Bolaibee's last call

Death certainly makes all things clear. I’m not sure if it’s the sense of loss or the tears that well in your eyes but grief just gives you a lucid perception of yourself, your values and your judgment.

Last Saturday I lost an uncle to cardiac arrest. He was 49. He brought himself to the hospital at Thursday morning, went comatose on the very same day and succumbed to a massive heart attack on Saturday morning. He spent his last three days lying unconsciously, unaware of the beautiful things his precarious condition has brought.

My siblings and I grew up calling him daddy and up to this day we call him that. Perhaps because our own father wasn’t around and being my dad’s brother, he was more than willing to be endeared that way. Having seen him for the first time in three years at the ICU just hours before he left felt like my heart was being crushed. It was all the more heartbreaking when his children, my cousins, approached his bed one by one to whisper that even if it’s the most difficult to do, they are willing to let him go. If I were to make such a decision at any point in my life, I wouldn’t know what to do. My grandma crying at my sister’s shoulder, who saw yet another one of her children go before her, was a picture of a child crying shamelessly in front of her children and grandchildren, instead of the headstrong family matriarch that I have known her to be.

It was my first time to see someone dying. It was my first time to be at exactly the same instant and place where a person dies. It was my first time to be there, the center of hysteria and raw emotions. And it was unbearable..just unbearable.

In death, you see yourself and your relationships in an entirely different level. You begin to see the mundane details of your life as what they truly are, petty and trivial. Everything just seems to be the small stuff, no need to sweat over it. In death, you re-think your issues and learn to set them aside for the things that really matter like mending broken bridges and being strong for those who are weak. In death, you realize how everything you have and everything you are are transient and you surrender them all up hoping that you will somehow get a good bargain. But then a force that is more powerful than you or your boss won’t settle for anything less and will take all of what you have to offer including a part of your heart. And then you feel numb, everything else seems to be fleeting that you struggle for whatever it is you can hold on to. But you can’t.

At the end of the day, you accept that there’s no better place for him than where he is. After putting up a good fight and surviving a good amount of battlescars, he deserves to go home and rest. When it is my time to go, I want to go as peacefully as daddy did. Fast and relentless. But for now, I want to learn to fight when it is needed and give up when it is the right thing to do.