02.20.08
Send Off
Feb 15: We paid our last respects to
an officemate, Kuya Titing, who died to cancer at the age of 50. It amazed me
how the Church was filled and ran out of seats because there were too many of
us who wanted to give such a great person the best send off.
As the mass progressed, I remembered
how I stood inside the same church feeling the same way when my grandmother’s
last mass was heard. The same weird feeling. The same vain attempt to hold back
a tear. The same bitter consciousness that we were gathered for a reason quite
different from that of regular Sunday worship.
Kuya Titing had always been
accommodating. When you needed something from him, you wouldn’t have to think or
ask twice because he would gladly do things for you. He was never absent in
almost all our office activities, assuming almost all the most difficult
assignments. During the months that he was sick, his absence really created a
void at the workplace and I was one of those who didn’t very well know how to
fill it. I couldn’t bear seeing him and much more accept the truth that he
would soon leave so I never visited. As much as I could, I wanted to freeze
time up to when he was still healthy and active and not stricken with grief for
his fate.
But circumstances would soon push you
to the wall and let you face what you have to face. Circumstances would soon
break all the defenses you built. Circumstances would make you realize that
there are more important things in life — your ailing friend needing your
hand to hold as the fear of death consumes him, or his last few words before
the last breath is drawn, it could be being able to seize every chance to tarry
death than shielding yourself from hurt, than self preservation.
Even in his last few days, Kuya Ting
taught me all these — to never waver at anything in life, even at the sight
of death, to think less of myself and more of others, to love more the people
around me because really, no one knows how soon anyone of us would be gone.
Seeing him in his last few days up to the last few minutes before he left, it
made all my countless hours of disturbed sleep and nightmares worthwhile. What
better send off there is we can give to dear ones but to be there in their last
few minutes.
esapade
with kuya titing
(and ate helen)
