She didn’t want to be rushed to the hospital for fear of contracting the virus. It was a bad case of pain that emanated from her back and traveled all the way to her chest. The time came for me to be home albeit due to an emergency caused by my mother’s debilitating rotator cuff tendinitis. For 51 days of only seeing my mother on Messenger video call, we relied on faith that there would come a time that we would see each other. When fear is at hand, we wash it off with faith. I had never seen the “world” for 51 days.Ĭrisis makes us stronger in faith.
There was a jamboree in my heart when I set foot outside the gate. For the first time, I was stepping out of the house where I live in Makati. Last Monday, after almost living a life of a monk or a bird in a cage, I broke free.
Gulod, one of the 18 barangays in Cabuyao, is still COVID free. When I left Gulod, there was no confirmed case of COVID-19 yet in Cabuyao and the total number of patients in the entire Philippines was 98.Īs of this writing, there are 10, 463 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country and 21 of them came from Cabuyao. My mother is 75 and like all senior citizens, she’s already immunocompromised. It broke our hearts that I decided to weather the lockdown in Manila because, my thinking at that time, was that I was already a carrier of the virus having exposed myself to a myriad of people in the city.
I maintained a two-meter distance from my mother when I saw her that time. It also has the capacity to divide family members who fear they might transfer the virus from one to the other. The virus is ruthless - in its invisibility, it kills people. I went home to Cabuyao just to say hi and goodbye to her. The last time I was home (March 14) was the shortest time I spent with my mother - two minutes. When the lockdown of Luzon due to the COVID-19 pandemic was announced, I had the conscious effort to quarantine in Makati.
I wanted to believe, in my selfish attempt to romanticize the scene, the paleness of the moon was caused by the 51 days that it waited for me to be back home. The moon was white and clung to the vast blue sky when I arrived in Gulod late in the afternoon last Monday.
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