When Everything is White...

Death is a terrible thing that befalls us human. It sucks...It sucks...It sucks...It sucks...It sucks...It sucks...It sucks...It sucks...It sucks...It sucks...It sucks...

Two doctors went inside to his private room at the hospital. They were redressing his wound at the back portion of his head, in which he recently acquired, just that morning, after he slipped off the bathroom floor. For some reasons, his falling was the result of the sudden loss of his consciousness, quite a bad sign for a man who doesn't have white hairs, and the loss of strength and glow of his youthful years.

He is in his late thirties, a father of two lovely daughters, and a wonderful husband to his beautiful wife. Unfortunately, for a reason that is still unfathomable, that with life's irony of ironies, why him? But they have become used to it. DEATH is something that they have become accustomed with. It took them some time though, to realize, but now, they have understood death more than anybody else. Neither one of them don't want to think about it.

I was there inside that room, too, quietly seated, watching the men in white robe as they did some checking in his newly-acquired cut. The vertical cut in his head was two inches long, with that I assumed that there's gonna be an addition to his Calvary of medicines -- vitamins and antibacterial capsules that he needs to take everyday, and another addition to the queue of his sessions of herbal and medical therapies, and that is surgery. His cut was deep enough that the doctors referred him to a specialist, a surgeon to be specific.

And I was there, nodding my head several times after each immediate instruction that was given to me by one of the doctors. Nodding was all I could do. In a while, when the doctors went out, and the room has fallen into deep silence except for the nineteen-forgotten air-conditioning system, I came over to him, in my right hand was a bowl of steaming oatmeal that I cooked earlier.

He looked at the oatmeal while he sat properly at his elevated hospital bed. He looked bewildered, sad, unhappy of what's going on. He didn't say a thing. "Tito, let's eat," I carefully said in complete Cebuano. His response was a couple of seconds late. He said that he couldn't eat hot oatmeal, thus, giving me no other choice but to leave it on his nightstand to cool down. Watching over him when I have a vacant time at school is all the help that I could ever do.