He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

Memories of My Third Big Brother

The road is long, with many a winding turn

That leads us to who knows where, who knows when
But I'm strong, strong enough to carry him
He ain't heavy, he's my brother… The Hollies

The evening before my third big brother Toto passed away, they said he declined dinner and went off to bed early. He never woke up again.  

Kuya Toto was 64. He never married, and for nearly half his life, he lived in the house I built for my mother back in our farming village, and I was supporting him. He couldn’t hold down a job, he didn’t socialize, and he existed in a world real only to him.  

On good days, he did gardening around the property. The flowers and the vegetables he grew were the joy of the neighborhood, and everyone was welcome to pick whatever they fancied.

On bad days, he could be seen walking around the village, conversing with himself or with some of his invisible friends. In the grip of a full psychotic episode, he would walk away from the house and disappear for days, and nobody could find him. Eventually he would come home, dirty and hungry but wouldn’t say where he had been. Thankfully, he didn’t do such disappearing acts often.

Sometimes he would lock himself up in his bedroom, but stood guard near a small peephole he carved out of the wall, where he could observe the activities outside. He was convinced that someone or something was coming to get him. The only person he trusted was our mother, and later, our big sister.  

The one time he actually agreed - or more precisely, was physically forced - to go to the doctor, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. 

My brother refused to go to the doctor ever again and no one was able to make him. He never acknowledged his condition. He knew the stigma attached to mental illness. (Villagers talked about people like him behind their backs while exchanging conjectures as to which evil spirits (engkantos) could have possessed them. Word was that my brother may have inherited the same spirit that took possession of a neighbour, long dead, who used to haunt the banana groves brandishing his wooden sword and loudly challenging imaginary enemies to a duel.)  

My family and I knew otherwise. I’ve researched paranoid schizophrenia extensively and found that it was caused by chemical imbalance in the brain, and can be medicated, even if not cured. It can be hereditary, or be triggered by stress and other environmental factors.  

After my mother died, I requested my big sister and her husband to move into the house so they could keep him company. My sister, who’s now 74, made sure that he had everything he needed, and reported things back to me. Whenever I prayed about my brother, I always asked that he would at least stay physically healthy or go early and without pain, because I worried about him eventually having to live alone. God had now answered my prayers and I'm grateful, but it didn't make the loss any easier.  

Before schizophrenia claimed the best of him, Kuya Toto was smart, ambitious, and good looking. My other older siblings used to tease me that I was his junior female version, (ahem) but then again, only to point out my bad posture and quick temper, things that I had in common with the guy.

Kuya Toto was also a good teacher and a compassionate man. A self-taught first-rate electrician in his younger days, he helped many of his friends get jobs in Manila and trained them to be electricians, like himself. Those whom he trained became trade electricians, good enough to work even in the Middle East.  

One day about thirty years ago, my fourth big brother Fernando had a jeepney accident which landed him in the hospital for weeks. This event seemed to have triggered something in Kuya Toto’s brain and he was never the same again.  

Today I grieve for his wasted life and for his unrealized potentials. If not for schizophrenia, he could have achieved whatever he wanted.

But today I also rejoice at the memory of the times he spent with me when I was growing up. I was the youngest child in the family, and he was eight years older. I remember being three years old, playing by the side of the creek where he and Fernando were swimming. One of them dived and accidentally toppled me into the deep pool along with them. I nearly drowned. Kuya Toto grabbed me and put me back up onto the ledge and said, “I’m going to teach you how to swim.” He then showed me how to float, ‘like a dead person’; how to dive; and how to paddle with my arms and kick my legs properly.

He taught me that the water was my friend.  

Kuya Toto tried his best to turn me into a little warrior.  When I was four, he built me an arrow gun from pieces of bamboo and taught me how to shoot accurately. I was very accurate. The first time I let my arrow fly, I hit his leg. He trained me to drop mangoes off a high tree with my sling shot. He said ‘aim for the stem, not the fruit.’ I was happy to hit the fruit. When he was older and became interested in the martial arts, he instructed me on the rudiments of judo and karate. He showed me how to pull a balisong - a local fan knife - out of my pocket and have it unlocked and ready in 3.5 seconds.  ‘Watch me: One. Two. Three!’ He even constructed for me a sort of weapon he called a chaku, made of two wooden sticks attached to each other with a metal chain, and demonstrated how to swing the end stick as fast as they did in the movies, without strangling himself. He would draw a target mark on a green coconut and dare me to hit it with the tip of my chaku.  

He taught me focus and concentration.

He made me fearless. 

After he went off to study in the city, he only visited with us on holidays. He would bring treats like peanut butter and cookies whenever he came home, and would tell me and Kuya Fernando endless stories about city stuff, like the wired contraption where one dialed some numbers and be able to talk to someone far away. Other times he would serve us triangle-shaped scrambled eggs and other things like that.

He taught me that there was another world worth exploring outside the village.  

We didn’t hang out very much after we grew older. He got a construction job in Manila, and I did my own things. I went to college, dropped out after two years and got married. Many years later, I separated from my husband and came home to mother with my three little daughters. After failing to find a good job locally, I decided to work as a nanny in Singapore. It was around the same time that his schizophrenia reared itself, and he ended up coming home and living with our mother as well.

On medication during the early years of his disease, he could do some contractual electrician work around our area, while he helped my mother look after the girls. This time around, although he was still a good teacher, he also had become a stern disciplinarian. I heard that when the girls were little, he oversaw their daily activities like a drill sergeant. 

He taught my daughters self-discipline.

When I thought about my years of absence from my children’s lives, I’ve concluded that they turned out alright, partly because Kuya Toto was around to look out for them, in his own paranoid kind of way.  

I've decided not to go home for Kuya Toto’s funeral because I’m in the middle of launching a big project. I know he would understand. Besides, I’ve let my children take over. My two older daughters who live in the Philippines have gone home to the village to organize his burial services. They got him some really nice flowers and hosted a big festive memorial, one that included the fourth and ninth day celebrations. It’s a village tradition. My youngest daughter who lives in Washington, USA, paid for most of the expenses. These girls loved their Uncle Toto. He was around during most of their childhood.

Although none of us became electricians, a big part of my third big brother's legacy resides in the things he taught my daughters and me. 

Sending all your money home? Expensive. Saving some for yourself? Priceless.

I have simple needs, and I've never paid too much attention to money, unless I was thinking of spending it. Until today.

One of my part-time jobs is coordinating activities for foreign live-in caregivers (LICs) and temporary foreign workers (TFWs) for a non-profit organization. I help plan educational workshops, organize sports competitions, fundraising and other group events, all of these tailored to arm the workers with tools to adjust seamlessly to their new environment. These activities also help provide newcomers with a sense of belonging to a community, a sort of family away from their families.

Getting twenty or more foreign live-in caregivers in one room for two hours on a Saturday, however, is not an easy job.  These men and women are the hardest-working people I know, and most of them are out on weekends, working part time to make extra money to send home to their families. Money to educate their kids, pay their rents or mortgages, or support aging parents. Sometimes they get so caught up in making money because the need is too great, that two things get neglected: their health and their own financial future. Many of these workers have no savings nor insurance, the importance of which only gets noted when the ability to work and earn money fails.

I know because I've seen it happening and I've been part of the community that helped raise funds for a few unfortunate members of this group, those who might have suffered a severe or fatal illness, and those who passed away. With no money for expenses or repatriation of their remains, it becomes the community's job to help finance their hospitalization or repatriation.

In response to these circumstances, I organize workshops that encourage them to put away some earnings for such a rainy day, or buy insurance to fall back on in cases of illness or death. Morbid but practical.

My boss, the president of the non-profit group that I work for, is very passionate about getting LICs and TFWs to upgrade their skills and become financially independent. He believes that financial security is the number one reason why everybody comes to Canada. To help make things easier for some of these people, my group worked with a school to get our members discounted tuition fees, and with a bank to get them low-interest caregiver education loans. We invited representatives from both the school and the bank to give talks and answer everyone’s questions about how these deals work. The first batch of our students graduated last August. A new batch are in the process of enrolling.

The school director called me recently to say that out of twelve enrolees, six had pulled out. They told her they’d changed their minds. We needed twelve students to proceed with the weekend curriculum that the school had specially set up for them.

A few days ago, the bank officer in-charge of releasing caregiver loans took me aside and told me in a grim and urgent tone: “We need to have one of those financial literacy workshops really soon. We have to get the newcomers as early as we can, before they can develop some bad spending habits.”

Apparently, he had declined the application of five of the caregivers we sent him for educational loans. The applicants whose names he kept confidential, already have incurred too much debt, even before they've become landed immigrants. Now I know why they cancelled their enrolment.

O the perils and pitfalls of easy credit. The intense attraction of acquiring material things. The joys of shopping for what my boss calls ‘anik-aniks’ (shiny, expensive, but ultimately useless items). And the guilt that comes from denying your relatives back home what they ask for, when you yourself live in a country of plenty. Those are the hurdles one has to get over, to achieve financial security in a new country.

First and foremost, my banker wants to address the danger of credit cards and bad borrowing habits, because he understands how easy it is to get mired in debt if one isn't careful.

“Letting them hear how credit cards really work will make them think twice before acquiring one,” says my banker friend. I totally agree with him. I’m already planning that financial literacy workshop as we speak.

My own advice: put away a small portion of your money regularly, in a place where you can’t easily touch it. Also, avoid credit cards like the plague. Take it from me. I once had two credit cards, so I know what I’m talking about. 

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, September 2013)

The Holy Week: Sunny with a chance of Easter Eggs

The Lenten season is upon us, and Christians all over the world are celebrating the life of Christ; how He lived and died to save humanity from the eternal fires of hell. How the Easter Bunny and the Easter eggs got into this picture is beyond me, but I won’t question the wisdom of western traditions.

Rather I’ll take you back to the days of my childhood in rural Philippines, when my parents and others of their generation celebrated the Holy Week just as differently, and perhaps as weirdly, as hunting for coloured eggs on Easter Sunday morning. Not for my village folks, though, was the unbridled physical display of piety seen in other Philippine towns: no self-flagellation, no wearing the crown of thorns, and most of all, no nailing of anybody to a wooden cross.

My village's Holy Week officially started on Palm Sunday, when people carrying intricately woven palm fronds go to church to commemorate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.

The real action began on Holy Thursday. One of the well-off families in the village would host a reading of The Passion of Christ, and invite all the usual suspects, regular passion readers who did this sort of thing every year. My father was one of them. These readers would sing, not read, every stanza in the Book, using a well-established tune. One reader after another, man after woman, stanza by stanza, until they reached the very last line. Then back again at the beginning. This went on until the morning, or perhaps even up to 3:00 in the afternoon of Good Friday. When a group of singers took a break, another group would pick up the tune. A huge dinner of meat stew and rice, along with an endless amount of brewed ginger tea would be served. A regular infusion of ginger tea kept the singers going. Neighbours and relatives dropped in regularly to listen and partake of the food.

In those days, life at my village came to a standstill at the stroke of 3:00 p.m. on Good Friday. No more singing, no bathing, and no physical work. No going to church. Just praying at home, sometimes with lighted candles. Jesus was dead and we were showing respect.

Activities get re-started early in the morning of Sabado de Gloria --- the Saturday of Ascension. Jesus had gone up to heaven to join the Father, and we were free to do as we wished. Mother would sweep the yard early. Being a tiny kid, I got picked up by my ears by various adults, then hoisted up to the heavens a few times first thing in the morning. I was told this would help me grow taller. I’ve often thought about reminding my big brothers that not only did they fail to make me taller, I could also have lost an ear and it would have been their fault.

After breakfast, my mother would cook sticky rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves, which were then eaten with sweet coconut syrup. Those cakes made the Holy Week worth waiting for.

Easter Sunday was the day of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: The more pious villagers would hire a jeepney to go to church in the city to celebrate Jesus’ return to life. A lavish, church-organized ceremony took place at 4:00 in the morning every Easter Sunday in our city. The event featured two processions starting out from two different parts of the town. One was headed by the statue of the Virgin Mary on a float, her face covered in a dark veil. The other was headed by the statue of Jesus Christ in another float. The two processions met at a thoroughfare, under a structure where an angel lay in wait to snatch away the Virgin Mary’s veil to signify the joy coming back to her life. The two processions then merged and headed back to church where a mass would be held to celebrate the Resurrection.

My mother never went to church on those occasions, and I loved the extra time I got to snuggle with her. By Monday, the passion books were all put away and everything was back to normal.

After my parents and their contemporaries have all passed away, passion singing went out of fashion in my village. Now all I have are childhood the memories. Back here in Vancouver, the Easter eggs are calling my name.

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, March 15, 2013 issue)

Languages by the pound

Back in the olden days, on the very first Sunday of my first nannying job in Singapore, my lady employer wondered whether I wanted to go to church with them.

“Do you want to follow us to church?” she asked.

“Can’t I just ride with you guys? I asked back.

“That’s what I mean,” she told me.

My first lesson on Singaporean English: when you ‘follow’ someone in Singapore, you are actually going together to the same destination; you aren’t walking or travelling in another vehicle closely behind them. Singaporeans, like other English-speaking peoples, have created their own version of English, called Singlish, a language that also incorporated words from Malay, Tamil and various Chinese dialects. I soon learned to listen and speak the same way to get my point across.

When I first arrived in Canada, I wasn’t too surprised to find that the same linguistic challenges applied. Nothing ever grows and mutates faster than a language, a many-headed entity that changes form and shifts shape to accommodate the changing times. It brings to my mind the vision of an avalanche rushing down a mountainside, picking up and swallowing all sorts of debris along its way, landing at the bottom much bigger and less purer than when it started going down the slope. The only difference is that a language just keeps on going.

I can speak for English and Tagalog, the two languages I know best. Growth in technology and globalization has brought so many new words and expressions into the lexicon that they would probably drive language purists, if such people still exist, out of their minds. Heck, it could drive a Taglish-speaking Filipino crazy, when he still has to figure out about 7 other major languages already being spoken in the country, on top of the techno-speak being developed by call-centre workers and the gay-speak, the dialect of the Manila gay and show business communities. And when he goes out of the country, he then has to contend with how other English speakers so mangled the language that it makes him feel as if he’s talking to a Martian.

(Don’t even get me started on how words are pronounced. For instance, why would the word ‘swam’ be spoken like ‘swam’ but ‘swamp’ be ‘swomp’ and swan ‘swon’? Aaaaaargh!)

Nothing gives English-as-second-language (ESL) speakers more trouble than the slang being spawned and spoken by various specific groups. ESL people learn English from books, and generally speak that way, but you’ll find out right away when what you’re saying translates very differently to an ESL speaker.

For instance, a friend who’s a nurse by profession once asked an elderly Canadian male patient on which side would he like to be laid? She didn’t report what his response was, but I could imagine celebratory bells clanging inside the old man’s head: “Service with benefits, baby!”

Or the nurse’s German husband who once requested her to check a pimple on his ‘foreskin’, when he actually meant on his ‘forehead’. To him, those words were similar. I heard that the nurse corrected him immediately, although on further thought, maybe he did have another pimple somewhere else and really wanted his wife to have a look at that one.

Or take the case of my daughter who lives in the US, who overheard her colleagues talking about dogs being sold by the Pound. A curious person by nature, she had to know: “How much per pound?” Judging by the scandalized expression on their faces, my daughter realized she must have asked the wrong question. On the other hand, dogs do sell per pound in underground markets in the Philippines, or so I heard.

Keeping any language pure is a losing battle, because language is alive. Language evolves. It adapts to its surroundings to survive. I sincerely wish all purists who want to fight this trend the best of luck.

A friend of mine has stronger words for such people. He says there will always be some narrow-minded idiots who will want to keep their language ‘clean’ and not allow foreign words to infiltrate it.

“Wanting to keep a language clean”, he tells me, “is another form of discrimination.”

“Like Hitler said in his book, urban mice should only mate with urban mice, and rural mice should only mate with rural mice. Well, Adolf, ” my friend adds, “I've got news for you: Mice don't care whom they mate with, as long as it's another mice!”

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, January 15, 2012 issue)

What exactly, are the roots of racism?

“Are all the Filipinos poor?” The man sitting beside me in the bus turned to me and asked.

I looked at his face to check if he was joking. The man, also an Asian, was serious. He actually wanted to know. Although I found his question ignorant and offensive, I didn’t say so. Instead, I asked him back: “Are all citizens from your country poor?”

He didn’t think so. I held my tongue after that. I got off on the next stop still upset about the man’s question. That interaction happened twenty years ago. I’ve thought about the incident every now and then; thought about various snide ways of answering him. I always come back to the conclusion that perhaps I should have told him that not all Filipinos are poor, instead of feeling insulted and defensive.

I could have told him that the very rich and the very poor Filipinos usually stay back home. That the rich ones didn’t need to leave the country to find a better life, while the very poor aren’t educated enough and didn’t have the wherewithal to pay their way out. That the Filipinos he meets in Canada are what I would call the adventurous, the middle, the educated class. These include the nannies.

I’ve experienced other expressions of racism since then, some of which were ironically well-meaning. A long time ago, a friend told me that her car broke down in the middle of the Lions Gate Bridge. Said bridge only has three lanes, the middle of which changes direction every twenty minutes or so. It’s one of the two bridges that connect our town to the mainland. Traffic on this bridge notoriously reaches bottle-neck proportions during rush hours. My friend’s car was caught in one of these bottlenecks. Fortunately she was able to steer her car out of the bridge into a safe shoulder.

“Otherwise, I could have been lynched!” relieved, she recounted her experience to me. Then to make sure I understood her, she inquired, “By the way, do you know what ‘lynched’ means?”

Bad question. I was young and rather proud of my fluency in English. I remember giving her three synonyms for ‘lynched’ in one breath. After that, she never assumed I would misunderstand her ever again. We remain close friends.

I’d been in conversations where a Caucasian would speak to me very, very, slowly, word by word, so that I’d get his point. Whenever this happened, I rudely interrupt the speaker by finishing their sentence for them. That usually shuts them up.

I’ve actually lost my temper and shouted at people for being racist to me, at least twice. I’ve now regretted having done so. Forgive me. At the time, though, I found it very satisfying to watch the objects of my anger being rendered speechless with shock. I’m sure they’ve never seen a little brown person explode in their presence before .

Through the years, I’ve grown more tolerant of people’s false assumptions regarding Filipinos, or of other races, for that matter. I myself have been guilty of subscribing to ethnic stereotypes and although I don’t say them aloud, I definitely think them. I have a collection of racist jokes culled from my travels, which I enjoy reading and sharing with others. After all, as my friend says, there’s a little racist in everyone of us.

Which leads me to wonder --- what exactly, is the root of racism?

Firstly, I think it’s borne of ignorance. Not knowing much about a particular ethnic group, aside from what we’ve read in the papers and heard from our friends, we often draw our own skewed conclusions from such limited stores of information. We listen to stereotypes. We believe in blanket classifications of different races. Those guys are bad drivers; this group treat their women like furniture; those people are mostly involved in drug-dealing and other criminal activities. In reality, bad drivers, sexist men, drug dealers, and criminals can be found in every racial grouping.

Secondly, it’s the economy. Take the Philippines, for instance. Due to lack of economic opportunities at home, Filipinos leave the country in droves to seek their fortune elsewhere. Women work as nurses, hotel staff and domestics abroad. In Canada, the Live-in Caregiver Program has brought in thousands of our women to work as domestics and caregivers. A Canadian man admitted once that whenever he saw a gaggle of Filipino women in the bus on weekends, he used to assume they were nannies on a day-off.

And finally, it’s a by-product of colonization. The bitter irony in this type of racism is that a sense of superiority stays with certain members of the colonized long after the colonizers have left. I’ve felt it. I’ve fought against it in my own country. There’s another name for it: colonial mentality. It comes from being born in a place where one is expected to take pride in having some conqueror’s blood running in one’s veins, of being considered prettier than the indigenous because one has a fairer skin or a more western nose. Sad but true.

These days, I’ve stopped reacting violently to whiffs of racism. I try to live by example. Pessimists say there’s no cure for racism, but I’m thinking if I could help open one person’s mind every now and then, that’s good enough for me.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, Oct 15, 2010 issue)

A Salt Spring Holiday

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, Oct 15th, 2010 issue)

For many immigrants, working usually takes precedence over taking a vacation. I speak from experience. I myself often feel guilty about going on holiday when there’s so much to do. You know, deadlines to meet, mortgage to pay, and children to support. Yet, everytime I came home from a vacation, I couldn’t help feeling inspired.

Take last week, for instance. I went to Salt Spring Island to attend the Apple Festival, only because it was a working holiday and two high-end hotels --- the Hastings House and the Harbour House Hotel --- kindly offered to host us for a week, courtesy of BC Tourism. Even so, I packed my bags with books, scripts and research notes. I didn’t want to find myself idling on such a trip.

Guess what, my work bag came back untouched but my head was buzzing with new ideas.

Salt Spring Island is located about halfway between Nanaimo and Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia. It’s part of an island group called the Gulf Islands. Salt Spring is mainly a farming community with over ten thousand residents, several thousand sheep and cattle, and a thriving deer population. Those in the know consider Salt Spring Island a special place, it being the residence of choice of numerous writers, artists, photographers, cheese makers, sculptors, ex-hippies and gentlemen farmers from all over Canada, many of whom came to visit the Island in the olden days and never left. Artist Robert Bateman and multi-awarded writer Brian Brett, among others, call it home.

There’s a palpable atmosphere of enlightenment and do-gooding around the place. Every other person seems to be involved in some worthwhile cause or another: to change the world, fight poverty or look after the environment. For example, there’s The Pie Ladies who bake and sell hundreds of pies during the apple festival, with proceeds going to the various charities they’re sponsoring. Then there’s the Coffee Ladies who raise money to buy coffee from the Nicaraguan coffee farmers at free trade rates to sell it on Salt Spring. Profits are sent back to Nicaragua to build schools and other facilities. Or those who raise money to send impoverished local kids to school.

But my friend and I are going after other quarries, one of whom is the Apple Man of Salt Spring himself, the organizer of the Apple Festival and dedicated organic apple farmer Harry Burton. Burton’s apple farm is overrun with weeds and vegetables growing among his 125 varieties of apple trees, which in turn share the 4-acre space with innumerable wasps, at least three garter snakes, two dogs, one cat and dozens of chickens. One chicken seemed to have lost its feathers around the neck, looking as if it narrowly escaped being plucked. He told me it was a rare breed called the Naked-Neck. I had to ask.

Harry Burton was proud to say that no insecticides or chemical fertilizers ever touched his farm. He relied on compost, seaweed and oyster shells to feed his plants. Burton, a former professor of Environmental Protection at Canadore College, North Bay, Ontario, developed a strong affinity with the outdoors during childhood. Farming is his “attempt to come back in line with Mother Nature”.

On his website appleluscious.com, Burton cited several advantages to growing organic food: it protects the quality of water, keeps chemicals off your plate, prevents soil erosion, restores biodiversity, and helps reduce global warming by saving energy. Besides, you don’t have to waste money on pesticides and herbicides.

Eating organic food is one of the most important contributions any of us can make to save the planet, according to Burton. Tons of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are used in commercial farms every year. More than half of these are known to cause cancer, birth defects, genetic changes or serious irritation if ingested directly, but somehow people have allowed themselves to be convinced that food can be exposed to such poisons without absorbing them. When we invest in organic farming, he added, we get a huge dividend: good, healthy food.

Another organic farmer/writer we sought out was Michael Ableman, owner of Fox Glove Farms and the guru of sustainable agriculture, described by a local newspaper as the man “who can grow carrots on rocks.”

An organic farmer for over twenty years, Ableman has been running Foxglove Farms in Salt Spring Island for almost ten. He also established on this farm The Centre for Art, Ecology and Agriculture, to raise awareness and demonstrate the vital connections between farming, land stewardship, food and community well-being. He organizes workshops on how one can help conserve the environment through organic farming. Wow. Listening to Michael Ableman reminded me of a similar center I’ve been planning to build in my own village in the Philippines one day. Now I don’t have to re-invent the wheel. All I need to do is pick the brains of this man before getting started with my own project.

After I shared these thoughts with him, Ableman gave me a copy of From The Good Earth, one of his books. It’s all about growing organic food around the world. I just knew I have to talk to him again.

As you can see, going on holidays can be very beneficial, especially vacationing on a place like Salt Spring Island.

The Final Journey Home

When Ramon Cutillas was hit and killed by a pick-up truck while cycling along a street in Edmonton, the event spawned some problems for his community and for his family back in the Philippines.

Cutillas left his wife and four children in the Philippines some three years ago to work in Edmonton under Canada’s temporary workers’ program. He was jobless when he died, and didn’t have any savings nor unemployment insurance. The family couldn’t afford the expense to have his body shipped home, and were seeking financial help from the Filipino community in Edmonton.

According to Edmonton’s Serenity Funeral Homes, the process of getting a death certificate and obtaining documentation from the Philippine Consulate in Vancouver, plus preparing the body for shipping, to finally loading it on a plane to Manila usually cost between $8,000 and $9,000.

I have no doubt that the Filipino community will come through for Cutillas and his family, as they have always done in situations like this. They will not rest until enough money is raised and Cutillas’ remains is sent off to be reunited with his wife and kids back in the Philippines. These people understand a family’s emotional need for reunion and closure.

I can fully comprehend this need myself. Having been away from my three girls for many years, I would love to, at least, pass away in the Philippines, surrounded by them, and leave peacefully after saying my good-byes. Failing that, I’d try to make sure that my body is shipped home and buried in the family plot.

Wildly romantic, says a friend of mine, and totally unpractical. He added that in view of this, perhaps I should start saving. This friend doesn’t subscribe to the idea of spending thousands of dollars on shipping someone’s lifeless body to some country, when her survivors could otherwise make better use of that money.

Meanwhile in Vancouver, another close friend recently died of cancer. Everyone who knew this woman visited her in the hospital. When the time came for her to go, we were only grateful that her sufferings had finally come to an end. She was married but childless. Her husband had her remains cremated and ashes packed in a special container; he then obtained a special permit to carry the package in his backpack on board the plane for burial back in Iloilo, Philippines.

The total cost he paid for cremation and documentation: $775, GST included. Getting his wife interred back in the homeland: priceless.

This amazing disparity between the cost of shipping an embalmed body and a cremated one, however, raises some important questions in my mind. I’ve since asked myself: do I really want to spend $10,000 dollars to get my frozen dead self back to the Philippines to get buried, where I won’t be able to hug or talk to my kids anyway; or, send them an urn containing my ashes along with $9,000 in cold cash? Will it make any difference to me whether they mourn over my actual body or my powdered form?  I don't think so. I will be dead by then and probably couldn’t care less. The children, however, may beg to differ.

But speaking of Ramon Cutillas' case, wouldn’t the same amount of money be more useful to his family, the same family who has now lost its breadwinner? Another friend, a European, thinks so. And despite myself, I agree with him. But it’s not for my friend nor me to decide, right? The Cutillas family had spoken and they wanted their husband and father’s body back. They wanted him there so they could say goodbye properly, mourn his loss adequately, and bury him at the place they could visit every now and then. And talk to him, even with the knowledge that he would never again answer them back. The future can take care of itself.

Let’s be practical for a moment, though: how much would $9,000 Cdn be in Philippine pesos, based on the current rate of exchange? That’s about P400,000, give or take a few pesos. Enough to buy a small house in a rural area or start a small retail business. But in times of death and bereavement, it’s not something people think about.

A very Filipino thing. Even a cultural thing. Definitely an immigrant thing. Because if you’re a Filipino working or living overseas, and most of the members of your family are still based in the Philippines, wouldn’t you want to go back home to them when you die, to know that they will feel some form of closure, rather than an eternal sense of loss because they’ll never see your final resting place?

Lately, I’ve been thinking of this more and more. The best thing to do, isn't it, is to get one's affairs in order before death comes along? It would save one's family a lot of anguish and even guilt, because then they wouldn’t have to choose practicality over personal wishes, because you’ve made the choice for them.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, May 15, 2010 issue)