Eulogy: Lola Batangas (1916–2018)

A year after Lola Bats passed on to the next life, I'm sharing the eulogy I wrote and read by Anna. I wasn't able to fly to the Philippines to attend her funeral because I just arrived in the USA and I was in the midst of school admission interviews.

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Lola Bats, as her grandkids fondly call her, lived a very long, fun-filled life. I may have lived only in the last third of her life but it will take me a while to get used to the fact that she is no longer with us. All of her grandchildren each had a special relationship and unique experience with her. For a few minutes, let me share some of mine.

Let’s start with food…

Anna, Biboy, and I used to spend our summer holidays in Padre Garcia. Lola would typically wake us up early in the morning and herd us off into the vegetable patch to pick fresh patani, sitaw, and kamatis. These were some of the ingredients for bulanglang, a vegetable soup she often paired with pupur, which are deep-fried vinegar-marinated pork cubes. Even after she moved from Padre Garcia to Sucat, she would always prepare (or supervise her helper to prepare) pupur and bulanglang whenever I visited her, even if I were just dropping off my cavan of rice straight after work. She made sure I’d eat some, no matter how late, before shooing me off back home to Calamba. When she became too old to cook, she would always apologise because she was not able to prepare pupur and bulanglang. I’m intimidated by frying meat so I never cooked pupur. But I was able to cook bulanglang for her once. She was so angry that there was no hugas-bigas, which she typically used to make the soup a bit thick. I was using squash (Mommy’s recipe) to substitute for hugas-bigas and Lola was protesting that it wasn’t the way her bulanglang was cooked. And then, she also had a lot of comments about the angles of the cut kalamismis and the length of the sitaw. I didn’t realise until then that Lola had a particular style of cooking bulanglang! She liked my bulanglang, though, and finished a surprisingly big portion.

Lola loved her mango shakes, just like Anna. One time, we went to Padre Garcia but made a stop at Lipa Grill. She ordered mango juice without consulting me so the waiter brought her canned mango juice. She complained. Ay! Bakit yan? Gusto ko yung fresh mango juice! In other words, she wanted mango shake. But just how much did she love mango shake? We had dinner in Crisostomo’s once. Ninang Trining, Mommy, and Daddy were with us. Lola’s mango shake just arrived and she slurped it down like a vacuum cleaner: one minute, the mango shake was there; it was gone the next! We, including Tita Ising, knew what happened after that.

The same went with “ice cream”. She used to request for “ice cream” whenever I visited her. But she wasn’t referring to Magnolia or Selecta. What she called “ice cream” was actually the grande sugar-free caramel Frappuccino with whipped cream from Starbucks. One time, Kuya Mitchie and I went to Starbucks a few metres outside her house to get her a drink. We just brought her Senior Citizen card with her. When the barista started looking for her, we said that she couldn’t come because she’s already 100 years old. She got pretty sick at some point after that so she no longer asked for her “ice cream” fix.

Now, let’s talk about travel…

When I visited her a few days after office trips, she’d say that I was like a bird, always flying off elsewhere. And then she would say that she already beat Lolo Bats with traveling. She got tired offlying airplanes and exploring Washington, D.C., Atlantic City, and other parts of the U.S. so when she got back to the Philippines, she wanted to ride the train.

She also liked road trips. When she was still strong, she’d ask me when we’d visit the farm in Padre Garcia. I typically answered that we could go if she’s game for the day. Often, she’d say yes, get her walking stick, and walk out the door. Often, we’d go to Cuenca and to Alitagtag before returning to Sucat. One time, the bridge at Pinagtung-Ulan was under repair so we had to do a detour through the barangay roads, which I never used before, to reach the STAR Tollway. We were lost but she didn’t think so because she had a story for each town we passed by. For example, we drove through Balagtas, Batangas and she started talking about Lolo using the tractor there. When we reached the Batangas City exit (instead of the Lipa exit), she exclaimed, Paano tayo nakarating sa Batangas City?!? There came a time when Lola wasn’t that strong anymore so we invited her helper to join us on her farm visits. Each time we visited the farm, Lola suddenly grew stronger and she’d walk so fast that her helper and I would have difficulty chasing after her! And then, as she approached 99 years old, I’d ask if she wanted to go but then she would decline because the drive was becoming too long for her, followed by her favourite comment Matanda na pala talaga ako.

And then there were her life lessons…

If other really old people had anting-anting to pass to the next generation, Lola had nuggets of wisdom. Some of her lessons that I could remember at the top of my head include:

•       Treat poor people the same way you’d treat middle-class and rich people.
•          Magmatanda ka nang mabuti sa mga kapatid mo.
•          Kung nakapag-aral lang ako, matalino rinsiguro ako.
•         Tatanda rin kayo.
•         Kapag nakapag-aral, di masyado mahirap magpalaki ng mga anak.

When she was in the ICU for a long time (I think when she was approaching her 101st year) I dropped by the hospital. She had a big smile on her face when she saw me and her first sentence was: Paggaling ko, pupunta ako sa States. When she was allowed to go home, she kept telling me: Paglakas ko, sasama ako sayo sa States. A month and a half after I migrated, she passed on, leaving her bodily limitations behind. I would like to believe that she made good her promise.