DETOURS

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Confessions of the Lost and Found

You, walker, there are no roads; only wind trails on the sea. - Antonio Machado, S.J.

Edited by Nicolas O. Elemia

This humble work is dedicated to all our children, and their mothers who bore them.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Foreword.. Remembering Slow Down.. Bridge Is Under Repair Landslide Prone Area.. Celebrating Warning: Falling Rocks Slippery When Wet.. Blind Curve Ahead Believing One Way: Sorry for the Inconvenience No Parking. Dont Block My Driveway..

Epilogue.. Contributors

Only two things have no limit: mans ignorance and the mercy of God. -- George I. Gurdjieff

When a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps he hears a different drummer. Let him step into the music he hears, however measured or far away. -- Henry David Thoreau

And as they continued to ask him, he straightened up and said to them Let the man among you who has no sin be the first to throw a stone at her. (John 8: 7)

Warning: Falling Rocks

WE WERE to have an early supper when she almost collapsed from her bedside bench. Myra lost her balance as she fainted while watching the evening news on a TV mounted on a side wall. I was lucky I caught her other arm but it was already too late. I repeatedly called her name but she seemed not to hear anything. I screamed to wake her up but she did not. Truth was my wife was already in a place where the road which would lead her back to me would be long and hard to find. A male nurse on duty heard my screams and he rushed to our ward. He helped me carry Myra back to her hospital bed. More nurses came and checked for her vital signs. They were declared normal. Moments later, she vomited repeatedly. It was the first time in our five years of marriage that I saw her throwing out. I panicked. It was almost 6 PM in ward 15, and barely four days after she had had openheart Atrial Septum Defect (ASD) surgery at Philippine Heart Center, Quezon City. She was ready for discharge the next day, and earlier I bought some fast food to sort of celebrate. But that particular morning was slow to come. If indeed it came, I did not notice its arrival. Alone and very afraid for the first time in my entire life, I cried like I never did. After two hours, they wheeled her out for an MRI. The doctors had suspicions of embolism they wanted to verify. When it was done, the lab results showed a severe stroke at the left side of her brain. Some wandering lowlife blood clot with nothing to do was sucked in one of a myriad of arteries in her head. Her cardiologist explained that this was a rare one in fifty cases. And Myra was one in fifty. Quite a long shot, it was. I could not believe it. I sat down on the cold floor outside the crowded room and tried to take it all in with what little courage I had left in my system. I covered my head with a jacket as my sobbing did not cease. I called home and tried to explain things but it only deepened my sadness. After like 48 hours of close observation inside the Neuro-ICU and the swelling did not reduce even by strong medications, a CT scan was finally ordered. And the result summed all my fears. The bloody culprit was still there. In fact it grew and shifted beyond the midline of Myras brain. To everyone in the room that rainy afternoon, another major surgery was out of the question. Dr. Erroll Navarro, a surgeon from the pontifical University of Santo Tomas, was summoned in the middle of heavy downpour and Manila traffic. The crowded streets were flooded after a low pressure followed by suspicions of another typhoon. The bespectacled 35 year-old surgeon came at 9 PM. After we introduced he led me to a lighted wall where filmed results were hanged. There he explained in plain language the case. He spoke with utter urgency by pointing at places of what appeared to be an image of Myras skull. The initial suspicions were correct. My wife indeed had acute cerebral infarct in the left frototemporoparietal area and she needed emergency decompressive hemicraniectomy. He declared that they had to free an area in Myras head to relieve the growing pressure in her brain. And his team had to do it fast. A nurse routinely handed me a pen and a waiver to sign. I had no time to make excuses for the bathroom or make long distance calls. I was alone, and very terrified. My in-laws left for Negros

Oriental the day before. They were all smiles as they watched Myra talking to friends on her mobile phone and walking around with that last needle in her arm. But that was 72 hours ago. The inevitable came like a theft in the night. I reckon that with trembling hands I signed the forms without even reading what was in there. It was a very crucial hour, and I thought it was my darkest leap of faith. When she was wheeled into the OR, her second in just two weeks, after they shaved her head, I ran again to the elevator and rushed my way to the hospital chapel on the fifth floor. I thought that this second time I had to make bitter bargains with God or to question His goodness or to mock Him disrespectfully for causing so much bleeding in my heart. For sure I was one stinky, filthy trash among billions in the world but what did I do to deserve such whipping?

IN RETROSPECT, I could say that our first five years of marriage was never rosy and obviously less ideal. To say as to who was wrong or right would be to separate the wheat from the weeds. I was never the you-are-right-because-I-want-my-peace-of-mind kind. Yet all this time I know I had, at that time, the bigger burden of proof for instead of growing virtuesI nurtured a serious vice. I drank more than I needed. Alcohol was a delight. Like those pharaohs of old, I grew a serpent on my head. Then I made a lot of mistakes; very big blunders so embarrassing they dont deserve to be written on paper. For the uninitiated they would say that God chastised me this much because I turned my back on Him. Good grief. But I would not admit to this crime. Sadly, I would never also believe in a god like this. Well, maybe, this other argument could be closer. That instead of being stoned to death by a jury of my peers, enormous rocks were dropped from heaven, and these destroyed a hard-earned trail on which I proudly tread to stay away from that original path God paved for me. I knew He wanted me to serve in the Church but I heard a different drummer. Or maybe it was only the unpaid piper of Hamelin beckoning me farther out to sea only to die among those children? Truly, some questions are better than their answers. Weeks after her 35th birthday, Myra had complaints of exhaustion and shortness of breath. Everyone knew she had congenital heart disease and her work as a private school teacher for the last eight years did not help the situation. A cardiologist from nearby Silliman University was beside her when she gave birth to our only son, and even that was nearly fatal. It was supposed to be a normal delivery but she could not carry on halfway through it. The nurses instead used forceps to help our little Louie out and welcomed him to our world. When I met Myra I left the Catholic seminary and did not finish Sacred Theology. My dream of becoming a priest did not hold out after seven years. I had fire in my belly. I could not make the commitment because I witnessed a good deal of infidelity and hypocrisy in those years. I judged that I would not be an exemption and would only be a liability to the system. I was a born rebel and somehow my love affair with philosophy fueled my angst against Church politics. As an insider, I loathed what I saw. I filed for an indefinite leave from my studiesand with my hand on the plough I never looked back. I married Myra one April morning four years later. I had several jobs after this episode which included from being an enumerator for a subsidiary agency of World Bank to being a state university instructor. But when Myras symptoms became clear and apparent, I willfully decided to stay home and join my family in raising funds by approaching government agencies and politicians. I had to raise at least a million pesos from scratch. We only managed a quarter of it and left the rest to fate. At first it felt like a stay of execution. It felt like watching a beloved mindlessly staring at a ceiling in death row. Until

I found myself squatting on that cold tiled floor having my nth vigil, things were still in whiter shades of pale for me. With her rosary beads in my hand, I waited for Myra to emerge from the operating room alive for the second time. I could not go where she went againone for every week. With a big bandage on her head and tubes all over the place, she did come out from those sterile double doors, covered in dark green and unconscious. She survived one more time but to me she was never the same again. Perhaps the sun also came up after that heavy downpour. But I did not see it. My eyes were bloodshot. And I did not care anymore.

AFTER MORE than two weeks back in another ICU and into our ward, my days were like fleeting clouds of prayers, tears, phone calls, and whispers. I lost a lot of weight. I was badly in need of a scrub or a good bath. I slept on a thin blanket amidst the cold with only a paperback for a pillow. Myras cousin arrived on a plane via Cebu and it lifted some burden from my shoulders. But this time I had to crack my head as to where I could find the money to pay our mounting hospital bills. They kept coming in uninvited. We already went beyond the half million peso mark minus doctors fees. With a little courage I went to the Senate, House of Congress, Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, DSWD, and even to friends houses to beg. I practically begged. I had to. There was not much that separated me from those Metro Manila children begging at commuters during a red light anymore. There was none. And I decided not to care. I missed my old life of friends, picnics, books, music, beer, our native house. And I sorely missed our 4-year old son who never had the faintest idea of what hell and purgatory his mother went through. With what seemed like a chapter in eternity and countless days of staring at hospital walls, going into doctors offices, and swallowing my little pride in humiliation from insensitive secretaries and the like, and lots of bargaining, we pulled through and finally was on a flight bound for Dumaguete City on October 4. That day finally came. I feared it would not come. It had to come or the pain would send me to insanity. I cried on my seat while I gazed at those Sunday morning clouds as patches of sunlight sliced through them. I knew that He was watching up there, staring through those clouds, and He still did not answer my questions. I knew I had to look for them myself. Louie was waiting with my older sister at the airport and he cried as he was not prepared to watch his mother with a disfigured head and less hair, sitting on a borrowed wheel chair, and not able to hug him close because of an embedded bone in her abdomen. It was a tearful reunion after more than two months. The last time our son saw his mother with her ponytail and all was when we waved goodbye to family and neighbors one day in August.

LOOKING BACK at what happened I could see that it was a bumpy, rough sleigh ride. And rocks were thrown at me. A handful of big ones smashed and created a crater, a void so big, really. Indeed they fell but not from the heavens. These were all part of the geography of my trail. These were all part of my choices. I kept playing those scenes in my mind, in my dreams. But it was not so dark after all for I also had my little consolations. I met a lot of people, places I had no plans of going, rubbing elbows with strangers who became friends because of our common bond in suffering. Most of all I was able to establish a new-found relationship with God even if until now I still could not decipher the message of why He allowed it to happen to Myrato my family.

She was never the same wife and mother again after her ordeal. My wife still has broken sentences when she tries to talk and mostly use her left hand to point at something. Her right side is very affected by the stroke so was her speech and retention. She cannot read and write anymoreand for a husband who owns shelves of books this one breaks my heart. I give her a bath almost every day. I changed her clothes, give her a little massage, and pay for her therapy and medicines by working as a part-time religion teacher in a St. Augustine Academy where she used to work for many years. But time heals all wounds. Or wounds help to keep track of time. Like my phonebook of friends and contacts, Myras memory is now almost full. I witnessed how she gradually rose from her ashes. She inched her way out of her oblivion. Weeks ago, she started to check on my cooking and taking care of the house in my absence. Louie sings to her love songs as they watched television together. Our friends have been very supportive too and inspiring. And I believe that they in turn were changed by their faith, one way or the other, as they witnessed the pains and joys of my wife. As for me, I could say that I almost lost my faith in the Lord. Philosophy, theology, they both almost failed to help. Or maybe I did not allow them to. I have grown in my trust in divine providence the hard way and I am still very afraid of the future while the present is dangerous and risky enough. It is a paradox. It is a juxtaposed tapestry. My suffering has scarred my depths forever but I could not throw this burden away or let it burn. There is no other choice. There seems to be no end and I could not just go on having a bottle to drink every late afternoon and watch my sunsets. Like Jesus, His biggest temptation did not happen in the desert. It came when He was challenged by the Jews to come down from the cross. It is not my turn to be hanged. It is now my turn to make use of these fallen rocks to pave a different path for an advocacy. I now make the vow to serve the Church through my gifts of writing and teaching. I understand that I will have to continue to tell the story of how in the depths of my nothingness I found a flicker of the divine. So be it.

Guide Questions:
1. 2. 3.

Key Points:
1. 2. 3.