She Wasn’t Supposed to Die Alone

“Who’s your companion?” Manang Marisol asked me whenever we spoke on the phone. It was always the first question she’d ask during our weekly phone chats when I wasn’t able to see her in person. I’d usually answer with whoever was at home at the time: “Bong is here, Manang,” referring to my older brother, “Mama is sleeping…Papa is at a poker game.” Manang always wanted to know where everyone was. After she received my report, she asked the second most important thing she needed to know: “Have you eaten?” or “Kumain ka na ba?” It was among the handful of Tagalog phrases she taught us when she took care of us as kids.

I spent my days and often evenings with Manang from the time I was an infant until I started going to kindergarten, while our parents were at work, then it was just afternoons and evenings until Bong was old enough to watch me at home.

Manang had immigrated from the Philippines with my papa’s parents in the late 1960s in search of, like many, a better life in America, far away from the oppressive regime in their country. I often wonder what her version of the American Dream was. Someone outside our family may have viewed Manang as a live-in nanny or housekeeper, but no one in the family saw it that way. Manang was family. We weren’t raised to see her any other way—not someone who worked for the family. She had been with them since she was a teenager.

“Who’s your companion?” she’d ask with her soft-spoken voice across the phone line, always calling from the same place, my lola and lolo’s modest home on a nondescript street in Silver Lake. Just 5 feet tall and an irresistibly huggable woman, I imagined Manang was likely wearing her usual outfit: a thick dark-colored knit sweater with pockets, full of tissue or candy (just for me, I liked to believe), and flared polyester pants and slippers. A picture of comfort, of love. She never wore makeup, and we’d only see her in a dress on special occasions, such as weddings or First Communions.

Her black curly hair was usually cut close to her head, and she managed to keep it all black for a very long time. Her secret? My favorite ritual. She would pull out her “princess chair,” as I would call it—because it looked like a mini throne with its decoratively shaped brass wire back and legs and small circular vinyl seat—into the back room right in front of the TV. She always timed it to watch her favorite program, women’s wrestling, then call any willing volunteer to use tweezers to pluck out her gray hairs in silence as she laughed hysterically watching the wrestlers go at it. She just loved it. There weren’t any programs like this in the Philippines.

~~~

It wasn’t until I was older, around third grade, that I realized we weren’t Manang’s only family. She had siblings too in the Philippines. There were pictures of people I didn’t know on her dresser. I just never took the time to sit and ask about them. I was so wrapped up in the dramas that would unfold with the other kids that Manang Marisol had to manage. Perhaps she was too busy too.

One car ride home, my mama randomly mentioned that Manang’s sister was sick, and I was like, “What? She has a sister?” The idea that her world didn’t revolve around us made no sense to me, and then it didn’t make sense for other reasons. Didn’t she miss them? Don’t they miss her? Why is she taking care of us and other people’s kids, shouldn’t she take care of her sister? Did she have a boyfriend there? I never asked her these questions myself.

I was sad to learn that she wouldn’t be able to go to see her, because Manang had to “take care of all of you,” my mama said. But she hadn’t returned to the Philippines since she arrived in the States.

The following day, when we were dropped off at the house after school, I ran up to her and said, “I’m sorry about your ate. I’ll be okay if you need to go see her…” Manang hugged me.

~~~

“Who’s your companion…?”

I think of those all those phone conversations we had and wished I had asked her just once, “Who’s your companion?”

Manang Marisol, at least in front of the family, even through her late sixties was always an image of strength. On the weekends or during family birthdays, she always was her usual bubbly self, warm, smiling, teasing us and laughing at us the way she did at the female wrestlers. I liked to think watching us was her favorite program. I don’t remember her ever being sick, or taking a day off. So when I heard, just months after her 70th birthday that she was rushed to the hospital, I was shocked. As someone who loved her, how could I not know Manang was ill? How could I not know she had family in the Philippines? What else did I not know, that no one told me, that I didn’t take time to ask?

I visited her every day at the hospital after work that first week. She had her own room that my mama, titas, and lola had filled with photos and flowers, and Manang Marisol did her best to be cheerful, even with tubes up her nose and hooked up to an IV and a humungous dialysis machine that was sustaining her. Thankfully she could still wear her favorite knit sweater in bed, but instead of her polyester pants, she had a pink hospital gown on. It felt wrong. This was not a special occasion, this was not comfort.

The first thing Manang would ask, the minute she saw me, was, “Who’s your companion?” Most of the time, I’d say, “Mama,” who was usually parking the car when we went together. Other times it was just me. I hoped that wasn’t a disappointment.

The following week, Manang Marisol started to deteriorate quickly, with more tubes and monitors of all kinds being hooked up to her, including an oxygen tank. No longer was I hearing the question I longed to hear when I walked into her hospital room. Manang wasn’t able to speak at all. But each day I’d hold her hand, sing to her, and cry at her bedside as she struggled to breathe. Then the one day I didn’t visit, the one day I decided to stay home after work, was the night Manang passed. No one was with her. She wasn’t supposed to die alone.

~~~

In the months that followed, my titas would pass along different possessions of hers that they thought family members would want. First it was framed photos. Another month would pass, and my titas would want me to take some of Manang’s clothes or blankets. And then, last week, the items got even bigger: my lolo and lola wanted me to have her princess chair and beautiful wood bed frame with four decorative posts. I think it was too painful for them to keep her room just as it was. She wasn’t coming back.

Each item I received felt like a hug from Manang Marisol, especially getting her chair and bed, which was uncharacteristically fancy, considering that she never showed any signs of wealth at all. She dressed simply, she lived simply, though she gave to all of us so generously with her time, her home-cooked meals that she’d feed each kid by hand kamayan style, her frequent calls, and all that candy my parents didn’t know she was giving to me.

I was just happy to be close to Manang Marisol in any way I could. I also think my lolo and lola pitied me for sleeping on the floor on a futon when they visited my studio apartment in Koreatown.

When Papa and Bong helped move her furniture to my apartment, they offered to reassemble the frame, since they had to disassemble it to fit through my narrow door, but I didn’t want help—this time was for me. So surrounded by framed photos of Manang, I took my time assembling the bed, reliving my favorite memories with her, her smile, her laugh, her gray hairs.

As I struggled to pull the box spring onto the frame, I noticed the edges of papers hanging out slightly from a small opening in the box spring’s corner. I was surprised we didn’t notice it earlier, probably because Papa and Bong brought it and the mattress stacked together on their sides.

I propped the box spring back up against the wall and discovered more than just a few papers tucked into it. I pulled out loose letters in Tagalog from the Philippines in with a few words I could understand, old photos of herself I had never seen before, and random receipts for items like medication, tissue paper, and Vicks. And with each item I pulled out, I kept thinking excitedly, There’s gotta to be money tucked in here... Manang liked hiding candy in her pockets for me to dig out.

Then deep in the box spring, amongst the treasured and trivial items, was a small, embroidered green keepsake box. In it were some assorted handmade cards that kids had given her over the years, with colorful drawings and sweet notes, like “Happy Birthday, Manang! I ♡ You!” Each note made me smile and showed how much she was loved. And at the bottom of the card box was something I had no memory of at all: a little black book that looked quite worn, its top corner slightly dented.

I opened it, and an aged photo fell out. It was of Manang as a little girl around 3 or 4 years old. I could tell it was her because of Manang’s distinct gaze, those eyes that just screamed, “Mahal kita.” She was standing with whom I imagine were her sisters, wearing a simple solid-colored jumper, and was the smallest in the group. The rest of the girls were wearing what looked like school uniforms.

As I flipped quickly through the front of the book, practically every page of the weathered cream paper was filled with columns of notes in Manang’s handwriting. The first column was of dates, starting with 6/13/69, followed in what seemed to be intervals of one to three months: 8/20/69…11/3/69…12/22/69. The middle column listed people’s first names, some repeated. And the third column were numbers: 50…65…45… They always occurred in increments of 5. As the years progressed into the 1980s, the third-column numbers increased: 110…135…160.

Then, I noticed a little hidden sleeve in the back of the black book. And there, tucked inside, were a few remittance receipts spanning twenty-plus years from Western Union for relatively small amounts of money—$45, $80, $125—sent to the Philippines. I looked up the receipt dates, names, and amounts in the book, and they matched. As I flipped through the book more, I wondered who these people were. I didn’t recognize anyone’s names. I also wondered where the money came from. Was it money she received from my lolo and lola? My parents? The other parents who brought their kids to be watched, fed, and loved by her during the day?

When I got to the last used page in the book, there was one single entry in it, written just weeks before she was admitted to the hospital: “5/26/95…Aurora…20,000.”

I called my mom on the phone immediately and said, “Mama, I just found something of Manang’s…who is Aurora?”