The Best Listener

A cousin once told me over dinner that moments when you felt most blissful or most happy are never repeated in the same, exact intensity, that’s why the older you get, the more you realize that a life is built on being bouyed (and sometimes dragged down) by memories.

If I had to take one of those instamatic, psychological tests in which I’m given less time than it takes to blink an eye to say a word in reaction to another, my reaction to the word “generations” would be family.

Yes, predictable and ho-humy, but family is normally a very understated and underestimated sustaining factor of our DNA.

We all have funny, enlightening, depressing or “for our ears” only accounts of what goes on with our blood relatives, and whether we like it or not, we continue an age-old tradition of passing down stories for other generations to hear.

They may get embellished, censored or downright fabricated as the years go by, but they’re still worthy of at least one telling at a family gathering.

A little over a year ago, a most beloved storyteller, and more importantly listener, was lost to us. My lola Nena, who was (in my opinion) the binding factor in most of our reunions and get togethers, passed on seven years short of turning a century old.

Of course our family got the usual barrage of “Wow, she lived a full life,” or “That’s a great age to die.” Whatever. As far as I was concerned, my lola was going to live forever. Period. She had gottten sick before but she had always stayed in the hospital for a brief spell and was back home and back to normal.

But, ironically, on Mother’s Day in 2007, she finally succumbed, and slipped rather quietly away from this life to the afterlife, and none of us seemed prepared to believe it.

It’s hard to verbalize the loss of someone who was there from the moment you were born, although oftentimes she seemed in the background as you went through the more tumultuous times in your life.

A grandmother is nothing like a mother, they’re seemingly more patient, more detached, and more oblivious to your faults. Perhaps because they didn’t see you that often or, in my lola’s case, didn’t want to get too involved for fear of being too intrusive.

But oh, how she could listen, with that lightness and lack of judgment that a child would possess.

She seemed genuinely interested in everything you had to say and her voice would rise in wonder whenever something new or “innovative” would be included in a conversation.

The fax machine, to her, was more alien intelligence than she could ever have dreamt of. The very notion that the exact same page could appear exactly the same way halfway across the country (or the world) seemed like black magic.

How very different from this new generation, who look at a fax machine as a Jurassic piece of equipment.

It’s been more than a year since her passing but her presence is still felt and sorely missed.

As a test to what an impact this magnificent woman had in our lives, I shot out a text an hour before I was to write this article to my fellow cousins, asking for a one to two sentence “memory” of her.

Within minutes, I received responses, even one from as far off as Madrid, Spain. The common thread? “She was a great listener” kept coming out, as if it was the very first thing that came to mind. And that she was.

I can only imagine, with regret, how many stories were filed lovingly away in my grandmother’s mind, stories that could have once more been shared with other generations to come.

She will forever be remembered, and retold, as the matriarch with the mostest, for as long as someone is willing to listen.

Published in the Philippine Dailly Inquirer, 6/14/08