A Birthday (written August 22, 2019, finished August 22, 2022)

My heart aches when I think about Mommy. So I try not to.

But it’s hard when her birthday is coming up. Last year, her birthday came up a few months after we buried her. I honored her birthday wish that we gift two (2) kilos of rice to a stranger in need. My sister felt the same so I lugged sacks of rice to a nearby orphanage and to our church for the parish’s feeding program.

A 2015 picture of my mom,
Evelyn R. Luab

Now, her birthday is a few days away and all I feel is resentment. She is not around. She is never going to be around. She is gone. What does it matter if I give away rice or not? It will not bring her back. Nothing will bring her back.

I go to Sunday mass in the chapel I visited almost every day for all those days leading to her death. At first, there was just sorrow. Now there is hurt in my heart. I had put my mind and heart into asking the Lord that she be healed. Once I decided to ask for a miracle, I went into it with complete disregard for the rational. I chose to dismiss all arguments against it and just asked with complete faith and trust. 

A miracle, after all, is the impossible. If I rationalize it, why even ask for one? Why even doubt? I had everything to gain, and just myself to lose. 

Mommy died on February 28, 2018. I tried to understand God’s decision. I know He could have granted me my dearest wish, but He did not for reasons I actually understand and try so hard to appreciate. I bring back images of her as she was nearing her end so that I can appreciate His taking her from that kind of life. 

So I pray for her every day. I ask for her eternal repose. But beyond that, I try not to think about her. Every time I feel a thought of her coming on, I dismiss it.  It is a struggle because I miss her every day, several times a day, too many to count. I don’t want to open that door. I don’t want to remember all that love, because it brings so many memories that I really have to ignore or I might come to a complete stop, wondering if I will ever be that special again.

A mother’s love is all-encompassing. She sees everything, yet loves regardless. In her eyes, her children are special. I share that special space with my sisters. There are days, though, when I feel that space has all but dissolved with Mommy gone.

It’s the year 2022 now, and once again, it’s August. Mommy’s birthday is coming up. I am no longer angry or hurt or resentful. I am just sad. So there is hope. There will come a day when I can actually celebrate her birthday with love and joy blocking out all these other feelings that I cannot describe.

So Mommy, I am truly glad that you are with God, and that you are free of all earthly pain. Try not to be sad that I, that all of us, still miss you. It’s your fault. It’s hard not to miss a lifetime of being loved, the way you loved us. 

I imagine your eyes widening at this before breaking into that infectious laughter of yours. Of course, I am being silly. Laugh, Mommy. Happy Birthday from your silly daughter.

No goodbyes

I did not say goodbye to Mommy.

When the men were about to seal her tomb, her immediate family lined up to throw flowers into the compartment that would be home to her remains.

But I had distanced myself, watching from under a Sampaguita tree on the rotunda nearby. I had slipped away, unable to bear any more grief even as the tears would not stop flowing. I could not see clearly. I felt a heaviness that threatened to crush my chest and arrest breathing. 

I felt, rather than saw, my sisters look around for me and I shook my head, crumpling my handkerchief into my mouth to stop my sobs from becoming audible, even as they shook my body. A friend I’d last seen in high school put an arm around me, which brought me back and gave me enough control to mutter a miserable “thank you”. 

Mommy would not have approved of such behavior. She was made of iron. When Daddy died, I barely saw her cry. Instead, she entertained visitors, and attended to and gave directions on what needed to be done. She was tireless, strong and there.

I was fine when I rushed home upon learning of her death since I was immediately thrown into a whirlwind of things that had to be done. From the airport, I went straight to the funeral parlor where I took over from my sister and oversaw Mommy’s body being transported to the chapel where her wake would be held. 

I remember my first sight of her. It was her and yet, not her. My mommy did not look anything like this thin, stern-looking being whose hair had been flattened to her skull and whose cheeks were painted red, making her look grotesque. I frowned and tried fluffing her hair with my fingers to make it look more natural. I asked those attending to her to reduce the redness on her cheeks and her lips. 

No tears threatened to flow in my determination to make her look as she would have liked. There was nothing I could do to disguise how thin she had become just before she died so I was just relieved that Mommy had insisted on a closed coffin. 

I felt lost inside the chapel. I’d never organized a wake. When Daddy died, Mommy took care of everything. Now, it was her wake and I had no idea what to do. Our eldest, overcome by grief and fatigue, showed up at a hospital emergency room instead of the chapel and I was alone. Our youngest was busy with life and family.

That night, it was just her body and me, but I did not feel her presence. After my friends from the newspaper left a little after midnight, I prayed and wondered if I really wanted her to contact me. And what I would do if she did. I tried but could not sleep so I started collating all her photos to show at her wake. The morning light had already filled the room by the time I was done.

After that, my sisters and I went through the days, fumbling through the wake. We were lost. Our rock had gone. We made do, but I think we did not do as good a job as Mommy would have done. I certainly did not. I failed her when I refused to deliver the eulogy at her burial mass, not knowing she had stipulated it in her will. I could not have done it anyway. My sister, Tina, was amazing. She did it for all of us, and she did a great job.

So many people came to pay their respects and kept us occupied. It was only during the nightly celebrations of the Holy Eucharist that I would weaken and allow the tears to roll down my face to unload the grief that I somehow kept at bay. I looked over at my sisters with their heads bowed, and they were doing just the same.

I didn’t know where Mommy was, only that she was not there. I could not feel her. I don’t know what I expected. All this talk of Heaven was comforting, but all I could feel was this total, overwhelming loss. I could not find her, even if she was bigger than life in the stories of her former students and friends. She was lost to me, never to be found.

She was not there when they started sealing her grave, so I did not say goodbye. How do you say goodbye to someone you so badly but cannot find? How do you cut off someone who’d already left you? How do you stop being a daughter when your mother dies?

I had no answers, so I did not say goodbye.

A Message from the family of Evelyn R. Luab

(Delivered during the book launch of “Light Sunday” - selected essays written by the late Evelyn R. Luab for the regular Sunday column of SunStar Cebu - which were compiled and published into a book by Class '72 of Sacred Heart School for Boys - Ateneo de Cebu)

To the Sacred Heart School for Boys Class of ’72, led by Mr. Jose Soberano III, our friends from SunStar Cebu, Saint Theresa’s Alumnae Association of Cebu City led by Ida Magallon, all of Mommy’s close friends who we are privileged to call “Tita” and “Tito” from the bible study and meditation groups she attended under the Cenacle sisters and the Redemptorist Fathers, and those from her Ayala hiking group, friends ... good afternoon.

I wish Mommy was here. I wish she could see all this. I wish she could feel all the love, support, respect and the high regard with which you hold her. She would be very thankful and quite touched that her former students have chosen to honor her by publishing an anthology of her essays written for “Light Sunday” of SunStar Cebu.

This book has taken a long time in the making. Class ’72 tried to do this while Mommy was still alive but they found her at a stage in her life when she no longer had the energy to do the work needed to do this book. She was also too proud to take me up on my offer to do the work for her. Nothing that my sisters and I said could convince her that to take on this project for her would not be a burden to us.

As you know -- as anyone who knows her well knows – Mommy did not want to be a burden to anyone.

You see, Mommy was a giver. She was the best at giving. But she was not that great at receiving. For some reason, she always felt a sense of discomfort that she had caused a person to spend time, energy, money and effort on her.

Take for instance the time she ran into Mr. Soberano at UCC Café. Mommy said that when she asked for the bill, she found out that he had already paid it. I heard this story almost every time we would be eating at a restaurant and chance upon one of her former students there. She was always anxious that THAT person would do a “Jo Soberano” and pay for our meal without our knowledge.

But that story always ended with her telling us how good she felt that a student of hers from some time back remembered her well enough to do such a nice thing for her. She appreciated what Mr. Soberano did, just like she appreciated all the nice gifts and touching gestures that people did for her and she took well to remember them, even keeping things from way back.

After she died, I found a clipping in one of her notebooks which contained her “Light Sunday” articles published in 1999. It was a clipping of GEETEEVEE, a column by Bien Fernandez titled “Flashbacks.” I saw that she had circled a paragraph where Bien expressed that he had been fortunate to have had Mommy as his English teacher in high school because not only did she teach discernment in English literature, more importantly, she taught compassion.

Indeed, she had loads of compassion. You will see this in the articles contained in this book, which offer a view of how she lived her life as a wife, mother, grandmother, teacher, friend, a member of the Cebu community, a citizen of this nation, an employer, and all the other roles she played in her lifetime.

Mommy wrote what she knew. She laid out what was real to her and what stood out to her. She did not pretend to be a connoisseur or an expert of anything. One cannot go through 1,350 clippings collected over 27 years of her writing “Light Sunday” and fail to realize that here was a real person, a woman with thoughts and experiences just like ours, laying herself and her life open in the hope that it would help someone gain something – whether it was an insight, values, strength, a realization, an appreciation of their blessings…anything.

And because Mommy was a person of faith, she made sure that even as she shared of herself in “Light Sunday,” that it would not be about her but about how God’s love and amazing grace shines in the most mundane to the most unusual of experiences, in the daily rigors of our journey here on earth and through people from all walks of life, even from those we least expect it.

This is why we agreed to have this book published. In our hearts, we are sure that Mommy appreciates this tribute. However, we must be honest and tell you that she did not expect one and she did not really want to have a lot of fuss made over her. She had even left instructions to this effect before she died. “The less people who know I am gone, the better. I came quietly into the world – my passing should also be quiet and simple,” she wrote us.

Obviously, this did not happen. I think Mommy never fully realized the impact she had on people … or the power of Facebook and social media.

So, we would like to take Mommy’s lead and make this book not about her, but about the mission that she had set for herself in writing “Light Sunday.” She saw her column as a way to spread God’s Word in her own words by telling stories of how His Love prevails in our lives in times of joy and sorrow and even in the midst of problems and obstacles.

Thanks to Class ’72, her work outlives her and we hope, inspires readers both old and new, to do all things with Love – Love of God and of fellowmen, and to keep believing that with God, all things are possible.

We would like to mention in particular Mr. Soberano not only for leading the group in taking on this project but also for believing in and supporting Mommy. We also thank the other major sponsors -- Mr. Erramon “Montxu” Aboitiz, Robert “Bob” Gothong, Benjamin “Boojie” Lim and Jasper Tan.

Raymund, we are amazed by your creativity and the amount of work you did in so short a time with your wife Estela and your kids. There are 73 articles in this book, which Raymund got his kids to encode – and this does not include those that they encoded and which did not make the cut. Thank you for the patience and sensitivity you displayed in handling our family and for respecting what Mommy wanted for this book.

We also thank the members of the core group working on this project – Mr. Bien Fernandez, Roy Emil Yu, Danny Kimseng, Rene Villarica and his son Carlo and the staff of Cebu Landmasters.

We also thank SunStar Cebu, without who this book would certainly not be possible. Mommy always counted as among her greatest blessings the fact that she was able to do what she loved, which was to write, in the service of the Lord.

To all those who are here, I cannot name you one by one, but please know that you are as much a part of this book as all those I mentioned earlier. Some of you, literally and by name. We are all part of "Light Sunday" because we are all part of Mommy’s Life.

So let me end by thanking everyone the way Mommy usually thanked someone for a gift or a gesture that was so big that she knew she could not repay it:  “Thank you very much. This is exactly what we wanted for Mommy. Ang Ginoo na lang ang mahibalo kaninyo (The Lord knows best how to reward you).”

Good afternoon.

Clippings

1990 column picture

It is done.

Some four months after we buried our mother, I have finished scanning all of her clippings of the “Light Sunday” column that she kept from 1990 to 2017.

I learned many things. One, that my mother would have made a very poor librarian. So many of her clippings lacked dates. I guessed at some of the dates based on the order in which the clipping was glued to the page of a large notebook, one of many which featured the faces of long-gone Tagalog celebrities on its covers.  

She was not much for presentation either. I cringed at how unevenly she cut out the columns and felt a faint sense of vertigo over how they tilted left or right on the pages. And she lacked several. My mother wrote for SunStar Cebu every Sunday from November 25, 1990 to August 6, 2017. I counted 1,340 Sunday columns in her possession, but figured that she lacked about 41 more.

1998 column picture

Two, she wrote about us. Many times I stumbled on a half-forgotten memory retrieved from the yellowed edges of her clipping. There we were growing up, getting jobs, leaving home, getting married, having children, getting sick…named or unnamed, we peppered her columns for some 27 years.

And she wrote about her concerns, things that were real to her. Most importantly, she spoke with hope and total belief in the Lord even if she highlighted issues and challenges that seem insurmountable.

My young immature self then had wondered if my teacher of a mother, whose strong religious beliefs and love of God always managed to work itself into every piece she wrote – masked or unmasked – would register with a newspaper-reading public (Internet access was not widespread then) that seemed to feed on current and more worldly, trendy and cosmopolitan topics.

This column pic lasted just months in 2004.

I should have known better than to doubt her. I have friends who tell me that their mothers would look for and read my mom’s column every Sunday. We would get positive feedback via mail and in person. 

My mother wrote as she lived. With a love for God and family, and a genuine concern for mankind even if that concern was often shortchanged. Sure, she was also critical and sometimes got burned for her opinions, but this never stopped her from expressing what she felt was right. 

Finally, color in 2007.

As I scan page after page and read through years of her writing, I relive having a wonderful, caring, imperfect, stubborn, strong-willed, God-loving and -fearing mother, and I miss her even more. So do my sisters.

We laugh at the memories her writing evoke, wince at the times we unknowingly caused her pain because we had grown up and away from her, share her frustration over how problems remain unsolved because of lack of leadership or will, and admire her tenacity of faith and unfailing belief in the power of prayer.

She got a new column picture in  2017,
the last year she wrote for SunStar Cebu.

My sister, Ludette, says it best:  "Most people will say that their mothers are special. But Mommy Really. Was. Special."

I have four sisters, a lifetime of memories and 1,340 pages of mostly undated, unevenly-cut and discolored clippings to back me up.

The Sign

I stare at the photograph displayed at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila.

It is a picture of the interior of the 18th Century Church of La Purisima Concepcion in Guian, Eastern Samar that hangs in the Gallery of the Via Crucis of an unknown Bohol Master.

The photo on display at the Gallery of the Via Crucis
of an unknown Bohol Master inside the
National Museum of Fine Arts.

It is Jimboy, my brother-in-law, who points it out.

In the center aisle, walking towards the altar, is a likeness of my mother, Evelyn R. Luab, who we buried just recently.

“Now that’s a sign,” my sister Ludette murmurs. We both know she is talking about the “signs” that our eldest sister Tessa claims come from Mommy. We’d made fun of her “signs” which range from songs on the radio to car license plates.

But we look at the figure leaning on her umbrella before the altar, and it is easy to see Mommy leaning on her cane in church. I take a picture and send it to my other sisters with the words: “I do choose to think that she wants us to know that she is with God even if it doesn’t make sense to me to ‘read’ it in a picture.”

Mommy inside the Basilica in
Batangas City in 2015.

I am not a believer of “paramdam” from our beloved dead, even from Mommy who I love dearly. But I do believe in God and I know He comforts those who come to Him with their sorrows.

This sorrow cuts deep. Mommy is gone. I will never see her or hear her voice again. I know I should be happy that she IS better off, that the unhappy bed-ridden state that had become her life the last months before she passed away has ended.

But my heart aches. I wake up tired. And I leak all over the place. I can’t seem to keep it together. There are so many things I wish I’d done differently or sooner or more frequently. 

Mommy was an amazing woman. As my sister Tina so aptly put it, we’d always known that she was loved, but nothing prepared us for the magnitude of that love.

She would have been embarrassed by all the attention at the wake, but she would have been deeply touched by her former students, who came in batches. She would have been amused by the lighthearted squabbling over who was her favorite. She would have comforted those who teared up because they had lost the person “who made me who I am today.” She would have been happy to see long-lost friends even if she’d wished that those who came in wheelchairs or struggled to walk had not bothered. She never did like to inconvenience or be a burden to anyone.

Her former students came in batches
and the flower stands overflowed
into the hallway outside the chapel.

But since she wasn’t around, all five of us daughters did what we could. We listened and smiled and did our best to attend to all of them. And many moments in between, we cried. My eyes have not been this clean in decades. Or saddled with so many bags.

Now that we’ve buried her body and gone back to a semblance of normalcy in our lives, I remember why I miss her so badly.

Sure, my last memories of her were in her weakened state, when she could only manage a few minutes on the phone before she got tired or humor my chatter before she turned on her side to rest. 

But now, I remember the strong-willed and loving mother – the one who left herself out when dividing the family treat on weekends so that we would each get bigger slices. The one who made us do chores and brought us to Carbon market then Pasil not only to help bring the goods home, but to train us how to buy vegetables and fish.

This is the mother who made us study every day even if we had no quizzes the next day because she wanted to SEE us studying. She required us to put in hours on the family business on weekends and made us take turns accompanying her to that eternally-long church service outside of Sunday mass every week.

She made us help her check the objective-type tests she gave her students.  She even managed to get two of us to teach her students dances for the play she was putting on for the school.

We obeyed her because she was Mommy and she said so, and we were none the worse for it. 

Thanks to her, we learned to read at a very young age. It wasn’t just the Mills and Boon or Barbara Cartland books that she left lying around the house, but also English literature which she brought home from the school library. We discovered “Nancy Drew” and “Hardy Boys” only after we realized that our school library didn’t only carry “The best of classic American short stories” or “Roots” or “Fountainhead”. 

Now that I am a parent, I marvel at how much leeway she gave me even when I was still in high school, more so in college. I went on overnight trips and leadership trainings outside the city and even beyond Cebu. I rode the jeepney and walked everywhere by myself. Part-time work in a local paper during college meant coming home very late at night or early in the morning, which must have given her some sleepless nights. 

Mommy and her girls.

She gave all of us daughters our wings and the courage to test them. She rarely reined us in, except when she saw us heading in the wrong direction. And even then, she struggled to understand. Many things changed through the years but her love kept us coming back and together. That love endured through all that five, strong-willed and independent-minded daughters could throw at it.  And we loved her back. Oh, how much we love her.

Mommy died on February 28, 2018 but we lost her before that. She’d stopped laughing at my jokes long before she drew her last breath. It was not because my jokes were not funny. Even those drew a polite laugh which turned genuine when I'd tell her she was faking it.

Now, she is silent and I am afraid that if I cry any more, my heart will finally break into a thousand pieces that I can never recover. How then can I hold her if not in my heart?

I look at the picture and I know that the Lord will hold her for me until I am whole again and can remember with less pain. Maybe I am desperate but I am taking this picture as a “sign” that our mother is now in God’s house and facing His altar. 

We differ on Tessa’s songs and Mariles’ white butterfly, but all five of us seem to agree on this “sign”. We know that the Lord comforts us. And yes, Mommy might just be pestering Him as well.