Lolo’s Ghosts!

By Jing Villamil

 

THIS, too, waited three generations to be told. It is not about her Lolo’s ghost, obviously. Though he was, and is, much revered by his “salinlahi” for his superlative achievements despite all odds thrown his way from childhood to young adult, in their eyes, Lolo is definitely singular, not plural.

Apparently, she refers to the ghosts her Lolo hosted. More precisely, the ghosts who followed him around.

Her Lolo was one of the country’s many unaccounted disappeared. A “desaparecido”. He still is. If only there were their opposites of a few accounted appeared, all would had been swell and well up to his old age.

He had been gone for quite some time, but to his family, he is not gone. In fact, the marble sign atop his empty grave is very insistent on this: “He is not gone. He just went ahead.” There is no date of his death, only of his birth.

You can almost see and hear his children and their children stomping their feet. A simultaneous temper tantrum: “He is not gone! He just went ahead!”

As they, whom you love and lost are not gone. As we will not simply be gone. Just went ahead.

For years after his disappearance, his clinic and the rooms beyond were swept, dusted, aired but were left largely reverently undisturbed. In the dim coolness were floor-to-ceiling shelves and shelves of books he had penned, typed and bound himself. The whole household would wake-up before the sun was up with his relentless pounding, re-aligning and slapping together of hardbound covers and the pages in-between! And rugby smells with the morning whiffs of chico fruits and giant sampaguitas!

His physician’s scribblings were coherent only to himself and to his colleagues to whom he endorsed referrals, and to the pharmacists whose major requirement for the course must had been the ability to decipher doctors’ ciphers. His biographer might have to give up her own ghost before she can be halfway through his notes!

Maybe to spare his biographer crossed/walled eyes, he would take the time to type in his ancient machine the patient’s name, details of medical history, treatments and follow-up. Just in case one among his bloodline would step on his same antiseptic footsteps. Eventually, one child and one grandchild did. There was no sense in wasting good genes.

Anyway, tucked behind those bound books on the shelves, were bottles and bottles of carefully-preserved oddies, for want of a better layman’s term. Bottles intended to be sealed and never to be unsealed. For years. Decades. Centuries even. He must have embalmed the oddies himself; there was no other to do the job. And in his usual obsessive compulsive way, with much attention to museum craft. And prayerful respect to God’s creatures as they were once were. Or parts of them were. This, too, was UP-PGH continuing education.

As were the specialties and fellowships he kept attaching after his name – surgery, gynecology, obstetrics, internal medicine, family medicine, family planning, cardiology, even medical technology and radiology – through a lifetime of postgraduate weekends or every other days at Herran, now Pedro Gil. He entrusted boxes of tapes to doctor-friends to record missed lectures, and he thanked them with frozen fresh Dagupan bangus and fat green avocados from his patients Camps 1 to Baguio!

As if these bottled ghosts haunted, hounded him to continue to trace the why and the how of their not becoming whole, of the monstrocities they had become. That the others may become complete, monstrocities no more.

(To be continued.)

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