Love in the time of grief
I was drowning in personal grief when just in time a rain of lifelines of love fell from the heavens—prayers, good cheer, and some of my favorite things.
From a niece in Bangkok came a two-course Italian dinner for my family of three, reviving my appetite. Remembering how much she had liked it herself, she had it delivered from a friend who had catered a party she had given on one of her Manila visits.
A cousin sent salsa monja, which nobody makes better than she does. Another cousin sent my favorite comfort dessert, her very own specialty, lemon pie. A friend and partner in political and spiritual advocacies sent my favorite ice cream flavors, another friend a huge bar of chocolate-almond turron from Portugal, and yet another some of her almost brand-new dresses in my favorite classic style.
Friends just back from a foreign trip sent holy water and rosaries from Lourdes and Fatima. For the two days of court hearings, a dear friend lent her driver and took a load off my anxiety.
To help myself, I started accepting small intimate lunch invitations again, from old friends, and resumed my regular aqua aerobics exercises. I’m trying to get back to usual activities, even if only to go through the motions of normalcy. The outpouring of support definitely helped ease my situation, but I try not to lose sight of the priceless lessons to be learned from it. One of them is that no one has it easy, that there are others in far greater pain.
Different boost
As if all that support and sympathy were not enough, came the most unexpected and altogether different boost yet. After I had written about the launch of a collection of essays by us members of the writing club First Draft, itself the book’s title, I received a note from someone in far Busuanga, Palawan. She has been a reader of mine, she said, since her daughter gifted her with my own first collection of essays, “Personal Space,” published in 2013. She was just taking a chance, hoping to connect with me, via Messenger, she said. She asked if I could send her two copies of “First Draft.” By her own suggested delivery and payment arrangements, the deal was done.
She texted me again, not long afterward, that she was coming to Manila and proposed we meet. She said she that remembered having read that I lived in Makati and was booking herself nearby. Vergel and I met her for high tea at the Makati Shang.
To my surprise she was no super-senior like me, as I tend to imagine my typical reader. She was about as young as my daughter, my eldest child. Her daughters were as young as my grandchildren and may have been at Assumption College at around the same time, the family’s time before Busuanga.
In the course of our conversation, I noticed there was nothing I could tell her about me she had not already read, and remembered. When I mentioned in passing that my recollection of Coron was from our vacation there when I was 8 or 10, with uncles, aunts, and cousins, “Nabasa ko nga po,” she said.
Relatable
I was pleasantly surprised that she quickly recognized me, considering that my picture in my column is from probably a couple of decades. “Hindi naman nalalayo sa katotohanan.“ She, too, seemed determined to make my day.
In true Filipino tradition she brought pasalubong—Palawan delicacies, but no sweets. She remembered, again from my column, that my sugar count was rather high. She brought me kasuy, dried pusit, and marinated danggit, nothing too salty, also in consideration of my self-published high cholesterol.
She said that, although a generation younger, she could relate to the issues I raise in my essays. She also mentioned that my columns were just the right length, perfect for her attention span.
Well, I guess when you write for a national newspaper with a wide circulation, you never know how far your voice will carry and resonate. It certainly warns me to keep it honest. Amid the distraction, I missed one column.
My dad, Joaquin (Titong ) Roces, himself a daily columnist before going into politics—and serving five terms as congressman for Manila—told me something I can’t forget, and will never forget, especially having met my dear reader from Busuanga: “The true test for columnists is not how long they have been doing it, but whether anyone remembers anything at all from what they have written.”
