Goodbye, Sister Mary Joseph

One of the joys of my life is my friendship with the Carmelite nuns of Laoag. They are a wonderful group of women. I love the joyfulness they show me.

My mother, who died maybe nine years ago, left behind two living sisters.  One, older than she, was a cloistered Carmelite nun in Laoag, called Sister Mary Joseph. The other who was younger lived in Vancouver and whose name was Hilda Cruz Aldaba. Once they were six brothers and sisters. Now only my aunt Hilda lives.  Sister Mary Joseph, Tita Chitchit to our generation, passed away last Tuesday. She was 98 years old.

I received the news about her death in the car on our way home. The next morning I booked my flight to Laoag. My husband Loy couldn’t come with me because he had legal appointments he could not postpone. So I was at the airport alone for hours.  I had a lot of time to think about my Tita Chitchit.

 The first time I visited her was with my mother and grandmother. Maybe I was five years old.  She brought me into their garden at the back of their convent. She showed me their mabolo trees. They had big thorns on their roots. In the car on the way over I heard my mother say Tita Chitchit was supposed to be a Descalced Carmelite, meaning she wasn’t supposed to wear shoes. I looked at her feet surreptitiously but could not see them because her brown habit covered her toes.  What if she stepped on those huge thorns? Were her feet bleeding?

That visit I remembered eating tabtaba, a kind of tree mushroom. I ate it guisado or sautéed and minatamis, cooked with syrup to make dessert. I thought it was delicious but my Mommy and Lola exchanged glances that sort of said they pitied the nuns. Those were the days when they would ring their chapel’s bells when they had no food. The neighbors would then bring them food and leave it in a covered lazy susan close to the convent door. They would turn it around and get the food and eat it.

When you visited them at the cloisters you could not get too close. They were separated from you by black grills with small squares and iron points of around three inches waiting to get stuck in your eyes if you came too close. They even had black curtains behind those grills so when you visited you could only see your relative. The rest of the nuns were shadows.

Then came Pope John XXIII who scolded them all and told them to stop living like beggars. They had to earn enough money to buy their own food and contribute to the church. So they began to make hosts and candy. They made delicious candy from camias, sampalok and santol. They always sent us these goodies at Christmas, brought them when they came to visit.

 Tita Chitchit was an outstanding Carmelite nun. She won the trust and respect of all the Prioresses and delegates to the First General Assembly of the Association of Discalced Carmelite Monasteries in the country who elected her their first president in 1983.

The burial of a cloistered Carmelite nun is a lucky event because people who are not allowed into the cloisters are allowed in. They have their own cemetery almost at the tip of their cloister, which is apparently built on a hill. I kept looking around at the trees. Finally, I asked Sister Tessa, do you have mabolo trees?

Yes, she said, at the side over there. My memory was right.

Why do you not make candies anymore? You have so many sampalok trees.

Look at those two tombs. They were the candy makers. They both died. None of us learned their craft. So no more candies.

One of the joys of my life is my friendship with the Carmelite nuns of Laoag. They are a wonderful group of women. When I got married, they were among the first to greet me. They have a great sense of humor. They are very real human beings. I love the joyfulness they show me. They requested me to come with Loy next time so they could put him through an inquisition to see if he was worthy of me. I promised to bring him over one day.

 I never would have met these women if not for their Sister Mary Joseph, my Tita Chitchit. They never would have loved our family so much if not for her. Tita Chitchit was the key to our relationship and now she was gone. Suddenly I found myself standing over her head in the coffin and I saw her bare feet, one pointing east, the other pointing west, just like my feet do naturally when I’m lying down. Then I felt a rush of love. We had something in common. My ninang and I have the same feet.

I don’t know why but throughout her entire ceremony that was the single moment that touched my heart. I knew then that I would pray to her and love her and the other nuns forever.

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