My father’s ghosts!

By Emmanuelle

THIS story is best told in the first person, so Emmanuelle might as well:

My father’s ghosts. Plural. Not his own ghost obviously. Though spectacular in his children’s eyes, father is definitely singular.

I refer to his ghosts. Or rather more correctly, the ghosts he hosted. Even more precisely, the ghosts who followed him around.

Let me start you a little less giddy. My father is one of the country’s too many unaccounted disappeared. If only there were their counterpart of a few accounted appeared.

He has been gone for quite sometime, but for us his family, he is not gone. In fact, the sign on his empty tomb is very insistent on this: He is not gone. He is just gone ahead

You can almost hear his children stamping their booted feet down. A simultaneous temper tantrum. He is not gone. He is just gone ahead.

As they whom you had loved and lost are not gone. As we all will not be simply gone. Just gone ahead. Like the guide who has the only flashlight in the dark? Like Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones jumping his way ahead across traps within the mountain of doom in search of the lost treasure? Very much like so.

In the dim coolness of father’s den were shelves and shelves of books he had penned and bound himself. His penmanship in his physician’s scribbling, were coherent only to himself, to his colleagues to whom he endorsed referrals, and the pharmacist whose major requirement for the course must have been the ability to decipher doctor’s ciphers. His biographer would have given up his own ghost before he was halfway through those notes.

During his later years, father would take the time to type the names and details of his patients’ medical histories just in case one of his children or grandchildren would follow his same antiseptic-fumed footsteps. Eventually, a child did and a grandchild. There is no sense wasting good photographic genes.

Photographic is the word here, not pornographic, though the doctor’s jokes being swapped around like crazy would like you to think so. On second thought, there truly are a lot of naked bodies cutting across the pages of medical books before clerkship and internship. The bodies are really actually cut across, or any which way the academics require for better viewing of the organs within.

Anyway, tucked behind those books were bottles and bottles of carefully preserved oodles, for want of a better layman’s term. Bottles that were meant to be sealed and never to be unsealed for years. Centuries even. He must have embalmed the oodles himself, and in his usual obsessive compulsive way, with so much attention to museum craft. And prayerful respect to God’s creatures as they were, or parts of them were. These, too, were education continuing.

As were the specialties and fellowship he kept stacking after his name – surgery, obstetrics, gynecology, internal medicine, cardiology, family medicine – through a postgraduate lifetime of weekends or even every other day of classes at Herran’s UP-PGH where he fast whisked off a degree in medicine.

As if his ghosts kept haunting, hounding him to trace the why and the how of their monstrosities. That they be monstrosities no more. That they be finalities no more.

Not all tucked arrayed on sight and hidden behind those shelves were strictly in practice of the healing profession. Lodged between and among those books of hourly daily weekly monthly yearly details was literature. His ghosts, at last.

One story is about this early morning call he responded to, beyond Camp 3 of Kennon Road. Though he was compensated not in doctor’s fees but meager farm produce, the natives of the mountain were his tribe after his own heart.

Well, he pronounced the patient, a man in his supposedly healthy forties, to be well on his way to dying. This heart could only beat up to three, in the afternoon. As it was mid-morning, he advised the family to spend the four to five hours left to say their proper farewells and to make him feel their love through senseless skin and fading ears.

At three in the afternoon, the nail-tapping started at the edge of his office desk. He looked up, and greeted apparently no one. He said: you are not a minute more; you certainly are in a hurry. Apparently no one stopped tapping his nails, tapped his way past the doctor to down the clinic hall, through the walls, to the dim coolness of the den.

Home to the others. Apparently, to this one, too.

(Readers may reach columnist at jingmil@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/
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