My Magic Cloak

More than joint aches and a receding hairline, what brings home the fact of old age to me is the death and/or the declining health of a few beloved people. A few months ago, the father of my friend and former piano teacher, Alma, passed away. He was followed, after a long bout with cancer, by the mom of one of my dearest friends, Tess. And just yesterday, the mom of an officemate, one of the few people I trust in our department, passed away as well.

I've never met my officemate's mom, but I am lucky to have known papa (Alma's dad) and nanay (Tess' mom) when they were still alive. Papa was a thin, short fellow who carried himself like a soldier. He always stood ramrod straight and spoke in a low, almost stern voice that I would have found intimidating had he not been the incredibly warm and friendly fellow that he was to me. During the time that I was still taking piano lessons from Alma, he and mama would always go out of their way to make me feel not just at home but a real part of the family. They would even serve me snacks -- usually, puto and softdrinks -- even though I was paying Alma less than 200 pesos a month for the lessons.

Tess' mom I had little interaction with, mainly because she was a shy woman who liked to hide in the kitchen. But I remember rare moments when she would burst into laughter while lying on the sofa and watching Eat Bulaga in their cramped living room. At those moments, she looked like a female Buddha, so full of life and guileless joy that nothing, not even a hand-to-mouth existence, seemed capable of dampening her spirit.

I can only imagine the amount of grief that Alma, Tess and my officemate felt over the loss of their parents. To my mind, that loss is like an erasure in an extremely valuable painting, a white scar where Mona Lisa's smile used to be. No matter that everything else in the painting remains the same, the entire painting itself has become so unsettlingly different, that we too, mere museumgoers that we are, find ourselves altered by it.

In my case, the alteration took the form of a realization: I won't be forever twenty-two, which is where I still am now psychologically. Time will come, hopefully not soon, when my mom will not swoop in every time the laundry piles up in the hamper and my dad will not be sitting on his favorite chair on the porch, waiting for me and my sister to entertain him with a little conversation. Time will come when, instead of sweating it out on the court and flirting with other boys, I will be walking arthritically to the grocery or drugstore and brandishing my senior citizen's card at the sales clerk.

I don't mean to make aging sound like such a dreary prospect -- I'd like to think that there are loads of joy waiting for every person at any stage in his life, sort of like a hotdog and Coke stand at every train stop -- but it is true that for many PLUs, especially those who choose to not "go straight" and get married, old age seems like a dark and lonely road. One of the most heartbreaking true stories I've ever heard was about a friend, a gay man in his sixties, who lived alone and decided to go to the drugstore one night because he was feeling a little ill. He'd barely gotten out of the house when he had a mild stroke, lost consciousness and fell on the pavement. Since no one was around at that late hour, he just lay there for what must have been a long time, under the moonlight, surrounded only by his dogs. (The good news is he survived and is more or less back to his normal -- and naughty --self.)

I'm not exhorting anyone to "turn straight" and get married; the same fate does befall lots of married people as well, after all. I am merely trying to illustrate what the death of a parent can make someone feel. On Edsa, there's a billboard that says "Every time a baby is born, a new dad is born too." I think the same applies to the death of parents. Every time a mother or father dies, an orphan is born, who is different from the person he was before if only because he doesn't have that magical protective cloak, which having a parent gives. A cloak that keeps us from going out naked and vulnerable into the world. (Naturally, I don't speak for those who never even saw their parents or whose dad or mom proved to be unspeakably cruel. Perhaps those people had to make do without a cloak all their lives.)

That said, I'd like to believe that, when and if the time comes (knock on wood) my own parents leave this world, I will discover reserves of strength that I didn't even know I possessed. Hopefully, I will be able to use all the things that my parents have taught me to survive and be happy, not simply to get by but to honor their memory. That's what a friend and ex-lover did when his mom died; a happy-go-lucky guy who spent nine years in college, he has since become the family "patriarch" (he has a lover, plus two married siblings with children) and makes surprisingly grown-up decisions about everything from finances to child care. And his success owes a lot to the fact that he does things the way he thinks his mother would have done them.

Which brings me to this furtive, recalcitrant hope: though we can lose our magic cloaks and become vulnerable, we can also learn to find or weave another one. It may not be the exact same thing, but it can help us get through some of our darkest moments.

***

Here's a cloak I want to weave for the future. It's a pretty ambitious one, so I don't know if I'll be able to actually make it.

This cloak is in the form of a house. This house has many rooms. One room has many books, a big window that lets in light and a giant poster of Meryl Streep. It will belong to my friend the Mel Man.

Another room has a small garden. Its bed is a small stage. In this room can stay my friends Darwin and Maeng.

Beside it is another room with a table and playing cards, and a big comfort room with cubicles. Here is where Arc and Winston (yes, they are together) will renew their passion for each other.

Down the hall is a room with lots of pirated DVDs and an extra bed for "guests." This is where Sam will stay.

And there will be more rooms -- for Tess, for Nelson, for Jon (something Tori Amos-inspired, maybe) -- where they can all grow old happily in, always just a few steps away from a loving friend.

And, of course, a room for B and myself, which I'm sure will have nice, flowing curtains and, like Mel's room, lots of books as well. This room will be adjacent to the big living room where we will all gather, to trade stories about past and present "bookings," to play Pinoy Henyo or charades, to sing songs like this (click on it!) those nights we most need to feel warm, loved and safe.