The departed

Letters of sympathy are the hardest ones to write. It is a pitiless endeavor. Give this blogger a note of thanks, a birthday or get-well-soon-you're-missed message to dash off anytime. The family's personal flag of mourning has been flying half-mast for sometime since the death of Chiqui Barretto Server early this month. It seems it will continue flying that way till past Easter. This morning  my brother called from overseas to tell us his wife's 16-year-old nephew just  passed on to the next life. Cause of death: leukemia.

As is my wont these days, I'm on this cleaning spree (deleting messages to free up space for incoming and outgoing mail). The exercise has proven therapeutic. But half an hour ago, I chanced upon this note I had emailed to my godmother and cousin Jane Pearl Server-Banzhaf. We were exchanging letters. She just lost her husband Hans.  Two years later, she left us exactly 19 days after she turned 63.

If the thought isn't too irreverent, I can use this as template for similar letters that have to be written with more frequency as death is accepted as the living's constant companion. Meanwhile, hearts go on beating, a reminder this season that those who're left behind must keep on toasting in this manner: "Here's to life!"

Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 4:25 PM

Dearest Ninang Jane,

First of all, it's okay to cry and cry. I remember suppressing my tears when my Dad died in January 1992, trying to put up a brave front before my siblings and Mommy, and it wasn't till June of that same year, on Father's Day, when my article on him came out in the old Daily Globe, that an avalanche of tears fell.

I must have been in sixth grade when Hans came into our lives. I remember you and he standing on the lawn, you introducing each of us to him, and we went up shyly to shake his hand. He looked dazzlingly handsome, and you did make a fine pair. 

Through the years I would see him striding in that determined way of his and learning how to drive in Manila's traffic and being as barumbado as the worst truck driver. I think he picked up some Filipino cuss words, too. 

He was the one, at one post-Christmas reunion at Shorty and Lita's home, who yelled, after hearing the roll call of names of our nieces and nephews (Jongjong, Klengkleng, etc.), "Isn't there a Pekpek?" And Chiqui repeated the question while everyone roared in laughter. 

I remember him as moody and sometimes masungit, too, but we all have our days. Like I said in my previous email, the man I married is in many ways like your dearly and recently departed (Hans ran the Banzhaf residence with German efficiency). My pursuit of fine arts wouldn't be possible without Rolly taking upon himself the bulk of housekeeping chores that I must confess bore and depress me, if I have to do them all the time. 

I know the coming days and weeks will be difficult, but your friends and relatives will keep in touch through text and email to comfort you. Besides, you have all those beautiful children and grandchildren to remind you of what you and Hans had brought forth to this world.

 

Love,

B

 Photo of Jane from the collection of one of her three daughters

Death in the Family

“Honey, nobody dies of a broken heart,” my friend, a jaded journalist, likes to tell people who come to her with tales of breakup and separation.

But I’ve always felt that it was possible, that a heart can shatter into a million pieces no matter the brave front you show. This was the case of my godmother, Jane Server Banzhaf. When her husband Hans passed away two years ago, Jane, already weakened by emphysema, grew progressively fainter, a wisp of her old, chain-smoking, coffee-drinking self.

Last Sept. 27, my sister Evelyn, brother Dennis and I visited her at the ICU of Asian Hospital. Jane’s youngest child Yammy was keeping watch. I lost count of the tubes connected to the patient whose chest was the only part of her moving. Everything was still. Her eyes seemed pasted shut, the eyeballs unmoving. We hoped that she would wake for a few minutes. She never did.

Back home my brother gave his prognosis to my mother who is very attached to Jane and who considers her not just a favorite niece but another daughter and dear friend. When Jane entered widowhood, my mom kept her company on some weekends—they’d eat together, watch TV together, sometimes play mahjongg and sleep on the same bed. Dennis, a doctor, said Jane was being kept alive by the whole enchilada of life support. Mommy whirled as though struck by a blow. By that time I had let Jane go, wishing her what a poet called the peace of all things.

When the confirmation of death came Monday, I was prepared. Telling Mommy was a different story. She broke down and was nearly hysterical. It was sometime before she quieted down. She had hoped for a miracle.

Jane was cremated that same afternoon. In the evening my siblings, daughters and I rode to her home in Ayala Alabang to pay our respects. Her jolly older brother Shorty arrived at the same time as we did. He brought my hand to his forehead, and everyone chuckled. “Why are you laughing?” he asked. “My sister has just died.”

Earlier, he told Evelyn and her husband Obet, “Please don’t wait until I’m in the ICU before you visit me.” The humor and the truth in that statement weren't lost on us.

In this old picture are Jane, who was the middle child, her brothers Shorty and Fritz and their mama, Nazaria.

Hang in There, Ninang Jane

When I was this wee, I was a bit resentful of my other siblings when they would address my baptismal godmother and first cousin on Mommy’s side “Ninang Jane.” She was my ninang, I would rage inside, so why were they laying claim to her? Why can’t she just be Jane to them the way her brothers Shorty and Fritz were to us? Yes, I admit to having been proprietary toward her as only the immature could be.

When I still didn’t know what the word glamour meant, Jane Pearl Server (standing left with her mama, Nazaria Dula Server) was already firmly installed in my mind as the epitome of that. I have a faint memory of her wearing white gloves and bending down to whisper goodbye to my ear before she enplaned to the US to study at Marymount College. A still fainter one of accompanying her to Ben Farrales’s shop in Ermita and stepping out, looking up at the elegant awning and admiring that stretch of road. Was it an unintended early lesson in aesthetics?
She sent me Dr. Seuss books at about the time I was learning to read, and The Cat in the Hat, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back and A Fly Went By made the interminable hours of childhood tolerable. Years later, she came home married and introduced us one by one to tall, handsome Hans Banzhaf who formally shook our hands.
My chest constricts as I write these words. Hans went ahead of Jane two years ago. Meanwhile, widowed Ninang Jane is fighting for her life at the ICU of Asian Hospital. I think of what a great friend she has been to her four children Pipo, Tina, Dada and Yammy even if she isn’t the baking-cookies-from-scratch type of mom. Right now my wish is for her grandchildren Olivia, Georgia and Max to continue to experience this special being the way she once graced my youth.