BY JULLIE Y. DAZA
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WHEN all is said and done – she’s gone, just another statistic, one of 4.1 million Filipinos of working age stranded by quarantine – it has to be said again.
Government failed her. The system failed her. The lockdown failed her – IATF, DoTr, DILG, a “clearing team” of Pasay City’s Barangay 159. Did her angels fail her? We the people failed her – with our callousness, our Christian virtues of charity and compassion, our bayanihan spirit of neighborliness. Heal as one? We could not help one single individual, a single mother who was nothing more remarkable than an LSI (locally stranded individual).
On June 5, Michelle Silvertino died after walking from Antipolo to Cubao to Pasay. On the fifth day, pale and frail, her lips a livid blue, she was found unconscious on the stairs of a footbridge on the well-traveled EDSA. On those stairs she had waited for a bus to take her back to her four small children in Bicol. Even if a bus had come by, she would not have been able to board because she had no travel pass, all her IDs, papers, and other passes notwithstanding. The travel pass would have to travel from her barangay’s rural health unit to the municipal health office and then the municipal police station before finally reaching her – one or more days after she was gone.
Without an autopsy, Michelle’s remains were buried in Pasay’s public cemetery, so we’ll never know if she died of heat and hunger, fatigue and despair, or COVID-19.
Will her children, ages 3 to 11, ever know the full story of their mama’s sudden departure? Will there be an easy time to tell them how she died and what killed her?
DSWD social workers were quick to locate the Silvertino home in Bgy. Burabod, Calabanga, Camarines Sur and gave cash and food (for 10 days) for the children and their grandmother, aunt and uncle and their son. The kids will be provided scholarships. Foster care is a possibility but it would be a challenge to separate four siblings, especially when they feel loved and cared for by mama’s relatives.
Remembering that old movie, “All Mine to Give,” orphans who have lost their parents could not bear being torn from their brothers and sisters.
