memoir

Today is my sister’s birthday

/ RCRuiz

I’ve been thinking about my sister in the in-between hours, all throughout the day. Perhaps it’s one reason why I felt somewhat agitated. It’s not until I took the time to sit down and think about the day that I realised it’s because I didn’t get to talk to my sister.

My sister and I were born almost exactly a year apart. Both of our birthdays fall in April. Hers falls earlier in the month and mine closer to the end of it. I think about my sister and the unexpectedness of her passing and what a gift it was that she was able to come to us and spend time with us in the months after Jan passed away. Little did we know that she would leave us too.

For a long time, I couldn’t put a name to what it was that I felt when my sister died. I was able to carry on after Jan’s passing, I was able to push through and still keep going, but when my sister died it was like the world stopped and I sank into a deep dark place. I’m not exactly sure how I got out of there, but time helps a lot and it helps when someone picks you up and says: you don’t have to do anything for a while, you just have to keep on living.

In the days when I was going through treatment, when chemo was rough and I didn’t want to even get out of bed, I thought of my sister saying: Come on, Rochita. Don’t just lie there. Fight.

And I would get up and I would make myself go downstairs and eat breakfast even if I didn’t feel like eating. I decided I wouldn’t die, but I would live.

Because there was so little of a gap between us, my sister and I were often mistaken as twins when we were kids. And my Mom liked to dress us up in twin clothing. There are loads of black and white pictures of the two of us twinning. For a long time, there was just me and my sister. We had to wait another seven years before the first of my brothers was born. My sister and I were each other’s best friends and confidantes. We could fight like cats and dogs, but we were each others’ allies. (It’s kind of impossible to remain hostile when you’re sharing a room.)

I want to honour my sister today. To remember the sound of her voice and the way she smiled. I’m thankful my sons have memories of her. That they know who I’m talking about when I talk about Tita Weng.

In 2022, when I was preparing for surgery, I had a dream about my sister. We were playing together under a big tree in the garden, and I was so preoccupied with what I was doing that I didn’t notice that she’d stood up and walked away.

Today, I remember my sister whose light I carry with me.

(Collage made in 2022)

What it’s like

/ RCRuiz

Today, someone asked me what it feels like.

“I mean, you lost your husband and then now you’ve lost your sister.”

How do you put into words what it feels like to lose the other half of your heart?  She was always there–my sister. In the darkest periods of my life, I hang onto the thought that my sister was always there. She was witness to my wildest dreams and imaginings and she was the person I confided in the most in times of deep despair. She loved me steadfastly even when she didn’t agree with the choices I made and even when it grieved her to see me walk away from the path that was familiar to us both.

I have a memory of my elder sister from when we were in grade school. Back then, going to school meant climbing down the mountain path to the gravelled road and then a 10-15 minute hike to the central school. I was always slow back then and a little bit of a spoiled child.

(My sister, being much quicker on her feet always was at least a few feet in front of me. )
In this memory, my sister has reached the bend in the mountain path–a couple of meters down from home. I am still at the top of the path. It had rained in the night and the path was a bit slippery and being the scaredy-cat that I was, I wanted my sister to come back and help me down the slippery slope. She, on the other hand, was already impatient to go to school because the first bell had already rung.

I remember my sister telling me to hurry up and I remember crouching there and crying for her to come get me.

Finally, she came marching back up the mountain slope. I still remember the look on her face.

Regardless of how aggravated she was, she helped me down from the top of the slope. She held my hand until we got to a place where the earth was less slippery.

My heart aches.

I have so many memories. Of stories shared in the dark of night after the lights went out–of listening for the crunch of gravel outside our bedroom window–of running up and down the mountainside.

There are not enough words to say what it’s like.

 

 

In-between post

/ RCRuiz

Today, I decided to share an excerpt from the memoir I worked on when I started writing again. Rereading it, I realize just how clearly it describes what happened to me–the slow erosion of self, the gradual erasure and subsuming of who I was to the personhood of the man I married–because, as my mother told me: it is our duty as wives to submit to our husbands.

In time, that erosion of self led to a complete forgetting of who I was and what mattered to me.

During one of my first sessions with my therapist, she asked me if I could name anything that I liked doing before I married and moved to the Netherlands.

Tell me, she said. What are the things that you enjoy.

The only thing that I could name and that I could cling to was writing. It was as if I had forgotten the self who lived before I came to this country.

Before I came here, my world was filled with life and art and sound, music and dance and song and laughter; discussions and debates over the dining table; books and words and loud speculations about the future.

I learned to hide those things because Dutch folks don’t like loud voices, because the way we laughed at home is considered unseemly here, because grown up people do not dance, do not indulge in fancy–not in this small town where I live in.

Today, I am engaged in reclamation. I have colored my hair–not an atrocious color, but still scandalous enough and I am wearing my colorful clothes.

I call my eldest son, Kuya (Filipino for older brother). I laugh and dance with my youngest child. We chatter, we make noise and we don’t care if the world shakes with the sound of our cheerfulness.