This Christmas...

It's 10:45 am right now and I'm at home, not sick...not ditching...just mourning. My grandfather in the Philippines passed away today. It's only been 2 hours since I found out and it's felt like 2 days. I got a text from my uncle as we were getting ready to head for the office: "Leng, Iniwan na tayo ni Papang"..."Papang has left us." I haven't been put in this position in a while and crying, you would think, would be the first thing I'd want to do, but I just went numb. After telling my mom to call the Philippines all the fear I had been anticipating since we last saw my grandfather had come crashing through. He was gone.

The last time I saw Papang was in August of 2001 when my family and I went home to the Philippines for 2 weeks. I hadn't seen him since I was four so our meeting, suffice it to say, was daunting. He looked so different since I left him 19 years ago, thinner, older, weaker. It was hard to imagine the airforce colonel I left in 1982. When I was a little girl I used to love when he came home from being away on duty. I vaguely remember him in his khaki uniform coming up the stairs after months in Davao or Tawi-Tawi, ready to talk to his then only granddaughter. And then I left for the states and suddenly he became someone we would call every so often to greet HAPPY BIRTHDAY or MERRY CHRISTMAS. And as the years went on, so did his health.

Eversince we got back here from our vacation there I've been dreading every phonecall from back home. Knowing that in his condition, his departure from our lives was forthcoming. And now it's happened and more than ever I just want to sit and talk to him, tell him that as far away as we had moved, and as long as we had been gone, I had never forgotten him. The only comfort I'm finding in all this sadness is that Papang is no longer suffering. As cliche was it sounds, I know in my heart he's much stronger, much better and in a more glorious place than anywhere his earthly life had ever taken him. I just wish I could have said Good-Bye and I love you...