THERE are no green leaves of summer in our country. All the leaves around us are green. But we have a summer, even if that season does not proceed from Spring and move into Fall. Seasons, after all, are not demarcated by nature but by man.
But I believe in the green leaves of summer, separate and supreme from all the green leaves around. I owe it to write about the green leaves of summer to this brother who passed on 16 years ago in his 40s.
Manong Pempe died of cancer. The lungs manifested it but, in the end, we never knew from where the cells came and to where they spread.
Manong Pempe stayed in the small city, while the three of us, his siblings, ventured forth into other countries and bigger cities. We would see him every now and then, because he was also busy. He was a stage actor, a poet, a writer, an artist and an activist. During his wake, people we didn’t know thanked us for the help he gave them. These things he never told us.
It was late October some 16 years ago when he arrived with his wife, Naomi, to our apartment in Manila. It was a sudden reunion. He went to the hospital to undergo a battery of tests.
All the tests proved negative, until the doctor recalled that there was an x-ray done. I volunteered to fetch the film and, on my way back, I saw on the small sheet attached to the negative the words “mass” and “possible metastasis.”
That morning, he and his wife entered a doctor’s clinic. I still can recall what my brother said after coming out from that consultation: “It’s cancer.” We all echoed false assurances; that maybe it was not cancer and that maybe another doctor could offer a different opinion.
Those were all wrong—the pretense and the make-believe—before cancer and the growth that cannot be controlled.
As his disease grew serious, we would learn more about dying and death, and pain. We found out that when the patient complained about severe pains, we should not say “It will go away,” because we would not be sure it would go away. One night, at his bed, in our home, he turned to me and asked: “Where does this pain come from?”
We discovered many things about our community that year. A busy family friend would cook chicken for my brother. These were persons who actually made things bearable, quieted the anxiety and sorrow.
We discovered many kinds of doctors and experts. We saw this young doctor who touched the lump on the neck of my brother and pronounced that, if not treated soon, will burst. We discovered cocktails of pain relievers. We finally saw the power of morphine.
Manong Pempe decided not to have chemotherapy. He said he would not want to spend his few months all weak. He talked to his three children. He promised that he would be always around them. They would not see him but he would be around, really around.
The children are now all grown up. The eldest, a son, is married and with his own daughter. The second, a daughter, is also married with her own son. The youngest is working and working. Wherever they go, they carry with them a photo of their father, long hair and all defiant, a child of the ’70s.
The day my brother passed away was the birthday of Lia, the first daughter. Numbers and calendars are part of destiny.
I do not have a memory of his death in the hospital. What I remember was how I was able to tell the children that we should now close the lid of the coffin. That was the last they woud see their father, and I was managing good-bye.
My sister, Lilibeth, told me how, during the last hours of our brother, his face became calm once more and his eyes alive. For those who knew my brother, he was a handsome man. Beauty does come back before death—that was a wonderful assurance.
I never got to mourn the passing of my brother. The day of the funeral, I prepared a set of music to be used for the procession. Played over and over was the song “The Green Leaves of Summer.” Folksy, sweet, cinematic and not the kind of song played during the funeral, the song, I am certain, amused and pleased my brother.
That afternoon, in April, there was a drizzle as the funeral cortege was moving out of the old Peñafrancia Shrine. The old men and women said my brother did not want yet to go.
It was in October 1998 that he was diagnosed with cancer. In 1999 he was gone.
My brother really never left. Each year, I wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning of the 15th of April, and I see him approaching me and embracing me. I believe good brothers come back if they are called home by the green leaves of summer.
I believe in the green leaves of summer, and of seasons made by man and not by gods.
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E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano