Ode to superman
By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
HAGÅTÑA — It was an e-mail that I knew I would receive one day and always dreaded to read: “Papa is gone.” The message didn’t need any elaboration, other than a post-script apology that read: “We tried to call you but we couldn’t get a hold of you.”
“He died three hours ago,” my mother said when I returned the call. She calmly said that my father had his breakfast that morning, went back to sleep and decided to sleep forever. Before his death, I was scheduled to fly home in a week to surprise him. He missed my surprise by six days and 21 hours. Or was I too late to witness his appointment with eternity that he himself had set? My father, Jose Cagurangan, was a very organized man (which was probably the only thing that I didn’t get from him). He had a schedule for everything. During his last stay at the hospital a couple of months ago, he snapped at the doctor who asked him if he wanted to see a priest. “Why? Am I dying? I am not dying yet. I will decide when to die.” He did. I rushed to re-book my flight the very next day. Who wants this kind of homecoming? My father fought a long battle with emphysema, which he had acquired from smoking for I don’t know how many decades. The habit started when he was a teenager, working on his parents’ tobacco farm in the northern part of the Philippines. During the last two years, he was living on the cusp between life and death, painfully watching his once dynamic life fading away, while at the same time hanging on to what strength remained to keep breathing — to just keep breathing for as long as he could. He was once a haughty presence that had been reduced to a shrunken figure, humbly borrowing artificial life from an oxygen tank. Until that day he decided to sleep forever. Like what you might probably say about your own father, I would say, too. He was a domestic tyrant, very controlling. But he was the greatest. He was blissfully married to my mother for 40 years and raised seven children. He worked night and day, running a grocery store and attending to his duties as a village official, to be able to send all of us to one of the most decent universities in the Philippines. He had always believed in God but didn’t know how; and being agnostic, he didn’t know how to teach us the concept of a Divine Authority. He made the perfect compromise by sending us to a Catholic university and allowed us to choose our own path of faith when we grew older. Before I ever heard of Socrates, my father was the very first philosopher I had known. During my last long conversation with him last year, he told me that he had finally discovered God and asked me if I was done searching. “I’m getting there. I’ll tell you when I’m ready to discuss it,” I said. I didn’t realize that the conversation wouldn’t have a sequel and that he would leave me soon along the journey. My father was cremated a week after his death. The undertaker showed us his ashes and bones before they were placed in an elegant marble urn. Why we decided to burn him instead of burying him, I don’t know. “Do you want to put preservatives?” the undertaker asked. What difference would it make? My father wouldn’t care anymore. The dead don’t care. The grief of loss and the pleasure of the memory belong to the living. I find mercy in the fact that what they had cremated had ceased to be my father, who had just become the idea of himself. The dead are permanent past tense, the absence in places where they used to be, and the phantom that won’t reply to your curiosity. “Now tell me, is there a God? Is there life after death?” I asked my father’s ashes. Grieving is selfish.
But when I looked into the coffin, I saw that familiar face — so serene, so relieved — finally free of pain. I could tell he had forgiven God. I whispered: “I don’t want to see you agonize again, so please don’t wake up.”
For whatever I have become now, he deserved the credit — or the blame. He taught me how to think and encouraged me to write. He told me that God wouldn’t mind if I ask questions and use my reason.
The dead carry questions that are left unanswered and conversations left unfinished.
I refuse to grieve now because grieving is selfish. We cry for our dead for our own selfish reasons. We cry because we refuse to feel the pain of loss. This, I learned from my own son, who asked me, “Would you rather see him alive and hurting every minute, or resting in peace with no pain that we the living have to put up with?”
