The Fullest Moon

    

October 1, 2008 by Migs  
Filed under Migs

Grandmother died at the Philippine General Hospital last Tuesday at precisely 9:21 p.m. May she rest in peace.

When we arrived in the evening, a group of doctors and nurses had crowded round her bed at the ward to make her last a little longer. The males among them took turns performing CPR, while the females pronounced numbers and marked things on their papers. Bed Two had become a makeshift emergency room: green curtains demarcated grandmother from the rest, several pumps and machines were plugged in, and everyone became pregnant with repressed agitation. Although it wasn’t quite as chaotic an emergency as I had expected it to be, nothing made any sense still. Maybe few things ever do.

We stood there watching the ECG monitor, or rather I remember I did, while father made phone calls and mother whispered prayers. The lime-coloured waves were drawn like an outline of a strange valley, and I tried not to observe what my siblings were doing. The other patients looked on solemnly, with pertinent curiosity, forgetting perhaps for a moment their own afflictions and cancers and injuries while searching, as we all did, for signs, or a sign, of life from grandmother.

But she only lay frightfully on her bed – legs open, eyes closed, mouth agape, all kinds of tubes stuck into all parts of her body. Nothing in her position was voluntary; she was a limp figure, a shadow of her former, healthier self. When I watched over her the previous night, she still had not remembered my name (Gerry? Michael?), though at one point, when I least expected any movement, she suddenly grabbed me by the shoulder with her two hands and kissed my forehead. It was a tender kiss that made an even more tender smacking sound.

As I write this, I am waiting again – along with father, cousin Jacques, his wife Neslyn, and neighbourhood kid Reyboy – outside, at the parking lot of the hospital, waiting this time for St. Peter’s Memorial Services to come fetch the body of Hermogena Bassig which lies currently at the morgue. It has been almost four hours since she “expired”, but father explains that we should stay here. We can’t let the other funeral parlours rove the morgue and take grandmother away, since mother, who stopped paying installments to St. Peter’s last February, just might reactivate and regain hold of her policy upon the main office’s reconsideration. It’s a business the kind of which is most painstaking at a time when to a person all kinds of business seem trifling.

So we wait. The engine of our white Mazda van is turned off while we dry some tears. The one o’clock morning air swarms with an obscene amount of mosquitoes; thus I am forced to climb the vehicle’s roof, where insects are significantly scantier and the breeze is a bit cooler and where I can oversee the flow of late traffic along Taft Avenue. There’s also a vague neon skyline I see of a couple of Manila hotels. And when I lie down I see nothing but the twinkling collection of scattered scars in the vast sky.

It seems too romantic, even for a tragedy, and my thoughts drift to all kinds of directions; I am reminded of a scene from About Schmidt in which Jack Nicholson talks to his deceased wife while seated on the roof of his big trailer. Whereas in the movie, it is a shooting star from which Nicholson receives cosmic tidings, mine is brought by the fullest moon I’ve seen in my whole life. It is divinely bright, and it shines with a thick outer glow at a distance that seems delicately close. I try to forget that grandmother’s life is over, and to think instead that she is, with her toothless smile, watching us from above.

About the Author:  Migs Bassig is a freelance writer and journalist with a background in Mass Communications. After working for a Manila-based advertising agency, PR firm, and events organizer, he now contributes to various locally published magazines and newspapers, and is one of the authors of Metroblogging Manila. A suburbanite commuter, Migs has lived all his life in the Philippines and loves scouring the Philippine capital’s rich patina of arts and literature.