Coming Home

By Angioline Loredo

The trip home was an out-of-body experience.

First, the ritual of burying the dead.  I do not know what it is like in other parts of the Philippines, I suspect Iloilo's is not that much different.  There, after the soon-to-be dearly departed draws his or her last breath, family, relatives, neighbors, and friends spring into action like little elves with their own designated assignments.  You get the feeling they have done these chores often enough they are practically experts, and the only job left for a city slicker like you is that of an ATM, i.e., to shell out cash every time goods and services need to be compensated.

Thereafter everything that happens is beyond your control; it is as if unseen terrestrial forces are at work, over which you do not have a prayer.  Tataasan ka ng kilay if you so much as hint an objection.  And so it is that any group of people can just materialize any time (including mealtimes) and you are expected to drop whatever it is you are doing so they can say their prayers (that last for at the very least half an hour).  It can happen that you have as many as five sets of people over for prayers in a day, sometimes you wonder if maybe God finds it all very taxing. 

The wake is called that because superstition has it that someone has to be awake at all times while a body lies in state.  In Iloilo the designated "wakers" are the mahjong players, who play until the wee hours of the morning.  Try sleeping with the sound of rattling tiles, and you know what it means when they say ikaw na ang namatayan, ikaw pa rin ang napeperwisyo.  You wake up early and there are sleeping bodies all over the place, it can be quite surreal.  It all came to pass, of course, and even though my aunt was 89 and death came as a deliverance of sorts,  it was still terribly sad when the time came to bury her.  As usually happens, I guess I cried as much for myself as for her.

I survived by pure adrenaline.

There were nine more days of prayers after the funeral, during which in early evenings a group of professional prayer women (Greek chorus I call them) led prayers for the dead and sang Latin songs I had not heard since I was a child.  It was all very moving actually.  At that point it was OK to be absent at the prayers, so I took a break by going to Negros Occidental (with a cousin and her husband), a place I had never been to, believe it or not, I almost kissed the ground to honor the moment.  The (45-minute to 1-hour) ferry ride was a revelation of sorts. Para kang sumasakay sa eroplano – actually mas maaliwalas pa –  with boarding passes, assigned seats, uniformed attendants, etc.  Our hosts in Bacolod City were a young cousin and her husband (a second-generation Chinese), who had become very rich (from very humble beginnings, mind you) manufacturing welding rods (I had visited the plant, so next time I see someone holding a blowtorch I will have a better appreciation of the technology). They gave us a tour of Bacolod City (which with its wide streets and nice big buildings make Iloilo City look like a dump in comparison), treated us to a fabulous "native" lunch, brought us to a few antique stores (that freaked me out because most stuff were cheap, not to speak that the quality was quite good), and on to Talisay City and Silay City. The two places turned out to be as "gracious" as I had always imagined them growing up, especially Silay City, where they had opened some "heritage houses" as museums.

We spent  the evening in the seaside birthplace of the husband of my cousin (my traveling companions) in barrio Taloc in Bago, the first town south of Bacolod City (about 13 kilometers away).  It was the closest I came to by way of a "natural" experience during my trip.  For starter, we reached the house by negotiating a narrow dirt road that seemed to lead to nowhere, but suddenly there was this two-story house with wrap-around balcony in the middle of a coconut grove.  Wala nga lang electricity.  We spent half the night on the beach, on surely one of the starriest nights I had ever seen in my life, I could have stayed forever counting the stars in the sky and listening to the waves lap the beach.  In the morning we went back to the beach in time to catch the fishermen come ashore; we bought all the crabs and alemosan (a variety of hito) we could find and had them for breakfast.  They never tasted better.

So many things had changed since my last visit in 1998, it felt quite overwhelming at times. Even in Iloilo, you can buy almost anything now, including, would you believe, French baguette and brioche.  And there was a certain brashness to people's attitude, I could not quite figure out where it was coming from, much less decide whether it was for the better or worse. In the end, however, a trip home is about people you care about.  When it was time to leave, I found myself reading the faces of my brother, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews, etc. as I said goodbye, wondering about a lot of things in their lives, and suddenly I was awash with tenderness and nostalgia – and saying to myself, I really should try going home every year, because for all the hassles and the problems I am forced to deal with, I do have a good time every time.

E-mail to friends, 12 May 2000