Friday, September 16, 2005 A.D.
The Wake
After a most tiring and eventful week, I can only look back and wonder how I managed to take in that kind of abuse. I practically spent entire days in Arlington, where my grandmother's wake was held, and the atmosphere really got to be disorienting at times. It was easy to lose track of time, and as the week progressed, even the days started blending into each other. Time and place seemingly stood still in that dreary chapel.
We buried my grandmother last Tuesday, on my grandfather's second death anniversary. The burial, which marked the conclusion to a whirlwind schedule, was really just one of the many memorable moments of last week. I can still remember most of them in detail, I think. I list them below, but please forgive the apparent absence of order... I place the blame entirely on my mind's incapacity to comprehend the workings of time in dreary chapels.
The Initial Undertakings - A bunch of paperwork had to be settled and decisions had to be made. Upon reaching Arlington, we talked to the funeral director and the memorial plan coordinator, both of whom were quite helpful. The funeral director for the evening shift was a courteous woman in her 30s who dressed neatly, in the typical manner of a lesbian (by inference, she was, but that didn't matter). I observed how she managed to handle herself in conversation in a way that was very business-like and sympathetic at the same time and thought that she was far better than the one we talked to when we arranged my grandfather's funeral two years ago. Back then, the funeral director for the graveyard shift (cheap pun not intended) was a wiry, balding sleazebag who spoke like a showbiz tabloid reporter and displayed all the tactfulness of one. His limbs carried the exaggerated expressiveness of a dangling marionette's, and the skin on his face seemed eerily pulled back. His eyes were deep-set yet bulging, resulting probably from years of exposure to artificial lighting. He also irritatingly kept pursing his lips every so often, which he probably thought qualified as a gesture of sympathy. He was already taking on the features of a nocturnal creature (think Gollum). To say the least, he was about as entertaining as a death in the family, and definitely the last creature that one would like to meet in such a place. After working out the forms, he took us to the showroom. The showroom was where they housed the assortments of caskets and urns that they offered. He was actually there to help us choose a casket for my grandfather, although he ended up not so much helping as he did coercing. I found myself amused at his sales talk though, which he delivered with the uncanny skill and familiarity of a used car salesman. He took us from casket to casket dropping the names of recently deceased celebrities who enjoyed (for lack of a more appropriate term) the benefits of particular models (back then it was Rico Yan and a sleek blue casket, Sen. Rene Cayetano and an expensive wooden one, and Ishi Raquiza with a simple white one painted with flowers). He went on to describe the features of the different caskets, noting the thickness and quality of the metal used, linings, bubble tops, gaskets for airtight locks and swinging handles for pallbearing ease, as well as a lot of other items that escape my mind. He wasn't merely selling us used cars, I thought, he was selling us macabre Transformers. We did finally choose a casket, but it did feel a lot like blackmail. This time around, for my grandmother's, we were politely shown around the newly renovated showroom and were given a sales talk not different from the one we got two years ago. The list of celebrities were dropped (Miko Sotto, FPJ), and the same features were enumerated, but the final decision regarding the casket didn't feel at all forced this time. We finally opted for a simple but elegant casket that I felt most suited my grandmother. I stepped outside the offices to see a banner displaying Arlington's contact details. The Smart number listed there was 0920-9SOLACE (that's not so bad as personalized numbers go). The Globe number, however, was 0917-8BURIAL, which was a bit blunt for my taste, although by far, it's still better than 0917-8EMBALM or 0917-8CREMATE, so it should suffice.
Food for the Soul - For the duration of the wake, we had to ensure that we never ran out of food to serve to visitors. Water and juice were always kept chilled in the refrigerator, and the candy supply was replenished daily. Snacks were in abundance, with some visitors gifting us with even more food by the pot-load. We also had a regular supply of vegan food for special guests (more about them later). The nice thing about all this was that we had free access to all these edibles. We ate when we were bored and we ate when we were not bored. We also ate to compensate for our lack of sleep (I know I did). For dinner, we ordered out nightly, accumulating some 30 to 50 packed meals a night. Since my uncle is part-owner of a Japanese restaurant (Nippon, Tomas Morato, good food), we had Japanese food almost every night, served in neat styro boxes (I averaged two a night). It should be noted that I was discovering the many different permutations of bloated and gorged on four hours of sleep a day, and thus always felt as if I had liquefied stomach contents.
Room Without a View - When one feels both bloated and gorged, what better way is there to wind up the indulgence than with a good long sleep? The Felicidad chapel provided us with a backroom which we were able to use as our base of operations. There was a bathroom with a shower stall, a dining table beside a kitchen counter (with a microwave and a sink), a refrigerator, a couch, and an adjacent room serving as the sleeping quarters. Unfortunately, the toilet in the bathroom had a flimsy flush mechanism, so I avoided using it, thankful that my stomach was capable of dealing with liquefied contents for extended periods. The shower stall ended up as the repository for discarded mineral water boxes, and the couch a bag depository. The refrigerator was worked non-stop, as were the dining table, microwave and sink (see previous paragraph). The bedroom was only large enough to fit a closet and a single bed with two night tables on either side. Two table lamps were placed on the night tables, and they were the only sources of light in that particular room, giving off a pale yellow glow. The room also had its own aircon, ensuring that the temperature there was lower than the other areas in the chapel. Two pictures were hung on the walls, both of which looked like photo-realistic Victorian paintings. The room was cramped, cold and dimly lit, in short, and exuded a general ambience similar to that of the Bates motel. We avoided it like the plague. It didn't stop my cousin-in-law, however, from napping there (then again, nothing does). It also didn't stop me this one time, tired as I was, and as I lay there staring at the gloomy ceiling cast with sepia shadows, I thought, 'People who sleep here will look just like that - as if they are merely sleeping.' To sleep there was to lie in state. I forgot the urge to sleep that instant, not wanting yet to be available for viewing.
Enlightened Poultry - As my grandmother was Buddhist, it was but fitting for us to observe Buddhist rituals during the wake. My aunt arranged for two sets of monks to preside over the ceremonies daily at 3:30pm (is there a word for a female monk? monkette perhaps?). Joined by devotees in civies, the monks all wore flowing orange robes and shaven heads (even the monkettes). The daily ceremony lasted for more or less an hour, and had us, the family members, neatly filed in two lines, with males on the right side and females on the other (think soiree). For most of us unschooled in Buddhist traditions, our participation merely consisted of standing with our hands clasped and bowing when we were told to do so. There was the full bow, which required for us to bow while kneeling, palms on the ground and foreheads on our hands (thus assuming the armadillo position in a way). There was also the half bow, where our clasped hands were swung downward with the actual bow. Our hands were unclasped before the upswing, with the index fingers and thumbs forming a triangle that we then brought up to our foreheads (I was to know later that the triangle symbolized a heart). The choreography for the half bow was more difficult to enact, as evidenced by my rather problematic articulation in the previous sentences. We all got handed a book of meditations, written in Chinese no less, for us to join in the continuous chants (fat chance... most of us couldn't even read the characters). Note that I used the term 'meditation' as opposed to 'prayer,' because Buddhists, I found out, generally do not 'pray' in the Judeo-Christian sense of the term, but practice a more inward and contemplative approach (Buddhism being an ethicalist religion and not so much deistic). The meditations were either in a continuous string of characters or in the form of Chinese poetry. Again, this form of poetry is different from the more familiar Anglicized and Latinized forms in that rhyming is practically inessential to the art. Chinese poetry commonly values cadence, grouping verses by a fixed number of characters/syllables (like Japanese haikus). This ties in with the esteem given by the Chinese to calligraphy, as the poems display in neat columns when written on paper. The monks ably went through meditation after meditation, even calling out page numbers despite the fact that they weren't looking at the books. The cadence varied with each meditation, however, kept in time by the monks themselves who had bells, cymbals, skins, and various percussion toys. It didn't help me much though, as their memorized meditations often went from zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in an instant, obliterating all my attempts at figuring the characters out. One more thing to be noted about the chants was that there were symbols on the books that told when one was supposed to hold a syllable, how long, to trill or not, go faster, slow down, and so on. I never got it, needless to say. This convention of writing was apparently understood by the devotees, as they didn't have a problem in joining along with the chanting monks. The symbols didn't really indicate pitch, however, so the resulting chant was consistent merely in timings and far from harmonic - a pulsing monotonous cacophony that was surprisingly conducive to meditation, as I somehow discovered (although I found mantras, in their calming repetition, more effective). One time, after the service was finished, my niece and nephew - both four years old and perpetually caffeinated - went up to me and said that there was a goose in the backroom, and apparently, the goose was also 'sitting like a pretzel.' Curious, I looked in and saw one of the higher monks meditating with closed eyes and gracefully swaying like a drunken master in a stupor. He was on a chair right at the entrance to the eerie bedroom and, true enough, was sitting with his legs crossed - like a pretzel indeed but far from fowl-looking. I patronizingly asked the pepped-up two what a goose was, expecting to be lectured about the newest Cartoon Network character (a goose in orange robes?), and received the reply, "A mumu."
Sacrificially Senile - Not to be confused with Buddhist rituals, we also observed Chinese traditions. A monkette casually remarked one time that Buddhist and Chinese practices have been practiced simultaneously over the years that it was easy for anyone to regard them as interchangeable, which should not be the case. She went on to explain that some practices actually conflicted, as one of the basic precepts of Buddhism is freedom from material attachment while Chinese mourning usually involves 'gifting' the deceased loved one with a plethora of offerings. These offerings typically include his/her favorite things, symbolic gifts made of paper, and actual food (dishes designated in both variety and number). There is also a predominant theme of having these offerings burnt, because the ancient Chinese believed, as with most ancient belief systems, that burning is a transubstantiation of sorts, like a direct line to the immaterial world (sticks of incense are used for 'talking' even if some find them more useful to mask certain gateway odors). For the complex task of directing the various Chinese practices, we had a Chinese ritual coordinator. It wasn't really a free market in Arlington for this sort of service because there was only one such shop set up there (in the parking lot of all places). The shop pretty much sold everything, from candles, sticks of incense, lanterns, paper offerings, donation invoices, stamps and stamp pads, to cloth banners and articles of clothing. They even brokered intricate paper structures that stood for houses, cars and varied appliances (to be burned). The main coordinator was an aging Chinese man who walked with a noticeable hobble and a stiff but partially bent spine. He also had an expressive face that helped much as he spoke very little Filipino and what little he spoke only sounded Filipino but without the intended meanings (he should come with subtitles). His expressive face had white eyebrows, the last traces of hair above his shoulders seemingly, all of which had gone immaterial long ago, along with most of his teeth. I had very little chance of interacting with him, but what helpfulness he had in him was marred by the fact that he was already going through severe memory lapses that, among other things, hinted at senility. More than overseeing things, he actually overlooked them. He displayed a suspicious jerky alertness that gave away a certain amount of overcompensation, making it seem as if he went around his day in a freshly woken up state. I was myself in a freshly woken up state one morning, after staying overnight at the chapel, and saw the old man enter with no apparent purpose. We stared at each other awkwardly for several seconds, waiting for each other to make the next move like dazed deer doing a stare-down. I watched him curiously while he looked around the chapel, and finding nothing of interest, casually hobbled towards the door but not without first grabbing a leftover packet of Zesto by the exit and stabbing it with a straw through the bottom, proving that overseeing funerals can be a thirsty affair. I've seen first graders snatch Zesto with more discretion.
The Tonsil Shredder - Aside from the daily group of monks, we also received visits from a gaggle of people who belonged to the same Chinese associations that my uncle did. Some of these associations came about from immigrants who were from the same province in China and who congregated locally. Some of them were alumni associations, business clubs, volunteer firemen, and some were civic clubs. Like the running joke but elevated to social groupings, I couldn't distinguish between these associations because to my untrained eye, they all looked alike. The groups came to pay their respects, which they did via a traditional ritual. A band that played traditional Chinese instruments backed them up, and at one time, a dirge singer even 'sang' with the band, himself playing something that resembled a clapper. I wanted so much to give the high pitched singer a glass of water and a roll of tissue because he really seemed like he was bawling. We received around ten groups during the last night of the wake, and while they were doing the rites, we were required to kneel until they finished, during which time they went around offering us handshakes. It came to that, I thought, condolences had become institutionalized into standard procedure, like their uniform barongs. Each group offered at least one basket of flowers and at least one paper lunchbox (it looked like that although I have no idea what it really was). Some also offered food, which were again traditionally designated, totaling some twenty-four dishes in all. Each group also employed a barker. His role was to shout out the items that were offered, prompting the members to hold the particular item out in front of them and bow (e.g. "STRAW MUSHROOM!"). For this, each group followed their own choreography, with some adapting ridiculous hip movements (hip as in the body part) that made them look like Power Rangers with deadly sticks of incense. The last group for the night, who offered the most number of items, also employed the loudest barker. It probably would have seemed weirder for me had I actually understood what he was shouting about (everything was read in Chinese), because he was technically reading from a menu in a voice that not only sounded angry but was loud enough to rouse the dead (cheap pun not intended). I had to turn my head slightly to avoid being directly affected by his sonic assault. I also had to turn away because I was already breaking into a cold sweat from trying to hold back laughing convulsions. Noting that his group offered the most items, Mr. Barker was practically shredding his voice box each time he announced a food item that his voice was starting to come apart toward the end. I was expecting for him to cough up blood, and I swore he popped a vein while shouting "SEA CUCUMBER!" That would actually make for a good t-shirt slogan, I think: 'I lost my voice shouting SEA CUCUMBER'... then again, maybe not.
Layered Clothing - We cousins spent the night in the chapel on the eve of the burial. It was, after all, the last night of the wake. In preparation for the next four occasions that we would be requiring them (i.e. the burial, the 49th day, the first anniversary, and the second), my eldest cousin began to segregate the pile containing grandmother's clothes into four appropriate boxes. The clothes were to be burned - at least most of them were, while the rest were to be given to charity. We were to decide that night which we would be offering and which we would be donating. It was a painful chore to have to look through all her things and figure out which among them were her favorites. It was an unsettling realization that people do actually leave everything behind, with the seemingly meaningless things mattering only to knowing eyes in the end. We were assisted in the segregation by my grandmother's nurse and another helper. We cousins easily identified which items were the ones she most frequently used, those being the clothes that she wore five to ten years ago (including four identical pairs of shoes in varying stages of usage). However, given their time frame, the two helpers claimed that my grandmother preferred clothes that she wore during the later stage of her life, which I knew for a fact she only wore for function more than form. It begged the question, "Would Ahma wear a Boracay shirt?" The two insisted that she actually liked the t-shirts and that they should also be burned, though it pained me to even imagine my grandmother wearing them when I didn't even see most of them fit to be donated to charity anymore. I proposed a solution, 'Give me a box of matches and I'll happily burn them outside right now.' We did eventually settle on a logical compromise. We figured that all of the worn out stuff should be burned, since we weren't going to donate them to charity anyway, given their state. Anyhow, being worn out did mean that she did get to use them a lot in her life. My brother then picked a handkerchief for my mom to keep as a memento, as my mom wanted. Earlier that night, the family was actually thrown into a bit of panic when a helper informed us that all this time, my grandmother hadn't been wearing shoes. The odd thing was that my grandmother herself had long ago already approved of the clothes that she was to wear for that occasion (she was a perfectionist, as I pointed out, and she always wanted to look her best). All her things had been kept in a dress box since then, so we found it really strange that her shoes had somehow disappeared when the box had been securely tied ages ago. We couldn't have merely used any pair of shoes, since tradition required cloth-soled shoes (i.e. quiet footsteps). We asked the Chinese funeral coordinator if they sold shoes of that kind. They did, except the pair they sold looked as if it had been around since the World Wars, with the soles already peeling in places. Not good. A massive shoe-hunt was then set into motion, with practically all of my grandmother's shoes brought in for screening. The first batch yielded nothing, and we were already contemplating on options that seemed impossible at that time of night. It was already close to midnight when the right pair was finally found among my grandmother's things at her home. Looking inside, we found out who actually took the shoes out of the box in the first place, because lovingly placed inside each foot was a balled-up stocking. She was a perfectionist, you see, and she always wanted to look her best.
I cannot think of my grandmother and not think of a happy memory. I do not intend at all to trivialize certain circumstances, and I definitely do not mean to be irreverent except at specific nocturnal types who sell lined metal boxes. I merely want to point out that despite a huge sense of loss, I still found amusement at several things. It's only being human after all... time may have stood still inside that dreary chapel, but the Earth still kept continually turning on its axis outside. I look back at the tiring week and realize that life really does go on. My grandmother's wake entailed a lot of contemplation on my part, even without accompanying chants. I am going to miss her dearly, that much is clear. I am going to remember her for as long as I am humanly capable of remembering, that much is also clear. For sure, the recollections will mostly involve the short span of time that we spent together, although I do not think I can forget about the many memorable moments from last week, however heartbreaking they may be. Everything is all right though, and it still holds true: I cannot think of my grandmother and not think of a happy memory.
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We buried my grandmother last Tuesday, on my grandfather's second death anniversary. The burial, which marked the conclusion to a whirlwind schedule, was really just one of the many memorable moments of last week. I can still remember most of them in detail, I think. I list them below, but please forgive the apparent absence of order... I place the blame entirely on my mind's incapacity to comprehend the workings of time in dreary chapels.
The Initial Undertakings - A bunch of paperwork had to be settled and decisions had to be made. Upon reaching Arlington, we talked to the funeral director and the memorial plan coordinator, both of whom were quite helpful. The funeral director for the evening shift was a courteous woman in her 30s who dressed neatly, in the typical manner of a lesbian (by inference, she was, but that didn't matter). I observed how she managed to handle herself in conversation in a way that was very business-like and sympathetic at the same time and thought that she was far better than the one we talked to when we arranged my grandfather's funeral two years ago. Back then, the funeral director for the graveyard shift (cheap pun not intended) was a wiry, balding sleazebag who spoke like a showbiz tabloid reporter and displayed all the tactfulness of one. His limbs carried the exaggerated expressiveness of a dangling marionette's, and the skin on his face seemed eerily pulled back. His eyes were deep-set yet bulging, resulting probably from years of exposure to artificial lighting. He also irritatingly kept pursing his lips every so often, which he probably thought qualified as a gesture of sympathy. He was already taking on the features of a nocturnal creature (think Gollum). To say the least, he was about as entertaining as a death in the family, and definitely the last creature that one would like to meet in such a place. After working out the forms, he took us to the showroom. The showroom was where they housed the assortments of caskets and urns that they offered. He was actually there to help us choose a casket for my grandfather, although he ended up not so much helping as he did coercing. I found myself amused at his sales talk though, which he delivered with the uncanny skill and familiarity of a used car salesman. He took us from casket to casket dropping the names of recently deceased celebrities who enjoyed (for lack of a more appropriate term) the benefits of particular models (back then it was Rico Yan and a sleek blue casket, Sen. Rene Cayetano and an expensive wooden one, and Ishi Raquiza with a simple white one painted with flowers). He went on to describe the features of the different caskets, noting the thickness and quality of the metal used, linings, bubble tops, gaskets for airtight locks and swinging handles for pallbearing ease, as well as a lot of other items that escape my mind. He wasn't merely selling us used cars, I thought, he was selling us macabre Transformers. We did finally choose a casket, but it did feel a lot like blackmail. This time around, for my grandmother's, we were politely shown around the newly renovated showroom and were given a sales talk not different from the one we got two years ago. The list of celebrities were dropped (Miko Sotto, FPJ), and the same features were enumerated, but the final decision regarding the casket didn't feel at all forced this time. We finally opted for a simple but elegant casket that I felt most suited my grandmother. I stepped outside the offices to see a banner displaying Arlington's contact details. The Smart number listed there was 0920-9SOLACE (that's not so bad as personalized numbers go). The Globe number, however, was 0917-8BURIAL, which was a bit blunt for my taste, although by far, it's still better than 0917-8EMBALM or 0917-8CREMATE, so it should suffice.
Food for the Soul - For the duration of the wake, we had to ensure that we never ran out of food to serve to visitors. Water and juice were always kept chilled in the refrigerator, and the candy supply was replenished daily. Snacks were in abundance, with some visitors gifting us with even more food by the pot-load. We also had a regular supply of vegan food for special guests (more about them later). The nice thing about all this was that we had free access to all these edibles. We ate when we were bored and we ate when we were not bored. We also ate to compensate for our lack of sleep (I know I did). For dinner, we ordered out nightly, accumulating some 30 to 50 packed meals a night. Since my uncle is part-owner of a Japanese restaurant (Nippon, Tomas Morato, good food), we had Japanese food almost every night, served in neat styro boxes (I averaged two a night). It should be noted that I was discovering the many different permutations of bloated and gorged on four hours of sleep a day, and thus always felt as if I had liquefied stomach contents.
Room Without a View - When one feels both bloated and gorged, what better way is there to wind up the indulgence than with a good long sleep? The Felicidad chapel provided us with a backroom which we were able to use as our base of operations. There was a bathroom with a shower stall, a dining table beside a kitchen counter (with a microwave and a sink), a refrigerator, a couch, and an adjacent room serving as the sleeping quarters. Unfortunately, the toilet in the bathroom had a flimsy flush mechanism, so I avoided using it, thankful that my stomach was capable of dealing with liquefied contents for extended periods. The shower stall ended up as the repository for discarded mineral water boxes, and the couch a bag depository. The refrigerator was worked non-stop, as were the dining table, microwave and sink (see previous paragraph). The bedroom was only large enough to fit a closet and a single bed with two night tables on either side. Two table lamps were placed on the night tables, and they were the only sources of light in that particular room, giving off a pale yellow glow. The room also had its own aircon, ensuring that the temperature there was lower than the other areas in the chapel. Two pictures were hung on the walls, both of which looked like photo-realistic Victorian paintings. The room was cramped, cold and dimly lit, in short, and exuded a general ambience similar to that of the Bates motel. We avoided it like the plague. It didn't stop my cousin-in-law, however, from napping there (then again, nothing does). It also didn't stop me this one time, tired as I was, and as I lay there staring at the gloomy ceiling cast with sepia shadows, I thought, 'People who sleep here will look just like that - as if they are merely sleeping.' To sleep there was to lie in state. I forgot the urge to sleep that instant, not wanting yet to be available for viewing.
Enlightened Poultry - As my grandmother was Buddhist, it was but fitting for us to observe Buddhist rituals during the wake. My aunt arranged for two sets of monks to preside over the ceremonies daily at 3:30pm (is there a word for a female monk? monkette perhaps?). Joined by devotees in civies, the monks all wore flowing orange robes and shaven heads (even the monkettes). The daily ceremony lasted for more or less an hour, and had us, the family members, neatly filed in two lines, with males on the right side and females on the other (think soiree). For most of us unschooled in Buddhist traditions, our participation merely consisted of standing with our hands clasped and bowing when we were told to do so. There was the full bow, which required for us to bow while kneeling, palms on the ground and foreheads on our hands (thus assuming the armadillo position in a way). There was also the half bow, where our clasped hands were swung downward with the actual bow. Our hands were unclasped before the upswing, with the index fingers and thumbs forming a triangle that we then brought up to our foreheads (I was to know later that the triangle symbolized a heart). The choreography for the half bow was more difficult to enact, as evidenced by my rather problematic articulation in the previous sentences. We all got handed a book of meditations, written in Chinese no less, for us to join in the continuous chants (fat chance... most of us couldn't even read the characters). Note that I used the term 'meditation' as opposed to 'prayer,' because Buddhists, I found out, generally do not 'pray' in the Judeo-Christian sense of the term, but practice a more inward and contemplative approach (Buddhism being an ethicalist religion and not so much deistic). The meditations were either in a continuous string of characters or in the form of Chinese poetry. Again, this form of poetry is different from the more familiar Anglicized and Latinized forms in that rhyming is practically inessential to the art. Chinese poetry commonly values cadence, grouping verses by a fixed number of characters/syllables (like Japanese haikus). This ties in with the esteem given by the Chinese to calligraphy, as the poems display in neat columns when written on paper. The monks ably went through meditation after meditation, even calling out page numbers despite the fact that they weren't looking at the books. The cadence varied with each meditation, however, kept in time by the monks themselves who had bells, cymbals, skins, and various percussion toys. It didn't help me much though, as their memorized meditations often went from zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in an instant, obliterating all my attempts at figuring the characters out. One more thing to be noted about the chants was that there were symbols on the books that told when one was supposed to hold a syllable, how long, to trill or not, go faster, slow down, and so on. I never got it, needless to say. This convention of writing was apparently understood by the devotees, as they didn't have a problem in joining along with the chanting monks. The symbols didn't really indicate pitch, however, so the resulting chant was consistent merely in timings and far from harmonic - a pulsing monotonous cacophony that was surprisingly conducive to meditation, as I somehow discovered (although I found mantras, in their calming repetition, more effective). One time, after the service was finished, my niece and nephew - both four years old and perpetually caffeinated - went up to me and said that there was a goose in the backroom, and apparently, the goose was also 'sitting like a pretzel.' Curious, I looked in and saw one of the higher monks meditating with closed eyes and gracefully swaying like a drunken master in a stupor. He was on a chair right at the entrance to the eerie bedroom and, true enough, was sitting with his legs crossed - like a pretzel indeed but far from fowl-looking. I patronizingly asked the pepped-up two what a goose was, expecting to be lectured about the newest Cartoon Network character (a goose in orange robes?), and received the reply, "A mumu."
Sacrificially Senile - Not to be confused with Buddhist rituals, we also observed Chinese traditions. A monkette casually remarked one time that Buddhist and Chinese practices have been practiced simultaneously over the years that it was easy for anyone to regard them as interchangeable, which should not be the case. She went on to explain that some practices actually conflicted, as one of the basic precepts of Buddhism is freedom from material attachment while Chinese mourning usually involves 'gifting' the deceased loved one with a plethora of offerings. These offerings typically include his/her favorite things, symbolic gifts made of paper, and actual food (dishes designated in both variety and number). There is also a predominant theme of having these offerings burnt, because the ancient Chinese believed, as with most ancient belief systems, that burning is a transubstantiation of sorts, like a direct line to the immaterial world (sticks of incense are used for 'talking' even if some find them more useful to mask certain gateway odors). For the complex task of directing the various Chinese practices, we had a Chinese ritual coordinator. It wasn't really a free market in Arlington for this sort of service because there was only one such shop set up there (in the parking lot of all places). The shop pretty much sold everything, from candles, sticks of incense, lanterns, paper offerings, donation invoices, stamps and stamp pads, to cloth banners and articles of clothing. They even brokered intricate paper structures that stood for houses, cars and varied appliances (to be burned). The main coordinator was an aging Chinese man who walked with a noticeable hobble and a stiff but partially bent spine. He also had an expressive face that helped much as he spoke very little Filipino and what little he spoke only sounded Filipino but without the intended meanings (he should come with subtitles). His expressive face had white eyebrows, the last traces of hair above his shoulders seemingly, all of which had gone immaterial long ago, along with most of his teeth. I had very little chance of interacting with him, but what helpfulness he had in him was marred by the fact that he was already going through severe memory lapses that, among other things, hinted at senility. More than overseeing things, he actually overlooked them. He displayed a suspicious jerky alertness that gave away a certain amount of overcompensation, making it seem as if he went around his day in a freshly woken up state. I was myself in a freshly woken up state one morning, after staying overnight at the chapel, and saw the old man enter with no apparent purpose. We stared at each other awkwardly for several seconds, waiting for each other to make the next move like dazed deer doing a stare-down. I watched him curiously while he looked around the chapel, and finding nothing of interest, casually hobbled towards the door but not without first grabbing a leftover packet of Zesto by the exit and stabbing it with a straw through the bottom, proving that overseeing funerals can be a thirsty affair. I've seen first graders snatch Zesto with more discretion.
The Tonsil Shredder - Aside from the daily group of monks, we also received visits from a gaggle of people who belonged to the same Chinese associations that my uncle did. Some of these associations came about from immigrants who were from the same province in China and who congregated locally. Some of them were alumni associations, business clubs, volunteer firemen, and some were civic clubs. Like the running joke but elevated to social groupings, I couldn't distinguish between these associations because to my untrained eye, they all looked alike. The groups came to pay their respects, which they did via a traditional ritual. A band that played traditional Chinese instruments backed them up, and at one time, a dirge singer even 'sang' with the band, himself playing something that resembled a clapper. I wanted so much to give the high pitched singer a glass of water and a roll of tissue because he really seemed like he was bawling. We received around ten groups during the last night of the wake, and while they were doing the rites, we were required to kneel until they finished, during which time they went around offering us handshakes. It came to that, I thought, condolences had become institutionalized into standard procedure, like their uniform barongs. Each group offered at least one basket of flowers and at least one paper lunchbox (it looked like that although I have no idea what it really was). Some also offered food, which were again traditionally designated, totaling some twenty-four dishes in all. Each group also employed a barker. His role was to shout out the items that were offered, prompting the members to hold the particular item out in front of them and bow (e.g. "STRAW MUSHROOM!"). For this, each group followed their own choreography, with some adapting ridiculous hip movements (hip as in the body part) that made them look like Power Rangers with deadly sticks of incense. The last group for the night, who offered the most number of items, also employed the loudest barker. It probably would have seemed weirder for me had I actually understood what he was shouting about (everything was read in Chinese), because he was technically reading from a menu in a voice that not only sounded angry but was loud enough to rouse the dead (cheap pun not intended). I had to turn my head slightly to avoid being directly affected by his sonic assault. I also had to turn away because I was already breaking into a cold sweat from trying to hold back laughing convulsions. Noting that his group offered the most items, Mr. Barker was practically shredding his voice box each time he announced a food item that his voice was starting to come apart toward the end. I was expecting for him to cough up blood, and I swore he popped a vein while shouting "SEA CUCUMBER!" That would actually make for a good t-shirt slogan, I think: 'I lost my voice shouting SEA CUCUMBER'... then again, maybe not.
Layered Clothing - We cousins spent the night in the chapel on the eve of the burial. It was, after all, the last night of the wake. In preparation for the next four occasions that we would be requiring them (i.e. the burial, the 49th day, the first anniversary, and the second), my eldest cousin began to segregate the pile containing grandmother's clothes into four appropriate boxes. The clothes were to be burned - at least most of them were, while the rest were to be given to charity. We were to decide that night which we would be offering and which we would be donating. It was a painful chore to have to look through all her things and figure out which among them were her favorites. It was an unsettling realization that people do actually leave everything behind, with the seemingly meaningless things mattering only to knowing eyes in the end. We were assisted in the segregation by my grandmother's nurse and another helper. We cousins easily identified which items were the ones she most frequently used, those being the clothes that she wore five to ten years ago (including four identical pairs of shoes in varying stages of usage). However, given their time frame, the two helpers claimed that my grandmother preferred clothes that she wore during the later stage of her life, which I knew for a fact she only wore for function more than form. It begged the question, "Would Ahma wear a Boracay shirt?" The two insisted that she actually liked the t-shirts and that they should also be burned, though it pained me to even imagine my grandmother wearing them when I didn't even see most of them fit to be donated to charity anymore. I proposed a solution, 'Give me a box of matches and I'll happily burn them outside right now.' We did eventually settle on a logical compromise. We figured that all of the worn out stuff should be burned, since we weren't going to donate them to charity anyway, given their state. Anyhow, being worn out did mean that she did get to use them a lot in her life. My brother then picked a handkerchief for my mom to keep as a memento, as my mom wanted. Earlier that night, the family was actually thrown into a bit of panic when a helper informed us that all this time, my grandmother hadn't been wearing shoes. The odd thing was that my grandmother herself had long ago already approved of the clothes that she was to wear for that occasion (she was a perfectionist, as I pointed out, and she always wanted to look her best). All her things had been kept in a dress box since then, so we found it really strange that her shoes had somehow disappeared when the box had been securely tied ages ago. We couldn't have merely used any pair of shoes, since tradition required cloth-soled shoes (i.e. quiet footsteps). We asked the Chinese funeral coordinator if they sold shoes of that kind. They did, except the pair they sold looked as if it had been around since the World Wars, with the soles already peeling in places. Not good. A massive shoe-hunt was then set into motion, with practically all of my grandmother's shoes brought in for screening. The first batch yielded nothing, and we were already contemplating on options that seemed impossible at that time of night. It was already close to midnight when the right pair was finally found among my grandmother's things at her home. Looking inside, we found out who actually took the shoes out of the box in the first place, because lovingly placed inside each foot was a balled-up stocking. She was a perfectionist, you see, and she always wanted to look her best.
I cannot think of my grandmother and not think of a happy memory. I do not intend at all to trivialize certain circumstances, and I definitely do not mean to be irreverent except at specific nocturnal types who sell lined metal boxes. I merely want to point out that despite a huge sense of loss, I still found amusement at several things. It's only being human after all... time may have stood still inside that dreary chapel, but the Earth still kept continually turning on its axis outside. I look back at the tiring week and realize that life really does go on. My grandmother's wake entailed a lot of contemplation on my part, even without accompanying chants. I am going to miss her dearly, that much is clear. I am going to remember her for as long as I am humanly capable of remembering, that much is also clear. For sure, the recollections will mostly involve the short span of time that we spent together, although I do not think I can forget about the many memorable moments from last week, however heartbreaking they may be. Everything is all right though, and it still holds true: I cannot think of my grandmother and not think of a happy memory.
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