Just a few years ago, she was diagnosed with diabetes. She was teaching then in a private school in Isulan, the capital town of Sultan Kudarat. The doctor's prognosis was gloomy: her days were numbered. Because of that and some other reasons, she decided to go back to Kulaman. At home, she continued with passion what she had been doing—teaching, serving her church, painting. She would only take a pause whenever she had to go to the hospital because her gastritis had confined her to a crouching position or her legs had become too numb and swollen. She had developed complications due to diabetes, and the worst was kidney damage.
Last summer, she got married to a gentle man who wanted to spend a lifetime with her even if he knew a lifetime could mean a thousand days only. Last June, she was given a permanent position in a public high school. It meant a regular salary. It meant she would have money to pay for her medicine. The opportunity, however, came too late. Her doctor said only 30 percent of her kidneys were working, and she had to start undergoing dialysis.
She refused further treatment. She decided to embrace her fate. She said she didn't want her family to be buried in debt just so a few hundred days would be added to her life. She ate whatever she craved for and did everything she wanted to do—that still meant teaching her students Math, speaking about God's love every Sunday, and giving life to walls with enamel paint.
The swelling of her body worsened by the day, and she had to be rushed to the hospital in October this year. After a couple of days in the hospital, she was brought home. She could not get up from bed, and she had difficulty speaking. She said, however, that she didn't feel any pain. She felt nothing.
She lapsed into a coma soon after. She lay unconscious and snoring. More than twenty-four hours later, she woke up. In an audible, lucid voice, she called her mother and asked the old woman to pray. Her husband looked at the mother and daughter with pain; his wife did not ask for him. She just slipped into unconsciousness once more and never made a sound again.
