After my mother passed on five years ago, I have found no compelling reason to visit the town and the house where I, my four siblings and foster brother, grew up.
Without her, that wooden house with open doors—which she filled with chatter and clutter, and guests of all kinds dropping by and staying overnight or days—is now just a shell, decrepit and decaying.
In its current state, the only things worth saving are bags and bags of photographs of family and friends, diaries, letters, plaques, certificates, and medals of her children which she treasured. A widow for 23 years, she had my dad’s love letters neatly filed still. This was discovered by my sister, who is turning the concrete part of the house (mom's old pharmacy) into a public library, only recently.
Yesterday, however, my foster brother, Peding, and his wife, Carmen, who are visiting from the US, wanted to visit our parents’ gravesite.
And so we trek to that little town’s cemetery. In a sea of stark, cold tombs, we gasp when we see this.
A canopy of beautiful flowers in mom's favorite color—purple! It shades three marble slabs: dad’s, mom’s, and Manang Ibay’s (our househelp of many years).
The flowers are lovely reminders of how grace crowned and blossomed in her life—and how much of that same grace, from the God whom she served, was shared with others.
Mom saw to the planting of that vine with purple flowers, maybe to leave us an imprint of her temporal life with us, and now, her eternal life with Him.
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