Tragic faces of death

This Halloween feature is triggered by Jeje Caintic, my niece now based at Italy when she shared the meaning of the occasion.

Pamilya gimasaker sa amahan was the October 17, 2011 headline of Sun.Star Super Balita.  I paid a total of two thousand seven hundred pesos for obstruction of traffic and towing.  I am not used to buy newspaper but that Monday morning intrigued me with what I heard about a parricide and suicide in Talisay City, Cebu of the Ponce family.  I was driving our ISUZU Elf loaded with 2 cu. m. of gravel when I bought the newspaper.  The truck engine stopped and did not start allowing the Mandaue City's towing business make money as quick as lightning inconsiderate of the less than a kilometer towing.  Those incidents were horrifying! Two (2) years earlier, I have documented the following tragic faces of death:

The incident that happened after our breakfast fellowship at San Narciso Parish Pastoral Center in Consolacion, Cebu last October 24, 2009 reminded me of several ways how physical life is terminated.  A relatively old man committed suicide by nose-diving from the skywalk near the venue like he was plunging into a swimming pool.  It was an awful and pitiful sight for all of us in the Community who saw his fresh and bubbling blood oozing from his nose and mouth with his face flat on the cemented road.  His shoulders jerked for a few moments for his last breath.  In the afternoon, the intercessory group prayed for his eternal rest and for his family’s relief from their grief.

That tragedy brought me to vividly fearful flashbacks.  When I was still a kid at 8 years old, I spent sleepless nights being haunted with the imagery of the bloated boy floating nearby.  In Mantahan, Maasin, So. Leyte, we were living near the seashore and during high tide, sea water was under our rented house.  The poor boy drowned a day before while together with his elder brother, they were fishing with the hook and line.  I saw that freak accident.  He was caught by a huge wave and was not found that fateful afternoon.

I was a witness to a revengeful murder when I was still in College.  I was among the crowd of onlookers standing around the basketball court where the benefit dance of our barrio was held in Kilim, Baybay, Leyte.  A neighbor who was a ‘dirty’ basketball player was stabbed to death.  It was very frightening and terrifying because he was only an arm away in front of me.  His basketball opponent that afternoon who was the murderer ran from the other side of the road towards his victim thrusting the 2 feet long and sharp bolo.  It is still fresh in my mind how the pointed tip of the murder weapon stroke his back piercing through his abdomen.  It sounded like the bolo forcefully penetrated into a soft banana trunk.  Tsakk!!  It happened at about midnight right after the music ended and everyone dancing was seated.  Dramatically, the victim was able to walk toward the center of the dance ground with the weapon stuck in his body until he collapsed to his death.  I trembled with the afterthought, “What if I was a mistaken target?” I could have been classified “being in the wrong place at the wrong time”.  I was so horrified that we kept discussing about it until morning without sleep.

One early bright morning on our way to a field trip to visit an “integrated farm” in Tacloban City to enrich the theoretical and classroom instruction of my students (Dept. of Horticulture, ViSCA, Baybay, Leyte), we were shocked to see an able bodied and robust man on top of his pedal operated cab newly killed. Our school bus was the first to arrive at the ”scene of the crime” (SOC).  Everyone of us in the bus had a strategic view of the man heinously gunned down point-blank at the head.  There was no blood but a clear sticky fluid with his saliva dripped from his mouth like a slaughtered pig.  Later, we learned that the casualty was a rebel returnee salvaged by his “comrade in arms”.    

The foregoing tragic faces of death are contrasted with the peaceful death of my mother-in-law (1996), my father-in-law (1999) and my own mother (2007).  Accordingly, “death can be seen as birth”.  “At the end of the birth canal, it seems fierce, portentous and full of pain.  Similarly, death is a scary tunnel and we are being sucked toward it by a powerful force” (Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?).

To a man who has not lived nor died, it is declared: “There was a very cautious man, who never laughed nor played.  He never risked, he never tired, he never sang or prayed.  And when one day he passed away, his insurance was denied.  For since he never really lived, they claimed he never died.” nmg