Unfinished Business

"The dying of the light"  (Yangon, Myanmar; 2015)

This morning, I joined my family in welcoming an uncle and his wife who are back in town from Toronto. It has been more than six years since their last visit. I was expecting to see my uncle in his usual confident moves, but what I welcomed instead was an old man struggling to walk even with his cane, hands shaking, and unable to orchestrate his own body movements. I felt a sense of sadness and loss looking at him.  He wasn't the uncle I had known.  He wasn't the uncle I spent my first semester in college with. The scene reminded me of a similar episode more than a decade ago.

When my father came home from Surrey after his last visit to my sister and her family, I was totally surprised to see a fragile old man whose gait lacked balance and steadiness. He was gone for only a few months; hence,  I couldn't imagine how he could have aged so swiftly. But then, I hardly went home to pay my parents a visit then, so I probably didn't really see him for months except for occasional visits. I lost sight of how he had been gradually aging.

That night, I went to my room wrecked by the father I had encountered that evening. My eyes welled up as I struggled to come to terms with how my father, who was a pillar of strength and somehow even a hero of sorts to me, was now a frail man. The man who brought out the activist in me and from whom I learned the love of reading and writing was fading away. A part of me regretted having allowed my busy-ness at work and with my own personal life to let slip away whatever little opportunity there was to reach out to  him.

It was a blessing that I was able to spend a little bit of time taking care of him before he passed on. Still, so much was left unsaid.  I had to be the strong, rational one and therefore didn't really face my grief until he was gone.  I was the one asked by my doctor-aunt to discuss the prognosis with the doctor.  In behalf of my family, I had to articulate the decision not to let him go through further treatments that would only prolong his agony.  I stayed by his bedside most nights until the final breath when he clutched my arm, his fingernails leaving marks  that would stay for days.

Weeks after he was gone, I would find myself thinking about the many things left unsaid, about the what-could-have-beens. I would find myself talking to him in ways I wasn't able to in the lifetime that we shared. Some nights I'd be haunted by Thomas Dylan's poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night;  Rage, rage against the dying of the light." 

Now that our country is faced with the same social ills that we fought together during the final years of Marcos' martial law, I talk to him more often. I wonder what he would do. I can imagine how angry he, as a journalist by training, would be with the proliferation of fake news. I imagine how livid he would be with the lack of decency and integrity among our politicians.  In my moments of self-doubt and worry as to whether I am compromising the life I am meant to live in order to meet my financial obligations, a situation he faced many times over as a family man, I talk to him and ask him for guidance.  I think about the many sacrifices he made for his family and how he probably tried to cope through alcoholism. During these times, the Spirit seems to whisper to me that I don't have to take the same path. Sometimes I think of him and wonder what he makes of the choices I've made.

Our troubled relationship used to make me think that life would just go on for me after he's gone. I was wrong. I still think about the kind of relationship we could have had.

Yes, I miss him and I long for him still.