MORE NEWS, BENGUET

Family buries one of two cancer-stricken members
BY RAMON DACAWI

LA TRINIDAD, Benguet -- They held the funeral mass in open air, on a sunny Saturday morning, on a bluff facing east, amidst young pine trees that now stand as sentinel to the young woman’s grave bedecked with flowers.

After the traditional prayers, the hymns and the homily, before the consecration, folksinger Dick Oakes, and his daughters, 22-year old Pocahontas and Libnah, 16, stood in front of the crowd, by the house door, composing themselves for a song.

“We prepared this for tonight’s concert but we won’t be there so we’ll sing it now,” Dick explained. He strapped his banjo and then struck the key for a trio of “The Circle Game”, a Joni Mitchell composition that has long been his family’s anthem. They had sang it many times before, during fund-raising concerts for the sick that the family had helped organize. This time, it was for the funeral mass of his second daughter – 20-year old Dorcas.

It was Libnah’s favorite. May last year, she sang it in-between cockfights at the Shilan cockpit, to convince game-fowl enthusiasts to contribute to efforts to help a barangay captain rebuild his house destroyed by fire the Holy Week before.

This time, the opening lines came out soft and almost inaudible: “Yesterday a child came out to wonder/Caught a dragonfly inside a jar/Fearful when the sky was full of thunder/ And tearful of the falling of a star….”

Towards the last stanza, the lines became clearer, the blending of family voices surer, washed clean by tears on the faces of the two daughters: “So the years spin by and now the (girl) is twenty/Though (her) dreams have lost some grandeur coming true/ There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty/Before the last revolving year is through.”

Then the refrain evoking memories of their childhood with their sister Dorcas: “And the seasons they go round and round/And the painted ponies go up and down/Were captive on the carousel of time/We can’t return, we can only look behind/ From where we came/And go round and round and round/In the circle game….”

Dorcas Oakes, the second of three daughters of Dick and his ailing wife Juliet, succumbed to melanoma, a fast-developing cancer, at sunrise on Sept, 12. She was buried three days after on the family plot below the bluff overlooking the valley floor. She was in her senior year as a nursing student.

She was a scion of the Oakes clan of Bontoc, Mt. Province and the Tumpao family in La Trinidad. She was christened after a woman in the Bible, whose story is in the book of Acts, chapter 9 verses 36 to 42.

Also called Tabitha, Dorcas was a follower of Jesus, a seamstress who made clothes for the poor, a pure practitioner of benevolence. When she suddenly died, widows whom she had helped were devastated. They asked Apostle Peter to pray for God to restore her life. The Almighty did.

Fr. Charles Carino, who officiated the funeral mass the other Saturday, explained Dorcas means “deer” in Greek. It also means “emblem of beauty”, of which Dorcas Oakes was, as captured in her smiling portrait - taken during her capping in June last year.

Like her biblical namesake, Dorcas wanted to serve the poor beyond those times she helped musicians in numerous concerts for indigent patients. She was in the thick of her nursing internship late last July when she felt like sick. Dick was waiting for his turn in a concert when Dorcas called, saying she had to come up for a check up.

She was diagnosed for melanoma, or skin cancer. It was at stage 4, which doctors – and even nursing students like her - know only a miracle can cure. If she had felt and known the signs of the dreaded disease in its earlier stages, she didn’t say. She learned of her condition a year after her mother Juliet was diagnosed for cancer of the cervix.

Dorcas and sister Pocahontas found their nursing background useful in caring for their mother. A day after Dorcas’ diagnosis, Pocahontas’ name registered in the list of nursing board passers.
Dr. Mario Abuan, former vice-mayor of Mankayan Benguet who has returned to his medical practice, admitted it was his first time to encounter a mother and child afflicted with cancer at the same time.

No one knew if Juliet was awake to hear her husband and daughters sing. Dick had carried her to the upper floor of their home. She needed not see her daughter’s sealed, candle-lit pinewood coffin, with Dorcas’ capping photo on top, each time she woke up. Juliet could hardly stand now. Her own cancer is now at stage 3.

Neighbors, relatives, friends, started visiting her, increasing in number when they heard. Dorcas was also sick. They prayed for a twin miracle while groping for words of comfort. They came to help bury a cousin, grandniece, niece, sister, a classmate who shared their dreams of becoming nurses. Some didn’t know Dorcas but came to pay their respects anyway.

Folksingers whose own children grew up with Dorcas offered no hymns during the requiem mass. They paid tribute later that evening in a memorial concert that helped pay the burial costs and prop up a mourning mother’s own fight.

They held an encore last night at Le Fundue, at the second floor of the La Azotea Building along Session Rd. Pioneer Baguio folksinger Bubut Olarte, who drew the poster, dubbed it “We Shall Overcome”, after the famous composition of Charles Tindley, the father of gospel music.

Those who couldn’t come sent support. An Ibaloi woman raising her daughter in Kentucky after surviving cancer, sent P4,000. An anonymous donor added an equal amount he or she coursed through banker Rolly de Guzman of RCBC. A lawyer delivered P2,000 while another gave P1,000. A worker in Singapore, who read of the family’s plight through the internet, remitted P3,000.

Musician-newsman March Fianza, who stood as godfather in Dorcas’ baptism 20 years ago, waited until everybody had left the gravesite before clicking his last camera shot. He had to send the frames to fellow folksingers Northern California who, like him, are close to the Oakes family - Conrad Marzan, Estoy, Richard Arandia, Joel Aliping Fr. Leonard (Dick’s brother).

When they heard of the double whammy, the expats and their families pooled $800 for Dorcas and her mother Juliet. They’re setting their own concert tribute to Juliet and her daughter.

While Dorcas was slipping away, Dick wrote a gospel song just to cope. It will take sometime before he can set the lyrics to music. Perhaps before this revolving year is through