Saying goodbye to Fr. Herman

"Father Herman is gone. He passed away  yesterday, at 4:20PM...Bye Father Herman, he was close to all of us, was a part  of the family." 

Mama wrote this on the e-mail she sent me this morning. "Was part of the family." Now I understand why his passing leaves a gaping hole to us --my parents, my siblings, Lakay and I.

hug for papa

I was about 7 years old when my papa stayed in Manila for several months to study for the the bar exams. My ever brave mama had to brace herself to take care of all four of us (the fifth one was yet to arrive--after the bar :D ). Papa would come home once in a while, and whenever he did, the whole household warmed up with joy.

One time while he was away, I did the silliest, naughtiest, most cruel thing that one would do to the people who ache for nothing more but Papa's presence. I made the sound of someone knocking at the door, opened it and squealed: "Papa! Papa!"

In no time, I heard the rush of heavy footsteps from upstairs, stopping in the middle of the stairway. Three faces (my brother, my elder sister and mama) smiled in anticipation as they looked at the door, only to be met by the wicked grin of someone who was about to get some bad scolding.

After all the cursing, they all went back to their rooms, albeit with heavy hearts.

Now, 26 years later, I understand why they were so mad at me. Like them, there's nothing I'd like to do more now than to give my papa a big hug.

Papa, please take care. I miss you.

N is for Angel

Meet my friend N from Suriname. This woman is my angel. She can see right through me. To think that we don’t really share anything in common except the hallway where we first (randomly) met. I don’t know how to explain this, but, like what she said tonight, explaining things sometimes doesn’t really help.

N is the first person I ever felt at home with since the day I set foot on this land. In her I found a gift of friendship, love, and sisterhood. Such is rare, and is worth treasuring for a lifetime.

Tonight she said many things to me that I have told myself a long time ago. Yet somehow, she made me listen to her. She was the conscience that I could not silence. Through her “whipping,” I was somehow saved.

Alain de Botton said today in one of his tweets that “adult ills” can sometimes be explained by the absence of friends “who live within 2-minutes radius,” whom we can “gossip and weep” with.

N is that kind of friend. But she is more than that. And that's why I think de Botton missed out on something.

It’s not just the presence of a sounding board or an entertainer that keeps us adults sane. It is the presence of friends who serve as our mirrors, who make us see ourselves in such a way that we can’t go on lying to that reflection before us; and, also, in a way that we would really learn to love and appreciate what we see.

Thank God for friends like N. Thank you N.

Lola Ybing

Thank you Ate Lou for helping me remember Lola Ybing's second death anniversary. In a way, you have resurrected an unfinished journal entry which I have written during her wake.

I wrote then about a regret that all of us, her grandchildren, are probably sharing in today--the regret of not having the time to get to know her more. Mine was compounded by a lot of things that I have learned about her that week. The first surprise, among many things, was that she was one of the oldest alumni of St. Louis Girls' High School. The fact that she actually went to high school at a time when girls had difficult access to education was surprising enough for me. But that she has been with Girls' High --the school where most of her granddaughters have been formed and have graduated -- completely blew my mind. Papa, our Titos and Titas had no inkling about this at all. When asked why she kept silent about it all these years, she simply said that she didn't think it was important.

Not important??? A young girl from the unknown barrio of Sudipen in the 1930's entering a private exclusive school for girls? -- this is anything but unimportant. But then, if we think about how she had to deal with the challenges of poverty that surrounded her as a young wife and mother of six, it's not so hard to understand why she deemed this detail about her life as irrelevant.





Not only was she a private school girl. She was also one of the daughters of a man whom the barrio honored as their "mayor" in the pre-war days. (Remember, their baranggay now used to be the old center of the town). In a way, she must have been like a princess of the datu. No wonder I've always sensed an air of elegance about her - in the way she curls up her long her hair into a bun, in the gentle way she walks and talks.

In a lot of ways, I can see this gentleness and elegance passed on to our parents, titos and titas. And I'd like to believe that her grandchildren have at least a drop of that in their blood, too. We may have not known much about her and what kind of woman she was in her lifetime, but still we can show traces of her footsteps in the gentle way we deal with our lives.

We miss you lola.