New Year's Eve with my Mother
Now Nanay is 80 with precarious health. Eighty years of life, bursting with life as a young girl, full of plans but most of all to build a family founded on God. Her deep faith, simple but concrete, made her to see life, later as nothing more than a journey towards God.
I could not but recall what the Psalms said: What is man, that thou art mindful of him? . . . For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. (Psalm 8:4)
Nanay's glory and honor, for me is not so much in her achievements. Though she had enough as a teacher and being throughout her life, member of various religious organizations especially that considers the poor her honor lies rather in her attitude ib front of her sufferings.
When my only brother was killed qnd ibwas filled with anger she would simple told me with deep conviction and love that it was much better that he was killed rather than he could have killed. My brother was an activist.
She accompanied my only sister to meet our Lord when she had only some months to live. She was always beside Manang in her painful trips to the hospital for the chemotherapy and like pilgrims during the days in between since there was enough money to go back at home from Manila.
She endured everything especially my lack of love.
What is her honor is she never stopped loving in silence. When she took care of my paralyzed father she never complained even faithfully acted like a nurse even though she was not trained to do so.
She would always give their matrimonial bed to me when I am home knowing that I have a small bed in the seminary where I am assigned as a formator.
Now that she is eighty and left with only one eye working she continuous to take care of herself faithful to her medications so that she would be burdersome to others if she might get sick.
The truth is man is really made for God. Nanay understood this even when she was a child. It was this same God that nurtured and nourished her that I could say, her life is a like a multifaceted diamond. Beautiful in every angle, if it is seen in the light of the divine plan. Oh what a life, Nanay had received from God and now she has been continuing giving of her self since her parents died at a young age. Perhaps this first strong experience of death made her realize what it is to live.
Being an orphan at a tender age, immediately made her understand that she has a Father in Heaven and turned to the best mother in the world, our Blessed Mother Mary. It is to no surprise that in the which she dedicated and gave herself to God through Marian organizations: Daughters of Mary Immaculate, Ladies of Charity, Focolare.
I say this because before her birthday I browsed through her diary. What gems of wisdom I have found. She has written things about us, her faith, her struggles but mostly the concreteness of her love in daily life. Since it is lived with love, mostly it is lived in pain and suffering; but like a sand of suffering could really make pearls from the oysters, her experiences became more beautiful while I read them.
Perhaps the foundation of her existence and made her live continuously life is not only her daily masses, constant visitations, but her deep relationship with her Creator sustained by the deep relationship she had with her relatives, friends, and those who pove her which I could perhaps even not fully understand and savor.
Persons like me who sometimes do not love are blind but with love I could have but a glance of the beauty of what God has made out of her.
