Not a ghost story

UNLIKE the rest of the country, Cebu City will keep cemeteries open to fully vaccinated individuals during the “Kalag-kalag” days of Nov. 1 and 2. 

Defying the national government may make waves in the political realm. For souls, the closure of cemeteries is not an issue. There is no quarantining the dead.

Clay covers of secondary burial jars from pre-Hispanic times feature two human figures in a boat, the rear figure rowing. A museum curator told me that the ancient Filipinos believed that after death liberates the soul from its corporeal casing, the immortal continues to the destination it has been journeying in its lifetimes.

Raised as a Catholic, I believe Jesus will return and judge the living and the dead. Meanwhile, the dead are not in crypts and columbaria but among the living. 

A few nights ago, a flickering bulb brought back a nearly forgotten memory. It was near midnight when I cleared my work and switched off the lights at home, one by one. 

Downstairs, the flickering light bouncing from the toilet broke the dark into intermittent shards that hurt the eyes. Even more strangely, the set of bulbs that automatically shut down in power fluctuations all worked except for the one in the toilet. 

The shadows cast by that flickering bulb reminded me of a weekend when my cousins and I were playing “tago-tago (hide and seek)” in my grandparents’ home. Not eager to be found first and take the place of the “It” who had to find all the players, I ran inside Lola’s small dark storeroom, which we were forbidden to enter and thus, seemed to be the perfect hiding place.

Crouching in the dark, I waited for my cousin to shout that he had flushed out his brothers. Before this happened, though, a shadow was silhouetted against the door’s vents: Lola. Caught in the forbidden, I bolted out of the storeroom, got more than an earful from her, and, of course, became the next “It”.

The morning after, the bulb worked perfectly, as if it had never flickered in an icy toilet where the jets of the shower were only a degree less cold than the chill that certainly did not come from the small window closed for the night. The husband confirmed that the bulb worked when he had his shower earlier in the evening.

Power fluctuates, he said.

I stared for a time at the bulb in the morning light that mocks and dispels all fancies. I learned later that Mama, 82, made a turnaround and consented to a hospital procedure that she was earlier set against. My mother is Lola’s eldest and the most contrarian of her children.

In the journey of the living, the souls of our dead stay at the helm. The immortal steer and row, steer and row.

Wikipedia image of the lid of the Manunggul Jar at the Philippine National Museum of Anthropology

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

 * First published in the October 24, 2021 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Slogans of love

LOVE is a tagline.

Like the pails of roses and bouquets inundating the public pulse last Feb. 14, some took to the public sphere of mass media to spread advocacies for lovers, those about to fall in love, those resisting love, and those immune to love.

Here are my favorites, a mix of social good and pithy capsules for that most maddening of emotions (sa Binisaya pa: “makaboang”):

“Wear your feelings.” As paraphrased by SunStar Cebu’s Fe Marie Dumaboc in her Feb. 13 report, this was the essence of Talisay City Mayor Gerald Anthony Gullas’s Feb. 12 memorandum directing City Hall employees to abandon their uniforms in favor of an attire to “express (one’s) feelings” on Valentine’s Day.

His inclusive color code accommodates almost all statuses: red for couples, green for the “single and ready to mingle,” yellow for those neck-deep in “complicated” relationships, orange for the “prisoner to someone’s love,” pink for the solitary ones, gray for those relieved they “got away,” and black for the “dense”.

Talisay City Chief Maj. Gerard Ace Pelare reminds the public to avoid trouble by staying within the law: “make sure your date is of legal age”.

In a telenovela dilemma, a male teacher rejects his undergraduate student, protesting that he is too old for her. What should be emphasized are the reasons why student-teacher romances are inappropriate and must be avoided, regardless of the student’s consent: abuse of authority, conflict of interests, exploitation of the student’s vulnerability, and threats to the student’s emotional stability and academic performance.

“Dili magpataka og partner (choose your date).” Department of Health (DOH) 7 Director Jaime Bernadas advises checking first the recent travel history of the intended before going on a date that may just lead to a possibly fatal exchange of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), reported Wenilyn Sabalo in SunStar Cebu last Feb. 13.

And not the least is “H.E.A.R.T to H.E.A.R.T,” cautions the Commission on Population and Development (PopCom) 7, whose advocacy launched on Feb. 14 emphasizes these touchpoints for millennials: H stands for HIV, AIDS and STI; E for early sexual encounters; A for adolescent sexuality; R for reproductive health; and T for teenage pregnancy.

Love is a minefield, not just on Feb. 14, one infers from this headline from “Bag-ong Kusog,” the leading newspaper in Cebu during the American period: “Mirisi nga babayhana” (published on May 6, 1917).

Tamely translated, the idiom means “serves her right” but it is not just in matters of the heart that the saltiness of the Cebuano is beyond the ken of English.


Too close for comfort. The 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) [Source of photo: Medscape.com)


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in the February 16, 2020 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Summons

Hello, Death, old friend.

Will I recognize You when You come again? Fourteen years ago, as the family sat down in Papang’s hospital room for a silent supper, the flat line on the monitor announced itself like a hive of bees drawn to a riot of flowers.

In the electric distraction of extreme medical measures reviving his body, Papang slipped away with You and went home.

How else can I explain that in the same minute the Code Blue team was ramming a tube down the trachea to open an airway, neighbors spotted his figure pacing outside the house and his longtime companion saw a dark shadow going around the magnetic blue 1964 Volkswagen Beetle, older than I, his first child, by a year and arguably his first baby?

Death, You trickster.

Or were You hiding behind Papang’s feet, which splayed like the open wings of a resting moth, framing the imperturbable green of the flat line punctuating his 81 years?

A few nights ago, while washing dinner dishes in Silang, Cavite, I opened the door after hearing a strange meowing. Instead of one of the feral cats lounging around our place, an empty porch awaited. The brown moth was already resting against the ceiling when I went back to finish clearing the table.

In folklore, moths are harbingers of death, war, and disaster. The last two are anomalies but death, I disagree, is far from being a stranger. As a child waking up from afternoon siesta in the cavernous room of my great grandparents’ house, I cried shrilly to find myself alone and she would come running.

While dusty motes drifted in the shifting shafts of afternoon light, I dreamt of You, sniffed at the sweetly odorous mustiness of my great grandparents’ room across ours, where I imagined my great grandfather drowned in his sleep, where the pickled ham of my great grandmother’s amputated leg brooded, not far from the dirty kitchen where the turtles wept as they boiled.

Yet, whenever Mama entered the room, You stepped back. When she slipped me on her lap in the dentist’s chair, when I followed her voice and smile to emerge from motherhood’s anaesthetized dreams, You always deferred. Death is the terminus except where love is concerned.

The brown moth slipping in that night may have been You, up to Your usual confounding tricks. Except it wasn’t a moth, resting with open wings. Like hands folded in prayer, those wings marked the brown creature as a butterfly.

In my late grandmother’s garden, butterflies preened like orchids. The visitor that night was dun and modest but I listened and heard my mother’s labored breathing on the phone, the voices of my dead across the void: death is the terminus except where love is concerned.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 18, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Her story

WHEN I first knew Candice Grace Cabras as an undergraduate student in my Journalism class at the St. Theresa’s College in Cebu City, she was already a “woman of substance”.

This phrase was the title of a romantic potboiler about a woman’s hardscrabble transition from poverty to wealth and power. The protagonist relied on melodrama’s conventions of “feminine” strength: physical beauty and sexual wiles.

Candice was a personable young woman then but it wasn’t just her ready smile and ebullient personality that stood out among many uniquely striking, passionate young Theresians.

When Candice’s father returned after a long absence, sickly and needy, Candice, her mother, and siblings accepted him without question. Candice voluntarily donated one of her kidneys to her father, which enabled him to enjoy life until his passing not too long ago.

In that bestselling novel, “substance” was equated with material possessions and worldly power. Candice’s gift to her father—and her lifelong adjustment to the challenges of living with only one remaining kidney—seemed to me of an essence eluding writers of romances and philosophy: what truly is love?

That question was partly answered when I read a SunStar Cebu Mar. 12, 2015 article by Michelle P. So about Candice’s participation in the 50-kilometer All-Women Ultra Marathon (Awum).

Two hours after the 10-hour cutoff, the last runner to cross the finish line, Candice fulfilled her “dream”: to finish the Awum. As So wrote, “Unlike the runners before her, there were no drum beaters to announce her approach”.

There were plenty of tears, though, from the small group of believers watching Candice take “one slow and painful step after another”: her mates at the Talisay City Runners Club (TCRC), the Awum organizers who waited for each runner to finish the “life event,” and Jerry Maque, husband of Candice and partner in raising their three children.

It was no small feat for Candice: “She's 31 years old, 5 foot three, and 250 pounds,” wrote So in the SunStar Cebu article.

Love and grit. When I recently embraced this deep wellspring of empathy and strength, Candice had marked another “life event”.

In 2017, she published “Life with JJ: Lessons from a Special Mom”. JJ is Candice and Jerry’s seven-year-old son with Down Syndrome, brother of Miguela Louise and Ezekiel.

As Candice writes in Lesson 11, “Education is Liberation”: “We have to educate the world that we are not sorry for our children… They can soar greater heights and like any of us, they deserve a special space in this world.”

One of the joys of being a teacher is being inspired by our students. Salamat kaayo for being among the best mentors, Candice.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu on the January 6, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Love bytes

MANY young persons don’t know how to write a letter. I’ve read missives without a salutation or a complimentary close.

Rarely does a young letter writer find out the name of the person he or she is addressing. Or verify the spelling, the position, or the gender.

And the tone, the tone of the letters. Millennials write a letter as if it were just another SMS, Tweet or status post on Facebook.

A teacher drummed into our senior high school class that writing a letter is not first about getting what you want; it’s about letting the words reflect who you are, crucial when the person reading the letter has never met you.

All that seems like worlds ago.

According to “Heartbreaks and Healing,” a survey of 500 Filipinos recently conducted by the online shopping site Lazada, technology and new media mediate in the relationships of many Filipinos.

To break up with partners, 58 percent of Filipinos used their mobile phones; 34 percent did it in person; and 6.3 percent gave a handwritten letter.

More Filipinos (30 percent) chose to text and break up, compared to the 22 percent who called and the seven percent who resorted to instant messaging.

Perhaps technology spares more feelings. And trees, too. (I imagine I would try to write a “break-up” letter, crumple and throw aside, start with a fresh sheet, crumple again, and so forth. Or perhaps mistake a ream of paper as fresh tissue for a freshet of tears.)

The same Lazada survey (no data about scientific rigor) revealed that “online profiling” is standard to check out a potential partner.

Fifty-four percent of the respondents visited the social media page of a potential date, with 60 percent of these respondents losing interest in someone they liked before they stalked them online.

Ages ago, my generation used the “FLAMES” technique as an alternative to card-reading, matchmakers, and the personal network of relatives and friends one could rely on to spy on one’s obsession.

I wrote my name and the name of the boy, crossed out the common letters, and counted the remaining letters. If the last count landed on “F,” it meant the boy and I would remain friends; “L” meant “lover;” “A” for “acquaintance;” “M” for “marriage;” “E” for “enemy;” and “S” for “sweetheart”.

One could try a variation of nicknames to get the coveted “S” or avoid the dreaded “A”. In the corridors where nuns and teachers were omnipresent, we giggled that “L” came before “M”—a daring sequence we found romantic but too racy to aspire for.

In the age of instant connections and bloodless breakups, I wonder about social media’s substitute for the firing squad on Valentine’s Day. Technology shouldn’t be destiny.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 12, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

How Titanic is your love

IF marriage is tricky to get out of, are Filipinos working harder to stay married?

Or do couples evade marriage now?

Most intriguing are the recent findings of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) National Appellate Matrimonial Tribunal.

From 2012 to 2013, 186,367 couples said yes at the altar. That’s a 12-percent increase from the previous year, the CBCP was quoted in a June 18, 2013 article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI).

Over the years, the CBCP also recorded a 10- to 15-percent decrease in the number of marriages nullified by the church. The exceptions are Metro Manila and Cebu, where annulments were “high”.

Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz, tribunal head, said that of about 100 cases for nullification handled every year, only 9-10 cases are affirmed.

While more couples tie the knot, cohabitation is also popular. A couple who lives together without marriage can also part “whatever time they like,” said Cruz.

Married couples can also just split and avoid the hassle of annulment. The church calls this “canonical separation,” reported the PDI.

In the 1970s, when my parents made their nth and final canonical separation, society was not as tolerant of broken families. My sister and I stayed with my father on weekdays; with my mother, on weekends. However workable the arrangement was, I was resigned to explaining my odd family ties to homeroom teachers, who were a bit upset I could not pull out a complete set of parents to attend school functions.

These days, “odd” is the new “normal”. When A. and I reunited in this city, we compared who had more grey strands in the head, more cysts in mammaries, m

A. rescues dogs intended for the pot and feral cats. When she goes on long trips, she stews chicken necks (no bones to choke on) and freezes these in ice cream canisters for partner G. to defrost in batches and serve hot to A.’s adopted menagerie.

G. doesn’t love animals, specially street survivors with fleas and an ill-mannered tendency to snap at the hand that feeds them. However, that such an arrangement has prevailed for 20 years--A. doing what she can to make it easier for G., G. doing for A. what she would never do on her own—puts another meaning to “maximum tolerance,” which is an apt synonym for marriage.

Yet, since same-sex marriage is not allowed in the country, A. and G.’s commitment cannot be formalize in church or court.

Are they likely candidates for separation being never ritually conjoined? Will this country run out of chicken necks?

Some fowl-like flexibility is demanded today of couples. J. got married to T. in Vegas. His family disowned him but he stuck to her, even if in family parties, his side was represented by school chums and officemates only.

Then T. got promoted. Soon, J. and T. lived in different time zones. Or perhaps planets? J. considered the canonical solution. Friends brought him to a priest for counseling. Priest said give marriage a chance.

Fortunately, T. made a career compromise. The couple went on a second honeymoon. They had their first child, and then another.

The happy endings did not end there. The priest advising J. also got married.

A rosewood violin immersed in seawater recently fetched a high bid in an England auction. The violin was found in a leather bag strapped to the body of Wallace Hartley, who led his band in playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and other hymns while the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic.

Hartley was never parted from his violin, a gift from his fiancée Maria Robinson. The violin has a silver plaque with this engraving: “For Wallace, on the occasion of our engagement. From Maria”.

Maria never married. When she died in 1939, she left the violin to her sister.

If the Titanic had not hit an iceberg, if Wallace had married Maria, would the rosewood violin even be in an auction? If Wallace had married Maria, would they have stayed married? The Titanic was not the only one with a submerged complex.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 30, 2013 editorial page column, “Matamata”

Love lost and lasting

AT its most obsessive, love can plunge the beloved into a scission, a cleavage between what’s real.

There is no other country as intoxicating, which sunders us open to await exploration, mapping, possession.

When the fever passes, love leaves no territory unmarked.

I met D., a survivor, scorched but unrepentant, at a UV Express terminal. For a living, he ferries commuters from Bicutan to Ayala and back. D.’s real work is in animation and photography.

Subcontracted by the Disney franchise, D. rode the crest of the animation industry in the 1980s-‘90s. In the year 2000, D. lost his contract, his cushioned existence, his family.

When I mentioned to D. that my husband was in Bicol, I saw his face visibly change. That’s my ex-wife’s place, he said.

D. plays the field but swears never to get involved again with anyone from Bicol. You cannot overgeneralize, I said. Never again, D. repeated.

More couples got hitched around the country from 2012 to 2013. There is also an overall nationwide drop in couples seeking annulment. Yet, in urban centers, like Metro Manila and Cebu, there’s a spike in unions being nullified.

A June 18, 2013 report in the Philippine Daily Inquirer quotes Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz about these current marital trends. He heads the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) National Appellate Matrimonial Tribunal.

Cruz explained that couples in cities are more exposed to Western influences that shake families, such as divorce and same-sex marriage. He’s not the first and only one to sound off the alarm that the dissolution of marriage foreshadows the demise of the family.

The traditional family—nuclear, headed by heterosexual spouses—perhaps. Yet, in the wake of failed or at risk marriages, families still thrive. Single parent-led; run remotely by a biological parent in absentia and held together by grandparents, close kin, even helpers; headed by homosexual partners; run by the eldest of siblings—many modern families defy convention, mend and refurbish, improvise, move along.

The flexibility of families makes me wonder if it is just the institution of marriage that has failed to adjust to the invisible but tectonic shifts in contemporary society. For one, the financial independence of women.

The recent CBCP finding does not compare the number of annulment cases filed by women and by men. Years back, while interviewing women who survived domestic abuse, I noted that the professionals were the ones who sought and received annulment. Even though not one of the 10 subjects contemplated marrying again, these financially independent women chose a drawn-out, expensive process to close this chapter in their lives.

Yet, these women did not stand in the way of their children and ex-spouses reconnecting, even after years of silence and little or no counterpart for child support.

For these abuse survivors, sustaining a mutation of family life was even part of healing and moving on. A failed marriage without closure, was not. If women in the past waited for death to release them from the domestic yoke, women with education and the means had more palatable options to exit with dignity and sanity intact.

Should men be threatened by such women? When I got married 20 years ago, a German godparent cautioned me from expecting “too much,” specially on the wedding night. An uncle, asked about the secret of the longevity of his marriage, simply said, “agwanta (endure)”.

When my older son recently introduced his best friend to the family, I skipped the advice on sex and sacrifice. I asked him if his mutual understanding (MU, meaning more than friends, not quite steadies) shared the same attitude towards money. If they didn’t, could they talk about it?

The wife who compulsively spends more than the conjugal earnings; the husband who holds office at the casino; the swinger who supports his families with bribes; the unprotected sex advocate who shirks from facing up to the consequences of unplanned pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections; the eternal baby who cannot accept his wife earning more than he does.

Love may be the mortal itch. Money comes close. But an inability to communicate is at the root of many a marital hitch.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada. blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 23, 2013 issue of the editorial page column, “Matamata”

Romantic and reptilian*

LOVE does not just move everyone, from presidents to birds. It is the impetus for research and experiments in an emerging new science.

When a State University of New York researcher of the science of love cross-pollinated his ideas with a pain scientist at the Stanford University, the result was a neuroscience study that found evidence that romantic love may relieve physical pain like a drug, minus the side effects.

According to an article by Amina Khan of the Los Angeles Times, the academics tested Stanford campus volunteers who were chosen because they were in the first nine months of a relationship—conducive to being “still in the throes of romantic passion”.

The experiments showed that when the subjects’ left hands were heated to a point causing a moderate or high degree of pain, looking at the photograph of the beloved “distracted” the subjects from feeling the pain by about 36-45 percent for moderate pain, and 12-13 percent for the high pain.

This was the same level of distraction achieved when the subjects were given a mental task, such as thinking of all sports that didn’t involve a ball. However, a photograph of an attractive peer had no effect on the subjects, who felt the full pain of their heated palms.

When the researchers scanned the subjects’ brains with a functional MRI, they saw a further differentiation of effects. When the subjects were engaged in a mental task, the MRI showed that the subjects used the higher, thinking parts of their brain.

When the photo of a loved one was shown, the involvement ignited the “reptilian” regions, the so-called “more primitive reward centers” related to “urges and cravings that are also implicated in addictions”.

Stanford’s pain scientist, Dr. Sean Mackey, said that the results suggest harnessing the influence of a loved one to relieve pain without drug-induced side effects. He said he might not yet recommend a passionate love affair every six months, but he might consider this therapy for curing people withdrawing from addictions, like smoking.

Is it only sexual love that’s effective as a painkiller? Given the background of the study volunteers, what if the sexual love is long past the exciting first phase of the chase and the conquest, when love is now struggling to outrun, uh, demanding kids, runaway careers and multiplying chins?

Foremost, the Stanford study of love tantalizes with its correlation of the romantic with the reptilian. On the day of the publication of the Los Angeles Times’ article, the Agence France-Presse reported that a London court found a Saudi prince guilty of murdering his male servant after a Valentine’s Day celebration.

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) caught the prince assaulting his servant during two incidents in a London hotel elevator. Sexually explicit photos of the servant were also found in the prince’s cell phone. Prosecutors said that the injuries of the Saudi victim include bite marks on both cheeks, indicating a “sexual element” to the killing.

More painful than the sadism is the victim’s subservience to his perpetrator. In the CCTV video uploaded on Youtube and news websites, the victim does not try to escape after the perpetrator first steps out of the elevator. When the doors slide open again, the prince steps back in the elevator and resumes to pummel and slap the victim, who seems to be about his abuser’s height and size but who puts up no defense. When the perpetrator steps out again, the victim meekly follows.

The court considered reports that the servant endured years of “slavery” and abuse at the hands of the prince. “The victim was so worn down by the violence that he let Saud (the prince) kill him without a fight,” the AFP report quotes London prosecutors.

Love hurts, we all wail before loving again. But when love releases reptilian urges and addictive cravings that end in self-destruction, love chills.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917-3226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s “Matamata” Sunday column on Oct. 24, 2010