Visit to a nunnery

Ester, a cousin of mine came up to me and said, “When wilI you visit Tita Chit?  I want to go with you.”

“You do?  Let’s go as soon as we can.  I’m just looking for company,” I said and so three cousins — Ester, Marlene and I — flew off to a nunnery in the north to visit my mother’s oldest living sister.

 Tita Chit has serious dementia. She is a cloistered nun who still lives in the convent but in her own world as created by her own brain, which is losing its ability to traverse all the complex nooks and crannies. Maybe it is exhausted, lost speed from all the years. She is after all 95 years old. She sits in her wheelchair, bent but still has beautiful skin with hardly any wrinkles. She is the oldest nun in a small community of aging albeit cheerful nuns.

 We saw her when we arrived. She did not remember any of us. Another Sister joined  to keep the conversation flowing.  After that we had dinner surrounded by cats who stared at us, making us giggle, and dogs who barked at us, sort of scaring us from entering into restricted areas.

 But that night we got together with all the nuns. There were 11 of them. Once they were 16 but five of them have passed on. I remembered when my aunt went to set up their convent. It was 1948, 67 years ago. Then the convent was very simple.  Now it was beautiful with a chapel and a guest house.

 The evening with the nuns was wonderful. One of them had worked in Coca-Cola, so we had a common past. It didn’t matter that it was a long time ago. Nothing is more relaxing and fun than spending time with nuns in a nunnery. They are chatty, always laughing, full of stories. They talked me into teaching them creative writing and I wholeheartedly agreed. We all got so excited about that.

 They tried to convince my cousin, Marlene, to teach them how to paint. They brought out painted bottles that a lady friend taught them how to do. The collection even included a gold tin can of corned beef on which the lady had painted lovely small pink roses. They were all beautiful.

 The next day we met with our aunt at 9 a.m. and this time she recognized me.  “Inaanak kita, hindi ba?  (You’re my goddaughter, aren’t you?)” she asked.  I said yes.  She extended her hand and I took it. “Ang sarap na makita ka uli at mahawakan ka (It’s so good to see you and hold you again),” she said holding and stroking my hand. This aunt is very dear to me because she was the source of stories about my childhood and about the family.

She told me how she enjoyed playing with me when I was a baby.  She told me how after the Japanese had taken all our men and the women were left to carry their grandmothers to another place, my mother handed me to her and asked her to take care of me. Mommy was much bigger than she and could carry their grandmothers onto chairs and into a cart. When they were ready my grandmother said, “Return the baby to her mother so if anything happens they will be together.”

 We spent most of the morning talking about her mother, my grandmother, whose father was an Arguelles and whose mother was a Mendoza.  She remembered that the Arguelleses lived on Brixton Hill. She remembered Lola Aurea, a Mendoza, who lived in Malolos, married a Spanish doctor.  They had three daughters, Sophia, who married an Earnshaw, Pura who married a Sison and Carmen.

 She remembered the surname Earnshaw and suddenly switched to Spanish, “Earnshaw era muy bueno (Earnshaw was a good man),” she said.  We visited and revisited that topic in English, Tagalog and Spanish.

 Like I said, my aunt has dementia, meaning she is forgetful and therefore repetitive.  I was relieved that she did not have Alzheimer’s.  You cannot have Alzheimer’s without getting dementia first. But then the nuns told me that sometimes she would ask her caregiver, “Kailan ako namatay?   (When did I die?)” That told me she had Alzheimer’s Disease. Dementia is forgetful but Alzheimer’s makes you create scenarios that aren’t true. For my Tita it’s death. For my mother it was me trying to poison her.

 In the end we were all happy to have visited my Tita. It was a visit marked with a happy mix of sadness and laughter, of cats who sat around the dinner table looking at us, of dogs that barked to scare us, topped by nuns who charmed us.

 We are old women now, single again. One of my cousins is a widow, the other one is like me. Once in a while we all have flashes — should we enter a nunnery and explore a different side of life?  It’s worth a thought.

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