Lucrecia Allado Ravelo Vergara (1912-2017)

Lucrecia Allado Ravelo Vergara with the author. (Contributed Photo)

Lucrecia joins her Jaime at Mililani Memorial Park today, exactly 97 years since she was born in Pasuquin, Ilocos Norte, married to an eight-year older husband from San Esteban, Ilocos Sur, who preceded her to Milalani 10 years ago, married for 55 years to the day she died. Lucrecia took care of her dates and numbers well.

I visited her two years ago while she was at the nursing home in Kuakini Nursing Care where she turned physically invalid due to a cracked hipbone. She was orphaned early, with two male siblings, an elder one who acquitted himself in Bataan during World War II but caught the dreaded TV virus and bug in the process. The other was a young sickly boy who came around before she was and had two years of care before his ability to survive went kaput. But she managed to help this teacher, her eldest boy who she made to understand that life is lived on earth, and not anywhere else. She would not name Hegel or Nietzsche, Einstein or Edison, but she had the wisdom of her age lived in her daily life. She did not look at the variations of the Egyptian Rah to her present-day Dios up in the sky but was devoted to what her Jesus Christ on earth represented. Her life lived the witness of that devotion to the end.

The mother of five, I was the eldest boy, the automatic patriarch of the family when my father left the Philippines for graduate school in the United States. My elder sister will be at her funeral, ironically playing the next matriarch in the family, a role that was denied her in the heavily patriarchal system of Pilipino life, like everywhere else in the world. Manang Fe Rosario left her sickly husband behind as well, will significantly play the role she deserved and we had as a family long ago affirmed.

Fe leads the remaining family of five, me here in Saipan, and the rest in Honolulu, with the middle boy Alex a retired chaplain of the Honolulu Police Force, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, our fourth brother with the Hawaii Parole Board, and the youngest sister, a retired nurse at Kapiolani Hospital. She raised five kids for almost six years while her husband pursued graduate studies at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky.

It is now a quaint family of five, the new elders as it were, and our focus is not to highlight this particular mother and her family but to say that there are just as many families out there who had managed to keep a picture of corporateness while maintaining the faces and roles of its individual members. We delight in our gifts and contradictions; so do others as well.

For Lucrecia, today is her glorious day, and solemnly we salute the matriarchy she firmly showed but quietly maintained. Salud.

Jaime Vergara Jr.
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