Remembering Jessie Badillo-Snyder: Poet, Mother, Doctor

Jessie was first a cousin. But she became a poet, a good one, published and winning many awards. When presented with a choice between medical internship and a fellowship at Silliman University, she opted to postpone her medical studies in favor of a summer with poets and writers.

She moved to the United States and married a fine American who not only understood her poetry but her insistence that dishes be piled up first before one paid attention to their cleaning and washing. She bore two wonderful sons who love her so much and I believe understood also her poetry and much later, her pains.

Some ten years ago, she was diagnosed with cancer of the lungs. In the coming years, the cancer metastasized and spread up to the brain, that area which made her the poet and the sweet person. The disease was attacking the very site of her obsession, and fondness, too, with lines and words, the territory that allowed her to share the lovely and anguished universes of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. These were the poets that Jessie shared her own dreams and young pains. With Sexton, it was, I believe the Mother of fire,/ let me stand at your devouring gate/as the sun dies in your arms and you loosen it's terrible weight. With Plath, it was always, I believe, a brief respite from fear/of total neutrality.

I believe she loved many more lines from those two women but I always believed Jessie marveled at the sun and had only one fear, that day when she would turn neutral and pale and boring.

Cancer never made her pale and dull and boring. She formed a donor group, worked for its accreditation to the point of making representations with the US legislative bodies. Her group was called Kiss-Root Foundation, a translation of the Masbateño/Tigaonon “Haduk-Ugat.” She was going back to her roots but in her own way, she was kissing her origin, her beginning. Last year, she managed to send bicycles to selected beneficiaries in Ticao.

Three years ago, Jessie became an ardent partner of my mother in the project to provide free pre-school education to selected children from the informal settlement near our home in Concepcion Grande. Each year, my mother would receive a huge box containing school supplies, which would include crayon and pencils among other things. She would send also books specifying which ones were appropriate to certain age ranges. This year, she included even food items, crackers with lots of nutrients. All this she was doing in between her treatment, the haze between treatment, and the pains when the effect of medicine subsided.

In one of my email to her, I was vainly trying to tell her to take it easy. Frank as I was with her always, I asked her how she managed to do all the packing and the mailing and the organizing. This was her response:

A huge part of my efforts that may look frantic to you is indeed frantic, my way of therapy for me so that I deflect my reality to what is positive and not to the nightmare that is hidden in the claws of that very real and deadly crab inside me.

It is not easy, every day, to wake up very tired and to want to sleep all day, but to resolve not to do that because it will only lead to extending my life without much purpose. I take KISS-ROOT concerns and issues to the extreme so I can look at the other extreme of being alive, and to know and to feel that I can still move my fingers, and that I can continue to piece together words, even with intermittent brain freeze, vision loss, hearing loss, and loss of sensations, and to know that whatever I do for this organization is always intended for those less fortunate than I am, and that is meaningful to me, and that is what keeps me going to a frantic, extreme scale, whenever I can scale the extreme. The reversal of that extreme, stiffness in bed, in the darkness of that fatigue, inability to be effective against gravity, disability, the failure to remember the simplest routines, even to twist a bottlecap, being immersed in weakness for hours, immersed sometimes for days, pain and more pain even with medications, these take me to an edge where danger is a must, and despair the very air. It is a place in my mind that is brutal and unforgiving and violent, not at all habitable; what I do with KISS-ROOT is a refusal of that place, a way of escaping because there is much to be done, not for me, but for those who need life more than I do at this time, and that is my Northern Star to the right path.

On January 26, a beautiful snowy afternoon, past 3 in the afternoon, US time, about 4 in the morning in the Philippines, Jessie passed on in a farm estate in Maryland, surrounded by her family.

A few days before this, I was getting texts from my cousins, her sisters, updating me about her situation. I felt so far away. She was so far away. Even as I tried to look beyond the blue mountain far ahead, I know that home in Maryland was beyond navigation. But it was not beyond the reach of words, the embrace of poetry. Thus, I summoned my memory of Ticao, the language of the islands and wrote this:

Para Saimo Pimay

Nano daw kun nababati mo an pagaspas /I wonder if you can hear the rustle
San mga dahon san ipil-ipil?/ of the leaves of ipil-ipil?
Bagan wara sani na tanom dida sa iyo uma /I believe there is nothing like this plant in your farm
Kundi mga matugnaw na duta, ginpapapatugnaw /but cold soil, made even colder
Ginpapaputi sin yelo /whitened by snow.

Batia: dyurugting an dahon san ipil-ipil /Listen: tiny are the leaves of ipil-ipil
Kaya an huyup san hangin /The blowing of the wind
Bagan mga kalit na haduk /Are like furtive kisses

Gintatan-aw ko niyan usad na maya/I am looking now at this maya
Basi masugo ko ini na pusiw maglayug/Maybe I can ask this little bird to fly
Lampas sa mga kabukidan,/Past mountains
Lutaw sa mga balud/To float above the waves

Mahingaw-hingaw ako, makimaluoy/I will whisper, and plead
Na lupadon niya an mga dampog/That it flies over clouds
Para maabutan ka, kag idapi-dapi/To reach you and touch tenderly
Sa imo agtang an akun kamingaw/Your forehead with my longing
Pati na akun damu-damu na dili masabutan/And the many things I do not understand
Sa pagpapahumali kag pagpaaram/About farewells and bidding goodbye

Kaya, Pimay, sige na,/So, Cousin, go,
upud na did sana na pusiw/Go with that little bird
Hapihapa iya mga pakpak/Caress its feathers
Ginsugo ko na siya/I already told him
Na darahon ka sa isla/To carry you to the island
San Diwata san mga diwata/of the Enchantress of Enchantresses
Sa imo pagmata/When you wake up
Kahampang mo na/You will be facing
An sirangan kag an sulnupan/Where things rise and where things go down
An habagat kag Amihanan/The monsoon and the north wind
An katahum-tahum na kuweba/The most exquisite cave
San aton mga kapagalan/of our fatigues