Just a day apart, I lost two friends for all time. I valued them in such different ways I never thought I’d speak their names in the same breath till now—Lina Prima Alba Limbo and Cirilo F. Bautista.
Lina was a close friend from our parents’ generation, and that friendship has continued to our children’s and has been sealed further, over the years. I am baptismal godmother to her youngest son, Hermie, and godmother at the wedding of her only daughter, Trixie.
We had been friends even before we became classmates at St. Theresa’s, Manila, where together we developed other friendships that have lasted in old age, in sickness and, in her case, in death.
Already on dialysis for more than two years, Lina had slipped into an emergency during a procedure. Trixie kept us posted on her condition. She was confined for some time, but as soon as visitors were allowed, we were all there.
We continued our visits after she had been discharged. Home with Trixie, a widow like her, Lina seemed getting better and even joined us visitors for lunch at nearby Milky Way. She had been looking forward to another outing when she had a stroke.
She fought hard but never left the ICU this time. In one of her lucid moments, she said no to signing the Do Not Resuscitate hospital form, which other patients in her condition would welcome.
It was so like Lina to haggle for perhaps one more visit from us, one more lunch out, one more session of memories and laughter.
Happy memories
On the first night of her two-night wake, my tears just kept falling endlessly. Called to speak, I somehow felt relieved: Happy memories flowed out uninterrupted by tears. For some reason, maybe Lina arranging things, I Xeroxed a copy of the letter Lina had written to Trixie on Mother’s Day only last year. I had put it out along with other letters from other mothers in my senior section of the Sunday Inquirer.
I ended my talk by reading it. Trixie and I hugged each other, sobbing. I decided to stay away on the second night, feeling again the onset of painful, wet grief. I went instead to the Manila Symphony Orchestra concert, featuring Ingrid Santamaria, at the Ayala Museum, and felt soul-soothed.
The following morning, a text message came announcing Mass to be followed by interment at the Santuario de San Antonio. I felt Lina wanted me there. I rushed from my aqua exercise and made it. As it happened, the celebrant was Fr. Laurian Janicki, a Franciscan friend, who joins us six matrons for aqua exercise when he’s in town—the only “aquabeau,” as we call him, among “aquabelles,” as we call ourselves.
Upon seeing Lina’s name on the detached door of the yet empty hole, I lost it again. Nothing was left of her but ashes in the urn, which I kissed and watched disappear into the niche.
Walking away, I realized I was close to my parents’ own niche. Who knows? Maybe Lina had arranged that, too, so I could visit her when I visited my parents.
Baguio love
The other loss is Cirilo F. Bautista, National Artist for Literature and husband to our high-school classmate Rosemary. For many years I missed Rose, missed talking with her. The rare times she appeared at our gatherings, she was always in a hurry to get back to ailing Cirilo.
During their courtship, in Baguio where they met, both taught at St. Louis University. The Theresian nuns who also taught there worried for their star academic because her parents were not keen to release their daughter in marriage to a writer.
In the end, the nuns (who were instrumental in their courtship—one of them, Sister Angelina, became sponsor at their wedding) and Rose were proven right: Theirs was the perfect union of poet and life’s muse.
One day, she called me to say Cirilo liked reading my column. I was, of course, beyond thrilled
—no poet of any stature had told me that. Vergel and I were once invited to a parangal at De La Salle University, in Taft, a gathering naturally dominated by poets. I’ve always had an enormous respect and fondness for poets.
My father loved poetry and taught me to love it, too. (My father’s brother Anding may have been a fine writer himself, but he also liked to kid around, “What is the fastest way to disperse a crowd?” he would ask and answer, not for any lack of love for it, “Poetry!”)
Rose and Cirilo gave us books of his poetry, and I wrote a column about him again after reading his poems. He was happy I seemed to understand and appreciate his poetry. I got to know him better through his poems and other writings. In them I will always find his spirit.
Everything he wrote, all his books, he dedicated to Rose. I found myself in profuse tears again just imagining how Rose must feel losing such a man.
People’s loss
His loss, of course, is not just Rose’s, but mine and this nation’s too. The presence of Frankie Sionil José and Bien Lumbera, fellow National Artists, consoled me and assured me that, more often than not, this award is given to those who truly deserve them, like Cirilo.
Vergel once drew a caricature of Cirilo for my column. Rose liked it so much she sent me a picture of the two of them and asked if Vergel could draw them together. Alas, the drawing didn’t get done. Vergel pleaded sudden fright at being asked, and has in fact stopped drawing for my column altogether.
When we heard the news of his passing, Vergel and I decided to attend the services at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. What a sendoff! The simple man Cirilo was, he would have probably chuckled at the ironic grandness of it all.
Where Lina was a great personal loss to me, Cirilo was an equal if different sort of loss to a people already poor in almost everything.
