I really don’t  want to kickstart my sharing with such a morbid subject like death. But remembering death in my particular case is like discovering the real reason for hope. Death comes with a certainty at a time when we least expect it, as it did when my father died at the early age of 58. Dad, a bastion of hope for our family, is  a queer book-lover who reads books as if they were food.  And one the richest hours of my life was spent with my father in those reading sessions at night, before bedtime, everyday.  It’s a daily routine that I won’t forget until today.   But I remember Dad more, when illness reduced him to a mere vegetable, until a decaying liver and a bleeding ulcer claimed his life. That was in 1986, when my father was immediately transferred to Manila for  treatment.  Since then my mother stay glued at his bedside, caressing my father’s face with such tenderness only a woman deeply in love can do. Finally,  Mom came back to our home in the province with my Dad, who had become someone else.  Dad lost his interest in communication and language ceased between us, as if Dad’s brain lived only in sleep. How it pained me to witness the gradual degeneration of my father from a healthy family man to a useless heap of flabby skin.  But to see him like a vegetable on his bed, his wasted body nourished through a net of nasal tubes, his skin cut as needles were injected in his sunken veins, was a much, much more unnerving sight, that ripped right through the heart. All through the period of his agonizing ailment, Dad never talked to us and never complained of pain. There were times I would see him lying on his bed, brows knitted , tears gently falling on his furrowed face. The scene is forever etched in my memory, seeing an iron-willed man like my father, crying like a spent-man. And finally my father died but I did not cry on his deathbed.  I died earlier than him, in all those months that he had suffered.  When his final hour did come, this little death escaped in a hurry.  It was more like a feeling of relief, which was what my father must have felt also. Yes, for many years, there was the longing. If only Dad chose to be more predictable in his last days, longing would not have been difficult. But in God’s time, we understood the message in his silence and his indifference to pain. Very few people faces death with such gallantry and Dad is one of those rare exceptions. His death was such an enigma, that he continues to live with us. In agony and death, Dad’s wit never waned.  Him and his collection of thoughts will always be my sanctuary.