Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Rage Against the Dying of the Light

TODAY, they will bury my grandfather that I never met in a small town outside Dipolog City that I never heard.

In the near-December days of his life, more than two decades ago, my grandfather left Davao and went back to that town where he grew up. The only image I have of him is a faded picture hugging my older sister, still bald and only few months old. I was not yet born at that time.

He was my father's father. And looking at the quiet tenderness my father showed, I knew my grandfather was the stern one, a stock impossible to budge. So when we heard the news early morning of August 3, my father choked everything in and became the hard limb that he was taught to be, which most of his life he wasn't able to do. That evening he took off for Zamboanga.

I have never shared this with anybody, except one, and I think it is not my part to share the burden of my family. I have taken part in overwhelming deaths -- those of the famous ones, who left some legacy, a footprint in my personal life: Francis Magalona, Michael Jackson, Corazon Aquino. I mourned their loss: thought of the succeeding days of emptiness and of the longingness for some other people to replace them. Sharing my grandfather's deaths in these times is like tossing a flare of a matchstick into sea of supernovas.

I did not share not for the sake of silent pride or secrecy. I held back because the death of the my grandfather barely shook me. I do not know my grandfather. I do not even know his real name. (Doing a false tribute would do more injustice to his life I never saw.)

Death does not happen to the dead, I believe. Death only happens to whom the dead leave behind: the loved ones, the ones who remember the hurt and the ones who feel the resonating tremble of their immortality in literature. The dead only experienced dying; death goes to the living.

For now, I do not feel death. What worries me now is what will become of my father after he goes back home. For sure, I will feel more his experience of death than anything I will ever know of my grandfather's life or his passing.

Reposted from Gelatin Silver World, August 12, 2009.