ETHER DIARIES

When the funeral coordinator turned over my mother’s ashes, she handed us a small packet of fragments. For a moment, I thought they were implants I had never known about. She told us they were green bones. It is rare, she said, and many believe it to be a sign of a virtuous life. I held them in my hand, surprised by the idea that even in death, my mother had one more story to tell.

It still feels unreal that she is gone. When I went home, I sat on her death bed, feeling the faint imprint of her presence, and wished I had given her more of my time. I let work swallow me whole, and I forgot how fragile the remaining days with her were. Yet one thing I never regretted was letting her serve as a barangay captain.

When she first decided to enter public service, my sister and I resisted. She was already a senior citizen, and we thought she deserved rest, quiet, and the softness of retirement. But our mother was never built for silence. She needed people, movement, conversation, purpose. She needed life. So we stepped aside and let her chase what called to her. And she did. And she shone.

During the four nights of her wake, I met people who traveled long distances just to stand before her one last time. Many were strangers to me. They came with stories, with gratitude, with tears that began even before they stepped inside the chapel. Women clung to each other as they cried. Men who looked unbreakable lost their composure the moment they spoke her name. These were the people she helped, the people whose lives she changed while I was away building my own. She had so much love to give. And what she could not give to us, she poured into them.

My sister and I decided to place the green bones in a pendant that was offered to us. I stared at it and as someone who does not easily accept cultural beliefs, I searched for the science behind it. And yes, there is an explanation.

But when I look back at my mother’s life, I realize she never needed green bones to prove anything. Her virtue was written in the people who came, in the grief they carried, in the love that filled the chapel for four long nights.

That love is enough to say she lived with kindness. That love is enough to say she lived well. And if the belief about green bones were true, then she lived a life that made it undeniable.

I’ll keep thanking the Lord for you are the mother He gave to us. I love you Ma.