Category Archives: Family

The last few years have been difficult ones for my family, and the one person guiding and getting us through them intact has been my Mom. Today is her birthday, so this little post goes to honor her. Celebrating such love is one of the best things about this blog, and sharing it seems to be largely missing on the rest of the wretched internet. And so we offer gratitude and appreciation on this day for the woman who keeps our family together.

She moved into her new home last year, letting go of the house where so many childhood memories took place, and so many adult memories as well. I thought at first that I would miss the old house – it seemed such an indelible part of all those memories. I was thankful when my brother and his family simply switched homes and moved in, keeping it in the family. When we had Christmas Day dinner in the old house, however, I understood that things had changed, and it wasn’t a bad thing. I thought I might be sad, that pangs of our former lives there would come back up in ways that only served to remind us that such a time was over. I thought our connection to that house would only be painful now that so much had changed. My Mom knew better. 

She said many months ago that she didn’t miss the old house. She missed the life she had there, and the memories she made during that time, but she didn’t miss the house. I wasn’t so sure until we returned there for Christmas, and I realized she was right. It wasn’t the house that had made those moments and years matter, it was Mom. And Dad. And my brother. And me. Our family is what made those memories mean so much, and it would have happened wherever we happened to be.

I feel that in Mom’s new home. There is a warmth and comfort and love that comes through, not because she has made it her own with key pieces of furniture and objects from our old house, but because she is there. 

Home isn’t a place, it’s the people we love. 

Happy birthday, Mom. Thanks for still being our home. 

According to my Mom, my Grandma’s favorite waltz was the ‘Blue Danube’. That makes sense, as she was always one to be thrilled by what thrilled others. For me, though, my grandmother’s waltz will always be the lesser-known and lesser-celebrated ‘Viennese Blood Waltz’, also by Johann Strauss, but not nearly as played as much as its blue cousin. 

This was the song that sounded on my Grandmother’s music box clock; as a child I never realized how lovely it would have been to be awakened by a music box. I don’t know if Gram ever used it to wake up – she was always simply up in the morning, and when we were growing up I never, ever saw her sleep. She stayed up reading well beyond our bedtime, and was up early to say her prayers in the morning, often worrying her rosary beads before there was light in the sky, and always before me and my brother were awake. 

In this waltz, I hear my grandmother, and am reminded of the happiest moments of my childhood ~ nights spent playing cards in her little room when she would visit our house, and weekends spent in Hoosick Falls when Mom would bring us for a visit. 

In this waltz, I hear something else now that I am almost into my fifties, now that I understand a bit more of the world and the way time has its way with all of us. These days, this waltz reminds me that the grandmother I knew and adored was but a small part of the woman who raised my Mom, lost her husband to a heart attack, and then settled into a quiet life that led into the section that I inhabited with her. This waltz goes back years, long before I was born, long before my mother was born, to a time when Gram was a young woman, one of five children, and making her way into the world. 

My Mom would often say that Gram always seemed old to her, even when she was young, but I had glimpses and hints of the life that Gram had, and I remember seeing a picture of her and her husband out on the town – Gram glammed up and smiling broadly at a cocktail table, sitting across from my Grandfather whom I would never meet, looking like some starlet that she used to describe to me and my brother as we drifted off to sleep in her care. 

We know so little of each other, I think, even of those who matter the most to us. Every human carries such infinite mystery, such unknowable history. It’s a wonder we ever get over ourselves long enough to love someone else – and a marvelous and happy wonder at that.

It wouldn’t be 2023 without another loss, and this time our family lost my Dad’s older brother – the oldest of the Ilagan brothers – my Uncle Ding (a shortened version of Narding, which is a Filipino nickname for Leonardo). That leaves just one last Ilagan brother – my Uncle Pablo – who just visited this fall. 

Uncle Ding had had similar medical afflictions as my Dad, but for years longer. In many ways, it is yet another erosion of the people who have been in my life since I was born, and an echo of the loss of Dad this past summer. 

Uncle Ding and his wife, my Aunt Sally, formed part of our favorite family visits in our childhood. They lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey with their three children – our cousins Greg, Lee Marie and Mark. They were only a few years older, but as kids they might as well have been adults, as they wanted little to do with us, with the occasional exception of Mark, who took us around the block on his motorcycle once. 

Our visits were centered around the NJ anesthesiology conference that Dad would attend with his brother. Mom would take us around to see the sights, usually in nearby Philadelphia, but we were more interested in hanging out in our Uncle’s cellar, where a pool table and air hockey and a foosball table provided the dreams for two boys whose own cellar was then only a holding place for the washer and dryer. 

My brother and I would sneak out of bed at night and creep down into the basement, fire up the air hockey engine, clicking around the pool balls and somehow avoiding getting yelled at for keeping the house awake. My Aunt and Uncle seemed less strict with their kids than our Mom and Dad were with us, but everyone thinks that about their parents I suppose. 

I remember one night we had already changed into our pajamas and were in the family room waiting for bedtime. I’d crossed my arms in front of me and must have looked cold, as my Uncle came over and asked if I wanted him to turn up the heat. It was the simplest and kindest thing to offer a kid like me, and something my own parents would have never bothered to do. I told him I was fine, but that little act endeared him to me for life. 

He and Aunt Sally were a foil to my own parents in many ways, and they were there for all the weddings and funerals and formative family events in our lives. In later years, Andy got to to meet them, and he was as amused by them as they were by him. Now, another light has gone out, adding to the darkness that 2023 will forever embody for us. 

My father left us during a full moon – the Sturgeon Moon – and as a full moon appears now, Mom says she feels Dad’s presence then. There is comfort in that, and when our last full moon – a Beaver Moon – ascended, I stepped outside to see what I could feel.

It was cold out, and a threat of snow was only a couple of hours away. There were stars out too, and the sky was lit a gorgeous shade of blue – the kind of blue you don’t often see at such a gray time of the year. It felt like a glimpse into the winter ahead of us. 

I hope it will be a healing winter.

When my Dad’s health aide was working with him, back when he still had good days here and there, she would get him to engage in various art projects, some of which involved him drawing and painting – things he would never have done in his younger years, but which he took to with his usual precision and perfectionism, making sure each was just right. She also got him to work on letters to me, as she saw the letters I’d written coming in every week. One of these she gave to my Mom to mail many months ago, but my Mom had put it away in a bag and forgotten about it until it resurfaced the other week. She gave it to me when I last stopped by, and I put it on the passenger seat of my car as I left her house. 

My first visit to Dad’s resting place was sadder than expected, and as I drove out of the cemetery I was feeling empty and forlorn. I couldn’t feel my father there, and I wasn’t ready to let him go. It left my heart aching and my head struggling to keep him alive somehow. Driving out of Amsterdam, I passed the same route we used to take to church on Sunday mornings and Christmas Eve. Those days and years felt far away, yet I still needed my Dad. As I drove over the bridge that connected the banks of the Mohawk River, the sun was nearing the end of its descent in the sky. Instead of taking the left to the Thruway, I continued on the road that would lead into the rural areas near Florida. This was the way to the veterinarian who used to treat our first dog, a German shepherd named Crystal that Dad had raised when she was only a puppy. That dog, like my father himself, would protect us religiously until the day she died, not allowing harm to come to any of us on her watch. There was still an animal hospital where the vet’s office once stood – a small comfort to know that some things carried on. 

I started to feel my Dad’s presence again, on these back roads flooded with late afternoon sunlight, banked by fields of corn and the odd pumpkin patch. Super-saturated with the colors of autumn, this humble section of the world kept its beauty and its grace mostly to itself, content to simply exist and provide a backdrop to the scant intermittent parade of cars that sped in search of more exciting destinations. Turning onto a side street, I suddenly remembered the card my Mom had given to me. I pulled into the empty parking lot of a little library – closed for the day and empty at the late-afternoon hour – and slowly opened the envelope. 

“Hi…” it said on the front, over a collection of birdhouses and their inhabitants. I knew my Dad hadn’t chosen the card, and yet somehow it came directly from him. I began crying a little – the simple declaration of ‘Hi’ felt like a message he managed to send in the most unexpected way, at the moment when I needed it the most. Inside, a generic message, “Hope everything’s going well in your little corner of the world!” was written above a  picture of two birds near their home. 

Beneath that, in a scrawl not far removed from that of a child, my Dad had valiantly attempted his signature, connecting his spirit to this page, connecting his heart to this letter – and a letter was always the way I connected to someone most profoundly. My Dad knew that, understanding and recognizing the love in all the letters I had written to him over the years, and in the occasional ones he would write back to me. In some ways, this last letter to me was probably not unlike my first letters to him. Our circle had been completed, and once completed, a circle continues on forever. 

After feeling that my Dad wasn’t here anymore, I held a card he once held, a card that he meant to reach me, and I felt him near once again. He was in this letter, he was in my car, he was in the land and the sun and the sky and the trees. Mostly he was in my heart, and I felt the reassuring comfort of that, as if he was still here guiding and supporting and loving me. 

A sense of gratitude washed over me then, whispering that it would be ok, reminding me that Dad would never truly leave my side. 

Everyone deals differently with death. For most of my life, I’ve shied away from it, changing the topic whenever it came up and actively dismissing it from my mind. The thought of losing someone I loved was too terrifying to do anything else. It was my way of coping with something that felt insurmountable. When Dad started to decline several years ago, I had to face it, whether I liked it or not, and it wasn’t easy.

His journey was a long one, and in many ways that helped. We had time together – time to become closer and talk before it became impossible, time to confront what was happening as every door closed and options dwindled. I had a good few years of dealing with impending death, so when it finally happened, I was as ready and prepared as one can be, even if one can never truly be ready for that. During his last two weeks on earth, I embraced the process as best as I could, managing to find the beauty and grace in what was happening, and finding solace in family, and the love that would continue even after his physical form departed.

Last weekend marked the two-month point since he died – something I hadn’t taken notice of – and I found myself in Amsterdam dropping off some food for Mom. Dad’s cemetery marker had been engraved and up for a few weeks, but I hadn’t been to visit. It was something I was consciously avoiding. Part of me was waiting to make it meaningful, to visit with intent and purpose, but as I left Mom’s, dirty and sweaty from putting up some fall decorations, I found myself turning down the road to the cemetery, almost without thought.

The afternoon sun hung just above the tree-lined horizon, dappled and divided through evergreen boughs. It was warm, and it was the last day of September. Turning into the cemetery, I passed rows of gravestones, looking at the various names, wondering at the families and the people who carried those names onward. There were names I recognized, though I’m sure not all were related to the people I knew. At the bottom of the hill, I stopped the car and got out. Along the edge of the cemetery a section of unchecked growth allowed for a little bit of wilderness to establish itself. In this wild area, stands of cattails stood tall in the wet ground, while groups of asters and goldenrod lent a surprising jolt of color to the end of the day. Wild roses gone to seed gave off a fainter warm glow in their bulbous hips. It was a trio that only God could have put together, so I made a little bouquet of asters, goldenrod, and rose hips to bring to Dad. As I plucked the rose stem, my thumb met a thorn, tearing the skin and releasing a tiny drop of blood. A primal reminder that I was still alive, that my body’s blood still pulsed through its veins. It pricked a bit of my heart too, as I realized with full certainty that my Dad was not physically alive.

My little bouquet procured – no extravagant calla lilies or protea or hybrid roses – I got back in the car and drove back up the hill to where my Dad’s ashes were interred. Mom had already sent me photo of it, so I knew what it looked like, but it’s different when you see it in person. At the bottom of the columbarium, I found the engraved names of my parents. I ran my fingers over it, cool to the touch even in the dying light of the sun, and left the simple flowers beneath it.

Time twisted then, and I remembered my only trip to the Philippines, 27 years ago, when my cousin took me to the cemetery to visit her recently-deceased husband, and the markers of my grandparents. Seeing the Ilagan name there was jarring – not only because I never saw the Ilagan name anywhere in the United States, but also because it was on a gravestone in my father’s homeland. It struck me then, when I was only 21 years old, that one day I would be burying my own parents, and seeing their names engraved in stone. It was something that would haunt me forever after, right up until this present moment, as I knelt down and again felt the cold stone and the carved letters of my lineage. The moment I’d been dreading and fearing all my life was at hand, and though I’d always envisioned it blaring and announcing itself in frightening fanfare and debilitating noise, here it appeared in quiet, marked by distant birdsong, and the occasional rumbling of a car along the nearby road.

My Mom has said that she feels comfort visiting Dad here. For me, it was the opposite at first. As I backed away from their marker, I felt a profound sense of loneliness, a realization that my Dad was definitely not here. I knew his ashes were there in a piece of Wedgwood that once stood in our family home, I knew his name was forever embedded on the small square of stone I just touched with my own hands, and I knew his spirit lived within me, but in that moment I only felt his absence. It was the emptiness of being left behind, and as I got back into the car, I started crying.

Rather than fight it or try to collect myself instantly, I let it happen, allowing the grief to come over me in waves, catching the tears in the last tissues of a box I kept in the car for just such occasions. The sadness didn’t end, and the feeling of missing my Dad didn’t depart, but eventually the overwhelming sense of loss subsided, enough for me to start the car and begin the drive home.

Dear Jaxon ~ 

Hello little guy. This letter comes with no significant meaning or purpose, other than to mark this day in time. Yesterday our family gathered for a brunch two months to the day that we lost your Lolo, and you slept through most of it as you tend to do. You awoke when the eating was done, and you joined us for some crawling and almost-walking. I don’t blame you for taking your time – you have a whole life of walking ahead of you; make the most of these days when you can lounge and crawl – some of us spend our time figuring out ways to do those things, and most of us find it impossible. Hang onto your childhood days as long as you can. 

I took the featured picture of you from outside Lola’s door. You were looking out at your brother mowing the lawn on a summer day. I took a similar photo of your brother and sister when they were about your age, standing behind a glass door at their first house. Now they are thirteen, and I wonder where the time went. One day many years from now I’ll try to tell you about this past summer, if I’ve made some sense of it by then, and I’ll remind you of how much you were a source of light and healing in a dark time. 

This little song is a message to you to hold on, no matter how much the world may rock you – and it’s a reminder to myself to hang on too, because when you go through a summer such as the one we’ve just had, you sometimes want to give in to the sadness. 

YOU GOTTA HOLD ON
HOLD ON THROUGH THE NIGHT
HANG ON
THINGS WILL BE ALL RIGHT
EVEN WHEN IT’S DARK AND NOT A BIT OF SPARKLING
SING-SONG SUNSHINE FROM ABOVE
SPREADING RAYS OF SUNNY LOVE

It dawns on me that while I have promised to be your guide and guardian whenever you may need one, you may be the one guiding us as we fumble our way toward healing, finding our footing in an uncertain time when it feels like we’re slightly unmoored without Dad. It’s difficult to be sad when we see your smile and hear your laugh, and if you’re gently nudging us back to happiness, I’ll lean into that and try to feel the joy of the moment. 

AND SO I HOLD ON TO HIS ADVICE
WHEN CHANGE IS HARD AND NOT SO NICE
IF YOU LISTEN TO YOUR HEART THE WHOLE NIGHT THROUGH
YOUR SUNNY SOMEDAY WILL COME ONE DAY SOON TO YOU

Dreamt of Dad again last night. Brief but powerful – in the dream I was picturing him at last year’s Christmas dinner – his last here with us, and one where he wasn’t quite aware of what was going on. His look in the photos from that night is distant and unfocused, slightly unsettled too – and I wept for the long battle with his illness, and how it had robbed all of us of so much. The scene shifted, as dreams do, and suddenly I was sitting on the edge of my current bed next to him, and I rushed to hug him. “Daddy I love you…” I cried like a little child (because I have not referred to my father as ‘Daddy’ in decades), sobbing through tears again, shaking and half-waking myself. “I love you so much…” I repeated, and then his arms were hugging me back and I heard him say, “I love you too” in a soft voice.

I woke up, face streaming with tears. Looked at the clock and it read 4:44.

Perhaps early morning is the time he likes visit. It’s a time I remember from my youth, on those nights when I’d crawl into my parents’ bed unable to sleep for fear or terror of some unnamed worry, and in the earliest stirring of the day, my father would sometimes get up to use the bathroom, and I’d sleepily see him coming back to bed in the grey shadows of a day barely begun. 

On this morning, all these years later, I walk out into the dark living room and sit on the couch to prolong the moment. It is at such a time that I feel my Dad’s presence most keenly, and strangely, as it comes with such profound sadness, such powerful moments of missing him. 

Maybe that’s all it is: my overwhelming grief providing the perfect combination of wanting and wishing that in these early hours it feels like he is here beside me. 

And maybe it’s something more.