Today, my mother will be laid to rest. I shall be both priest and son. As priest, I shall stand before the bier and recite the obsequies prescribed by the Catholic Church. As a son, I shall be bidding a final goodbye to my mother. It must be one of the most heart-rending experiences for any priest.
Leticia P. Callangan-Aquino. “Laetitia” is Latin for “joy.” As a child she had many joys particularly from a doting father, my grandfather (grandma was of the sterner, disciplinarian type) and from an aunt who she would always recall with fondness even in her old age, her Auntie Biling (Librada Sumabat). But there were woes aplenty too, and all of these gave her nerves of steel and strength of character. She lost her only sibling to uremia at a time when medicines were scarce and physicians were not quite sure about the course of treatment. She told me that while seeing her sister die, she blamed my grandmother for giving her a fruit to eat the day before—obviously a childish attempt at identifying an explanation for what, to her, was inexplicable.
Then there was the experience of the Second World War—life in evacuation, seeing the precious house her father had built set ablaze by incendiary bombs released by “liberating” American forces. She was also conscripted into service by the Japanese as translator because she developed quite a facility in conversational Nippongo.
But she and my dad gave us, their children, the ultimate joy parents can give their children: The gifts of discernment, diligence and faith that allow any person to make sense of his life. She was unselfish: Whatever she could give us, she would, including her “Santa Claus” gifts that we continued to receive even until last Christmas!
She became a lawyer at the time that women lawyers were a rarity. In fact, she was the class muse at the Lyceum of the Philippines (where she completed her law studies after transferring from MLQU) because her classmates had no other choice—she was the only woman in her class! She and daddy wed, and came back to Tuguegarao to settle (luring daddy away from Camiling).
When I was born, and then my brother, and then, five years later, my sister, she put her entire profession in the back-burner—setting aside what could have been a promising practice and becoming a full-time mother from whom we learned our first lessons, acquired our manners, and inherited the Catholic faith. Study periods were supervised, and reciting the Holy Rosary as a family was not to be taken lightly. She was as strict and demanding on us as she was on herself, because she allowed herself no luxury, no frills as she was every solicitous of our needs.
Her fulfillment as a lawyer came in teaching the law with assiduousness, forming future lawyers with a passion, and authoring three law books with no other motive than to get students to grasp the intricacies of law.
Mommy passed away in her sleep on the day of her 62nd year of wedded life to daddy. And daddy was a broken man when he arrived from Manila to see mommy in her casket. I am broken too and I do not yet see how I shall rise from this. I placed one of my priest stoles in mommy’s hands. It is tradition in some places for a priest-son to place in his departed mother’s hands the “maniturgium”—the cloth with which holy chrism from his hands is wiped off at Ordination Rites. Since I do not think any maniturgium was used at my Ordination I found it more meaningful to give her my stole. And there is so much that goes with it: Gratitude above all for being the one person in my life who nurtured my priestly vocation from within my family, not only praying fervently for my perseverance, but urging me, already as a priest, to pray. While priests are expected to exhort their people to pray, it was mommy who had one frequent refrain for me: “Pray, pray, pray.”
The morning of her passing, I longed to see her, and I asked my assistant to phone her driver to bring her over to school. It would never happen. Instead, I was called at midday to be told that she had passed away silently, serenely during her morning nap. There is no experience as heart-rending as losing a mother, but I take comfort in the faith that when Jesus cried out in bitterness and desperation on the Cross—“Why have you abandoned me?”—he cried for me too. And the cries of the Son of God are never in vain!