Why my mother never dies

Cesar Gorillo .

MY mother left this world more than 20 years ago, but I can never find words to describe her continuing presence in my whole being.

It is her memories that never depart from my mind.  Thus, in almost all  my transactions, I never fail to say, “what would my mother say about this matter if she were still alive.”

There was a time when I felt so down financially after my sugar farm collapsed due to the sudden reduction in the buying price of sugar from P1,000 per picul to just P230.00.  I owed hundreds of thousands to some people many of which threatened me with lawsuits for collection.  I had to cry rivers of tears and the image of my mother never left me because I wanted to hug her and poured out all my frustrations at the unexpected tragedy.  I could not do it to my wife because I knew she was ready with words to blame me for the fiasco on some transactions which she never knew and with whom I never consulted.

I could never forget the time when our town, Dapa, Surigao del Norte was hit by the biggest typhoon that ever hit Surigao del Norte  and all the coconuts fell and we had nowhere to find our source of income. For food, we had to rely on fallen bananas to salvage whatever fruits might have been left by those who were hungry, on the lutya plant, not the good rootcrop but the itchy part where the edible portion were taken from, on the kuyot  which was poisonous if not prepared well.  Corn grits which was the staple food before the typhoon could not be secured because we had no money.

One time, my mother scoured the whole plains of fallen coconut trees to find any matured coconuts, even those which had sprouts already, to make into copra.  After three days, she found about twenty of them, and made a copra out of what she got.  She produced a few kilos and realized about one peso sales.  Out of the one peso, she bought a ganta of corn grits, a kilo of fish and prepared our lunch.  It was the best lunch I have ever eaten in my whole life and its memories continued up to this day. I have eaten in the best restaurants in hotels in Manila, but that lunch of corn grits and fish could never be matched, ever.

There was a time when I went to the seashore and upturned whatever stones that might contain some edible sea shells, fish or sea cucumber.  In one of the stones which could not be overturned, I inserted my fingers in the hole and my middle finger touched the most poisonous fish in the world, the stone fish.  My body trembled and my finger grew to the size of my hand and the pain was terrible.  I was still four years old at that time and I cried at the top of my lungs while my father looked for an arbularyo to treat me.  I remembered that while I was trembling, my mother put me in a hammock made of old blankets and sang a lullaby which I never knew where she got and keeps reververating  in my subconscious until now.  It was the best music I had ever heard in my whole life.

And then I remembered that I was enrolled in our barrio school.  I told her that we were four grades, Grade One to Grade Four pupils crammed in the whole room and I was in Grade One at that time and about eight years old.  After I finished my Grade One, she got me by my hand three months later and we trudged the length of four kilometers to our town in Dapa.  There, she filled out some forms in the elementary school and she enrolled me in Grade Two  and when classes started, I was so afraid because the pupils there bullied me being from the barrio and they teased me because of my scar at the back of my head and the constant yellow liquid that came out from my right ear. Every time I arrived home in the afternoon after walking the length four kilometers, I would wrap my arms around her, cried to my last tears while she smelled of tuba, tobacco and sweat which I really loved. She would then put her arms on my face and head and advised me to just bear everything because they were just children’s pranks.  Until now, those old woman’s smell is still the best for me.  I had smelled the best perfumes in the market but those smell of my mother continues to linger in my nose.

Tears are now falling from my eyes and I had to stop recalling all those memories.  Really, our mother had left this world a long time ago, but her memories continues in our whole being. It is also those memories that shaped everything I did in my professional career.

Indeed, God had put to us a heavenly reminder by putting the love of our parents right in the Second Commandment, “honor thy mother and thy father.”