Ang Peregrino By Eric S. Santillan

Silence before Death

The past few weeks were difficult for us in Cagayan de Oro and Iligan. Friends and family died. There were lots of help that came from all over the world, but we had to soldier on right smack in the middle of Christmas and New Year and find ways to grieve and celebrate despite everything that happened.

With death all around, with people just beginning to pick up the pieces of a drowned life, I am mute. Before death, I am silent and lose my tongue. I feel presumptuous about giving comfort, audacious to say something about hope, out-of-words and grasping what I could not take hold of and grab, and put a handle to.

When I worked in the National Orthopedic Hospital, when I was asked to talk to the families of the dying and the dead, I would feel what is becoming now an eerily familiar feeling: the humility and the confrontation with presumption. And the silence. Eerie silence. I would feel like an intruder into what were supposed to be very intimate moments for families; moments of great pain and anguish, and moments of surrender.

I am silent before death, partly because of reverence, partly because of fear, but largely because I could not understand it. How do you begin to explain that flood? Who do you blame? Should you even blame? Could you create a formula for what happened hoping that if you did, another Sendong will not happen again? Death is just so much larger than me. It brings finality to a world that is temporary. It is like the clang of the judge’s hammer signaling the end of a court session and the passing of his judgment. It is like the grating of metal on metal as a prison cell is locked with you inside. I could not help but be silent before such moments. Out of reverence, like the way we unintentionally lower our voices to a mere whisper every time we are in front of the Blessed Sacrament but need to talk. Out of fear of saying the wrong things, and of bringing an added burden to an already heavy load. There is also the humility before something I could not fully understand until I face it myself. I face death, but vicariously. It was not me whose close family members died. I remain but a mere spectator.

Death breaks away from our propensity to put things into clear concepts and into understandable definitions. We think we understand it; we can even give words of comfort to friends whose family members have died, but when it happens to someone near, to someone close, the very words of comfort we have given to other people do not seem to mean anything at all.

And so as we face people whose family members have died, we do so with respect and reverence. We do not presume that we know what to say. Maybe we do not even need to say anything at all.