Last Days and New Beginnings

“If you had one chance, just one chance to go back and fix what you did wrong in life, would you take it? And if you did, would you be big enough to stand it?”
– Chuck Benetto
(“For One More day” by Mitch Albom)
“All lines are busy now…” I tried many times. Finally my digital lines interfaced with the busiest switchboard on this time of the year, the one owned by Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT). Scrambling to grab a wireless phone into my ears, I screamed against the back drop of Christmas Carols…”Hello, Mommy…Hello, Daddy…”
“Anak…ay naku anak…Kumusta na?” My mom, a voice mixed in gleeful nostalgia, always greets me with a joyful outburst. “Kailan ka uuwi, anak? Pasko na naman…matanda na kami ng Daddy mo…” It was her favorite line.
“Malapit na, mommy…malapit na…” I answered back without certainty. And then she made the roll call. I heard the voices of my siblings, basked in the unseen warmth of my parent while I cherished the laughter across the Pacific airwaves. Meanwhile, I heard memories slowly wilting against the echoes of oblivion. Time is sometimes a cruel marker of life.
“Malapit na, mommy….seguro next year…”, was my readymade response. Seasons have changed quicker than I expected. It has been more than five years that I said those words. I have not been home for Christmas for more than eight years. My mother passed away three months after the last long distance Yuletide chat I had with her, a day right after her birthday… “Kailan ka uuwi anak?” Her words lingered for a very long while. Eventually, I did go home sooner than I had planned. My unintended prediction was right. But instead of a warm festive hug from the woman who nurtured me, I saw the last of my mother, in a wooden casket, too young for an eternal repose. My father was there. In a hushed and discreet tone, he said, “umuuuwi ka lang anak kapag may nangyayari…” I was guilty as charged.
Right after the shopping riots of “Black Friday”, withered leaves gave way to chilly substance. We just had our first snow yesterday. Cold became colder, skin took shelter, jolly songs of a drummer boy and twelve days counting backwards pervaded our radio waves. Trees dressed up with lighted trinkets. Shopping malls altered their working hours as people’s plastic money took flight in the registry boxes of overworked retail clerks. We abruptly became busy with lists, wants, names, songs, debt and anxiety. If this is Christmas, no wonder the Grinch sneaked in. Or is it the yearend dreariness, that segment of a calendar we hoped to arrive but never really wished for it to come, that time of the year that is both jolly and sad?
“Why do good things end?”, an old Barbara Streisand ballad vibrates in the chambers of my thoughts. Could it be because we don’t deserve it? Is it because there is nothing permanent? Is it possible that our Creator does not want us to be attached to the transitory and the fleeting particles of this world? Or is it merely because all things have to end (and that’s it) – good or bad, without logical reasons, explanations, alibis or empirical causes. For many, the images of our crossroads are still brighter than a shriveled portrait buried in our basements. What if we never left home? What if we stayed? What if we continued the fight and the struggle in our own backyards instead? What if we opted to grow old close to our kin enclosed within the gates of our birthplace? What if we never became immigrants in this land of dreams? On the other hand, what if we got deported and finally realized that this is not our home? What if we opted to go back instead and stay close to our childhood nest? What if we had the chance to fix something in our past? What if…?
“O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining…. It is the night of our Dear Savior’s birth”. Five hundred twenty five thousand and six hundred minutes allotted to each of us are reaching an end. The last page of that calendar will once again be torn from the walls it used to cover. The past eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours will soon tick for the last time. “It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old”.
Another page of this year has reached its final chapter. What if it ends with the last punctuation mark of this article? What if this paper folded its pages and ceased reaching a reader’s eyes? What if I changed course and retired my pen? Questions do not end. They always begin. Possibilities are always possible. Anything could happen. Anything might occur. And anything can take place.
In the midst and excitement of our Lord’s birth, we are also dragged by the cumbersome anxiety of an old year, taunted by the few days left we obstinately cling to, and vexed with the crisis of doing things rights or doing the right things. What else can be more stressful? In the meantime, my mother’s question echoes in the silence of my inner ears… “Kailan ka uuwi, anak?” She speaks like a Christmas Angle in an incomplete wish list and not as a ghost of a painful Christmas past. Like Charles Benetto, (a character of Mitch Albom, in his short novel, “For One More Day”), there are some who pass through the dark tunnels of destructive tendencies. We shed the bitter gall of remorse for not taking hold of a given chance to do what is right. We whimper in the molds our own insufficiencies and the fiasco of our failure. For some odd reason, the calendar reminds us of this pain, this end, and this finite aspect of our own mortality.
And then, for some miraculous historical twist, the calendar was altered ending up with the birth of Christ transposed towards the last days of the year. It is as if the whole political and social world concurred to recall the primordial meaning of “birth” – that which defies death, that which brings hope, that which keeps us alive despite missing a chance to amend a past mistake, and that which incarnates the voice of a loved one. Suddenly, the pagan hysteria of ending days is redeemed by the spiritual optimism of Christ’s birth.
For immigrants, it is this time of year that our struggles are exacerbated by the painful separation from our loved ones back home. We are reminded of our exodus, our Diaspora, the imperfect reality of our unfiltered reasons, and the nagging questions still in search of answers. Merry Christmas is being homesick while a New Year’s Day is just another way of throwing an old page from a crumpled calendar.
Some tales will end without a conclusive statement. As the last days of the year arrive, we will be rewarded with new beginnings. As to my mother’s question, I have come home. And so did she. For home is where the heart is, there where it never ends….Merry Christmas!