an unfortunate event
1 o’clock am, I was writing an article about adoption for
one of my rakets. 10 kilometers away, in a hospital an event was happening that
I was totally unaware of.
.
My cousin died this morning, at
Jose
Reyes
Medical
Center
,
as a result of the aftermath of her chemotherapy treatment, she had ovarian
cancer.
.
Her remains arrived around 7pm after being sent to the
funeral parlor. I haven’t seen it yet. I feel like seeing it would be finally
admitting that she is dead. When I found out this morning, at around 9am, I was
completely dumbfounded, and all I can say is, until now, I still haven’t
accepted her death.
.
Maybe because deep inside, I knew she’d survive. She was a
strong woman, one of the daredevils of the family. She learned to drive at 15
years old and would take their van out from under her father’s nose to practice
drive. She braved every feature of
Enchanted
Kingdom
and
Star
City
whenever we’d go there for
Christmas, and is one of the persons insisting on going to
Splash
Island
in the summer to brave the 4 story slides.
.
The cancer was unexpected, at first she thought she was
pregnant, then it turned out to be something worse.
.
It was really surprising because the battle wasn’t very
long. It was only her second chemotherapy session. Yet after the first, she
already looked like death.
.
Truth is, I feel guilty, because I never did anything to
help, never offered any.
.
We used to be really close my cousins and
I.
when we were young, because we all lived in the same compound, we would always
play together.
.
When we got a little bit older, we would go to family
outings, hence the
Star
City
and
Splash
Island
trips. Her and my
older sister with a help from her younger brother Jhe would convince to Ery to
take us swimming. Or she’d borrow the van from her dad so we could go to
Star
City
.
.
When we got a bit older still, we started to fall apart. We
started to have our own worlds. We’d still get together during Christmas, New
Year and Fiestas though; where we’d always try to rent a videoke machine so that
we’d enjoy the night. Aileen was always the one taking care of the videoke,
from finding a place to rent, to fetching it from there. In our generation, and
of those cousins still living in our small compound, she was the only one who
could drive, so she would always be assigned the fetching and the driving.
.
She gave me a friendster testimonial, and now I feel so
guilty that I never gave her one. That it is only now that I explore her good
side.
.
Everybody was so sure that she’d survive. Nobody really took
it seriously. Now I guess everyone has guilt feelings for it.
.
It’s the first night of her burol. I was expecting relatives
to arrive by the dozens, but I really didn’t expect them to arrive today. Not
when I myself haven’t accepted her death.
.
I was nice to see familiar faces that I haven’t seen in
years as well as to see new faces that I’ve never seen before. My cousins,
nephews and nieces they’re all here right now. Reminiscing, talking about how
everybody’s been talking about what-ifs and the like. It would be really nice
if it wasn’t for the event that made it possible.
.
I make it a point not to look at a corpse in a coffin,
there’s something eerie about it for me. Especially if the person I am looking
at is someone I know. I hope I get to look at her one last time though, and
properly apologize.
