Death of an Artist

With her death, I am tempted to believe that good people die young. She was a responsible high school teacher, a dedicated pastor of her church, and a self-taught muralist always willing to share her art. She was only in her early thirties when she joined her creator last month.

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.

Kulaman Jars in Cebu

I wasn’t able to update this blog for more than a week, again, because I’ve been to a writing workshop, again. This time, it was in Cebu. Yes, Cebu, where some of the Kulaman burial jars were taken.

Of course, I didn’t let the opportunity to see the jars pass. On November 5, Monday, I dropped by the University of San Carlos Museum, and for the first time, I was able to see the actual jars, not just their online photos. I even ran my fingers along their ridges. It was a surreal experience. I found myself on the verge of tears.

The jars were displayed atop a knee-high wooden platform about two meters wide and four meters long. The platform was placed right in the center of the museum, which was about the size of three classrooms joined at the sides. Thus I can say that the burial jars from Kulaman are the most prominently featured, and maybe the most valuable, artifacts in the museum.

After my extensive online research, I thought I had become a connoisseur of sorts of the jars. I was taken aback when I could not properly classify the artifacts in front of me. I tried my best, though, and I came up with an inventory of burial jars in USC’s possession.

I counted thirty-seven items in all, but only two of them were complete. One was medium-sized, circular, and nearly immaculate. Its body had bold diagonal ridges, and its cover was in the shape of a tent. Carved on the cover were two figures of lizardlike men. The figures were placed back-to-back, on the two wider sides of the cover.

Another complete item was a small quadrilateral jar that appeared grimy. It had dark yellow streaks around it. Its simple flat cover had a protruding knob. At first I thought the design was phallic, but on closer inspection, I found out that tiny holes had been bored on the knob to make it appear like a human face.

Including the two complete ones, there were eighteen jars altogether. The rest of the thirty-seven items were mostly anthropomorphic lids and some fragments I could not identify. Of the eighteen jars, only three were quadrilateral; the others were circular. Two were more than one meter high. Most had simple vertical or diagonal ridges around their bodies, but one of the tallest had a carved figure of a man.

The jars, or at least the ones that didn’t have covers, were empty, so there were no Late Neolithic human bones to see. The collection, though, also had some pieces that were discovered with the jars. They were tacked on a board near the wall, and they included stones, shells, and boars’ teeth.