“11 Days”
by: CCOC
My Bonsai Moment
(Inspired by Edith Tiempo’s Bonsai)
11 days, that is all the time I had with my loving mother. Short, that even the sound of her breath can’t be recalled. Her face is being remembered through pictures and stories from families and friends. For twenty years I hold unto those, trying to visualize a life with her in it. I create fragrance and warm touches in my head, imagining what it would be like to receive warm hugs and kisses from a mother. That is basically how I live my life without her by my side, but I know God has reasons for all the things that happened, are happening and will happen. That He only gives His toughest battles to His strongest soldiers.
It’s hard… that I need to take a short pause for a deep breath every time I’m asked because it is really hard to grow up without the person who is from the very beginning is the reason why you’re living. But life is not that bad after all, I have the other half of my heart beside me — my family. And with them, I can say with full contentment that I was raised full of love and without me feeling less loved.
However, there’s always a point in our lives that we’re too focus to live at the moment and with the people who are physically there with us. And as days pass by, we start to create this routine that subconsciously makes us almost forget the people that are no longer with us. And that is how I realized that I’m starting to feel that uncertainty in my heart if what I have is the real love of a mother or is it just a created feeling through my mind? It may sound strange but I came to that moment that the word “mama” is slowly becoming a mere idea in my head. As if it is just a word that I have to search the meaning for me to understand it. Right there and then, I was reminded of this particular story told by a family friend and this was the moment before my mother passed away. She told me how my mother who’s bleeding so much still thinks of me. That before she was brought to the hospital with all the chaos around her, all that she had in mind is to kiss me first, not knowing that it would be the last… or maybe she knew.
And that is my “Bonsai Moment”, that told memory of me and my mother. All this time I thought because there were only a few moments that can be recounted with my mama which all I can’t remember, I won’t be able to feel the real love of a mother. But then with that short memory that we shared before she died, though I can’t recall how tight her hug or how soft her kiss was, I felt her motherly love. The unconditional and selfless love of a mother that transcends beyond the borders of the sky. And this made me realized that you can’t measure or question the love of a person based on how much time he or she spends with you or how many memories you made together. Know that there’s us who only had 11 days to keep in our hearts.
