Death and Oceans

Every morning I want to wake up with unsurpassed energy and motivation, so I almost run outside to greet the sun and embrace the ocean breeze. But I don’t. Instead, I wake up with this unbearable pain. It starts from my lower back and now has climbed to my shoulders. I begin to open my eyes. Oh good. I can still see. I sit up on the bed, slowly heaving myself forward. I can see my reflection on the antique mirror I purchased from a yard sale seven years ago, when taking the bus downtown wasn’t yet a struggle. I look at myself in the mirror. My face remains seasoned, just how I like to marinade the meat, waiting for its destined place in my oven, just how I have no choice but to wait for my destined place behind St. Alban’s Church, lot J14, next to my husband. But it was too bad that the crisscrossing lines across my forehead or the skin sagging under my upper arms and thighs refuse to keep up with my spirit. I fear that my body is near surrendering and my spirit will die as well.

I have a love-hate relationship with mirrors. While looking from one angle, I take pride in enduring so many experiences, in attempting to live life to its fullest at 84. But then there are days when another angle only shows me the gray hair and the fragile body that can easily stumble and fall like the tumbling leaves, sensing the arrival of the rain. At any moment, I feel myself being whisked away by the strong gust. But I keep my feet firmly on the ground. My shoulders, shaped like an elephant’s trunk, serve as walls that would secure my balance. But the pain does not subside. I wiggle my toes. Good. They still know I’m in command. Any physical activity hurts, but I managed to get dressed, somehow, every morning. Now my day can begin. I never like to worry about tomorrows. I never know what to expect of tomorrows. At 84, I can only live life by the second. I don’t count the minutes anymore. After all, I can’t live forever.

Death and the ocean are my greatest adversaries. Both serve as point of reference, of direction. The ocean always remains visible. Death, on the other hand, likes its ominous presence, its foreboding ambience. It keeps me in suspense. I fear it every time I get up to take a walk. Just one fall, one collision and I would be restricted to the bed, only to be accompanied by sunflower sheets and matching bumblebee pillows. Nothing scares me more than to lose my sense of mobility, to be able to have that control even if that control is nothing but an illusion for me. I like to believe I will always have that power, but then again, I always thought I would be young forever.

It becomes another fact of life that youth does not last. And so are children, especially daughters. There will be a time in a mother’s life when she has to learn to let go, when she has to realize that her child has grown up, from the daughter who asked me about the moon and stars to the daughter who married a man out of security. It is a fact of life to be hurt by daughters, no matter how good she is. When that daughter decides to try out her wings and fly without me, realizing that she no longer needs me, the pain is hard to ignore. But in time, it subsides. By then I realize I speak from the voice of a mother. So if all I have in this world is Maria, then all I have is pain. And pain I can live with. Feeling pain means there is still life in me, even if I'm hanging on by a thread.