Why do Filipinos always want to come home?
(DATELINE: San Francisco International Airport) While waiting for our flight back to Manila, my siblings who sent me off told me that there is a phenomenon of birds migrating to the north in summer, then going back to the south by winter. My brother Jonathan — a US citizen, a former air force combatant in the Kuwait defense against Iraq, and now a federal police officer in Washington — told me that, in fall, salmon would come from the oceans to go home to their birthplace upstream and give birth to the next generation. Then they die in the spots where they were born. Amazing.
No matter where oceans they go for food, they would go back to the river of their birth, lay eggs, prepare the next batch of salmon, only to die there. That is their cycle of life. There is also a small town of Capistrano in south California, where pigeons always go home in the same season of the year. They migrate to the northeast, as far as Canada, and south to Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. When it’s roosting time, they go home to their town, like in a song, When The Pigeons Go Home To Capistrano. This is a natural phenomenon, consistent with the pattern for all living things. Wonderful.
Now, I understand why my 94-year-old father —sick and bedridden, in oxygen and aided by many therapists and caregivers — begged me to bring him home to his hometown in Ronda or Dumanjug where he was born in 1925. He wants to die in the bosom of his relatives, but all my siblings are in Washington, and I am the only one left here. My father must be torn between USA and Philippines and, in his mind, his homeland is winning the ambivalent crossroad. Our mom died a couple of years back in Fife City, an Indian reservation at the famed Rainier Mountain. Her remains were cremated, and buried in Ronda. My old man wants to die in his hometown and be buried next his mother from Dumanjug, and his wife in Ronda.
Like the birds and the fish, life has a certain pattern of wanting to go back to where we started. I also wish to be buried in our mountain barangay at sitio Pusodsawa, where we had our home — a small cogon and bamboo hut where 10 of my siblings were born. As the eldest, I took care of my younger brothers and sisters, in between schools and farm work. I wrote in my Last Will and Testament that I am leaving the land to my children and they must build a JBJ Memorial there, where there is peace and quiet, serenity and nature unmolested by traffic, pollution and politics.
Filipinos may stray all over the world — USA, Middle East, Europe, or Africa. But when they are about to meet their Creator, they want to go back to the place where they started. The fish go back to the rivers to lay eggs, the pigeons go home to Capistrano. And my Papa just want to be with his parents and with my mom. What a wonderful pattern of life and the next life. After all, each of us will go home to our Creator. Weather, weather lang.
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