In a few days, we would still celebrate your birthday, you would have turned 85.
As Nanay (Mom) breathed her last, her last words were, “I love you, MatMat!”. Her final days were all about love.
Nanay said proper goodbyes. She said I love you to each one of us, from her children all the way down to her great-grandchildren.
During the nights that she couldn’t sleep and was in pain, she would ask Ate (our eldest), Bella, and I not to leave her, just to be with her and hold her hands.
Nanay would hug Ate and Bella. She would also look and ask for Atong(my nephew).
My moments with her were special. I slept beside her. We held hands as the night turned into day. I tucked myself beside her like a little child, her little boy.
But there is one love that Nanay wanted all her children to see in her last days, and it was the love where all of us came to be.
On some nights, she would shout, “Dad. Dad!” I knew it wasn’t her father, as she calls my Lolo, Papa, it was Ate who remembered that Dad is Tatay.
When Nanay passed, we asked Tatay about it, and he said, yes he is Dad:) #whosyourdaddy
She wasn’t saying it as if she was asking Dad or Tatay for help. She was calling him. Nanay had three death rehearsals, as I call them, to the millennials they call it, “It’s a prank!:)”
On the days that Nanay wasn’t eating, all Tatay had to do was tell her to eat, and Nanay would take a few bites. Each visit from Tatay means Nanay will live for another day.
Until it was time to say their final goodbyes, a day before she passed, Tatay revisited her.
Not a lot of words were exchanged, You know that line from the movie, Love Story, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”. Nanay never asked for an apology, and Tatay never had to say sorry.
What is important is that Tatay showed up. If I can sum it up with a song, it will be, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” by Stevie Wonder.
Nanay got her final goodbye, got her last kiss, and got her man. In gay lingo, “Quota na Momshie!”
I had a feeling Nanay would go soon after that last visit from Tatay. I Knew Nanay would not go on anyone’s birthday as she didn’t on my niece’s birthday in January.
She will not go on her birthday a few days from now. She knows it will make us sad. But she chose to go on February 2nd, the love month because she wants us to remember that she loved us all, in the way she knows how.
In my eulogy, I said, I forgot that long before Nanay got sick and needed me or us for help. She was a strong mother, a wife, and a woman.
And as a woman, she loved, and she only loved one man, and while she loved us all, she loved him the most.
When my parents separated, Nanay never said anything terrible about Tatay, not a single word against him came out of her lips. She never asked her children to choose. Even then, she was teaching us that the heart is big enough to love them both.
Like most of us who loved, Nanay dreamed and wished for the fairy tale ending, but she got more. She got her happy ending.
When Nanay was young, maybe she thought of Tatay as her prince, her knight in shining armor. But strong as she is, she never needed a prince or a knight to save her.
She is a woman capable of saving herself. A lesson she passed on to my sisters and something I hope all the women in my family would embrace and learn from.
Nanay need not ask Tatay to save her from an ivory tower, yet Nanay loved him, and Tatay loved her back.
There is a line from one of my favorite movies, Pretty Woman, Edward said to Vivian. So what happens after he climbs up and rescues her? Vivian: She rescues him right back.
Nanay you rescued Tatay, by letting him go when it was needed.
Thank you, Nanay for sharing with us your love story, and I do miss you, a lot.
First shared on Facebook.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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