An uncle’s story

Crosshatching
A few weeks before Christmas, we learned that one of our paternal uncles has stage four cancer. It was already so advanced that the hospital that did his tests here in Cebu gave up on him. So he went to a clinic in Mactan that offered alternative treatment for cancer patients.
I visited him there recently. My uncle’s second wife, who is much younger than him and who he married shortly after my aunt died, met me at the door of the clinic. It was the first time that I saw my new aunty. She was always at his side, attending to him.
My uncle was happy to see me. Like the other patients, he was sitting on one of those bulky massage chairs while some kind of medicine hanging in a bladder above him dripped into a tube injected into his arm.
Yet there was no hint of pain in him. He looked relaxed and even seemed to be enjoying the movie on the big flat screen television in front of them. It was a film about America commandos fighting the Talibans in Afghanistan. Images of bodies being ripped by machine gun fire or blown up by grenades flashed on the screen as the patients tried to relax while being given medications.
In his usual self-deprecating humor, my uncle told me rather loudly that he and all the other patients in the room are nearing the deadline. Then he made comments about the scenes in the war movie, preferring to talk about the mundane rather than the more existential issues of dying.
After the treatment, I drove my uncle and aunt to the Birhen sa Regla Church, trying to avoid traffic so as not to stress him. Going to the late afternoon mass from the clinic had been his routine and that day he was glad that they would not have to take the trouble of getting a cab and having to deal with rush hour traffic in Lapu-Lapu.
My uncle maintained a jovial mood that day. He never showed a sign that he was suffering. Perhaps he was just trying to hide it. All the while, he was witty, cracking jokes about anything.
He told me that he is “friends” again with his children, making it sound like he has just been added by them on Facebook. My uncle was a recent convert to social networking, where he used to post pictures about his new life with his second wife, his grandchildren, and the usually religious and political things that interest him.
My uncle is a lay minister who has a religious program on the Catholic radio station in our hometown. His siblings jokingly call him “Father” as he seemed to be more religious than a priest. Whenever the clan gathers to pray before meals, my uncle is always summoned to lead it.
And yet, it was hard for my uncle to convert even his own family to his faith. In fact, one of them changed religion and another became an atheist. It could be because my uncle did not always practice what he preached.
My cousins, his children, hated his being judgemental and moralistic. My uncle was also ambitious and very conscious of status. It must have started during his stint as a union leader. Many years later, perhaps conscious of his influence on radio, he ran for a local position but lost. He has since been involved in local politics, supporting this candidate or that.
He was a people person yet one who could not get along with his own family. His relationship with his kids got worse when he married immediately after the death of his first wife. After a few unpleasant confrontations, they started to ignore him, leaving my uncle sad that he could not see some of his grandchildren.
But he somehow managed to start a new life with his second wife. Then cancer caught up with him. It threatened to destroy his new love.
Fearing that he might have little time left, he started to approach each of his children to ask forgiveness. Nobody could doubt the sincerity of a person facing death when he asks forgiveness. So my cousins actually did more than reconcile with their father. They also supported him financially in his costly battle against the dreaded disease.
On my uncle’s Facebook, I saw photos of him celebrate his recent birthday with his children and grandchildren. They all looked happy.
My uncle is a reminder that family life is more than the photos of us and our loved ones we post on Facebook. There are always unhappy moments and we cannot always be nice to each other. We can never choose our parents or our children. We just have to live with who and what they are. To love is to recognize each other’s imperfections and to never close our doors and to be the first to knock to ask forgiveness. We should never wait until death deprives us of that opportunity.
I now understand why my uncle can only exude joy and never pain in spite of his condition. I am very confident that this is the greatest miracle that could lead to his healing. It’s also a great Christmas story.