A Weekend of Remembering

The weekend of April 5 and 6, I had two occasions to think back to my prison years.

The first occasion was while feeding my mother at the MMG Hospital in Lucena. Inay was referred to the hospital by Dr. Oabel to prepare her for a second major debridement of her gangrenous right foot.

The debridement was scheduled for Saturday, but tests showed that inay had lower than normal hemoglobin count. The doctor prescribed blood transfusion, and luckily there were two units of type O blood which was not used by another patient. But Inay needed two more units, so instead of leaving early Saturday morning for Lucena, we were asked by my Aunt Bel to wait: “The hospital is sending a request for the blood, and you may have to pick it up at some hospital in Manila.”

Just before noon, she called again: “There are two units available, and a motorcycle courier will bring them in the afternoon to Lucena.” We ate a quick lunch and set off for Lucena. But traffic was unusually heavy, and we arrived at the hospital around 6 pm.

“The doctor decided to go ahead with the debridement,” my aunt told us as soon as we got into the room. Even though Inay did not yet get the four units of transfusion, the doctor saw her pallor and judged her ready for the treatment.

I was disappointed that I could not be there to hold Inay’s hand and talk to her as I was able to do during her first debridement. But my aunts told me that the doctor cut off most of the dead parts of her right foot, leaving a stump with the remaining healthy flesh. When I looked at her foot, it was thoroughly wrapped in bandages. May aunts said that the doctor placed his special gel, which they described as resembling pancit molo wrap. He would return the next day to check if there is a positive response to the treatment.

I offered to keep watch over Inay through the weekend, especially through the night, so my aunts could get some rest in Gisgis.

The two days I was with her, Inay was lucid, though she didn’t speak much, except to cry out from time to time when her foot hurts. Even though the pain in her foot is occasional and not constant, and bearable according to her, I feel inadequate, wishing I could do something to take way the pain.

But her appetite is OK, which the doctor says is a good sign that the infection is under control. And whenever I am with her, I take care of feeding her the meals prepared by her caregivers - meat and vegetables in puree form, rice porridge and shredded fish, and some soup. She also takes some fruit together with the meal, not after. That has been her habit since way back; we call it pamutat.

Feeding Inay feels like a ritual of a son serving his mother. And whenever I urge her to open her mouth to receive the food, I think back to my many years in prison, when she visited almost daily and brought food not just for me but for sharing with other prisoners.

Recently, Chato Basa, our migrant leader friend from Italy, invited Girlie and me to an Italian meal she cooked at the house of Lorna and Wingie Villamil. During the dinner conversation, Wingie recalled that we shared the same room at the Bicutan prison: “We always looked forward to your mother’s visit, since we could share the food she brought you.”

When I think of Inay’s right foot, I think of the all the walking she did for her imprisoned son - to and from prison visits, to military and government offices, to court hearings, to meetings of relatives and friends of political detainees, to street protest actions.

Since she doesn’t speak much, I wonder what she may be thinking. She has always been a self-reliant and strong woman. Now that she needs help even in basic functions, does she accept it as our way of giving back something in return for all what she had given, or do we make her feel helpless? Sometimes she blurts out what is in her mind: “Are you not tired taking care of me? Are you not impatient? Are you not sleepy? is this not expensive?”

Sunday morning, the doctor opened her bandages and said that Inay’s foot seemed to be responding to the gel. He removed some remaining dead tissues, and wrapped the foot again, till the next treatment the following Thursday. Then he authorized her discharge from the hospital on Monday.

Before going back to Quezon City, there was a second occasion to think back to my prison years, as Girlie and I went through all the paintings and pen and ink drawings that had been stored away in our Lucena house. We took those that we will include in the art exhibit we plan to have in August, partly to celebrate my 65th birthday, and partly to raise some funds for Inay’s care.

I was happy to discover that Girlie had kept two of my prison paintings that experimented with using sand on canvas. One is the piece on the night sky and the guerrillas. That means I need not reproduce that painting, and can go ahead to paint a counterpoint interpretation - of electric coop linesmen and engineers putting up posts to bring power to the barangays.

The second “sand painting” is of a Christmas parol against a prison window. That was inspired by one of the quotations we used on our Christmas cards: Manalig kang darating rin ang pasko ng ating paglaya.

There were two other smaller paintings. One is a group of marching women, with the spirit of Gabriel Silang in the background. Girlie recalls that Jaime de Guzman wrote an appreciative note about it.

The other is a black and white painting of a child that is half-crying and half-angry. Girlie thinks it may be my best known painting, even abroad, because it has been made into a poster on human rights.  I want to make a much bigger version of it, but changing the images surrounding the child, which were about martial law and repression. I have to look for other images from 2008: What is there for a child to cry about and to be angry about?

Explore posts in the same categories: Family and Friends, Renewing our spirit