No regrets

 My husband Daniel passed away last September 2021. We were together for 24 years. He battled leukaemia for five of those.

Daniel was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) at age 73. The doctors told us he was too old to undergo chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant. They suggested a new type of medication that would be injected under the skin in his lower abdomen.

Before agreeing to that, I sought second and third opinions from other specialists but they came up with the same diagnosis.

We went to the hospital for his weekly injections. His prognosis was good and his haematologist marvelled at how well his body was responding to the medication. The doctors warned him, however, to stop travelling abroad to avoid catching foreign infections.

For four years, I watched my husband handle his disease like a boss. Nothing slowed him down. He continued working as a freelance writer. He made short trips around British Columbia and wrote about people, places, and social issues that were regularly neglected by mainstream media. I joined him on many of these forays and got to observe how he did interviews and interacted with people, how he noted tiny details material to his story.

Daniel was organized, disciplined, and focused, both professionally and personally. He was fearless. He was creative. These qualities made him one of the most awarded magazine writers in Canada.

To my husband’s credit, he had faith in my writing ability. He believed that if I worked a little harder and procrastinated less, I could achieve so much more. He tried very hard to encourage me, but failed miserably. Unlike him, I mostly rely on inspiration. I was just too lazy.

Daniel spoiled me every day. He planned and cooked all our meals. He vacuumed and dusted while I sat around and read. He kept me supplied with my favourite treats. He bought me nice things.

Mostly though, he loved winning arguments. It helped that he had a strong personality and a loud voice. I compared him to a Zamboni. He could run me over and flatten me like a pancake, if I allowed him. Whenever I was right, I stood my ground firmly during a disagreement until he realized that being taller and louder didn’t ensure victory all the time.

Our loud discussions tapered about 11 years ago, after one of my visits to the Philippines. During that trip, my fourth big brother was stabbed and killed by a drug addict. He was my favourite big brother and my best friend. There were so many things I still wanted to do to help make his life better, but I missed my chance.

In my work as a writer, community volunteer and advocate for foreign domestics in Canada, I have seen and written about suicide, separations and failure. I’ve listened to grieving family members reminding others to do their best for loved ones before it got too late. Somehow, those words never touched me until I lost my big brother, until I felt like I was drowning under relentless waves of guilt and regret because I failed my big brother.

That event changed my attitude towards relationships. I promised myself that from that day on, I would try to live a life without guilt or regret. To be kind to everybody, to love my people the best way I can, every day, without becoming a push-over. To pick my battles. To express my side during arguments without enmity. To listen without judgement. To forgive myself when I fail.

Two years ago on March 2020, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic. Canada went into lockdown. People lost their jobs. Businesses closed. I happily stayed at home with Daniel. He was a sociable person who thrived on company. I prayed very hard that I would stay healthy and not leave my husband behind. I didn’t want him to end up sick and alone.

Six months ago during a writing trip, Daniel contracted pneumonia, which in turn worsened his leukaemia. He ended up in the hospital twice. I stayed there with him 24 hours a day and read the news to him. I fed him his favourite ice cream. I sang to him. He thanked me repeatedly for looking after him so well. When he decided to die at home, we hired a nurse to help me out. I sat beside him most of the time and held his hand until it was time for him to go.

Today I feel so very bereft. I miss Daniel so much, but I have no regrets. I am guilt-free.

(Previously published on the Mill Woods Mosaic, January 15th, 2022)

Loving Vancouver

 It was love at first sight.

I have known from childhood that Vancouver was a place I definitely wanted to visit, if only to see the colourful leaves that its trees produce in the fall. I saw a picture of those autumn leaves at the Readers Digest when I was about nine years old, and I was amazed. Leaves could do that?

I arrived in Vancouver for the first time in the summer of 1988. Having worked in Singapore for three years before that, I wasn’t too impressed with the mellow pace of life in North Vancouver, my first destination. Buses were scheduled in 15-minute intervals on weekdays, and every half-hour on weekends. In a community called the British Properties where very rich people lived, buses only went up once in the morning and once in the evening.

In Singapore at the time, waiting for a bus didn’t take as long, even in the suburbs.

It rained consistently in Vancouver in the fall of that year. In fact, I remembered that it rained or got cloudy every day in the autumn, for the next two or three years after. I’d never seen so much rain in my life. The leaves went from green straight to brown and then fell off, skipping the part where it was supposed to go yellow, orange or red. I saw however, that leaves did change colours back east. I felt so cheated.

Going to school in the evenings wasn’t easy either. It could take several bus rides to get to the classes I wanted, and waiting in the bus stops took the same amount of time as what I spent attending those classes. I got back home from school well beyond my bedtime.

I realized that if I wanted to do things faster, riding the bus wasn’t the way to go. I learned to drive in the same year, and by the start of my second summer in Vancouver, I was already driving a second-hand car. The ease and speed with which I could acquire a car, something that had seemed impossible in the Philippines and in Singapore, was a revelation.

Having my own ride gave me the freedom to chase the rest of my plans with amazing ease: going back to school, doing volunteer work, visiting places, getting a new job. That was when I finally fell in love with my new home country. Suddenly, Vancouver became to me a place where dreams are easier to reach, if one had a plan, coupled with self-confidence and the ability to work hard and see things through.

Despite the inherent racism within, Vancouver is still a great equalizer among peoples. What diverse community, by the way, whether openly or subtly, does not suffer racism? It’s the way one deals with racism that matters. Being smart and educated alone in a strange place does not cut it. Having the right attitude did. I knew that by having brown skin and speaking English with an accent, I might have to work doubly hard to prove myself. Speaking up and standing for oneself helped as well. So that’s what I did.

In Vancouver, I learned that being different is a strength in itself. So she’s white and you’re brown and he’s yellow, but it doesn’t really matter. Having the courage to resist blending in and to pursue your own interests gives a person a different kind of freedom. For an artist or a writer, especially. Finding your very own voice in a community already teeming with a multitude of different voices, and believing in that voice gives you an edge. It’s really up to you to decide where that difference will take you.

In Vancouver, where nature lurked in almost every back yard, I learned to hike the mountain trails, walk in the woods, camp by the lake, and picnic by the beach. (The first time I was invited to go for a walk, I had to ask why. Back in my rural village in the Philippines, one only walked for important reasons - to gather firewood or fetch water or do an errand. Otherwise, one stayed home and read, or do chores. I was told that down here, one can walk just for the joy of walking.) I’ve become a dedicated walker since.

In Vancouver, I learned that being different is a strength in itself. So she’s white and you’re brown and he’s yellow, but it doesn’t really matter. Having the courage to resist blending in and to pursue your own interests gives a person a different kind of freedom. For an artist or a writer, especially. Finding your very own voice in a community already teeming with a multitude of different voices, and believing in that voice gives you an edge. It’s really up to you to decide where that difference will take you.

So yeah, I love Vancouver. I love its weather, its people, its diversity, its bike lanes, its mountains, its parks, its beaches. I love that people are mainly tolerant of others, that animals are loved and protected. I love the city, despite its expensive housing market, its homeless population, even its seedier corners. It all belongs with the territory.

What I love most about Vancouver is the fact it helped me grow and test my limits. It allowed me to help my family and encourage them to strive, in ways that were better than I ever could.

Cornflakes, sugar and teardrops: a crazy teen-aged memory

Last year, I celebrated my first 50^th highschool anniversary with most of my old classmates, a few of my best friends, and some of my school idols. They found me through the Internet, and I joined our class chatroom. I didn’t actually graduate with them, because I dropped out in the middle of our fourth year. But I grew up with those guys. A big number of them later congregated at our old school back home to celebrate. They had an amazing time. Unfortunately, I had to stay back in Vancouver because of a sickness in the family.

I went back to school and finally graduated the year after them. So this year, I celebrated a second 50^th highschool anniversary with a different group of people. This batch added me to our Facebook group.

I was particularly excited because I reconnected with my very best friend from this class, another girl whom I had been looking for in the last 20 years. We were both 15 years old at the time. I’ll call her Dora for the purposes of this story.

Dora was everything I had always wanted to be: she sang, she played the guitar, she drove the family car to school. She was smart, funny, artistic and confident. I, on the other hand, was a feral child with absentee parents, and I lived by my own rules. I boarded with my aunt’s family, but nobody paid any attention to me, unless I was needed to run an errand. I was quiet and obedient. I kept to myself. I read mountains of books and magazines, and skipped school when my pocket money ran out.

In my eyes, Dora represented the height of cool. And she was my best friend. She was the head of our class choir while I ran the theatre group. During that year, we won every school competition in music and drama.

One day, I copied a poem called Cornflakes, Sugar and Teardrops from a Playboy Magazine that I borrowed from one of my friends’ dad. It was written by Shel Silverstein. I showed it to Dora. The poem went like this:

I’m eating cornflakes with sugar and teardrops

Since the milkman ran away with you

He stole my every dream and forgot to leave the cream

So I’m sitting here wondering what to do…

Dora loved the poem and immediately set it to a blues tune of her own composition. I was very impressed.

Dora and I had our own kind of fun. We were both crazy kids, and our teachers often looked at us and shook their heads. One time we decided to sit away from each other and had a staring contest for about 30 minutes during our English class. The first to blink would lose. I forgot who won, but our English teacher called us after class because she was worried we were fighting. It never crossed our minds that having a staring contest during class hours could be classified as weird. The teacher kept a straight face when we explained what we were doing.

We drew faces on our notebooks and day-dreamed during our mathematics classes, but kept an eye on the math teacher who habitually moved around the room while teaching. I remembered panicking when we lost sight of her, only to discover her standing behind us, about to knock our heads together.

Dora was gay, which didn’t bother me at all. She would often tell me about her secret crush, a pretty girl in our class. I would listen attentively and silently wished her well. I didn’t think our classmates knew she was gay, though, because Dora got a lot of attention from the boys at the time.

Dora and I graduated from highschool and went our separate ways. There were no mobile phones and no Internet at the time. I lost contact with Dora, but I kept the memory of our one-year friendship close to my heart. Later, I searched for Dora for years but failed to find her.

This year, I found Dora. We got reconnected. We had a long conversation and updated each other on the progress of our lives. She had vague memories of our year in highschool, but she did say that she had fun. Although I didn’t remind her of our crazy highschool antics, I found some sort of closure.

I googled the poem Cornflakes, Sugar and Teardrops and found two musical versions of it on You Tube. I thought Dora’s version still sounded better.

Me And the World Wide Web

Facebook wasn’t around then.

Back in 1989, I had no idea what the Internet was. I was a regular church-goer, along with my buddies who all came to Canada from Singapore to look for a better future. I helped prepare the church newsletter. I wrote about members of the congregation, little personal testimonies that they wanted to share. The man who ran the newsletter was an older white guy who downloaded his material from somewhere --- religious stories and articles he gathered from sources online. Only it wasn’t called ‘downloading’ then. He ‘copied’ them.

What he did seemed strange to me at the time. I got my information from newspapers, books and magazines. I communicated through the phone, the fax machine, or by snail mail. (Snail mail, for the benefit of the millennials, is when you write something by hand, stuff it into an addressed envelope, stick a stamp to it and drop it into a mailbox.) My boss, who worked from home, was very impressed that his foreign nanny owned a fax machine. I heard him telling his friends about my fax machine. Sometimes he even used it.

Back in the Philippines, my family and I talked regularly by long distance phone and less regularly, by snail mail.

At that point, a technological tornado was slowly brewing but nobody among my friends and family members ever noticed, least of all myself. The Internet was about to arrive. According to history, the World Wide Web was launched on the 6^th of August 1991.

The precursor to the internet itself was born in 1969, when scientists working for the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) connected computer networks between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute. Email was invented in 1971, to facilitate an exchange of information among the networks. (I only started using email in 1997.)

Around the same time, projects like the DARPA’s were also being developed in other countries. Geniuses back then created a system that connected even larger networks together for more efficient information exchange and sharing, and thus the Internet came to be. The same protocols they applied then are still being used today. I didn’t think those guys foresaw how their invention would change the world.

The Internet came to us like a bottomless empty vessel. One could pour into it whatever one wanted. See what we got back: To date, the Internet and the social media have made the world smaller; helped carry out regime changes; overturned election expectations; influenced public opinion, killed some traditional businesses and gave birth to new ones; created its own version of established truths; encouraged crimes; solved others, and made friends out of virtual strangers.

The number of internet users in 2018 totalled 4.021 billion, while social media users were pegged at 3.196 billion.

Millions of these users are from the Philippines, plus over 10 million more Filipinos scattered all over the world. It’s amazing to see how interconnected Filipinos are, by phone or social media, how cheaply communication can be achieved nowadays. Second hand phones back home are readily available. Almost everyone else I meet in urban areas has a cell phone. Less so, however, from the rural areas.  Still, one can buy a load of minutes for several pesos and send a text message for one peso. Wi-Fi is available almost everywhere.

Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook and Messenger have since become a favourite social medium for Pinoys, both at home and abroad. It’s free, it’s always available, and totally democratic. My daughters and I talk everyday by Messenger and follow each other’s news feeds, although we don’t subscribe to the practice of posting what we ate, or purchased, nor our duck-faced selfies. We leave all that to others. The only misgiving I have is, it could have been so much easier and cheaper if Facebook were available in the early years of my absence.

For a lot of people in the Philippines, Facebook has become the place from where we reach out to the world, express our dreams and desires, our joys, sorrows, angers and frustrations. It’s also the place from where can show the best version of our ourselves.

But there’s a flipside to something free, available and totally democratic. Facebook and other social media sites like Twitter, have also been used to change the course of events all over the world, to achieve darker purposes. Even the Philippines has not been immune to all this.

Good thing I only read dog and cat stories that have happy endings.

Published at the Mill Woods Mosaic on January 15, 2019.

What is a living will?

What’s a living will? How important is it? Based on my friend Rossana’s recent harrowing personal experience, I’d say very important.

What is a living will? According to the Internet’s legal dictionary, a living will is a written document that allows a patient to give explicit instructions about the medical treatment to be administered when the patient is terminally ill or permanently unconscious; also called an advance directive. It can be revoked by the patient at any time.

Is it legal in Canada? Yes, according to a Supreme Court ruling in a British Columbia case in 1993, where the Court ruled that “there is a right to choose how one’s body will be dealt with, even in the context of beneficial medical treatment, that has long been recognized by the common law. To impose medical treatment on one who refuses constitutes battery, and our common law has recognized the right to demand that medical treatment which would extend life be withheld or withdrawn.”

If you don’t have a living will, for instance, and you get very sick, so sick that your body is still alive and consuming medicine and sustenance through tubes attached to your body, but your brain is no longer working, the doctor’s job is to keep you alive by making sure those tubes stay attached. You may wake up and get better one day, or you may stay asleep like that for years. Or you may die. Nobody knows when. A good doctor will have a better idea, and will let your relatives know about your chances. He will suggest courses of action, and give them the option to decide what to do next.

My friend Rossana had been placed in such an extremely difficult position three weeks ago. Her older cousin who also lives in Vancouver, had a massive stroke and landed in a hospital. She was unable to move, talk, or open her eyes, but is alive. There is a very little brain activity. They had been keeping her on life support since then, hoping that one day she’d wake up and start to get better. After her first stroke, this sick cousin gave Rossana a signed Power of Attorney, giving her authority to take charge of any arrangement necessary in case she passed away. The cousin also told her that if she got really ill, she didn’t want to go to a nursing home. However, said cousin didn’t sign any living will, as Rossana had suggested.

After many days, the doctor took Rossana aside and told her that there wasn’t a very big chance that her cousin would ever recover. Hooked on life support, she could go on like that, unconscious, for a long time. There was no way to tell. The doctor wanted to know whether my friend would allow them to remove life support and let nature take its course. 

"Life is short, temporary, and full of surprises. Tomorrow, it could be anybody’s turn. That’s why I don’t buy green bananas anymore. I might not be around to watch them ripen."

Rossana knew she had no right to decide. It wasn’t detailed in the Power of Attorney. She went home and contacted the cousin’s family in the Philippines. They told her No Way. Rossana knew she could overrule the Philippine cousins if she wanted to, instead she asked her cousin’s sister who lives in the US to come down and talk to the doctors. This sister works in the medical field and would understand. They had a meeting with the doctors and made a decision two days later. The sick cousin was taken off life support and was moved to a nursing home where she would receive 24-hour care while they were waiting for her to get better or get worse.

Rossana was now relieved, but emotionally burned out and physically spent. She phoned me to say, “Nobody had to make a decision like that for someone else. I’m thankful I didn’t need to do it. I wouldn’t want my family to go through the same experience that I just did. I’m definitely writing my own living will. As in, right now.”

I see her point. My husband has written his, a long time ago, and I will prepare mine first thing tomorrow morning. You never know.

Life is short, temporary, and full of surprises. Tomorrow, it could be anybody’s turn. That’s why I don’t buy green bananas anymore. I might not be around to watch them ripen.

(First published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, on January 15th, 2018)

The bitter aftertaste of colonialism

Two Sundays ago, I came across a personal essay written by a 30-year-old Dominican-American man, published at the New York Times. Christopher Rivas remembers as a child how his father took great care of his appearance, so much so that he spent more time getting ready to go out than his mother or his sisters did.

His father explained, Rivas wrote, “that as a young man in the Dominican Republic, you had to work so hard, perfecting yourself, preparing your mask, so that when a young European or American woman came through, she might choose you, might take you home with her, like that was your only way out.”

It was a belief, Rivas says, perpetrated by the movies and TV, that a black or brown man gets made better by being with a white woman. It was, he adds, a whole system coded within him.

The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain for over three hundred years.

This story strongly reminded me of the Philippines, another country which had been under the Spanish rule for three hundred years. Before the Spaniards came, the nation we now call Philippines was actually a group of 7,100 disparate islands, every island had its own ruler, language, religion and culture. They were fighters too. The first explorer Spain sent to the Philippines, Ferdinand Magellan, was killed by a ‘Filipino’ warrior as soon as he stepped on the beach.

In response, Spain sent religious missionaries instead. They conquered the people through religion, planted in their hearts the fear of God, and made them feel guilty, unworthy and inferior. Cultures disappeared, religions died, identities got blurred, and languages evolved. Those who resisted were thrown into prison, killed or deported. At some point in those days, they declared those islands one country under Spain and called it Philippines in honour of their king at the time. Afterwards, when the Filipinos decided they preferred freedom, the Americans came to supposedly help deliver us from that nightmare, only to replace Spain’s with their own hidden agenda. This is my simplified version of my country’s history. 

But more than anything else, all colonizers left a toxic cultural spoor that the colonized then absorbed and accepted as their own. In the Philippines, how often has one heard an innocent remark about someone else who could be prettier, if only they had a fairer skin, or a more western nose? Or how proud or how superior someone feels for carrying a colonizer’s genes? As if being brown, short and flat-nosed is being second rate? Or how a lot of people think we can only get our act together when run by another country? Those are conditioned attitude, formed through centuries of colonization.

Dependency, feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and resentment are common by-products of being under another country’s power for decades. Filipinos are not alone. All over the world, I have no doubt that thousands of peoples feel this way. England was in India for two hundred years. In fact, a recent research shows that historically, only 22 countries have never been colonized or attacked by England at some point in the past.

Spain, also known as the Catholic Monarchy, was considered one of the largest empires in history. Spain controlled vast overseas territories that included places in the Americas, in Europe, Africa and Asia for over four hundred years.

Not to mention other countries like Portugal, France and the Netherlands, which left their own colonial mark upon countless places in the world.

More recent, however, more palpable and currently, still being felt in real time are the after-effects of colonization on the First Nations peoples of North America. In Canada, before the Europeans came, First Nations communities were self-sufficient, healthy, and confident of their special place in the world. They have their own form of government, languages and cultures. Their only fault was that they were too hospitable.

Colonizers took their lands away, forced them to live in reservations, destroyed their cultures, and sent their children to residential schools, where they were then converted to Christianity, and many of them sexually or physically abused. This is common knowledge. News media has detailed these abuses and the resulting court cases in the recent years.

I’ve been wondering about what benefits, if any, have the colonized gotten out of all these? I don’t know. Let me do some more research and I will get back to you.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, April 15th, 2019 issue)

THE OCEAN BETWEEN US, a film by Crisanta Sampang