Host of TV magazine show “Travel Time,” which ran for 29 years, culture mover and shaker Susan Calo-Medina died on Jan. 9. We’re running the touching eulogy delivered at her funeral by her good friend Bambi Harper, a culture and heritage advocate.
MY MOBILE rang that Friday morning. The caller said, “Susan’s dead.”
I think most of us had the same reaction. I answered, “Susan who?” Because the Susan I knew couldn’t be dead, she was too vibrant, too energetic, too full of life to die.
The caller kept saying, “Are you there?”
There are moments in life when there are no words.
Susan and I go back a long way, more than half a century to be exact. We go back to the Assumption of Herran, the College of Mother Esperanza, of towering acacias and of students who had to wear chemise under their uniforms so the outline of their bras wouldn’t show.
We wore veils to church and curtsied before a tiny French nun called Mother Rose, Notre Mere—our mother.
‘Mestisang intsik’
It was truly another century.
It was a very structured life and oddly enough, Susan thrived in it. She was an excellent student, a child of Mary.
These were girls who were members of the Sodality, who said their lauds and matins together in the chapel and wore strips of blue ribbons. I hated it; I couldn’t figure out how to get away from the nuns and what I thought was the disgusting Establishment.
How or why we became friends, I don’t know. She once told me I was a mestisang bangus and I replied she was a mestisang intsik, which we both thought hilarious.
She was a Scotch drinker; I was vodka. We both loved our parents’ cognac. To be specific—Napoleon VSOP.
We were both smokers, a wonderful habit we picked up in college.
We were the first of the girls to graduate from Assumption San Lorenzo, and later, Susan and I met again in Washington DC, both taking our postgraduate studies.
Before this Susan had entered the Assumption novitiate at Ravenhill, and I had discovered that religious life was not for her.
But what a lot of people may not know about Susan is that she was deeply religious. And truly spiritual.
Her religion was without condemnation or judgment. She accepted people as they were, with tremendous tolerance, although she had little patience for idiots and fakes and pretensions.
I pity St. Peter and no doubt that old misogynist St. Paul has his hands full now with Susan’s questions. She may let God off lightly because she loved Him truly.
Holly Golightlies
Eventually, after DC, she worked at PNB, New York, and invited me over for a party. It was an astonishing apartment. The phone rang and we couldn’t find it because it was under so many papers, books, blouses, coats and sundry other objects. It was the time of “Moon River” and we were all Holly Golightlies.
By the time the party was in full swing there must have been at least 50 people in that one-bedroom apartment.
In the early hours of the morning some guests had left but many of us were wandering around trying to find space to sleep.
There were people in the bathtub, people in the bedroom, on the sofa, on the floor, even on and under the kitchen table.
Finally, I joined a pile of bodies on the living room rug and went to sleep. Oh, to be young again…
The years passed. We married, had our children; our marriages had their ups and downs like all relationships. The children grew up and moved away, married, had their own children.
We were grandmothers, we grew old—although that wasn’t a word Susan approved of. Eventually we were widows together. As I said, we go back a long way.
And yes, it is true. I couldn’t believe Su was gone because she isn’t. She will live on in our memories, in what we are, in the things we never want to lose.
And she will live on in that tremendous library of videos she created of Philippine history, culture and traditions called “Travel Time.”
Many of us speak of love of country, or patriotism, perhaps of nationalism, but Susan, as her life’s work shows, truly believed and loved this country.
Her knowledge of its 82 provinces is prodigious and grounded on experience. She crisscrossed its rivers and mountains and forests more times than you and I can imagine.
She talked to fishermen and farmers and weavers, and loved them all. She was truly democratic even if she did claim she was a Bagobo princess.
So, though she may not physically be with us… she does live on in that fantastic body of work spanning two decades.
This is her legacy to us and, in fact, to the nation. She lives on in Lui’s paintings, in Mark’s scholarship, in Ching’s creativity—all these were things she loved (Lui, Mark and Ching are her children). She will live on definitely in Sophia and Samuel, her grandchildren she loved dearly and was so proud of.
So I will not say goodbye. In faith I know we will meet again. I used to kid her that I would be in my cloud singing opera, drinking vodka and smoking, while she’d fly by on her cloud doing her Pilates.
But I will say, “Su, you have run the race, you have finished the course, you have kept the faith.”
