Today marks the 2nd year where we are celebrating my father's birthday with him looking down at us from wherever souls of dead people are. My nieces & nephews--ages 3, 6,7,8 & 9-- are really into the mood of celebrating all by themselves. They got the keyboard from my sister's room and really sing on top of their lungs a thousand happy birthday songs... maybe because it's the only song that one of them got right on the keyboard. They even played statue dance. My mother prepared a sumptuous dinner for us-- a dinner as sumptuous as pansit can be.
Although it's not a celebration of the real sort, my father's birthdays will be spent like no ordinary days since his death. Alive, we sometimes forgot that it's his birthday, for my father never really made a good deal of his birthdays or himself for that matter. Death arouse our desires to be closer to him. Where before we go about our business daily without giving much thought about our father; now it seems that most of us find ways to mention him in our conversations.
That seems to be how reality is. Alive we all are negligible, but in death we are reverently remembered and all our failings conveniently forgotten or if not remembered with compassion and understanding.
Lesson?
If you want to be understood, request an early death.
But only if you are too weak to live and too weak be love alive.
And this is a subject worthy of its own title.
