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Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Obenieta: Till the end
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak
AFTER disembarking from a jeepney last Saturday night, while the rest of the world waited for the latest news about the pope on the verge of his homecoming, I accidentally stepped on a carcass of a tire-flattened cat. If that’s not a heavy-handed portent of dire things to come, that’s certainly flat-footed. What if the spirit of the cat would follow me and lick the smudge of its blood off the sole of my left shoe? Or so I spat at an ill-conceived notion. Watch out, so goes the warning off my head to the farfetched side of superstition.
Stop and look. Listen, that’s what a sage asked of us lest we lead ourselves into the wreck of “an unexamined life.” For us the living, the pope’s last moments are a “lesson in dying,” according to this paper’s headline last Sunday.
In its wake, whether it made a splash in a tsunami-swept beach resort or came sweet in the shape of a cassava cake, Death demands of us the rage to remind ourselves of our common inevitability. And so it holds us always in a thrall, the remains of the Grim Reaper’s scythe. No other sight compels us with its insistence not to be overlooked, regardless of the cold mist of sorrow or shock in our eyes.
Reportedly shunning hospital “to carry his cross,” the pope might as well have defeated the Grim Reaper’s sneaky penchant to swoop and sweep us off unaware. For a while there, it was as if he showed us a way of winking at the cat-eyed certainty of doom. That may explain why I have not lapsed, while the world weeps, into the redundancy of grief.
So much has been written about Karol Wojtyla’s legacy of forgiveness and humility as well as his concern for human dignity. Even as he lay dying, his body ravaged by the residue of an assassination attempt and other complications from his Parkinson’s disease, he encouraged research to “enhance and prolong human life.” (And, yes, he also averred it’s acceptable for patients to refuse drugs that cause unconsciousness or to reject extraordinary medical measures that would lead to a “precarious and burdensome prolongation of life.”)
But not only in the majesty of his death does the meaning of our mortality stare us in the face. There are lessons to be learned even in the banality of personal disasters according to the testimony of the tabloid. Why do we need to bother, for instance, at the way money problems reportedly pushed two men to end their lives last Friday? (A 42-year-old coconut gatherer in Barili hanged himself for his failure to pay his siblings for bailing him out of jail and a 35-year-old man was found lifeless, his mouth frothing after a drug overdose.) What do their miseries tell us?
Hoping against hopelessness, in the long haul, might be about this: We don’t stop to look and listen.
(yomyko@yahoo.com)
(April 5, 2005 issue)
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