What I Learned From Lila Remembering Mom Leticia Ramos-Shahani

I'm reading Lila Shahani's "Eulogy For Mom" that she published on Facebook today, Saturday, 25 March 2017, all 2,300 words of it.

I'm now going to use the initials LRS to refer to the late former Senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani, because "LRS" is reachable and yet unreachable, familiar and yet unfamiliar, as LRS was in real life. The daughter will tell you that!

LRS was widowed at a young age – I have always wondered why the husband never showed up in prominent pictures – overshadowed by the wife? Now I have the answer.

When her mother was diagnosed with colon cancer about 3 years ago, Lila moved in with her. Lila says, "Retired from public service but not from working for the public good, she had plunged whole-heartedly into her new task: farming." She was into organic farming, and wanted to learn more and teach more.

Actually, I know that farming was not new to her by then. For Asingan, her hometown, which is also my own, years ago she had pleaded with the Philippine Carabao Center based in Nueva Ecija for several heads of Murrah buffalos, which just happens to be an Indian breed, and so the Bantug Samahang Nayon has been producing and selling pasteurized buffalo milk for quite a few years now. The milk is delicious, I must say, no buffalo smell. At Bantug, they have a proper milk processing plant. I don't know how she did it, but I wouldn't be surprised if LRS bargained with the powers that be for that thing. She was a leader and a farmer at heart.

Throughout her life, LRS was busy, Lila says, dealing with all sorts of people in all sorts of situations, from UN Secretary Generals to farmers. She never retired. She slowed down physically, but not mentally.

Her grandparents smoked opium as LRS watched, under a mosquito net. And in describing the scene as LRS told her daughter, Lila in fact describes the lure of drug abuse: "She retraced the beatific looks on their faces and the delicate care with which they prepared their pipes." Today, those who cannot ease or free their mind to relax, resort to drugs. There is thrill even in preparing the pipe – and in sharing the pipe. I've seen teenagers doing it publicly along the street where we live.

LRS would collect with her siblings sacksful of small crabs on the shores of Lingayen. That must have been 70 to 80 years ago. That tells me, who am a science writer with my background of agriculture (education) and forestry (experience), that there were forests of mangroves in Lingayen Gulf at that time. They are gone now. We always abuse our natural resources, harvesting without thought of tomorrow, not allowing them to replenish themselves according to their cycles of time. A little girl with her siblings gathering food cannot harvest with abuse, but a community can. This is the Tragedy of the Commons; this is what William Forster Lloyd, a British economist, was talking about in the 1800s yet.

LRS had stories on Bajo De Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal), which means at least 70 years ago, Filipino fishermen already owned Scarborough Shoal!

At college in Wellesley, LRS was "teased, tested and eventually accepted" by her white classmates. You can't bring down a feisty young lady who knows more than your language.

The Indian academic who became her husband, Ranjee Shahani, was already a much-published author and much older. They met in India while her parents were there. The courtship lasted 15 years and a thousand epistles (letters). As Lila describes it, "And such a deeply epistolary relationship it was!" Epistles from India, epistles from the Philippines – I'd like to read those epistles some day. And, yes, to gladly read between the lines!

Then Ranjee died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, when Lila was only 22 months old, and LRS moved her family back to the Philippines to share abode with her parents, Narciso Ramos and Angela Valdez. Lila doesn't say where; it could have been Asingan, the Ramoses hometown; Lingayen, which I understand is the birthplace of brother Fidel, sister Leticia, and another sister; or Manila, the center of political and economic and cultural life in the Philippines.

In Austria, LRS and daughter Lila learned to ski on the snow. Lila says:

I taught her not to (look) down to the end of the hill, to take each turn as it came, without worrying about the long-term outcome. To the very end, she thanked me for this lesson.

The daughter teaching the mother! I know it is also a great lesson in creative writing – don't look to the end when you're just beginning. In the case of LRS sliding on top of a snowy hill, if she did, she would have suffered, I suppose, Slider's Block; in the case of an author, I'm sure it would be Writer's Block. I started writing in 1957; since then I have never had Writer's Block, not even now at 77 years of age, because I never try to finesse my essay before it's finished!

From my quote above, Lila continues her story:

Still, those moments were few and far between. You might say I even resented the Philippines and my Mom’s international advocacies because they took so much of her time away from me.  

So it wasn’t until I returned to the Philippines to work at the Cultural Center of the Philippines; taught in UP, AIM and Ateneo; worked for the UN in New York, and then still later became an Assistant Secretary in the PNoy administration, that I finally realized just what my mom had had to go through her entire life: the endless hours of work, the constant struggles with male colleagues who thought less of you or suspected your abilities, regardless of how much or how well you did, the complicated process of designing and carrying out policy proposals, much less legislative initiatives. My Mom thrived in this atmosphere where she accomplished so much but also had to go through so many frustrating moments. But everything, throughout, was ultimately underscored by a deep love for the country of her birth.  

"The endless hours of work" were because of LRS' dedication to her job. "The constant struggles with male colleagues" were because of men's prejudices against women, which is true everywhere, and she would not allow that to hinder her progress. "The complicated process of designing and carrying out policy proposals" were because LRS must have known that if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself!

"My Mom thrived in this atmosphere where she accomplished so much" – LRS had found her calling equal to her talents, and would not give up even in the midst of frustration. She never said "Die" until she did!

Know that LRS died for her country. @

25 March 2017. Total word count, excluding this line. 1149