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Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Mother at loss on how to bury youngest son
IT'S expensive to be poor. Sometimes, it's even more expensive to die.
Seven-year-old Princess Aguilar does not know her father Anthony died last Saturday. There's no way of telling her. He died not knowing where she was since his wife took their only child away four years ago.
"We had news her mother had died earlier and that Princess is now somewhere in Cagayan Valley, perhaps with her stepfather," Anthony's mother Basilisa said.
Searching for the girl is of no moment now. Anthony's body lies in the cheapest coffin his mother could find at the third floor of the Baguio Memorial Chapels along Naguilian Road.
Anthony would have been 26 on November 3.
He was barely 18 and working as a construction laborer way back in 1999. In August 14 of that year, as he wrote in his diary, some friends asked him to help them build a shanty within the Mirador area here.
They were walking home at 8 p.m. Saturday when they were fired upon. Anthony, together with two of his companions, was hit. He fell into a canal and then passed out. He regained consciousness two hours later and found his right shoulder blade bleeding. He pressed on the wound, needing the pain to keep him from passing out again.
He groped for stones that he threw to a nearby house. He succeeded on the third try. The sound on the on the rooftop alerted the occupant who came to his rescue with a flashlight.
Later, in a hospital, he learned he was paralyzed from the neck down. The bullet had ripped through his spinal cord.
The gunmen were never caught. He later wrote the shooting had something to do with a controversy over the lot on which he helped build the shack.
Anthony was bed-ridden for life, the bullet lodged on his back. His wife later left him for another man.
Anthony didn't have any recollection of his father. He was four months inside his mother's womb when his father left the family home in Davao.
His elder sister Katherine, now 33, didn't want to remember and used her mother's maiden surname - Flores.
Katherine has a daughter, too - Cindy, now 13. Kate's husband also abandoned their home when the child was too young to understand.
Woes sometime come after the other. Two months before his brother was shot, Kate felt pain on her limbs. Gangrene had set in, prompting amputation of both her legs, just below the kneecap, to arrest further infection.
Until last year, Kate was a familiar figure in offices here, walking on her padded kneecap for whoever needed manicure or pedicure, or signature shoes, bags and clothes.
Anthony had also kept himself busy over those years he was limited to his bed. Slowly, he learned to paint cartoon characters, landscapes, whales and birds on cut drawing boards his mother could bring home.
Fifteen of the paintings stand on the wall of the funeral chapel. His mother said he had hoped he could sell them to sustain his medication against bedsores and bladder complications.
"Life is beautiful," he wrote on one of them, a caricature of Daisy Duck appreciating a flower bud. He drew Tweetie with a red heart framing the little bird's head. He captioned it with the verse from John 3-16.
A few years back, a certain Mr. Marasigan, a young businessman from Caloocan, saw a television feature of Anthony and Kate. Immediately, he decided to come up and meet them. He brought along a TV set, thinking Anthony would draw inspiration watching an early morning religious program.
"I just told my wife and kids I'll be up here in Baguio for a business appointment," the Samaritan told this writer.
Basilisa's family was then living in a shack at Gibraltar barangay, near the Presidential Mansion. The one-room affair, built with support from a nun, was eventually demolished when the lot owner needed the property.
Since then, the family kept on transferring from one rented room to another or temporarily staying with people who took them in. Stress took its toll on Kate's relationship with her mother and decided to try to make it on her own with her daughter.
The family was originally from Davao. When her husband left, and after Anthony's birth, she moved her four children to Bataan and then to Pangasinan, raising them by doing laundry. She came up to Baguio with group of nightspot entertainers she was washing clothes for. When the nightclub closed shop and girlie show troupe left, she stayed behind.
Last Tuesday, she was unsure if Arthur, her eldest, could make it to the wake. Arthur, a tricycle driver, has settled in Dasmarinas, Cavite with his wife and six kids. Mario, her third child, was with her at the funeral parlor.
It takes one to know one. Days after her shanty at Gibraltar was demolished, Basilisa met with Corazon Tagulino, a widow vending cigarettes at the side of the Rizal Monument here. She took pity on the latter's then 12-year-old autistic and epileptic son Manuel.
The mother and child had been sleeping for five years on the pavement at the side of the Rizal Monument. Basilisa sought help for them, which surprised people who knew her own lot.
Samaritans responded. Starting with a P3,000 seed fund from Engineer Rolly Bautista of A-Theanna Development Corp., they teamed up with residents of Barangay Irisan led by Saturnino Calag in building an eight-by-ten feet room. Before the rainy season set in three years ago, Tagulino moved in.
And now, Basilisa is at loss how and where to lay her youngest to rest. Or how to pay the coffin and funeral service totaling P21,500, good for a five-day wake which ends on Thursday.
She can't part with Anthony's paintings, saying they're her memento. One of the cardboards depicted Tweetie with a halo and angel wings. Anthony had captioned it with Matthew 11-28: "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (RD)
(May 31, 2006 issue)
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