My Laptop Is Dead, and How Do I Say Goodbye?
Her name is Manna.
I was on my iPhone, reading the messages of my sister. She spent 19 days in quarantine and isolation after testing positive for COVID. Now that she is well and good. She is back in the US with her daughter, whom she hasn’t seen in three years. It was a reminder from Mom, as she always says;
Life works out in the end.
I can start writing again. While we were dealing with this family crisis, it took a back seat. Family comes first, a lesson I learned from my Mom as she said goodbye to all of us. Her death remains a beautiful memory, sad but beautiful.
As soon as I finished reading my sister’s message,
“We are home safely, and let’s talk again tomorrow.”
I opened my laptop, and it was gone. It didn’t go through the process of dying. It just died.
It is an old laptop. It’s been seven years. A hand me down from my niece who works abroad.
During the seven years that I have been my Mom’s caregiver, a word that I didn’t come to terms with until her last days, the laptop was a constant companion. It is where dreams were made of and faded. It is on this laptop that I wrote my failed startup pitch deck. It was from this laptop that I wrote a letter that nobody will ever get to read.
Only my closest friends know that I am a caregiver. That was who I was for the last seven years. I didn’t work, nor write. Our eldest was with Mom 24/7. She was her primary caregiver. The word caregiver was too much for me. Part of me is embarrassed, a part of me doesn’t want to be defined by it, and my reasons change every time I look at myself in the mirror and asks;
Who am I? and What am I?
Caring for my parents is a given. I would do that without question, but later on, I knew what was bothering me.
The idea of being my Mom’s caregiver meant she is sick and that she is dying.
My Mom is a woman of strength, someone I misunderstood, a woman whose life wasn’t easy. Her childhood wasn’t a walk in the park. She grew up in a dysfunctional family. Her dad has two families.
Growing up as a young kid right after WWII is not a memory one would wish for a child. My Mom was born on February 17, 1939. She was five years old when the war ended. By then, Manila was a city with over 100,000 people dead, men, women, old and young, the city in ruins, and my Mom was a child.
And that was something I don’t see her as, a child who grew up after the war.
The same is happening now. We have children growing up where they face death each day. And now they have to see a war that we didn’t see coming, a war against a virus that has killed millions of people. And it is still happening today, in many parts of the world, children are told to stay home. Their childhood years — lost forever. The same lost childhood that my parents grew up in after the war.
And later on, when I was 12, my parents grew apart, and they separated.
It must have been hard for my Mom to experience death, a different kind of death, as both her parents were still alive. So as all her siblings, being the eldest in her family, this kind of death was personal, the end of her marriage.
When my Mom died, we all knew it was coming, and it was only a matter of time or days since she stopped her dialysis. So every day, in her last 21 days, we ask ourselves, will today be Mom’s final day?
The days and nights were long. My two siblings and I took turns in keeping Mom company at night. As the days went by, her pain is unimaginable. Her eyes are closed, but she can’t sleep. She was hardly eating, and on some days, she would barely speak.
But when the sun signals a new day, and there were days when Mom appears to make it through, I know that she is dying.
She would always sleep in the morning, but only after seeing her great-grandchild, who visits her every day in her last 21 days. Even at 3 years old, Mat Mat, as we call him, shouldn’t be going out, as the government imposed the lockdown. Still, somehow he is as strong as our Mom, defiant, he chose to be with her, and if he missed a day, Mom can’t sleep, and Mat Mat cries at home looking for her.
Mom’s eyes would also light up every time my Dad arrives, who at 82 shouldn’t be going out either, but like Mat Mat, he is defiant. He has to be with us, his family, and his dying wife.
That is how I remember it, my Mom’s death. It was about family and love.
It was also about forgiveness and ensuring that we know that she loves us in the way she knows how. One evening, when it was my turn to be awake and watch over her, it must be from lack of sleep that my eyes closed. I woke with my Mom’s hands brushing my hair, and she told me that she loves me. It is not just I love you, but she said —
“I love you, Nap.”
Nap is my pet name.
It was the sweetest memory of my Mom ever calling my name.
I know I have been forgiven for the times I wasn’t a loving child to her.
On the 21st day, as her great-grandson arrives, she tells him —
“ I love you Mat Mat, Goodbye.”
As soon as he kissed our Mom, she said she was hungry, my eldest sister gave her a spoonful of yogurt, and Mom closed her eyes in her arms.
The one who took care of her 24/7, her firstborn who never left her, the one who deserves to have that final moment with Mom, was given that gift.
I was writing on the very laptop that died today. I can’t remember what I was writing or to whom. But, I knew I stood up, took Mom from the arms of my crying eldest sister. My other sisters were crying, my nephews and nieces were crying, and Mat Mat was in total disbelief at what is happening around him.
I laid Mom to bed. She was still breathing, she was sleeping, but this time it would be her last.
I made a call to Dad, and I can’t help but cry, and he told me to hold on, that he is coming. He asked me to take care of my sisters until he comes home.
He is finally coming home.
He is going to bury his wife, the mother of his six children.
I consider ourselves blessed when Mom died. The cases have gone down, and that we were allowed to bury our Mom as she wanted it. I knew she never wanted to die from the virus, be alone in the hospital, and be burned into ashes. Most families have to live through the pain of losing someone during the pandemic and not have a proper burial for their dead.
As most Catholic families would do for their dead, I asked my sisters for a shorter wake, three days instead of five to seven days. Unfortunately, my two sisters living abroad will not be able to come home. Travel remains restricted.
We are not waiting for anyone, but Mom or Life had other plans. I look back at this moment every time I feel lost in what is happening in my life.
And that is to wait and be Life’s observer.
Dad didn’t leave Mom during the wake. We have to wait for another two days when we can't bury her on the third day because it falls on a holiday. But that means another two days for Mom to be with my Dad.
If there is love in the afterlife, this is how it looks like. As Dad showed up, he finally showed up for her. He was, after all, the only man she loved.
I knew that Mom was directing everything, the last scenes of her movie. If this is a movie, she got her fairy tale ending. After all, her prince showed up. It was then that I accepted that the last seven years were all leading to this final moment. I was only playing a supporting role in her movie. Mom found her happiness.
The End.
We were able to celebrate her life through songs and words. Her grandchildren showed up. They, too, delivered. They loved my Mom in ways I never knew until they prepared songs and read their messages, even while some live abroad. They, too, can’t travel to see her for the last time. Not a single soul in that room had dry eyes after the eulogy ended.
On the day she was buried, after the prayers, I cried on her coffin and aloud said;
Mom, please take me, there is nothing for me here, and let me grieve for my mother.
Grief never ends. I found out days after, even after six months, there are still days that I cry, no longer the ugly cry but tears will roll down in my eyes, that I will be quiet for hours and even days.
Still, I am slowly getting back to life because that is what Mom wants for all of us, to continue living.
After all, she never really left. She is still around us. In our hearts, she occupies a bigger space than when she is alive. That is how I feel about her now that I am no longer her caregiver since she got back her superpowers. When life doesn’t make sense, I ask for help, and she is more than ready to provide me the answers. She is back to being a super mom, a superwoman because that is how she is before she got sick.
Superwoman.
It wasn’t my last face-to-face encounter with death. Months after, I lost friends, not from the virus, but the friendships ended.
Did I grieve for the long years of friendship that die?
I do, even now.
When I took off and stay with my friend for two weeks, to write, and when I came home, only to see that some of my plants died,
I was sad, and I grieved too.
What is grief if not love persevering? That powerful line from the TV series WandaVision is true not only to me but to millions who have lost someone this pandemic.
Now that my laptop has died. The computer who saw my years as someone sad, depressed, at times angry. I wrote a final letter that never came to be because I decided to give life another chance. Because I can’t see my Mom experience the loss of a child because that pain never leaves a mother. She once lost a baby boy, the one who came before me, the brother I never met. She had a miscarriage. It will kill her to lose her two sons in her lifetime.
I started to tell stories from my past on this laptop, which I never understood while they were happening. This is where I do my job as a writer. This is where I became a storyteller.
So now that it is dead, what do I do next?
I can only say Goodbye and thank you for being my writing ally when I had my self-doubt and couldn’t silence the inner saboteur.
You are my first reader. I never gave you a name, but now you have one.
You are Manna, from the bible story I remember as a child.
Manna, the daily provision from God to the Israelites, who were lost in the wilderness for forty years.
You are Manna. Through you, my life has changed. And I am no longer lost in the wilderness. I am but an observer of what is left of my years.
As Mom always says;
My other stories you may want to read:
- Space — Coffee, Dad?
- Work — Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
- Reentry — It Feels Like Family Again, but Where Is Mom?