Joy 1990 – 2023

Joy Dalipe died on a Sunday in July from complications of childbirth. She was 33 years old. A few months earlier, Joy had given birth by C-section to premature twins. These two were her 5th and 6th children.

Her husband, Dennis, had been our ranch manager. We had set aside a space near our front gate and Dennis had built a house for his family there. The two eldest children learned to ride their bicycle on the level ground of our horse corral. Dennis and Joy often worked with a baby swaddled around their bodies. When the twins were born, Dennis resigned from his duties as ranch manager. The medical and child care responsibilities were too much for the couple to manage alone. They returned to the home of Pacita, Joy’s mother, about a kilometer away from our place. Dennis still made himself available to us for the occasional odd job, but the medical needs of Joy and the twins, plus his duties with his other children, as well as his own and Pacita’s farms occupied most of his time.

The twins have passed the window of danger common to premature infants. But Joy’s body never recovered. She continued to be in and out of the hospital. And then she died.

Many of us older expats enjoy living in the rural Philippines. To some degree it is because living here is much like stepping back into a simpler time. The prevalent use of draft animals, the large extended families, and the close knit rural communities all contribute to that. But then, some young person dies from a relic of the 19th century. Complications from childbirth.

But our close knit rural community came together. Much work, on our place and others, stopped for about a week. The men felled a tree and built a simple wooden coffin. They built a block and concrete sepulcher on a hillside near Pacita’s house. The women comforted and fed the bereaved family and tended to the children. Several hogs were slaughtered to provide wat-wat, the boiled pork that is the staple food of large Cordilleran gatherings of people.

One day, I went to fetch something from the house that Dennis built. There, I saw Joy’s rubber farm boots, the only useful thing left behind when they moved out. The sight conjured up images of the empty saddles of cowboy and cavalry lore. The person who used that item is forever gone from us.

A historian whose work I often read has said of those killed in our wars, “Their deaths rend a hole in the fabric of our families and communities”. So too, I think, do these untimely deaths from what should be preventable causes.