My last surviving Lola (from my father's side) just died recently. She was hospitalized, became weak, closed her eyes and never regained consciousness. She was around 70 but she doesn't look like one.
Despite her age, she never got tired of making small talks to whoever parks besides her. I always see her in front of her house looking at people or vehicles or animals or whatever is passing her by. For the past years, whenever I come home from Manila, I see her there -- staring at things, sitting still, making light conversations, waiting for something.
She used to sell bananas or any fruits and vegetables in season despite being well off. She has properties and business that she can afford to just live on interest until her super twilight years and yet she still worked. Not a day in her life did she stop. I should learn from that. We should all learn from that. She lived a simple life, donned simple clothes and saved a lot. She helped a lot too. From her grown up children and their families to people whom she met and is in need. She never failed to help them. And I have constantly admire her for that.
But one thing nobody heard of about my Lola is that her penchant for keeping her money inside her many closets, bottles of old coins, wads of bills (old and new), some even dating back to the era before Marcos or way before that generation that when my uncles discovered it a few days after her funeral, it took about 2 days to finish counting them all. That's a lot I guess. Her own little empire that she painstakingly collected over the years and kept lovingly hidden. Maybe she plans on traveling or buying a new dress, maybe she's saving for Armageddon, maybe nobody will ever find out the reason why.
I just had a thought that maybe each of us has these personal oddities that some we tell about but others that nobody will ever find out why and how we do it. Like my Lola. Maybe this is what will make us legends in our own way so that when our grandsons or great granddaughters talk about us, they will talk about us with fondness and always with that wishful heart and desire that they should have known us, talked to us or got to know us while we were still alive. I guess that's the mystery of it all and that in life, we can't really tell it all. That some things are really meant to be kept forever...
When you stop and you go away, you just leave a legacy that the ones left behind will treasure and a mystery to remember you by. This is what I'll remember my Lola for. So I guess her journey did not really end, she just moved on to another one -- what it is, where it will take her is another mystery that we will all take on...in the end.
Goodnight Lola!
