By Beth Sabado

The author, from Pagadian City, Zamboanga del Sur, Philippines, is a nurse by profession and has worked as a Columban Lay Missionary in Taiwan. She is currently based in Hong Kong as Coordinator of the Lay Missionary Central Leadership Team (LMCLT).

The Sabado Family home, Pagadian City, Zamboanga del Sur.

I had the chance to watch a stage play in Birmingham Repertory Theatre entitled ‘Refugee Boy’. A story about a fourteen-year-old boy born of an Ethiopian father and Eritrean mother and because of a violent civil war back home his father made a heartbreaking decision to leave him in London. The boy woke up one morning and his father was gone. As described, ‘Refugee Boy’ is a story about arriving, belonging and finding a home.

Back: Telesforo, Pacita, Felix and Gondee. Front: Beth and Patboone (died 1981).

‘A home is a place where I can unpack my luggage down to the very bottom’. This is how one of the refugees in the play defined a home. Her definition stayed with me from then on.

When Dad passed away on March of 2008 I remember consoling myself with the thought that Mum was still around. However on one gloomy afternoon of February 2013, I received that dreaded phone call from my brother telling me, ‘Beth, Mum is hooked up on ECG but the traces are a flat line’. After a few minutes, with the convenience of modern technology, I was connected to my sister in the USA and my brother in the Philippines at Mum’s bedside praying the prayer of commendation online! Virtual and posh, I thought, but Mum passed into eternal life with God in whom she believed passionately and wholeheartedly.

Beth, left, with her sister Gondee, brother Felix and their mother, Pacita.

I was on a flight the following day and when the pilot announced that we were on our final approach, all of a sudden this question dawned on me: ‘Where is home for me now?’I felt a vacuum of loneliness deep within me. It was so daunting. The thought of going home to an empty house the next time I traveled home was mentally debilitating. For more than a year I kept asking myself the same question: ‘Where is home now?’

Beth's parents in old age.

Losing both parents is the same as losing the center of your home. This loss will somehow redefine that space: that space that used to give comfort, that space where you felt loved, that home where no amount of concealment can ever bring back its original form. I had the chance to return to my parents’ house a year after Mum passed away and the emptiness and deafening silence confirmed that big change. Opening the refrigerator gave me a sense that it no longer belonged to the same family, that it was no longer the family refrigerator!

I lived out of a suitcase during the first quarter of 2014.Over a period of three months I visited six countries and the demands of traveling took their toll on my health. While on the last leg of my travel, I felt my energy level draining. I managed to return to base in one piece and standing but then I was in bed for almost two weeks. I realized that as I grow in age my body demands a longer time to recover from my travels. When I was younger, taking a long-haul flight and reporting back to work on the same day was a common thing. I believe the time has come for me to ‘Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth’(a line from Desiderata). With those days I spent on bed, I had the time to ponder on my own new definition of home. Just like in the play, home as a place where I can unpack my luggage down to the very bottom. However there is more to that.

Beth's parents.

Meeting people for the first time and feeling the connection and trust, catching up with friends, family and relatives, visiting colleagues, exploring new places, sharing a meal, a moment of laughter, a time to rest, receiving a phone call from a long-lost friend, receiving a smile from a stranger, listening to the sounds of nature, sitting on a favorite chair while reading a book and sipping a cup of coffee, finishing a task, a time for prayer: these are spaces where I feel moments of grace. That space that gives joy, warmth and comfort, is a space of home right at that very moment. The presence of God becomes more tangible in every single act of ‘unpacking’. Indeed this is my new perspective of home, a space where I live deep within. I am home.

You may email the author at clmcltcoordinator@gmail.com or at madamsaturday.ms@gmail.com