a eulogy.

In light of the past events I just had to post this blog. This is the first eulogy I wrote and delivered for my late grandpa, whom we called Daddy in the family. I was also proud also to see an article about him in the news last week on Sunstar. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to making a eulogy:

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Delivered at the Carmelite Church, Cebu on 7 Jan 2012

The day I heard about Daddy’s passing, I had just arrived home from work. I got home, I took off my shoes, and then my mom told me what happened. Papa had already left for Cebu and it was just my mom, Miko, and I at home. How does one prepare for news like that? Daddy has passed away. I don’t think I could describe what I felt that time. The feeling seems to escape any attempt for me to capture it in words.

Upon hearing this news, I found myself swept away by a wave of memories with Daddy. It was as if something had thrown me off my routine, forcing me to think and reflect. Like the realization of something precious that I carry with me every day was suddenly lost, and now I have to recall the events leading to that particular loss.

I remember the times when Miko and I would visit Daddy when we’re still little boys. It was in those idyllic, hot summers where we would look forward to Daddy’s special mango iced candy. He would always make a batch if he felt like it and would give one to Miko and I happily. We would spend those warm afternoons with him, eating iced candy and watching cartoons in his bedroom. I can’t remember now how old I was back then. Back then there was no age, and only us, that we were together, and that we all were alive.

Daddy did not have a penchant for the extravagant. He saw a beauty and a particular elegance in the simple and the ordinary, along with its potential to be extraordinary. Anyone who saw his toy car collection would immediately understand this attention of his to detail. He understood that the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary was simply a matter of love. When Miko and I were in his bedroom playing with his stationery, old papers he had from Comelec, he would take a barbecue stick, a piece of paper, fold it and with the paper, now looking like a flower, fasten it to the stick. He blew into it and it would spin around like a small windmill. Miko and I still remember these pinwheels. We could remember him smiling at how it entertained us. It never occurred to us to ask him how they were done, maybe because we always wanted to see him make it for us.

In remembering these moments with Daddy, a quality of his stands out. Daddy was a quiet man. But I use the word loosely, for even in the most quiet of men can an inner voice scream and shout with a passion rarely found. When I gathered the stories about Daddy in the past few days, it became clear that it was this voice, I think, and its clarity which guided him in the choices he made.

His life was punctuated with moments of quiet. In parties he would sometimes stay in his bedroom with the aircon on, away from the noise in the living or dining room. He had a deep respect for silence. He also found a beauty in silence and gave it almost a sacred quality, something which I could relate to the most with Daddy. We might be tempted to rush in and call him withdrawn. But to be withdrawn would mean something else. It would mean to distance oneself from the world those one loves. The silence of the withdrawn aims to sever and disconnect rather than to preserve and create. To me Daddy’s silence was far from that: it was patient, preserving, and nurturing. It was a silence that, instead of severing, strengthened the bonds. That was how I’d feel whenever I would visit his room when there were parties at his house.

I’d like to paraphrase Hemingway when he said that good writers know what must be said, and that great writers know what must be left unsaid. After 82 years, Daddy now has arrived at the conclusion of the novel that is his life, of which we all play a part and a chapter. And though I was only in the last 22 years, in light of what was said and unsaid, Daddy was a great writer, and a great man. May he rest now in peace.