Home Sweet Home

Part 1: Grief

As a child, they taught me that selfishness, as a quality, is distinctly unbecoming. Such a thoughtful child, they said – Mama, Lala, Aunty Mari, Tito Bert and Tito Jaime. As my constant nemesis in childhood, I felt that Vina, at polar opposites to me, was unarguably self-absorbed. Though, more than-likely, I lashed out at her for the lack of attention Lala sent my way. For a long time, I believed them, believed the stories I told myself. But grief has a sneaky tendency to scrub things clean and leave them raw. For all of us, the early stages of grief revealed our inherent inner selfishness. In the depths of it, I felt that even Dad and Vina could not possibly understand the emptiness. In their own ways, I know they felt the same, islands in a sea of negative space. Such is the self-delusion of the bereaved. Or perhaps I should specify, of myself, as the bereaved.

Part 2: The Unravelling – Again

It’s happening again – in a different place, at a different time, but it feels the same. Vina might tell you that it was Mama’s fault, that her death, like Lala’s madness, is ‘what got the ball rolling’. But that feels too easy. Sometimes, when my mind starts to meander, memories come bubbling back to the surface. But only in snippets, never the whole picture. It’s like trying to retrace my steps in shallow water: it gets harder and harder to sift through the clouds of sand that bloom with each step. Sometimes, I wonder if it wouldn’t just be easier to stand still. 

At the funeral, Vina’s chair, next to mine, is empty. The fake leather cushion is dented, as if she had just been sitting there a moment before. Laying neatly on top, uncreased, is the pamphlet – a photo of mom, smiling. “Where is she?” Dad growls under his breath. I shake my head, eyes unblinking. His fingernails dig into my arm. 

Later, I wake to the sound of her finger tapping on the glass of our bedroom window. I unlock it, sliding gently up, careful to hold it just before the squeak, and she tumbles in, breath stinking of beer and cigarettes. “Be quiet or you’ll wake Dad.” I say before slipping under the covers. She stands there, I think, fully clothed until morning light. 

Dad finds her drinking coffee on the stairs out back. The coffee mug shatters. On my way to work, white shards of porcelain crunch under-foot. The coffee puddle sun-dries to a deep-dark brown. 

Soon after Vina stops speaking. Two months later, she’s gone. 

I try not to be too hard on her – on Vina – anymore. In sifting through the memories, it’s hard to tell what constitutes a true moment of clarity. In one version of the truth, I might have said it was Vina’s fault, that she was born with one foot out the door, destined to leave us on the wings of entitlement. More recently though, I see the ways that she was never allowed to be. That there never was a ‘her’, an ‘essence’, for her to manipulate, nurture – there was only ever Vincent, an impossible legacy, which when measured against, she either was, or wasn’t.