Nanay left us when she was only forty-nine. I was beside her in the hospital when our Creator decided her time had come. For three years, her life had been tethered to a dialysis machine, ever since her kidneys failed and could no longer carry her on their own.
I was too young then to understand what forty-nine meant—to grasp how a woman that age might wrestle with life, death, and pain. I was young, healthy, and unaware, standing at the edge of a life that still felt wide and full of promise.
3rd year College had to wait. I worked at night so I could be awake every other morning to bring Nanay to the hospital. The dialysis center was in Quezon City Memorial Circle, and we traveled all the way from Better Living in Parañaque. I slept most of the ride. Nanay would remind me to rest. I would wake when we arrived, find a wheelchair, and bring her into the ward.
Nanay was an introvert. She preferred solitude. Perhaps it came from insecurity—she had only reached the fourth grade in elementary school. Yet she loved to read. Her judgments were careful and wise. She understood people, money, and survival in ways no classroom could teach. She was the quiet force that held our family together.
Through her ideas and persistence, she gave Tatay a woodworking business. Ate Prax, our bright and capable firstborn, helped her buy machines, lease a modest warehouse, and register the business properly. On their anniversary, they gifted it to Tatay—something built not just with tools and paper, but with foresight and love.
Inside the ward, I saw her developed acquantances. The dialysis ward became her small world. Patients, watchers, nurses, doctors, orderlies—everyone knew Nanay. They spoke of her intelligence, her insight, her wisdom. They would tell me how remarkable my mother was.
I used to feel embarrassed when I heard this. I thought they were only being polite.
How could I have known? Whenever I asked Nanay for help with my homework, she would smile and tell me to ask Tatay instead. He was the intelligent one, she said. She had only finished fourth grade.
It was only after she was gone—and after I became a parent myself—that I finally understood. Intelligence is not measured by diplomas. Wisdom does not announce itself. It works quietly, in sacrifice, in decisions made for others, in the long view of life.
One day, as I sat beside her, exhausted from work, she spoke gently.
“Benjie,” she said, “balik ka sa school pagnatapos na ang lahat ng to. Naubos ko na ang pera natin dahil sa dialysis. Matatapos na rin ang paggastos natin dito. May ipapamana ako sa iyo."
I was too tired to feel anything but the weight of the day.
“Hindi nga lang pera,” she added, and smiled.
Nanay left me no inheritance in money. What she gave me was something far more enduring: the wisdom to build fortune—both tangible and intangible
Originally published on Benjie's Bench - Measuring Life's lessons in Millimeters
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