I met Rose on her fathers funeral. She wasn't sad, just maybe strained from preparing everything and her mother's constant prodding over accommodating me among other guests. It made me somehow guilty of not actually wanting to be there. I hated the thought of obligatory small talks and awkward moments where we sit there and trace every member in the family tree. Being the second family, they were after all, considered derelicts. But they were persistent , trying to salvage every pride and hope on being accounted as family.
I didn't wanted to look but she led me to the coffin. I never really saw much of my uncle since they were on a constant feud with my mother, but on that instant he looked peaceful. He wasn't rawboned and lanky unlike other cancer patients. They did not had him powdered pale white. No lipstick, no hair gels. He smelled nice though like fresh tulips on summer days or if that's formaldehyde i never knew, i was too uneasy to ask.
His neatly pressed Barong Tagalog contrasted on his already decaying skin. He wore no shoes because they couldn't afford one. If i knew early on, i would have stolen a pair of black suede shoes from my father's vast collection of footwear. She said it didn't matter, her father would have been outraged over the frugality of his funeral anyway.
She recalled of him wanting to have something non-traditional - like burying him headlong on their empty vacant lot. No coffin. No flowers. No candles. No empty coffee cups. Just the family, their prayers and their acceptance of him dying. He thought he would have made a good fertilizer.
He never finished high school so he ended up working odd jobs just so he can put his kids through college. He was a farmer, a laborer, a construction worker, truck driver, bodyguard to a once famous politician, tricycle driver, and an ice cream vendor. He traveled half way round the country to sell a smuggled Indonesian bird to pay his daughter's graduation fees. Worked an all-nighter at a public market just to buy his wife a new electric fan. He was the type to walk around in flapping boots because buying a new one meant not giving his son allowance for two days. Those heroic days may not be the happiest days of his life but probably the most perfect in his eyes.
He had five children, one of which is a step son from his second wife. Regardless of whom should have the most authority, they were all there. Bullfrog eyes swelled from crying and weary from days and days of vigil.
Despite of what must be a tremendous despair and misery, Rose was beaming and nomadic. Offering Milo and cheap raspberry cookies, consoling her crying brother and traversing between medicating her mother, talking to me and finishing her marmalade sandwich.
I knew she wanted to cry but i didn't said anything. Her restlessness was probably her way of concealing her yearning to be with his father again.
She put down the tray and headed to his coffin. She stood there, neither talking nor crying. She looked at him as if he was the only person on the room. Oblivious of the chaos and the constant bellowing of men gambling. I wasn't sure if she felt the need to look at him in his last days but in that moment i knew it was much more than that.
