A tribute to those we forget, the ones we leave behind

When I think of my childhood, I think of dreamy episodes - tiny, vintage snippets salvaged from a dusty old roll of film. I remember hot summer days running around barefoot in my grand-aunt's garden with a group of cousins - playing games like Marco Polo and Sardines, or rummaging for pyrites and small pieces of quartz through discarded mounds of gravel - until the darkness of evening forced us all to go home.

But in the midst of these happy memories, what I don't recall is the woman who raised me. The shadow who followed me everywhere and wiped smudges of dirt off my face, who bathed and dressed me everyday, combed my hair, tended to me when I was sick, and made sure that I was eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The shadow woman I speak of is my yaya, Manang Delia. All I remember about Manang was that she was quite old when I was born. She was a small woman with sturdy features - a jaw that could break chestnuts, and a harsh voice that matched her strong personality. She came to us in the 70's, 20 years before I was born, to raise my three older brothers. She never married, never had children, and from what I recall, never seemed to take any vacations. She lived in a separate room from the rest of our house, where she ironed our clothes while watching telenovelas on a small, secondhand, TV.

From the moment I came into the world in 1987, until the age of 15, Manang lived with my family, but was never part of the dinner table. She was with us everyday and shared special moments of our lives, but remained a shadow's presence, unseen and unfelt in the background. I had as much regard for her as what writer Amy Tan, through the character of Ying-Ying St. Claire in her book "the Joy Luck Club," describes as "a fan in the summer, or a heater in the winter, a blessing you appreciate and love only when it is no longer there."

"Amah loved me better than her own. She had given up her own child, a baby son, when her husband had died and she had come to our house to be my nursemaid. But I was very spoiled because of her; she had never taught me to think about her feelings. So I thought of Amah only as someone for my comfort, the way you might think of a fan in the summer, or a heater in the winter, a blessing you appreciate and love only when it is no longer there."

For someone who was with me during the entirety of my young existence, I knew very little about who Manang was - where she came from, where she grew up, her likes, dislikes, secrets, or thoughts, and I never bothered to ask. As I look back at my childhood I acknowledge in shame that Manang was never a person to me. I didn't know her birthday. I didn't know her last name. I never asked her why she never married, or what it must feel like to raise children whom you will never be able to call your own.

Today, Manang came to me in an episode of a dream. She stood in a doorway, frail and fragile, and looked exactly the same way she did the morning I first realized that I was going to lose her forever. It was a school day, and I was 15 years old. There was that all-too familiar irritating knocking on my door, which woke me up everyday at 6. I opened it and there stood Manang, framed in my bedroom doorway. Her face was haggard and she looked exhausted. Her voice, usually harsh and scathing, was subdued, as if she was struggling to yell at me but physically could not.

Disturbed and distracted, I dressed and left for school - only to find out later that she had had a stroke... She was having a stroke, but forced herself out of bed, to wake me up in time for school.

After Manang's stroke, we sent her back home to Bacolod, her provincial hometown far away from the city. For a while, I battled with strange feelings of loss, but they felt empty and vacuous - as if her disappearance was an inconvenient shift in the smooth routine of my day-to-day existence, and nothing more.

10 years later, I find myself far away from home, detached from ancient recollections that have nothing to do with my life at present. I am no longer a 5-year-old child followed by an anxious shadow. And yet Manang still came to me in a dream... A dream that felt so real, I could almost reach out and give her a contrite child's embrace. In my dream, I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for never having loved her for being my surrogate mother. I could have told her at least once that she meant something to me, if just a little.  But this time, I woke up crying.