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Alone on New Year’s Eve
“Kilala mo pa ba si Mommy?”
Riza Vidanes asks this question to her one-year-old daughter, Summer, as soon as she arrives at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila.
Riza, a mother of two, works in China to be able to provide for her family. She arrived home a day late for Christmas and will leave a day before New Year’s Eve.
Looking intently at her daughter, she asked Summer three more times if she remembers her Mommy. Summer gives her mom a baffled look, perhaps trying to put together the puzzle using images of a woman’s face from a webcam and the woman right in front of her.
At the departure area, I met the Abalos couple. For the past 15 years Feliciana Abalos has not spent the New Year with her family. This year will be no different. She needs to fly back to Hong Kong because her employer has returned. “Wala po akong magagawa dahil gusto ko mabigyan [ng] magandang kinabukasan ang aking pamilya. Sa husband ko sana lagi kami ginagabayan ng Ama at buo ang aming pamilya,” Feliciana said.
Standing close to Feliciana is her husband Agapito. After all those years of seeing his wife off at the airport, bidding goodbye is perhaps, by now, a routine deplete of emotions.
Yet shortly before Feliciana makes it to the gate, the pain of separation began sinking in once again. Agapito told his wife, “Kailanman hindi ako magbabago. Lagi mo alalahanin kahit nasa malayo ka lagi pinagdadasal kita. I love you, 'nay.” He wiped the tears falling down his cheeks as Feliciana tried to hold back her own.
Christmas and New Year have always been a picture of happy reunions. For many of us, we will be spending the holidays with our loved ones. Yet for some families like Riza’s and the Abalos couple, they can only wish for the same next year.
For those who lost a mom or a dad, a sister, a brother, a baby or even a beloved pet, Christmas and New Year will never be complete ever.
I hardly have any recollection of a Christmas or a New Year when my family was complete. Truth be told, we never had any of those family photo beside a Christmas tree. My father is an OFW who worked in Saudi Arabia since I was two. He would come home every two years but almost always not on Christmas or New Year. He’d say it's the time of the year when he is most needed at work because no one would be around to look after the store he manned.
She knew my dad would not be home for Christmas nor on New Year’s Eve but year after year, my mom would painstakingly put up our Christmas tree and wrap our gifts. Oh how I love and miss you, ma.
The year after l lost my mom to Alzheimer’s disease, dad didn't get to spend the holidays with me and my brother. It was expected anyway.
It was a sad Christmas for me yet it was even sadder for my brother Robert. It took a while for him to come to terms that mom is gone for good.
I still remember knocking at the door, greeting him a Merry Christmas as soon as the clock struck twelve. He didn't open the door. He didn't have to say it. I knew he was grieving, I knew he was sobbing and he didn’t want me to join his misery.
On New Year’s Eve, my brother tried putting up a better show. He waited for midnight and greeted me a Happy New Year with a smile that looks so well rehearsed I knew he was faking it.
He ate the spaghetti I cooked just so I won't feel bad and then soon left to join his friends to bury himself in loud music and the sound of beer bottles clinking together.
Music and fireworks — they have their way of challenging misery and solitude, but no loud music and not even the grandest display of fire can banish the pain of a grieving heart, not as the year turns anew with our beloved ones nowhere in sight.
After that year the holidays became a little more bearable that the previous years. In one of those years I got a pet named Bradell who kept me company on Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Somehow we helped each other get through the unspoken sadness of the season.
After my brother got married, I knew I will be spending less and less of the holidays with him. What better way to escape solitude than immersing one's self with work. I had spent a New Year in Baguio, a Christmas in Dumaguete, and another Christmas at a 7-Eleven in Ortigas during a break at work. The things I did to make me forget the pain of being alone during the happiest times of the year.
God must have been watching me all these time. After all those years of solitude He gave me my own family. I will never be alone anymore on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve. I can never thank the Lord enough for seeing my pain and ending it just when I couldn't take it anymore.
These holidays, there will always be that someone somewhere, hoping to get a phone call from back home, that someone who slept through the night on Christmas and New Year’s Eve because there was no one else around, that someone who will open a bottle of wine and watch the fireworks alone from a far.
If you know of that someone, pick up the phone, and greet him or her a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
For that someone, somewhere, one day you will never be alone anymore. One day you will partake of Noche Buena and watch the fireworks on New Year’s Eve with the people you love. Somehow, someday, God, He will find a way. —AT/KG, GMA News
Bernadette Reyes is a senior correspondent/anchor at GMA Network Inc. She has authored a number of essays about motherhood and her favorite topic, her mom.
Read her previous stories about her family here:
