My mother, 98

By Nestor Mata

WASHINGTON â?? When my mother died last week, she wore a blissful smile on her face. It was a smile of accomplishment. She seemed to say that she had come so far, and now it was over. She had indeed accomplished many things in a lifetime that spanned almost nine decades. She was a journalist, a suffragette, a freedom fighter and an author of two books. She was married three times, and gave birth to and raised eight children.

My mother, Mamerta de los Reyes, was born in Cabiao, Nueva Ecija, at a time when it was one of the rice granaries in Central Luzon. She was educated in a convent school in Manila.

Long before the outbreak of the World War II, she was a suffragette, a member of the feminist movement to fight for Filipina womenâ??s rights to vote. That was in the early 1930s.

After the womenâ??s suffrage was granted in 1937, she became a staffmember of the â??Commonwealth Advocate,â?� a monthly magazine . And when the Pacific War broke out, she served as an intelligence officer of a guerrilla outfit.

Many years later, in her war memoirs (â??The Price of Freedom,â?� a book printed by the Trinity Rivers Publishing House in Manassas, Virginia in 2003), she vividly narrated the pain and agony she and her family went through during the Japanese occupation. She herself experienced the terrible ordeal and horror of being captured, imprisoned and tortured by cruel Japanese soldiers. She survived, miraculously, but not her second husband Pedro Blanco. It was her second book. The first was â??Sulu In Its True Light" that she co-authored with her first husband, Alfonso M. Mata, my father, long before the war.

With the liberation of the Philippines by Filipino and American military forces from the Japanese yoke, she had a brief stint as a columnist of the â??Star Reporter,â?� one of the daily newspapers in English that sprouted like mushrooms in Manila.

Then she migrated to the United States, after marrying her third husband, Isaac Block, a naval officer at the time, who later became a Baptist minister. She settled and kept herself busy in social work in the Washington area in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She spent two decades as director of the International House on 19th Street.

Subsequently, she was president of the Federation of Womenâ??s Clubs and member of the National Press Club of Washington, D.C.

When my mother died of cancer at her home in Alexandria, Virginia last March 11, 2005, exactly two months short before her birthday on May 11, 2005, she was 98 years old. And she left behind her third husband, six living children, 25 living grandchildren and 36 great-grandchildren. The day before Godâ??s finger touched her, she opened her eyes and whispered to me, â??May nagbabantay na sa akinâ?� ( Someone is already watching over me).

The following morning day, before she finally went to sleep, my sister Betty M. Bartolome and I bade our beloved mother goodbye.... â??Good night, sweet mother, and may a choir of angels in heaven sing thee to thy rest."

(Mr. Mata, a veteran journalist in Manila, was in Washington to be with his mother before her death.)