. I volunteered for the task being the "communication major" in the family. Anyway – I was only too willing. Someone had to do it "right," I told myself. Not too much said, not too little. Unpretentious but not too honest for public consumption. In the end thankful. A recent grief counseling session revealed that my brothers and I, for now, have different stories to tell of our mother. So this is really all my mother according to me. I thought the duty formidable – in my grief almost impossible – but, surprisingly, it came to me like water pouring from a crystal pitcher. It was clear what I wanted to say. And I was thirsty for a rare – maybe an only – opportunity to speak to everyone willing to listen about my parent. I found the words. And four pages written on an old notepad from a defunct company wasn’t nearly enough. I planned to try to have my eulogy for my mother published the year after. I panicked when it was apparent I had lost the draft – the version which was to remain the final form when I delivered it. I frantically asked my brothers if the eulogy was recorded so I could transcribe. There was no copy.
It’s Mothers’ Day, again, and it can’t wait. My ode to my Mom are excerpts from the original eulogy that, as it turns out, is still as clear in my mind as when I first wrote it. I suspect it always will be.
I couldn’t believe my Mom was gone. Anyone who knew her would think she would live forever. She was a beautiful woman. She had jet black, thick hair that pronounced her widow’s peak. She had beautifully toned fair, smooth skin. Chiseled nose and full lips. My relatively small waistline I owe to her. She threw her head back and clapped her hands once whenever she laughed. A lover of life. Passionate as an artist would be. And an artist she was. We don’t usually make mental notes of how our parents are distinct from other individuals but everyone who met Celia usually remembered her. And, almost like a stranger, I, just like a real stranger who first met her, was almost always enthralled and mesmerized by her looks and her ways.
In their generation of working parents working more to stay connected to your five or seven-year-old kid might have been too tall an order. It explains how distantly I appreciated her. As a little girl I idolized her glamorous lifestyle. Off to work every morning putting on her liquid foundation and red lipstick. Her stockings and her high-heeled shoes. Her figure-hugging wraparound dresses were her trademark. I realized as I started working as a newscaster that I had even mimicked her hairstyle. Which is why I never ever cut it shorter than shoulder length. She was the president of her own carpet company that made it to second largest in the country in the ’70s.
I grew up thinking we were wealthy. Placing it all in context we really weren’t. What this smart and painstaking middle class woman worked for she immediately spent on her family. So I grew up having most of the best things in life. We have a pool, a beautiful house which she kept looking like Architectural Digest all our lives. We had good shoes. Ate good food. Went to the best schools in the country. But she didn’t have much jewelry, art or property. Towards retirement she didn’t – really couldn’t – spend on changing the entire roofing of the 20-year-old house that she built. We never knew until, maybe, too late what she gave up to give us the life we had.
I’ve written that we often appreciate our parents like heirloom furniture. Property that is precious and ours and we don’t know why. We have no idea who or where or why it came to be in the family. We used it, played in it, damaged it, wore it down. Cherished, yes, but for no apparent reason. It’s just always been there.
An old classmate of my Mom in grade school said that Celia was always known to be the intelligent and talented one in class. She sang a lot. And she would oblige a song whenever she was requested. Being the eldest among seven siblings she gave up her pursuit of a Law degree in UST to put her brothers and sisters through school. She sang and sang her entire family out of struggle and towards the better lives they now have. At the wake her former co-worker described Celia, "She walked the walk and talked the talk."
I am Made in Hong Kong. Celia and Ramon were both working in the former British colony when they met, fell in love, had me and she set out to build the life for her family like the movie in her mind. She built her dreamhouse. She stayed beautiful even as she worked and worked. She cooked and cooked. She tried and tried. She read and read. We were five kids. Then, in the late ’80s, my younger brother Chinito, at 19, was diagnosed with leukemia.
She lost her child. No one should ever lose her child. But her grief she mostly kept to herself. And then she decided to fight back – again – and celebrate the memory of her son by going back to school at age 50. She topped her Bible Class batch studying God’s Word in Greek.
Mom never did the social scene. She had the wisest cracks teaching us kids that socializing for no reason or purpose takes up too much of time otherwise available for worthier pursuits – like reading, family and sleep. But I always thought her to be a tad reclusive. I was in high school not understanding her fits of apparent depression.
It was on an unusually pleasant Sunday I visited my mom a few years ago. I remember the light shining translucently through her floor to ceiling window – the sliding doors that took her out to her garden surrounding the perimeter of the house and which led out to about 500 square meters of blue grass and tall palm trees with bushes of bougainvilleas and dainty white flowers surrounding the water. We were sprawled on her faint celadon green wall-to-wall carpeting in her room – like two high school girls exchanging secrets – as she told me of an incident in her childhood which led to a heartbreak she carried throughout her life. Slowly but surely it made sense to me what those fits were all about.
For the longest time I was awed by her. Her beauty, her strength, her achievements, her intelligence. All my life I now understand I’d been trying my darnest to live up to standards she set on me. It was impossible. Her kind of pain I didn’t carry and at the time couldn’t understand because we had different lives. She saw to it I had it much better. It isolated her life experiences from me even more. She probably didn’t know she might have been dealing with the realization of my life over what she could have had herself. And then one day my demi-god asked for help. "Korina, could you help me write this letter to my Pastor? I bought a book on American idioms, I have good grades in school, I’m thinking of impressing him more by using a line or two from here…" my Mom said.
It would seem she lived her life to its fullest. It wasn’t her fault being born into a family of humble means with choices limited by circumstance. My mom, having been recruited at the young age of 64 and myself blessed with a life where I’d seen much more than any average lifetime as early as when I was 25, my Mom and I knew she deserved much more. The genuine mettle of one’s character is measured during the direst of straits, not within circumstances of convenience, but definitely within a situation of limited means and resource. Reaching the finish line at exactly the same time it is the runner with one leg who gets the medal. Only as I write this and as she has left that I know for sure that it is, in fact, her handicap that has made her great. I wish that I should’ve been the one to tell her this.
I send her back to the Light, to her Maker she was both anxious and reluctant to meet. That’s my mother, Celia. Flawed and beautiful and great all at once.
or
www.philstar.com/philstar/LIFESTYLE200605149610.htm
CHAMBERS By Korina Sanchez
The Philippine STAR 05/14/2006
"… I swear I love my husband and I love my kids. You know I wanted to be like my mother… But if I hadn’t done it as soon as I did…there might have been time to be me… for myself… There’s so many things that she wishes…She don’t even know what she’s missing. And that’s how she knows that she missed.." "Sandra," Barry Manilow
I wrote the eulogy for my mother the night before her burial. I volunteered for the task being the "communication major" in the family. Anyway – I was only too willing. Someone had to do it "right," I told myself. Not too much said, not too little. Unpretentious but not too honest for public consumption. In the end thankful. A recent grief counseling session revealed that my brothers and I, for now, have different stories to tell of our mother. So this is really all my mother according to me. I thought the duty formidable – in my grief almost impossible – but, surprisingly, it came to me like water pouring from a crystal pitcher. It was clear what I wanted to say. And I was thirsty for a rare – maybe an only – opportunity to speak to everyone willing to listen about my parent. I found the words. And four pages written on an old notepad from a defunct company wasn’t nearly enough. I planned to try to have my eulogy for my mother published the year after. I panicked when it was apparent I had lost the draft – the version which was to remain the final form when I delivered it. I frantically asked my brothers if the eulogy was recorded so I could transcribe. There was no copy.
It’s Mothers’ Day, again, and it can’t wait. My ode to my Mom are excerpts from the original eulogy that, as it turns out, is still as clear in my mind as when I first wrote it. I suspect it always will be.
I couldn’t believe my Mom was gone. Anyone who knew her would think she would live forever. She was a beautiful woman. She had jet black, thick hair that pronounced her widow’s peak. She had beautifully toned fair, smooth skin. Chiseled nose and full lips. My relatively small waistline I owe to her. She threw her head back and clapped her hands once whenever she laughed. A lover of life. Passionate as an artist would be. And an artist she was. We don’t usually make mental notes of how our parents are distinct from other individuals but everyone who met Celia usually remembered her. And, almost like a stranger, I, just like a real stranger who first met her, was almost always enthralled and mesmerized by her looks and her ways.
In their generation of working parents working more to stay connected to your five or seven-year-old kid might have been too tall an order. It explains how distantly I appreciated her. As a little girl I idolized her glamorous lifestyle. Off to work every morning putting on her liquid foundation and red lipstick. Her stockings and her high-heeled shoes. Her figure-hugging wraparound dresses were her trademark. I realized as I started working as a newscaster that I had even mimicked her hairstyle. Which is why I never ever cut it shorter than shoulder length. She was the president of her own carpet company that made it to second largest in the country in the ’70s.
I grew up thinking we were wealthy. Placing it all in context we really weren’t. What this smart and painstaking middle class woman worked for she immediately spent on her family. So I grew up having most of the best things in life. We have a pool, a beautiful house which she kept looking like Architectural Digest all our lives. We had good shoes. Ate good food. Went to the best schools in the country. But she didn’t have much jewelry, art or property. Towards retirement she didn’t – really couldn’t – spend on changing the entire roofing of the 20-year-old house that she built. We never knew until, maybe, too late what she gave up to give us the life we had.
I’ve written that we often appreciate our parents like heirloom furniture. Property that is precious and ours and we don’t know why. We have no idea who or where or why it came to be in the family. We used it, played in it, damaged it, wore it down. Cherished, yes, but for no apparent reason. It’s just always been there.
An old classmate of my Mom in grade school said that Celia was always known to be the intelligent and talented one in class. She sang a lot. And she would oblige a song whenever she was requested. Being the eldest among seven siblings she gave up her pursuit of a Law degree in UST to put her brothers and sisters through school. She sang and sang her entire family out of struggle and towards the better lives they now have. At the wake her former co-worker described Celia, "She walked the walk and talked the talk."
I am Made in Hong Kong. Celia and Ramon were both working in the former British colony when they met, fell in love, had me and she set out to build the life for her family like the movie in her mind. She built her dreamhouse. She stayed beautiful even as she worked and worked. She cooked and cooked. She tried and tried. She read and read. We were five kids. Then, in the late ’80s, my younger brother Chinito, at 19, was diagnosed with leukemia.
She lost her child. No one should ever lose her child. But her grief she mostly kept to herself. And then she decided to fight back – again – and celebrate the memory of her son by going back to school at age 50. She topped her Bible Class batch studying God’s Word in Greek.
Mom never did the social scene. She had the wisest cracks teaching us kids that socializing for no reason or purpose takes up too much of time otherwise available for worthier pursuits – like reading, family and sleep. But I always thought her to be a tad reclusive. I was in high school not understanding her fits of apparent depression.
It was on an unusually pleasant Sunday I visited my mom a few years ago. I remember the light shining translucently through her floor to ceiling window – the sliding doors that took her out to her garden surrounding the perimeter of the house and which led out to about 500 square meters of blue grass and tall palm trees with bushes of bougainvilleas and dainty white flowers surrounding the water. We were sprawled on her faint celadon green wall-to-wall carpeting in her room – like two high school girls exchanging secrets – as she told me of an incident in her childhood which led to a heartbreak she carried throughout her life. Slowly but surely it made sense to me what those fits were all about.
For the longest time I was awed by her. Her beauty, her strength, her achievements, her intelligence. All my life I now understand I’d been trying my darnest to live up to standards she set on me. It was impossible. Her kind of pain I didn’t carry and at the time couldn’t understand because we had different lives. She saw to it I had it much better. It isolated her life experiences from me even more. She probably didn’t know she might have been dealing with the realization of my life over what she could have had herself. And then one day my demi-god asked for help. "Korina, could you help me write this letter to my Pastor? I bought a book on American idioms, I have good grades in school, I’m thinking of impressing him more by using a line or two from here…" my Mom said.
It would seem she lived her life to its fullest. It wasn’t her fault being born into a family of humble means with choices limited by circumstance. My mom, having been recruited at the young age of 64 and myself blessed with a life where I’d seen much more than any average lifetime as early as when I was 25, my Mom and I knew she deserved much more. The genuine mettle of one’s character is measured during the direst of straits, not within circumstances of convenience, but definitely within a situation of limited means and resource. Reaching the finish line at exactly the same time it is the runner with one leg who gets the medal. Only as I write this and as she has left that I know for sure that it is, in fact, her handicap that has made her great. I wish that I should’ve been the one to tell her this.
I send her back to the Light, to her Maker she was both anxious and reluctant to meet. That’s my mother, Celia. Flawed and beautiful and great all at once.
or
www.philstar.com/philstar/LIFESTYLE200605149610.htm
