Almost four months ago here in Calatagan Batangas, Philippines, my grandmother died, succumbing to lung cancer. It was diagnosed just four months before her death. She was only 74, but decades of nicotine inhalation made her lungs weak and unable to do their jobs. She died peacefully without gasping for breath.
I know she's not ready yet. She's telling me so during the nights and dawns we're together. I was her nurse during the night. In late May she worsened. She was as hopeless as a baby. But we showed her that we love her. We took care of her until the end. At exactly 8 p.m. on June 1, 2011 she breathed her last.
The next morning I heard my aunts and uncles conversing. All attentions and gazes were on a calendar that was posted on our front door. They were so puzzled about the calendar, and when I looked at it, I too felt uneasy, as if all my hairs went up. Then it hit me: I saw it before. But I just thought there's nothing unusual there.
What I'm talking about is the cloth calendar that we annually pre-order during Christmas time. The one with family our surname printed below the picture on it. All dates with corresponding holidays were marked yellow, while the ordinary days were marked white. What so puzzling here is: Why does that the day 1 below the month of June have a red mark on it? It's the only date that has a red mark on it.
Some skeptics here dismissed it as "kids might have put red in it" (for we have so many kids here; five at least ranging from 1 to 8 years of age), or they say that it's just a human/machine error from the factory. I talked to the kids (except from the 1 year-old) and as what I was expecting: no one did it, or no one put that red mark on that June 1st.
For me, yes, to conform with the skeptics, I agree that human/machine error is responsible for the unusual thing on that calendar. But because my grandmother died on that date, it's not easy to vanish the idea that our time here on earth is pre-destined, that someone knows when are we going to die.
