I Buried My Nephew on Christmas Eve

Note: Got this from a friend's e-mail. He said that this came from a bulletin on Friendster. Hope you find time to read the whole article.

Sunday, December 26, 2004 5:47:00 AM


Subject:
I buried my nephew on Christmas day...

Message:
This is the most painful Christmas day for me yet... At four o'clock in the morning, on Christmas day 2004, my father woke me up and said we had to bring my sister to the hospital. I asked why and he told me she just had a miscarriage.

Putting on a pair of used jeans and a jacket, I went to the livingroom and found my sister sprawled on the kimi with blood oozing down her legs... her skin was pale and her breathing heavy. My dad, brother-in-law (my other sister's husband) and I brought her to the Veteran's Memorial Medical Center. My brother-in-law carried with him a shoebox and told me that the baby was inside. While the nurses were checking for my sister's blood pressure, I had an urge to open the box and take a look at the fetus. I was surprised to see a developed fetus, not possibly less than 20 weeks old, obviously pre-terminated on purpose. I immediately showed nurses my discovery and they proceeded to question my sister about what medicine she took to abort the baby.

She didn't deny it anymore... she took a popular drug called "*******" (I've had old friends and students who took the drug specifically for abortion... and I've asked my aunt who's an OB-Gyne about it as well a few years ago). She took one pill and placed one into her ******. Very effective combo if you really want to flush out an unwanted baby... very lethal if you combine it with other drugs... which in the case of my sister was very much apparent.

At the time, I couldn't think of getting angry towards my sister. All I could think of was that the baby should have been mine... at least he would have had a fighting chance of being born alive, a fighting chance of experiencing life outside his mother's womb... It was so painful for me, taking him out of the newspaper he was wrapped in, wrapping him in an old scarf, holding him with my bare hands hoping that maybe somehow he could still be saved.

I prayed to the Lord that morning, just as the sun was about to rise... I asked him why He gave the child to my sister instead of me... I cried until exhaustion and pain overwhelmed me.

As painful as it was, my dad gave the child for me to bury as "his mother is not worthy of him..." I gave him a name, Samuel... we made a small casket out of a shoebox and transferred him to an old box I had, more decent looking than the old shoebox. My other sister as well as my brothers, my parents and I prayed over him and sprinkled his body with holy water. In his make-shift casket, we gave him a small infant's shirt and a feeding bottle with breastmilk (my other sister is still breastfeeding to her four-month old son), an old driftwood I picked up from Dingalan, Aurora last summer that I kept as a charm, and my dad's lucky stone. We buried him in garden soil, collected inside an old ice box. As much as I wanted to give him a decent cemetery burial, society won't accept him because he was aborted. The hospital won't give him a death certificate. The funeral parlor turned me away. (Sheesh, I can't believe that Filipinos can be this narrow-minded and inhumane!)

Tomorrow, I am going to plant grass and flowers on top of him, inside that old ice box... he will be with me when I move on as he is now mine... as he should have been.

My sister will be staying in my house when she checks out of the hospital... can't do anything about that as my parents are living with me and they wanted to confine her where they can see her... as for me, I don't think I can live under the same roof with her... not anymore. It's just not the same... She did this to her own son... and she did this knowing that our parents will be there for her, catching her where she falls, and, once again, her responsibilities are assumed by someone else.

I refuse to live with this again... and so I will leave... I will leave with my children and Samuel. I will spread the word about how he had died and how irresponsible, insensitive and inhuman this kind of abortion is... unwanted pregnancies from irresponsible sex is no licence to kill.