• Tribute from Yasmin

With incredible sadness I share that my mother, Zelda Santos-Sacro has departed this life on earth in peace and comfort. It’s been an extraordinary honor to be her daughter and I miss her dearly.

I don’t really have the words to share how much she is a part of me. To know me and how I care for others is to know her. She was a person who worked hard and sacrificed an incredible amount to get where she did. She did it with directness and always looking out for the people around her. I see now that her MO was: I have learned through my struggle, how do I help you not have the same?

She was my first role model for what being an upstander and an ally meant. She loved through the sheer force of nurture, advocacy, and cooking as an expression of love. She was maddeningly paddling below the surface to keep afloat and provide the best for my sister and I. She did it with style and grace and a directness that sometimes surprised, maybe even upset people. But all for the love and honesty of others.

I catch myself now saying her phrases or seeing her character in my children: that stubborn will, the off handed joke, the gestures of care. I appreciate so much that she got to see me with my husband and 3 children successful in my career. Time and again the messages I received from her via texts and in birthday cards in the last years were: I love you, I’m so proud of you, you are doing a great job as a mom.

I said it in return, but perhaps not often enough. And I hope that through this last challenging, brutal and beautiful month she knew it and felt my love in my words and actions. I will remember beach house singalongs and dinners and the way all those who loved her so fiercely gathered close.

My son said that on his last day with her before returning home she asked him to look out for his younger sister and brother for her. I know she’s watching out for all of us from above and am glad she’s with her heavenly departed family.

To my sister Katyana and Dad who have been the most incredible supports. I don’t know how we survived this, but we are all the stronger for it.

Plans for a memorial service in the spring will take place in San Diego. We welcome your support and prayers. Hold your loved ones dear and tell them you love them. This lesson in grief has taught me that and so much more.

I love you, Mom. Thank you for everything.

• Tribute from Katyana 

I feel so broken.

Of the many blessings my mother shared with me, I’ll elaborate on two.

My mother believed in a poem called “Children Learn What They Live.” She was so intentional about certain things because she wanted us to live by them. There’s the obvious concern about education for my sister and me. But she was especially concerned about the ways we remain connected to and show gratitude for our relatives and friends. We were told to send thank you cards, greet people on birthdays, reach out to relatives or family friends who were local to a city we were visiting. As youth and teens this was exhausting, we didn’t know some of the people we were sending cards to, we didn’t know why we had to greet another auntie with a card or phone call.

But the part she didn’t know she was teaching, the part that we simply lived, was actually testing the limits of our own love, and knowing how much of our hearts we could give. She taught us, in living it, how to detect and weed out what could be harmful to us, how to “let be” the things that shouldn’t matter to us, and how, after seeing the truths of someone as they are, to turn our attention to the ones who really do matter. She was my confidant in the internal struggles I had with my friends, and though she’d offer advice that would make me laugh or I’d brush off, she was also just listening and paying attention. She noticed the way people interacted with me and acknowledged the good, and also blatantly condemned the bad. Once she showed trust in someone, I did too.

Into adulthood, our notes of gratitude became sincere. Ate and I took her directives of “Batiin mo...” and sending pasalubong from the level of performing the motions until they became gestures of sincerity: an honest note or greeting to family and friends. Mom was so proud of the way that Ate and I could deliver a speech at a graduation ceremony or a wedding. She was so impressed by the way we spoke and how our message touched others. Did she not know that our speech is, in so many ways, a translation of her own heart?

The last gift I want to acknowledge is my mother’s cooking. She really started cooking once she moved to America, because she missed the foods her mother would make for her at home. Once Lola Che passed away, she cooked even more, with a desire to recreate the scent of home and comfort through her mother’s food. In our youth Mom stirred up some weekly regular dishes: a pancit that was perfected by the criticism of her husband, bistek, chicken adobo, nilaga, and sinigang. Lumpia was a day of wrapping for me and my sister. We’d turn on the TV and not watch it; just wrap hundreds of lumpia, reserve a little to cook immediately, and pack the rest to freeze for future holidays and parties. And of course, on sick days, arroz caldo. These dishes have become something that my children and niece and nephews already know and love. I'm so glad that their Lola could share her gift of home with them.

I started cooking too, once Theodore passed away. And nine years later, though I make a mess in the kitchen, I see myself doing the little mannerisms she would do: one hand behind her back at the tie of her apron, a soup spoon kissing her lips, and then tap tapping it on the edge of the pot while exclaiming “Sarap!” I recall one of our stays in San Diego when I made my parents chicken-pork adobo. Mom asked my Dad: “Whose is better? Mine or Katya’s?” Mommy was scorned by her husband for making him compare a mother’s cooking to her own child’s. It’s funny though, because hours later, while sitting at the dining table drinking coffee and the rest of the house was asleep, she said out of nowhere, “You want to know the truth? That is the best adobo I have tasted in my life.”

Even in cooking, Mom wanted me to do better.

I know that now. And I have the rest of my life to thank her by living that way.

I love you, Mommy.

Send to someone

Share this obituary with others

https://everloved.com/life-of/zelda-sacro/obituary/

Copy