Lascia ch’io pianga
“I really want to be like Kenshin.”
I was referring to Kenshin Himura, protagonist of the manga Rurouni Kenshin. The final installment of its live-adaptation film series, I watched with my college best friend on Sunday night.
Kenshin is a hitokiri, a hired samurai assassin during the Bakumatsu period in Japan, who wields the sakabato, a reverse-blade sword, no longer to kill but to defend the peace of the people around him.
It’s funny when I think about it: how I am more attracted to a fictional character than actual, living persons, or women, such as, perhaps, actress and activist Emma Watson or former US first lady Michelle Obama. Kaoru Kamiya, a female character in the Rurouni Kenshin storyworld, had also left an imprint in me since childhood. Even if I vaguely understood what the anime adaptation alternately titled Samurai X was about back then, Kaoru’s strong will and outspoken personality may have influenced how I perceive femininity and courage today.
But Kenshin’s exaltation of the simple, pastoral life has always intrigued me. That he finds genuine joy in doing the laundry, and that he inspires, effortlessly, the people he meets, no matter how broken they may be, are attributes I can only wish to find in myself.
“You should kill many people first,” my partner quipped.
“No, I don’t. I’ve had enough trauma in my life to equal his.”
Trauma: a term people either avoid due to discomfort or use loosely as an excuse. It’s the perfect word to describe how my life has been playing out over the past week.
The last thing I told Maricel before she died was how excited I was that all live-action films of Rurouni Kenshin would be made available for streaming on Netflix. She reacted with the “wow” emoji. She paid for our shared subscription for the month of June in advance.
I hadn’t thought much of it back then — the lack of response, dismissing it as her possibly taking some time off of social interactions to devote more time for self-care; the advanced payment, assuming that she did it before she forgot, again.
Not especially now will there be a way to verify or confirm if she had been thinking of taking her life that Tuesday morning. Surely, though, the samurai story that entertained me in childhood has embedded its significance in my life more deeply than ever.
“Do you think I’m a good person?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I know you are.”
“Was it difficult to accept what happened to me?”
“Love, I had accepted it before you even realized what was happening.”
Since my sister’s passing, I have retained the normalcy in my daily routines, to feel alive. I paced myself and refused to take extra responsibilities in the meantime. I longed for the random chat notifications I used to receive from her. I itched to share relatable and funny memes, but there was no one on the receiving end anymore. And I had to learn to live without this special person in my life.
The feigned productivity I built to protect myself from the implosion of grief crumbled, eventually. After entertaining myself with TikTok videos until past 2 a.m. one night, as soon as I shut off my tablet’s screen, I cried.
I cried, until I was tired enough to sleep; yet, feeling tired, I continued to cry.
That was when it hit me: that I never truly allowed myself the time and space to feel my pain.
Taking my bereavement leave, which my employer graciously extended from a week to two, made me feel guilty. I chased deadlines that had to be pushed back because of my absence immediately after days of making final arrangements for my sister. I also had to support my mother overseas; she could not go home because of the pandemic and quarantine restrictions in place, and she turned the retirement age of 60 exactly a week after her youngest child died. She would’ve gone home, finally, this year. She missed her three daughters’ growing up years, and when she could make up for lost time, there was one less person to make up to.
My sister hadn’t kept in touch with anyone else in the family but me for the past five years — that was, until months before she died, when she made a cold call to ask my mother recipes for the air fryer she had recently bought. My mother raved about their conversation to me for days, describing it as a “miracle”. Interestingly, Maricel and miracle are anagrams. I’ve known this since childhood.
While reeling from the side effects of my second vaccination dose, I joined an online Buddhist retreat on grieving, synchronizing my time with Paris for a weekend. I paid no mind to the soreness of my legs during sitting meditation and found my place among a grid of 300-plus little boxes from 48 different countries. Each of those boxes represented a person who, like me, was suffering.
The shared witnessing of our sorrow during those days, when each of us profoundly believed that the pain we were cradling was ours alone to bear, is something that will give me unparalleled comfort for the rest of my days. It was a transformative experience: to be part of a family — and the “Inner Island” dharma sharing group — that not only acknowledged but also understood our deep well of emotions, that not only listened but also encouraged being listened to.
Three days later, I woke up to the news of Father Mike’s passing. I wasn’t sure how to react — I just got back from a retreat on grieving! — and I still am not sure how I feel about it to this day. We shared a close but complicated relationship, my mother has a fondness for him, and I struggle reconciling the good with the bad.
I can’t remember how we lost contact; it was likely because I went to therapy. When I reviewed our past conversations dating back to as early as October 2012 — at least the ones that were recorded in either my phone’s inbox or Facebook’s chat history — I found that the interaction just waned. The last messages were mostly about my early call time for a shoot the following morning at work, or that I had arrived at my rental and would be sleeping.
The last message I sent was in mid-2016. Nigel and I were almost a year into our relationship.
I do remember it had always been through calls that Father Mike and I communicated.
If I still believed in a higher being, I would’ve said he, or she, or it, had humor.
On the day I learned about Father Mike’s sudden demise, I was to talk about him — with someone I hold dear, whom I would be speaking with for the first time in seven years. It was a conversation I meant to initiate since years ago, one for which I had to mentally and emotionally prepare myself.
The phone call took more than two hours. Since then, I had to look up old journal notes and letters I never sent, examining every line that I had written, searching for clues that could help me regain repressed memories.
The blinking red light from the smoke detector has, once again, been competing with my sleep. I realized not all ceilings and walls are the same. Wrestling with the darkness, anyway, I deliberately watched videos that could trigger flashbacks and led myself into the pits of torment, sitting through a whirlwind of fleeting, incoherent images, trying to catch and hold on to something, some thing, any thing, that would at least make sense.
But every time I unravel a new experience, I forget. And the few I can recall — can, and not do — are the very things shattering the self-image I’ve worked so hard in years to shape.
Perhaps it was self-inflicted pain. For the longest time, I thought I was difficult to love.
So, I’m back to where it began: the perpetual dissonance between what I know and how I feel — “perpetual” being the struggle that had always stayed within me, waiting for moments of vulnerability before it resurfaces.
For all I know, my sister’s suicide may have been caused by a similar torture, the same beast but with a different face and name.
At least, for tonight, I wrote again. In my suffering, forgive that I am causing others’ suffering, too. There will be a time for atonement. For now, let me weep. •