‘I remember her fondly as I watch the Catholic world prepare to mark the holiest of days of its faith.’
I WAS not fortunate enough to have known my grandmother on my father’s side. She died when my father was only six years old, and he used to tell me that he never knew his mother much.
So my brothers and I grew up knowing only our mother’s mother, Liviosa Anoñuevo Dichosa, sweet on the one side and tough on the other, who (at least in my eyes) was the glue that held her family together — a much older husband and seven children (three girls and four boys).
She was the one who knew how to get things done; when the old family home in Cubao was torn down to make way for a four-door apartment, she was the one who was at the construction site regularly, noting the pace and quality of work, encouraging and admonishing at the same time.
She was also the one who was irritated when my older brother blew his Boy Scouts whistle from the window of a neighboring house where our nuclear family moved; the workers on the site mistook it to be the signal for a break so everyone stopped working! (I don’t remember that whistle-blowing to have been accidental, by the way.)
She was also a devout Catholic and that is where, I guess, I have become less of her grandson. She sent her daughters to good Catholic schools: my mother (the eldest child) went to the Holy Ghost College (later on the College of the Holy Spirit or, as we her sons would call it, of the Holy Mamaw), while the two younger girls (who became of school age when the family business was no longer robust) went to Centro Escolar, also a Catholic school for girls. The boys? Well, boys will be boys so a strict Catholic upbringing didn’t seem that important to their mother.
Her religiosity came through most during Holy Week. Of course, at that time it helped that there were no malls, that stand-alone movie houses would close down mid Holy Week, and that TV shows and radio programs would sign off as early as Wednesday. But we weren’t allowed to be noisy, especially after 3 p.m. on a Friday (The Lord is dead, we were told); no one was allowed to go out on a “gimmick” as you could court an accident (or worse); and, yes, there were things you couldn’t eat until after Sabado de Gloria was over and done with.
She once said that the reason Christ had two fingers raised in many images was because the world would end before the year 2000, and I remember being horrified at the thought.
She was not techie enough to understand that He was in fact warning about Y2K long before the world went gaga planning for it.
She also didn’t believe the Church would ever sanction cremation because, she reasoned, we needed our bodies for the day when Christ would come back and summon all of us (well, okay, only the deserving) to rise from our graves — and how indeed could your body rise if it’s all ashes — worse, scattered everywhere and not buried in just one place?
Going to Sunday Mass with her was so quaint as it was at a time when women wore veils over their heads and even had little cushions to lay out and kneel on when the proper time to do so came during the service.
Because of her, I grew up witnessing the Family Rosary practices of having the image of the Virgin Mary brought from one house to another for a week of evening prayer.
I think much of her faith has since been passed on to my younger brother, who has been a US Jesuit for nearly three decades. None of it was passed on to me (ha-ha).
While I truly cannot imagine embracing much of her beliefs — especially since she grew up in a world of conservative Catholicism which held that only Catholics would be saved — I appreciate the value of a belief system that helped her hold her world and her family together for as long as she lived. So while some of her beliefs (such as the V sign of images of Christ) have been proven to be baseless (as have many of the beliefs of the most conservative of Catholics anyway!) my growing up years would have been far less colorful — and family oriented — had she not been who she was, holding on to the beliefs she held on to until her dying day.
I remember her fondly as I watch the Catholic world prepare to mark the holiest of days of its faith.
