A Sudden and Unexpected Trip to the Country of Birth
The 2-week school semester vacation was a much relished break from school and studies on the very last day of which my mother played a very serious joke. In a hurry to go to church for the First Friday mass, she slipped on the floor in our family home. Rushed to the hospital, after two hours she re-joined her husband who had gone a year and a half before. She has also become united with her mother who had died two years after giving birth to her, with her first two children who had lived only for two years, and with countless relatives whose memories were kept in stories she had narrated.
Had I known of Eufrosina's death a few hours earlier on that day, I could have left on the night of that Friday, July 7, for the sad journey back home. Having managed to fly the following day, Saturday midnight, my brother Jeggs and I were with the grieving siblings and relatives on Sunday, July 9. Our mother's coffin was exactly where our father's had been a year and half before.
Eufrocina had never really recovered from the sadness that had been with her since her husband's death and had looked forward to the day when they would be both together again. She had revealed, when we we were about to leave after the family Christmas holidays six months before, that this would be t he last time that we would see her alive. She was buried adjacent to her husband's grave. The memory of the love between Domingo and Eufrocina from the time they had first met had been recorded three years before. In 1997, she had related their story to her grand daughter, Carmela, in an interview recorded with a video camera. The beautiful story would be preserved for future generations.
The wake and burial of Eufrociana once again served as a gathering and re-union of relatives many of whom I could faintly remember. It was also the establishment of what exactly the degree or nature of relationships among the kin who have grieved with us. The older generation of whom my mother was the oldest is dwindling in numbers. Slowly but surely our generation is replacing theirs. The relationship, however, of those of the earliest known generation through us of the present to o those of the future has been firmly established among the Mág-isá, Vergara, Agustín and Coronél clans of Pulilan, Bulacán.
My brother and I made the painful and sad journey to the adopted country exactly a week after we had left.