My Mother Lives Here Because I Live Here

This is Grief at a Distance, a column by Matt Ortile examining his grief over his mother’s death in the Philippines during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the apartment on Sterling, I think it was the light that spoke to me.

Sun sliced into the bedroom, the living room-dining room, and the galley kitchen through generous southern exposures. The views weren’t spectacular—just the buildings on the other side of the block, and the parking lot promised on StreetEasy. I don’t drive; Mom never let me. But her voice, from the back of my brain: They will never build on top of that lot. We’ll always have natural light.

I took off my face covering and washed my hands, partly to check the water pressure. It was August of 2020. Covid cases in New York City were at a seven-day average of about two hundred fifty. But, as she might say, people are still dying. I felt safe touring apartments, especially when my broker gave me access to the spaces on my own. This was the sixth place I’d seen. (First one was too dark; second, too small; third, too expensive; fourth, too shabby; fifth, absolutely haunted.)

Still, as I said to Dad, I was just looking. I didn’t need to move. Stay put, I told myself, and calm down. Moving from a studio to a one-bedroom would be yet another milestone, a huge life change, in an already tumultuous year. It was the middle of a pandemic. I’d just published my first book. Mom had just died of cancer. Why leave my home of four and a half years?

But, she said, the light.

I negotiated a price and they took the Sterling apartment off the market. They were impressed by my Google Drive folder, ready with all my documents. (Always be prepared, Mom once said, with her tax returns sticking out of her purse, after another open house we’d gone to “for fun.”) The next week, I signed the papers in an oversized conference room, six feet apart from everyone else.

My welcome was warm. On move-in day, a neighbor introduced herself. She secured her floral face mask and shuffled through my new kitchen, pointing out the renovations. I asked how long she’d been living in the building. Proudly, she replied, “Over thirty years.” There was also the man with his partner down the hall—“I’m a Vassar alum, too!”—who received my light fixtures when I missed the delivery. There was the co-owner of the coffee shop across the street; she makes my iced oat milk maple latté as soon as I wave through the window. And there was the born-again Christian next door, her pamphlets in hand; “Matthew—what a beautiful name. Your mother made a good choice.”

Even the light woke me gently—no later than eight o’clock, whenever I managed to evade my grief-induced insomnia. A new place disrupts routine, encourages new habits. I made sure to put my antidepressants where I would see them: in the marble bathroom, next to the hand soap.

I furnished the apartment in a frenzy: a blue velvet sofa, a mid-century dining table, at least eight place settings with dessert spoons for when we’re all vaccinated. I lined a wall with bookshelves for a more vibrant background on Zoom. Instead of a big housewarming, friends got tested and joined me for small dinners: my belated birthday with Rachel; Thanksgiving with Mia; a farewell feast for Krutika. They gave me the gift of company, the space to grieve, permission to sob into the cotton table napkins I sourced from CB2.

I moved because I wanted to leave the apartment where my mother died. It was not “the apartment where my mother died,” in that she did not literally die there. Mom died in the Philippines—serenely, Dad said, her hand in his. However, in my mind, my old studio on Ocean Avenue will always be where I woke up on June 13, 2020, to see fifty missed calls from Dad; where I cried and wailed and begged for his forgiveness; where I spent seven hours in bed, calling everyone I loved to tell them the person I loved most was gone.

The Sterling apartment was my attempt at a new beginning. I needed to feel a sense of progress, momentum, stuck as I was in Brooklyn because of Covid, unable to grieve with my family in Manila. But Mom has never known this new place, will never visit it (at least not corporeally). It guts me that I’ll never get to cook her a meal here, to offer her my bed while I sleep on the couch, to show her the life I’m continuing to build. I fear this home will never know her touch. I fear my future because she will not be in it.

Now that I have the counter space, I bought a KitchenAid stand mixer for baking. I cried because Mom never got to give me her recipe for coconut macaroons. Then I used a recipe that uses pistachios. I cried because Mom loved pistachios.

The apartment was my attempt at a new beginning—stuck as I was in Brooklyn, unable to grieve with my family in Manila.

When my grandmother died, one way Mom felt her mother’s presence was by the smell of flowers when there were none. Mom promised me that she would do the same and say hello from heaven. In June, I did smell roses nearly every day. But that was likely all the bouquets I got that month, the back-to-back congratulations on my book and condolences about Mom’s death.

“She’s your guardian angel now,” my stepsister tells me. My family insists she’s with God, in a better place. They’re telling me what they think I want to hear—that she’s still with me, somehow. I’m agnostic, and I find the terms of Catholicism disagreeable. Still, I try to be gracious. I nod along and say that yes, she has to be somewhere, at peace, one with the universe. She’s no longer suffering, Dad believes, and so I must as well.

But I don’t want her watching over me. I need Mom next to me, on this same mortal plane, only a call or text or transpacific plane ride away. (I’m old. You do the traveling. Collect the miles.) That was the comfort of our immigrant lives, after she and Dad returned to the Philippines. Technology gave us ways to be together, as best we could, helped us figure out how to live apart. Now, we are simply apart.

When a cousin offered his condolences, I asked him about his own late father: “Nararamdaman mo pa ba si Tito?” Literal translation: “Do you still feel him?” It’s been ten years, he said in Tagalog, so not really anymore. He seemed almost relieved, and I respect that. But to me, the possibility is frightening. I never want to feel that she’s not with me.

At Sterling, as beautiful and bright as it is, something still feels cold. Admittedly, it’s winter and I keep the windows open to circulate the air. But I need the warmth of my mother herself, her embrace. I long to hug her again, to welcome her at my front door, to hear what she thinks of the rugs, the glassware, the light. What I would give to even see her at the dining table as a ghostly apparition.

“Basta lang hindi nakakatakot, hah?” I sometimes say to her, to the empty apartment. Mom often asked the same of my late grandfather: If you’re there, show yourself. Just don’t scare me.

At Thanksgiving, Mia cried when she saw on my bookshelf a photograph of Mom and me as a kid. It’s a picture I’ve had with me in every home I’ve known in New York. It depicts Mom at her—to me—most iconic: silk dress, pearls, Princess Diana revenge haircut. Mia hugged me, looked around the apartment bathed in golden light, and said, “Tita would be so proud of you.” Then she corrected herself: “She is proud of you. I know it.”

“I’ve never met your mom,” Krutika told me, as I gave her a towel and a pair of spa slippers. She was crashing on my couch before moving to Los Angeles. She was looking at the same photograph: three-year-old me wearing his first barong Tagalog, pressing his cheek against his mother’s, who smiles like the sun. “But I feel like I have,” she went on. “I know who she is—at least as a mother—because she raised my best friend.”

Rachel brought risotto for my belated birthday dinner, and admired the dining table as we ate. It reminds me of the one Mom had made for us in Las Vegas, I said, and then began to cry. “Oh there she is!” Rachel said, pointing over my shoulder. I swiveled around; she meant the photo of me and Mom, lit by a rose-scented candle. Rachel took my hand and said, “Tell me your favorite stories about her.”

Mom always looked for natural light when we went to open houses. In the Philippines, she’d lived in dark places all her life: her childhood home in the projects, the apartment she shared with my birth father. Las Vegas was a buyer’s market when we arrived in 2003, and she always judged a house first by its windows. Then we talked about how we’d decorate, insisting on our future together in America, filled with glittering promise.

The last home we shared was the one on Baywater Avenue, before I left for college. It was a five-bedroom two-story house in a new gated development, with empty lots to the south and west, and the street to the north. During the open house, shafts of golden sun were pouring in from all sides. At that, Mom said, This is the one.

Or so Dad tells me. These days, when I call to say hello, we inevitably reminisce. Together, we reconstruct the woman we love most in our heads, with our words, deprived of the actual person. Mom’s high school classmates once invited me and Dad to a Zoom call to swap stories and remember her. He and I were moved by the gesture, and their memories too. In the middle of the call, I wrote in my journal: “We are nothing more than stories.”

I fear this home will never know Mom’s touch. I fear my future because she will not be in it.

When we tell stories, we lend our voices to the characters. Whether a friend or lover, a coworker or parent, a woman at the market or even in fiction, we are the ones to give them life in retelling. In complimenting my book, readers have admired how I draw Mom in its pages. Of course, I sometimes say, she appears in the book as refracted through my eyes, how I choose to recall and depict her. That mother is not Mom, not in her entirety.

Still, it’s what we have to remember those we love. That was the theme of the speech I gave at her inurnment in Manila, which I attended via Zoom. (I set up my ring light and wore a light blue suit. I’d asked Dad if we should wear black and he said, “No, she will hate that.” He wore his suit from their second wedding.) I encouraged those present to tell stories about her—as a wife, sister, stepmother, classmate, colleague, friend—to keep her alive in our hearts. She exists differently in each one.

Alone in my apartment, without her and without witness, I try to listen for her, pag nararamdaman ko siya. But to conjure her is to pull from my syllabary, my words rather than hers. I consider that voice when I first came to Sterling, first saw the light. Who spoke then? When I hear her voice in my head, is she not only an echo—or an echo of me?

I am, in fairness, an echo of her. It was always a point of pride that I greatly resembled her when I was younger; “You smile just like your mom!” so say my titas. As I got older, people noticed more often our comportment, how we were alike in grace and movement. Once, on a flight to Paris, I met a Filipino family seated next to me. As I spoke, one of them said, “Are you May’s son?” She knew Mom from school, and had recognized me by the cadence of my speech, its similarity to May’s.

Though our time together was short, we’ve shared so much of ourselves with one another—as immigrant mother and son, as gay son and his protector—that you can expect a little bleeding. At home, when I make a joke or a mistake, I sometimes react by making a funny face in a mirror (you have to make your own company when you live alone) and realize Mom is staring back at me, laughing at me. What parts of me are her, and what parts of her are me? At this point, does it matter?

She lives here because I live here.

That’s what I’ve wanted to hear, I think, as I grieve. No surprise that I have to write it out myself. What helped toward the end of Mom’s life, as Dad and I worked through our anticipatory grief, was writing things down. Dad kept a diary—one sentence for every day. I won’t pull from his pages, but here’s a terrible bit from mine: “An ocean apart, my family on faraway shores; will I miss the boat on my grief?” (No, for I am firmly In It.) Writing is grieving, in a way—memorializing, celebrating, making meaning. I’m working on doing as I advised: telling stories to honor her, to carry her, to feel her with me for as long as I can.

The Sterling apartment can be a touch chilly, but I’ll see in the spring if that’s my spirit or just the weather. As I decorate, I’ve found myself drawn to teal, her favorite color. More specifically: an almost-emerald that evokes turquoise waters and, in turn, snow-white sand. She always wanted a beach house; I once promised her I’d give her a home in Palawan. She dreamt of sleeping to the rhythm of crashing waves.

At night, I play ocean sounds. I crack my windows open, just an inch, and get into bed, wrapping myself in my winter quilt, warm and blue-green. When the sun rises, I wake up to the light hitting my toes, my torso, then finally my face. (Good morning, anak.) I don’t turn away.

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