I haven’t written much on this site since your Jan. 11 memorial last year. Though so much has happened both on-site and elsewhere, any connections to you seem tenuous. Your birthday memorial falls conspicuously at a time when the Christmas season has come to an end. Not much snow on the ground here, but a lot of talk and New Year’s wishes are up in the air. Whether the preceding holidays were festive or not, the decorations from Halloween to Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas are mostly put away and the New Year and the 2024 political engines are beginning to rev up.
It was with these familiar trepidations that my most recent weekend travels mixed holiday cheer with old friends in New Jersey and the admixture of bearing witness at the wake of a high school friend’s mother.
Ray and I were both Filipinos at an all-boys academy in New Jersey. Our names fell alphabetically close, so we were seated together in homerooms and some shared classes through the years. But, it wasn’t until Christmas 2019 that I met up with him in New York City near Lincoln Center where I went to college. Vida, his eldest daughter and a dancer, was in the area rehearsing for The Nutcracker and my family was staying a few blocks away near the Rockefeller Christmas tree. It was a great time for a reunion and none of us knew that COVID-19 and lockdowns were ahead in the New Year.
His mother, Jovita, passed away the day after Christmas 2023, four years later. I didn’t even know she was sick or that her husband, Jose, had passed a few years before I met up with Ray at Lincoln Center. I had never met her before. Reading her obituary, I didn’t even know Ray had been an only child.
Ray’s greatest fear was that she would die at home alone. He felt blessed that he was with her at the end. His youngest daughter, Rio, held her hand. His wife, Gail, and Vida were in the room nearby. Her Christmas departure was the greatest possible gift.
As I stood in the greeting line at the wake, he recounted to me her last days. He told me how close and involved she was with her church prayer group. Members would come by to pray the rosary with her. Near the end, he too spent time with her praying. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she would occasionally pipe up to tell him where they were in the litany of prayers. He grabbed me for emphasis, “She would open her eyes, suddenly alert, and say, ‘Glory be, Ray! Glory be!’” indicating that it was time to end one set of “Hail Marys” and move on to the next decade.
He said in that time with her he learned just to listen to her, to what she was trying to say and what he needed to hear. I nodded. After I caught up with him in the receiving line, I knelt by her open casket to pay my respects.
I found the easiest thing to do was just to talk to her: “I never met you, but I was a friend of your son’s back in high school. We called him the hippest Filipino because of the way he dressed up. And he always looked good! He taught me to peg my pants, so I could be hip too.”
I laughed as I told her how I sold him a pair of nunchakus and some other Asian weapons. I forget how much I marked the price up, but that’s how I made my money back then. (She was probably proud that he worked in finance now.) I told her about our last meeting in NYC with her eldest granddaughter and that great picture we took together.
I told her, “I met Gail and Rio tonight. It was truly a gift to have had the whole family there at the end. Now you can be reunited with your husband, who wrote you all those love letters that he left for you in your classic Camaro.”
Feeling close enough to her now, I also mentioned, “I have an only son too, Joshua Emet. I hope you get to meet him. Maybe you can teach him the rosary, or maybe you already have.”
And then I ended with a prayer:
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
It’s been a year and a minute, Joshua. Many names have gone by attached to people no longer here—in the workplace, in the world, in our everyday lives.
In our own lives, your sister is preparing for college next year. Had you been with us, you would have led the way. Instead, her moments of leaving the nest compound our family dynamic of having a first (and only) child preparing for departure.
I have often thought of parenting as analogous to things like teaching her to ride a bike or to swim. Inevitably it’s about passing on the ability to balance herself on her own and learning the skills to depart from us. To risk skinned knees and survive falling. To go out into the deep and to strive for things that are worth taking her breath.
But as she gets ready to graduate high school, I also have been caught up with seeing her mature and grow taller than your mother. I still remember the baby, but my pride and admiration must make room for all this growth.
So too it is with you. I remember holding you as a baby. You would be 19 today. No longer a baby, but a young man. I have no idea how it works in heaven. It’s not a detail I need to know. I only trust that people can find you and when the time comes you might recognize us or those that go before us.
I wonder with almost equal inquisitiveness for your sister what you might have gone to college to study. All three of us in your family are too familiar with how our plans for the future can radically change.
Our family lost our third cat early last year. It has taken longer than usual to get us back on track to look for and be open to another one (or two?). His absence pointed out how integral having someone other than the three of us helps us function better as a family.
The room that would have been yours was where that cat recovered from his life-saving surgery years ago. It was where he spent his last evening with us as well. It was the room we used for Airbnb guests before COVID, and now has become our second-floor gathering space. Sometimes your mom works in there, and other times our guests sleep there. Its default setting is a zen sitting area overlooking our modest backyard.
It’s not a place frozen in time. But it is a place where people find reflection and rest. Most recently, your grandparents slept there, as did a close cousin with his wife and newborn child. I am grateful we can share that space. And to be in the same room as you someday. Thank you for your generosity all these years.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.