The caregiver: reflections on the crisis in care
July 20, 2022
Last Friday, July 17, 2022, the Anti-Terror Law under Duterte went into effect in the Philippines. 47 years ago, in 1973, Martial Law was declared by Marcos. What lessons can we learn?
When it comes to understanding the dynamics of power, inequality, and state terror, who else but the caregiver, maid, nanny, houseboy, secretary, slave, minion, nurse, garbage collector, grocery worker, essential worker, survivor — would have the most astute analysis?
Where do our loved ones go when they die? In our hearts? In their graves? In the ocean where their ashes are thrown? In our memories? In their writings?
February 19, 2012 (the death anniversary) of my youngest brother, Jay, and July 20, 1973 (his birthdate) — are triggers. My sister, mother, and I ask ourselves: what is a meaningful life?
Jay was born on July 20, 1973, the same year Martial Law was declared by Marcos in the Philippines. He was born into conflict and suppression.
After our parents’ divorce when he was six, my sister and I became his primary caregivers.
I remember one time, when he was in Grade 1, the jeepney school ride that was supposed to take him home from school took off without him, so Jay walked three kilometers from Dagupan City to Bonuan Gueset and crossed the Dawel bridge on his own.
Jay was six years younger than me, but a lot wiser. He would have been 47 this July 20, 2020. His birth year, 1973, also marks the 47th year commemoration of Marcos’ declaration of Martial Law. What has changed since then in the Philippines? A repetition of the pattern; except this time it’s Duterte’s passing of the anti-terror bill.
Silencing, censoring, and suppressing dissent have long-term impacts.
In April 2006, our home in East Timor was burned-down by political opponents, along with more than two thousand other homes. For four years, we couldn’t repair our family home.
In 2010, Jay accepted my invitation to visit my late husband and me in Dili and help us get our life back together. In 2007, our political party, which had been in the opposition, finally won enough seats to be in state power, and my late husband was elected as President of National Parliament; but in 2008, there were attempted assassinations that shook the country.
When Jay saw our burned-down home, he said: “I think four years of being crippled and mourning is enough. Let’s rebuild.”
He started collaborating with our neighbors and friends. He had previously trained with Mexican and El Salvadoran construction workers in California, spoke Spanish fluently, got his contractor’s license, and spent a few years building schools and homes with them. Our small bungalow home in Delta 1, Dili, was rebuilt by an extended family of kindred spirits from Manutasi, Ainaro, construction workers from Pangasinan, and Jay from California, with contributions of $25–$200, donations of cement, sand, wood, tiles, and labor from close friends.
Jay instinctively knew that human resources were more important than physical infrastructure. So much money is spent on costly material infrastructure projects, but not on transformative education and schools; on fancy cars for state officials, but not on girl’s and women’s empowerment, community development, and values formation; on prioritizing the building of mansions for government officials , but not on strengthening anti-corruption mechanisms and ethical governance. Who spends money in this way?
Being an artist, Jay was not in a hurry to repair our home. Our Timorese friends, whom he had recruited for collaboration, were keen on repairing fast, so that we could move back in, as we didn’t feel comfortable and never really relaxed living in the state official residences (for various reasons, including the possibility that the state residences may have been tapped).
Apparently, Jay’s processes on patience, when it came to choosing the stones and rocks from the mountains and rivers, and painting the living room wall with five different layers of textures, color, and light, almost drove the more impatient construction workers — nuts. Jay was more interested in conversations and getting to know the nature of his co-workers. All of us got political art therapy from the trauma and heartbreak of democratization by helping mix the stone and sand. By taking the time to talk to our team about the impulse to build so fast, we also began to understand why so many of our buildings were falling apart, like some of the new buildings that were audited and deemed ecologically unsustainable (because they were not designed with climate change adaptability and resilience in mind, lacked natural ventilation and light, and required too much air conditioning and electricity).
From that experience of helping us repair, he wrote a satirical short story entitled “The Nation-builders”.
Jay himself was quite poor financially, choosing to prioritize his writing and caregiving as a single father for his son, Gabriel, taking jobs which were flexible.
When he died in February 19, 2012, I flew with my son and mother from East Timor, where we were in the middle of campaigning in the Presidential election, in order to pack up his apartment in Hayward and help organize his funeral. I didn’t have time to grieve because I had to go back to the campaign, which we lost anyway.
One important discovery in the process of cleaning his apartment was Jay’s relationship to storytelling. He wrote all kinds of things: diaries, short stories, poems, memoirs, political observations…on all kinds of paper — sticky notes, index cards, napkins…not so much to publish, but to examine himself, our family, and so-called schemes to supposedly improve the human condition by extremely ambitious, greedy politicians who want fancy titles but are totally incompetent.
In Jay’s apartment, I found a black writer’s bag, complete with pens, pencils, an eraser, a stapler, writing pads, a journal, a laptop, and some of his handwritten notes and typed and printed stories. The writing bag was a universe unto itself. It spoke volumes about my brother. He filled this bag like he did his construction worker’s toolkit. There was nothing random about his relationship to writing; he didn’t leave anything to chance. He organized his marinating, fermenting time (a skill he learned from baking his own bread), to allow him to observe, take notes, dig, process, excavate, heal, research, edit, polish, and revise.
After his death, each one of us wanted to keep a piece of Jay. I wanted his notes, stories, and his writing bag. He wrote a story entitled “The Demonstration,” making fun of his sisters, including the narrator, who forced him to go to protests. After his death, I typed his handwritten stories and shared them at this website: https://www.academia.edu/1496619/_The_Demonstration_
He was a reflective, spiritual person with depth, who had a rich internal life. Socially, he was quite lonely, especially after his divorce, and struggling with hypothyroid and sleep apnea. I remember one story he told me about going to a dating scene in San Francisco where everyone was performing and marketing themselves assertively, but instead of feeling more connected, he felt even more alone.
There is a stereotype that Filipinos tend to be maids, nannies, houseboys, caregivers, and nurses. Anthony Bourdain in “Parts Unknown” did an entire episode on this. My sister, who is a nurse and psychologist, laughs ironically when she reflects on how we all tried so hard to evade this stereotype, and yet somehow, still ended up working in some aspect of undervalued caregiving. But in the end, it is also what shortened Jay’s life. He was the youngest and the one taking care of our mother, taking care of me, the children and their families in his school, on top of being a single working father to his son. He was like a coat-hanger upon whom a lot of people wanted to hang their hopes and dreams, until he broke.
How can kindness and caring for others shorten one’s life? Why is the sudden death of a supposedly strong caregiver so perplexing?
A difficult question to answer, as most of the caregiving was hidden and invisible, and only being brought to light now during Covid-19 in the midst of the transnational crisis in care.
Several of my loved ones who were caregivers, and disproportionately from certain groups, have now passed away. It takes a toll. It is a labor of love. Without it, our societies can’t function. Without my brother’s caregiving, I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything.
What I will miss most about Jay is the feeling of unconditional love, safety, and security that he gave me. He sent me care packages from California when I was working in Australia, East Timor, Korea — beautifully hand-crafted scarves, wool socks for my son, and dresses for my teaching. I don’t know how he found the time and money to organize these care packages — yet another stereotype of Filipinos who love to send “balikbayan boxes” for loved ones. If he were female, it would be expected. But he was a male who grew up in a misogynist, macho culture that denigrated vulnerability.
Our family and close friends remember him because in a society where there is pressure to live up to other peoples’ expectations about “success”, Jay created his own path. His untimely death, like those who have died tragically in Black Lives Matter, is a contradiction of our yearning for “survival of the kindest”. The kindest don’t survive. The fittest do. May Jay’s life, death, and writing give us vision for social change and revolutionary patience.
“A good leader is like a good gardener. You can see the labor of his work by the size of the fruits of the trees he tends to. To be a good leader, one needs to have the proper nourishing tools. If a farmer doesn’t have the right nourishing tools, he is left to use only his bare hands to till a wide expanse of land. A good writer must also have a muse to care for him. Just like a healthy tree has a farmer to tend after it. With good thoughts, caring, and nourishment, all tree, writer, and leader are capable of abundance…in fruits, words, transformation.” Jay Siapno, March 2011
Jay with his friend Cornelia Sylvester.
Jay with his friend Papa Diop.
Jay with Papa Diop’s family, Senegal.
