Tita Ging

MY COUSIN MATT texted me early this morning that his mother — my aunt, my father's younger sister — had passed away. Tita Ging was very dear to me.

Today I choose to remember her hearty laughter, her sweet, endearing voice, and her kind heart. She was like a mother to me. She cared for me as her own during the summer months I spent at my grandmother's house in Polomolok, beaming with pride that I got all those medals from school, and telling the entire world about it. With Tita Beb, she took me to the market, brought me to parks in Davao, and indulged me in whatever it was that I wanted. This was years before she had succumbed to a brain tumor that left her wheelchair-bound, unable to verbalize, and paralyzed. She was never the same again.

Hoping to get some sense of what had happened, I called Matt. My voice quivering, I asked him how he was. "Let's be comforted, Kuya, that Mommy's suffering is now over," he told me. I couldn't agree with him more. Hers was a peaceful death, I learned. She was in her own room, in the midst of family, when she went home to the Lord.

After seeing so many patients die, some of them my very own, I thought I'd get used to the concept of death. But the pangs of grief are so much harder to bear when it hits home.

O Lord, may You be our comfort.