In his dotage, my father-in-law, whom we all called Lolo Tony, liked to sit on his easy chair for hours, reading the editorials of different newspapers.

He was always a world unto himself. In 1959, he would rouse himself once a week and go to our then very new house in Quezon City for his “exercise.” Our house was on a 3,000-square-meter lot, two-thirds of which belonged to my husband’s brother and sister who eventually opted not to live here. That part was overrun by weeds. It was lolo’s self-appointed task to hack at the tall talahib.

If it was way into the summer, the dry stalks would swiftly ignite and the fire soon be all over the property. The neighbors would scream in panic, we would be in panic. The city had a water shortage and we would drag the limp hoses across the driveway to squirt a niggardly stream into the towering flames.

Even in Antipolo, where the Fernandos had several hectares of undeveloped farmland, Lolo Tony liked to go up the small hill, survey the land around, and the next thing we knew, there would be a raging brush fire eating its way down the slope. It drove everyone nuts. Then Lolo Tony would retire to his easy chair, quietly eat a soft-boiled egg and read three newspapers from cover to cover.

Once he came upon a cow grazing among his newly planted corn in Antipolo—the same ill-tempered cow that had broken through his barbed wire fence three times! The next thing we knew, Lolo Tony had fetched his rusty rifle and shot the beast dead. There was a big row that almost led to a litigation with the owner. Our family had to pay double indemnity because the cow was pregnant.

Lolo Tony would come to our QC house and quietly plant coconut seedlings all over our garden, oblivious of whether we fancied coconut trees among our flower plots or not. After all, he had given us the property, didn’t he? Later on he got a sidekick in his new driver, as old as himself, whose name was Spider (he got his moniker when the Luzon Bus Liner he was driving overturned and he emerged from the accident on all fours, unscathed).

Slash-and-burn team

They were a quiet slash-and-burn team. Whenever Spider and our pyromaniac lolo, wearing fireman’s boots, cast their shadow on our gate, we braced for the worst.

When Lolo Tony got hopelessly ill of cancer, he never complained, even when we knew he was in pain or had a fever. He just looked up at us from his easy chair, and later, from his bed, meek as a suffering lamb. He was forcibly brought to the hospital. After two weeks of confinement, he got up one morning, put on his pants, and decided there was no sense dying there.

Characteristically, lolo died during one of the worst typhoons that ever hit Manila. He just quietly closed his eyes and decided it was a good day to go. Taft Avenue, in front of Philippine Women’s University, where they lived, was flooded hip-deep. The City Hall underpass was 10 feet underwater. (Some joker had even attached a diving board to the overpass). Several bridges and innumerable squatter communities had been washed away. And the Pampanga dam was about to burst.

To get to lolo’s house we had to abandon our car in Harrison Boulevard and transfer to an antique army jeep that my mother-in-law, Lolo Pising, had sent to fetch my husband and myself. The jeep stalled somewhere along the way and had to be pushed by the driver and one of our sons, both of whom caught the flu.

When we got to Taft Avenue, we had to climb over the first-floor porch and through a window, to avoid a dunking. Their eye clinic on the ground floor was flooded, and papers and loose objects were floating around in the murky water.

In the sala we took off our muddy shoes and climbed up to the second floor where lolo lay dead. Under a cloud of white hair, his face was in quiet repose, his hands clasped together like a canonized saint. He was beautiful. It never stopped raining. The whole family wept, for Lolo Tony was a good man and he was gone.

The funeral hearse was very, very late—it got stuck in mud somewhere in Caloocan it didn’t arrive until midnight. Singalong Church, whose patron was St. Anthony, where lolo had requested that he lie in state, was knee-deep in water. The parish priest couldn’t accept the body, so lolo had to be brought to Malate Church.

His friends literally swam to lolo’s funeral, but they came, umbrellas upturned, cars stalled and brakes gone, shivering in the most abundant rainfall in 107 years. Calmly, Lolo Tony slept on under the glass of the coffin in a profusion of wet flowers. We couldn’t help smiling in spite of our grief. For it was as if lolo were alive again, and had just set fire to the summit of a hill.