Eufrocina Mág-isá Vergara, July 7, 2000
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. Had I known of her 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 mid-night, my brother
Jeggs and I were with the grieving siblings and relatives on Sunday, July 9. My
mother's coffin was exactly where my father's had been a year and half before
when we arrived. She had never really recovered from the sadness that had been
with her since my father'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 the
last time that we would see her alive. She was buried adjacent to her husband's
grave. The wake and burial
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 those of the
future has been firmly established among the Mág-isá,
Vergara, Agustín and
Coronél clans of Pulilan, Bulacán.
My brother and I were back to the adopted country exactly a week after
we had left.
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