Inseparable

I must have done something good to deserve my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law Lutgarda “Garding” Quintans Ramirez is as warm and gentle as the pashmina shawls she wears on her shoulders on chilly evenings. She is the grace I received from God the day I married her only son.

One would think I would have had a tough time with my mother-in-law, having married her only son. But Mommy has always been like a First Aid kit — in the background, but always there whenever you needed her.

We lived the first two weeks of our married life in her home, and in an apartment a few minutes away for the next seven years. But Mommy never visited our apartment unannounced (to spot-check on the daughter-in-law!), never gave unsolicited advice about how to run my home or care for my baby even on a colicky afternoon. She had no must-do traditions and never required our attendance on the red-letter days that her family, just like every other family, has. We were there because we wanted to, not because we were obliged to.

Mommy is a fulltime housewife and mother, and gave up maids while her five children were still small. She could have easily made me (a career woman at that) insecure with her Martha Stewart skills, but she never flaunted them. We just felt the joy that came from her homemaking skills.

She is renowned in the Ramirez clan for her culinary prowess — and that could have been terrible pressure on the young bride that I was, married to her unico hijo. She sewed curtains, made technicolor pinwheel sandwiches for merienda and vegetable carvings (like tomato rosettes) to garnish her entrees. For my son Chino’s first birthday, she made mini hamburgers (in made-to-order buns) and a multi-layer cake made alternately of bread and sandwich filling.

Her granddaughter Trixie Lareza grew up so inspired by her Lola’s cooking she decided to become a chef. “Why is it,” Trixie wrote in a magazine article, “that I can smell my Lola’s adobo even when I am a kilometer away from her house?” (Mommy would tell Trixie the secret: She fries the meat just to the point when it is crunchy outside and tender and juicy inside.)

My mother-in-law is also very creative and artistic. She makes her own window treatments and does artwork like decoupage on the surfaces of old bauls in her house. She cuts patterns from textiles and makes them into wall borders. Until her seventies, she would paint the walls in her living room using roller brushes, painting a bright ochre one accent wall of her house.

She spots antiques from among the stuff that neighbors and relatives are about to discard and turns them into conversation pieces in her house. She also collects Madonna and Child figures and paintings, and during the height of singer Madonna’s popularity, Mommy identified herself as “Madonna” during the traditional family Kris Kringle.

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But more than her Martha Stewart skills, it is something else that sets Mommy apart. Her deep faith is the essence of my mother-in-law.

Until recently, my mother-in-law would walk every day to the St. Scholastica’s Chapel on Vito Cruz street to hear Mass. She has such a hotline to heaven we always ask her to pray for our intentions. Even my sister Geraldine would call her up when she needs prayers before an exam, or when she needs counseling.

My parents-in-law when they attended my silver wedding anniversary with their only son Ed in November 2010.

I could see that Mommy entrusts everything to God. After praying — be it for the confirmation of a tour or for the recovery of a sick loved one — she says, “I am at peace,” you know her prayer has been granted.

My father-in-law Carlos jokes that Mommy could put a sign outside her house and make a business out of the number of sukis she has for prayers!

Faith and the belief in the power of prayers are my mother-in-law’s best gifts to me.

She is my mother-in-law, but much more than that. She is a symbol that God loves me very much, for He gave me not one, but two mothers.

(First published May 13, 2008, The Philippine STAR)

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My husband Ed and his four sisters Peewee, Elvira, Edith and Beth, are now orphans. They lost their beloved mother Lutgarda “Garding” Quintans Ramirez, 85, to complications arising from cancer. They buried her yesterday, three months after they buried their father Carlos, who died a sudden, painless death last January at age 86. They buried her four days before Mother’s Day.

My parents-in-law were married for 61 years and lived in the same compound in Manila where they lived since the day they were wed. They were the constant in each other’s life, they punctuated the other’s existence, they complemented each other, they brought out the best in each other, they were each other’s better half. I think they were each other’s oxygen — the quiet, unobtrusive presence in our lives that we cannot live without.

Ed used to say that the secret of his Pappy and Mommy’s longevity (and the longevity of their marriage as well) was their sense of humor. Pappy was quiet but had a military-like timing for his jokes, which drew Mommy’s hearty laughter.

Ed and his sisters always talk of the love and care their mother showered on them. Peewee, a grandmother herself, says she would miss the home-cooked meals her mother would send to her house even when there wasn’t any special occasion. Even when in the month before she died, she was still going to market and cooking up a storm in her kitchen for her kids and grandkids, even when she herself could no longer enjoy food, or eat beyond a few spoonfuls.

She wasn’t eager to be hospitalized. She was always saying, “Maybe this is God’s will for me. I am old already.” Maybe, in her mind, she was thinking that her passing on to the next life was a beginning, not an end — the beginning of her reunion with her beloved husband Carlos.

In fact, during her wake, her manicurista said my mother-in-law had made an appointment for home service about two weeks before she died. She had her hair dyed and had a pedicure. She reportedly told her manicurista, “Pagandahin mo ako dahil magkikita na kami ni Carlos. Susundan ko na siya.”

She put up a good fight in the hospital and even underwent surgery that lasted almost nine hours. Even in the ICU she remembers who of her nurses were noisy — they probably thought she was too heavily sedated. But my mother-in-law was a sharp and observant woman, even till the end.

Before the surgery, she asked her daughter Editha: “What else is my mission in life? I am already 85 years old.”

Editha said right away, “Your mission is to witness your recovery.” She nodded.

But perhaps, that is the mission we all wanted for her. But in her heart, she had made her choice. Weakened by her illness, she probably believed her mission was no longer in this earth. Her life was already a witness to the kindness of God and in praise of Him. She had accomplished her mission.

It was time to be reunited with her beloved Carlos.

Ed, Elvira and I were tasked by the family to take a look at Mommy Garding’s makeup before she was brought to her wake. The woman we beheld did not look like the Mommy we knew in her last few years. In his eulogy, Ed recalled we had asked the mortician to make adjustments in her makeup to make her look like the Mommy we knew. But no matter what we did, Mommy Garding looked 20 years younger.

When Mommy’s sisters-in-law Tita Fining, Tita Nena and Tita Ely saw her in repose at her wake, they gasped and said, “That is exactly how Garding looked when Carlos fell in love with her.”

Ed believes that his Mom suddenly shed all those years in her gentle face because now that she is in heaven, she is rid of all the burdens that she willingly took when she was alive to make her loved ones live happier lives.

Her almost divine “makeover,” plus her last-minute appointment with her manicurista, convinces me that Mommy Garding is blooming ever more now, in her husband’s embrace, under God’s approving eyes, in heaven.

I think for once, Pappy and Mommy had broken their vows — for even in death they did not part.

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