Memories of My Father
I grew up with three memories of my father. Thirty-two years after his death, I found one more.
My memories are all from before the age of three, the age I was when he died. When I wrote about them for a college psychology paper, the professor declared in front of the whole class that there was no way I could have had memories from such a young age. I felt angry and wounded. These memories of my father were all I had. Surely they had to have been real, otherwise I had nothing.
In the first memory of my father, he offers me a taste of San Miguel Pale Pilsen, the Philippines’ national beer and his brew of choice. I must have been just shy of two years old. It was sometime between 1981 and 1983, the year of my birth and the year of his death.
Back then our family lived in a two-story duplex on Amapola Street in Palm Village, a small, tight-knit neighborhood of young families whose kids played together on streets patrolled by security guards with friendly faces and crisp blue uniforms. Beyond the walls of our village, the brewing storm of Manila under the Marcos regime, a faint rumble was a dark cloud on a distant horizon.
The kids grew up and moved away one by one, and the streets were given over to the shiny condominiums of Rockwell and the hip bars and restaurants of Poblacion. Back then, doors were left open so we could dart in and out of each other’s houses after school, when the air was hot and humid and the light warm and bronze, before racing home, sweaty and sun-browned, to our yayas: live-in nannies who waited with icy pitchers of Tang orange juice and grilled cheese sandwiches at the ready.
That same light and air is seared into my first memory of Daddy. He sits on the couch in the living room, cradling me on his lap and holding a bottle of San Miguel in one hand. He dips his thumb into the bottle and brings it to my lips.
The foam is bitter and unpleasant. I must have made a face because he laughs. His face cracks open—how his eyes crinkle and teeth flash—but someone has switched off the sound of his laughter. He laughs this way in my mind, forever the silent movie star of crackling sepia dreams.
My mother confirms that this indeed took place, that it both annoyed her and made her laugh. I have never learned to like the taste of beer.
The second memory is of an early evening stroll around the narrow asphalt streets of Palm Village. I toddle along on chubby legs, soft tiny hand in his large sinewy one. In the other he holds a cigarette, as always.
I see only his legs, hairy and muscled in running shorts. When Daddy shed the slim, pressed suits he wore to work at the bank, he seemed to never wear proper trousers, only short shorts. He wore them on Sunday visits to the old Glorietta, when it was nothing more than a grass field outside the Quad Theater, or on weekend golfing trips to Punta Baluarte before I was born. I know—I’ve seen all the old pictures.
By accident he brushes the tip of my pinkie with his lit cigarette. I remember no pain, only the glowing tip of the cigarette, and the golden light spilling out of our front door as we walk home.
That same evening, I sit in front of the TV and attempt to staple the singed skin on my finger. I was obsessed, as my own daughter was at the same age, with the stapler.
My mother also confirms that this happened. The staple hurt more than the burn; maybe that’s why I remember. They say you remember the things that hurt.
The third memory is of the day Daddy died. He is missing from it, but this could only be about him.
A nightmare disturbs my afternoon nap and I wake crying for Yaya Linda, my nanny. I make my way downstairs looking for her and find my big sister on the couch holding a volume from the Childcraft Encyclopedia with our maid, Mary. “Yaya is at the hospital,” Mary says. “She’s taken your father.”
I join Mary and my sister. Together we turn the pages of the book called About Animals, which is filled with terrifying reptiles with huge sharp teeth and slimy green amphibians with sinister red eyes. Growing up, I reread all the other Childcraft books multiple times, but I never opened About Animals again.
My mother wasn't home that day, so she could not confirm this.
But my sister was, and this is where the razor edges of her memory slice into mine.
She saw him with her own eyes, hanging from the ceiling with the rubber exercise belt Mom used for her morning aerobics. He had climbed the brown velour striped stool Mom sat on to put on her makeup every morning and kicked it away in the end.
My sister gave me these details, the rubber belt and the striped stool. It’s ridiculous that I remember both items, but nothing else.
She shouted for help. Mary and Yaya came and took him down. They brought him downstairs and laid him on the carpet while Yaya ran for the neighbors. I don’t know whether he was dead or alive when they rushed him to the hospital, because I remember none of this. I was three.
My sister remembers everything. She was eight.
“They put his body on the floor in front of you,” she told me thirty-three years later. “Don’t you remember?”
It was a December evening. We sat on the 17th floor balcony of my sister’s Salcedo Village condo, looking out onto the skyline of the Makati financial district. She smoked as he did, ghostly white tendrils unfurling from the glowing tip of her cigarette, fingers reaching into the night sky.
It was the first time in my entire life I had ever heard her speak about Daddy. I don’t know why I’d never noticed how she kept silent whenever Mom told stories about him. She never laughed, not even when the memories were funny.
It should not have taken this long, but perhaps it was just as well. Perhaps only two women, not two girls, could have borne the weight of this conversation. Perhaps the years we’d lived and the lives we’d had were the only things that allowed her to blow smoke casually into the air as we spoke, and me to listen to her without falling apart.
“I was pretty sure you saw it. So you don’t remember?” she asked again.
I could picture the deep red Persian carpet, the stairs with their polished wooden banister, the front door with its flimsy mosquito screen, but those might have been installed in my mind by other memories. I tried to see him, but I couldn’t. Everything was there except him.
My sister and I both grew up believing that our father died of a heart attack at the age of 37—or at least I thought we both believed it. It turns out only one of us did. I had no reason to believe otherwise. She knew the truth, but she had chosen to keep her silence. Perhaps it was to protect me. Perhaps it was just easier that way. I can’t blame either of them, my mother and sister, for doing what they had to do to survive the grief, and live again.
Everyone had known, she said. His body had been on display during the wake, as is the Filipino Catholic tradition. There was nowhere to hide: the dark marks around his neck were visible above the translucent white collar of his traditional barong Tagalog and through the glass of the open casket.
When she said this, a fourth and final memory of my father surfaced in bits and pieces. First, the white casket with gold trim. The cold, thin glass. Daddy under it. Finally, myself: a chubby child in a white cotton dress with ruffles of eyelet lace.
In my final memory, I look down at him, his hair carefully combed, eyes closed, face dark behind the glass. I might be sitting on the casket, or perhaps in the arms of my yaya. I reach out a hand to his face, to touch the roughness of his cheek, but I can’t. We are separated by glass and silence, by death and time.
I don’t know it, but I will never see or touch my father again. I am being given my final chance to say goodbye.
Then he is gone, trapped in the eternal youth of amber photographs, immortalized by my mother’s stories, preserved by my sister’s silence. And by the four memories I have just shared with you now.