The night before my mother died, a stillness settled over the room that felt heavier than the humid August air. It was August 22nd, exactly a month ago and that night the world outside felt muted, as if the crickets themselves were holding their breath. In her final moments, with a strength that defied her frail body, she looked at me and smiled. “You know,” she whispered, her voice raspy, “you really do have long ears (palóng).” A laugh bubbled up in my chest, and I squeezed her hand. It was a familiar joke, a memory we had shared for a lifetime, yet her words, spoken then, hung in the air like a final, tender blessing. Those perhaps were some of her last intelligible murmurings.
The second night of the wake, the house was filled with the soft murmur of grieving relatives, the scent of fresh flowers and burning candles. Old stories were shared, laughter mingling with tears, a testament to a life well-lived. My brothers and nephews, their faces a roadmap of shared history, began reminiscing about childhood experiences. We spoke of a time when I was barely five years old, a time I only knew through their retelling coz I have no clear memories before that.
They said I had gone missing. My parents, frantic, had scoured the house and the surrounding yard. The search had gone on for what felt like an eternity until finally, they found me. I was sitting cross-legged on a small anthill, a "bungsod" where a sprawling squash plant had taken root, its vines heavy with fruit. When they asked me where I had been, I answered with the innocence of a child: “I was talking to my friends, the small people with pointed ears.” My family, a mix of concern and bewilderment, exchanged glances. They had been near that anthill dozens of times during the search, yet none of them had seen me.
The memory brought forth another, a part of the story I had heard countless times. My aunts and uncles, with a playful seriousness, had joked that I had been swapped, replaced by a changeling. My mother, in her usual mischievous way, had chimed in, “He can’t be my real son. Look, palóng ni sya ya!” We had all laughed, a lighthearted way of dealing with the story unseriously. I knew I had always had ears that stuck out a little and everyone attributes it to being smart. But that night, as my mother’s words echoed in my mind, the joke was no longer just a joke.
In the quiet hours after the wake, I found myself thinking about the pointed ears, the anthill, the small people. Maybe I was a changeling, a child from another world, as my relatives had once playfully suggested. Maybe I was not my father’s son, as my mother had so humorously claimed.
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But it didn't matter. She had been the mother I needed all along. She had seen me, truly seen me—the boy who talked to non-existing things, the boy with brooding persona, the man with the “palong” ears—and she had loved me, fiercely and without condition. She brought us alone and without reservations Her last words were not a joke, but a final, quiet acknowledgment of the boy she had chosen to love, the boy who, in her eyes, had always been exactly as he was meant to be. She had not only been my mother but my anchor, my home, the person who made a strange and wondrous world feel safe and understood. And that, I realized, was a bond deeper than any blood could ever be.
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