"UNFRIENDING" THE DEAD

IT’S this part of the year again we remember our beloved dead, and one thing just struck me at this moment: my Facebook friends who have crossed the Great Beyond still remain in my Friends List.

It’s just so easy to bid them the ultimate goodbye. Just a click on a button across their name and they're gone. But that I haven’t done. Nor have I tried skimming through my list and start deleting people. You know, those who have been inactive, those pesky ones who love to share troll-inspired information or fake news, and those whom I haven’t seen in so long time that I have forgotten why I accepted their Friend requests in the first place.

Maybe I’m too busy to do that, and I don’t really stay long Facebooking to afford overhauling my account to root out unnecessary or obsolete friends.

Or maybe, I feel ill at ease with the word “unfriend,” especially in the case of my wife who died in 2011. I like to think I honor her by remembering the good times she had with me and her family, and treasuring what she's left with me. 

HUMILITY IN THE WORK PLACE

I WAS tasked in January to deliver a pep talk for our agency, as part of our Monday’s flag-raising ceremony. It was a few days before the pastoral visit of Pope Francis in the country. So I chose to discuss the virtue of which the People’s Pope is known. Humility.

Pope Francis is known to have plenty of humility. Humility to him means spending time with those people we find hard to live with, those we probably like the least. He denounced self-importance when he preferred a modest two-room residence to a grand papal apartment on Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, when he waited in line with the rest of employees at the Vatican’s canteen, and when he gave up his chauffeur and started taking the bus to work.

When we speak of humility according to Pope’s examples, we can’t help but sound religious, preaching about the teaching of the church. Why not, humility is the mother of all virtues, the most important lessons Jesus Christ imparted to his disciples and believers down to all of us present-day Christians. We’ve learned in the bible that God cannot work on us if we are proud.

Humility came from the Latin humus meaning “earth,” or literary “on the ground.” And to St. Thomas Aquinas, humility “consists in keeping oneself within one’s own bounds, not reaching out to things above one, but submitting to one’s superior.” This is consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church that humility “in a higher and ethical sense is that by which a man has a modest estimate of his own worth, and submits himself to others.” 

CLASS '89 HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

WE were one in singing “Farewell” a ballad (a favorite graduation song during our time) by Bagets star Raymond Lauchengco, and befittingly, we said goodbye to our beloved high school, our teachers, BFFs, and the rest of our schoolmates.

For the Class of '89 of Narvacan National Central High School, it was the end of our young lives filled with emotions and excitements, our seatmates, groupmates, crushes, the JS proms, extra-curricular activities, and the music we played during school programs. The friendships that officially began four years earlier marked its end, and times ahead of us would test our commitment to stay in touch after graduation.

Right after high school we went separate ways. While most of our classmates in Acacia section trooped to Manila or Baguio for college, I stayed in Ilocos with Romano Peralta, Gilda Damayo, Mayrene Pintado, Joan Cauton, Jerry Cabanit and Carolina Filarca; we enrolled and finished college at the University of Northern Philippines in Vigan.

A LETTER TO MOTHER

Dear Inang,

I’m sorry this comes late for Mother’s Day. During that day, I couldn’t write a single note for you. I tried, but all I could remember was that morning in the kitchen a month before.

It was the most poignant scene, the one I could easily remember; though at that time, I didn’t realize its effect on me. And I think of it now, like a reader flipping through pages of an old photo album, turning back to that event in just one glance.

It was the morning I arrived with my brother and two sisters from the hospital in San Fernando. Tatang, whom we fetched with a hired ambulance, was lying lifeless, now half covered with blanket on the wooden bed at the sala. While everyone around me was crying and groaning, I was frozen from where I stood. And my heart was in ecstatic pain.

5 YEARS OF FACEBOOKING

IT was December 22, 2008 when I opened my Facebook account, upon the invitation of Arlyn, a classmate in law school, or more than four years after Mark Zuckerberg and some classmates first introduced this online social networking service to their fellow Harvard students.  

A day after my name and ID photo cropped up in blue and white corner of the cyberspace, my cousin Danny Cadorna, whom I haven't seen since he left for Japan in 1994, sent me my first ever friend request. Then another relative, a friend, a former classmate, a coworker, and even a stranger wanted me to be in their list of friends.

They are saying that most of the people who know how to use a computer and Internet have a profile on Facebook. No wonder, in just a short span, more relatives, friends, classmates, coworkers and even strangers occupied my notifications for a friend request, and even a game request, a join-a-group request and a “like” request to whatever that page is.

GRIEF RECOVERY FICTIONS

READING books is helping me a lot to cope with grief. After my wife died, I kept on consuming books obsessively, in an attempt to have anything that would fill in the time where I could possibly think about my loss. Keeping myself busy days after my bereavement was a pain reliever. I was loneliest when I was not reading.

I read mostly fiction, and there was a time during this period that I scoured bookstore shelves and e-books lists for any helpful grief books, hoping that they would give me wisdom to help me better understand my experience, and that they could speak to me on a personal level in the quiet solitude of my darkest days. A kind of a lifeline to carry around.

But I got no success, or perhaps I didn’t search well. I’m not the religious type of a person, and I’m not so much into reading inspirational books, though I have read a few of them.

ON REWRITING

‘I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.’ ~ James Michener

REWRITING makes the difference between good writing and poor writing. James Michener and other great writers had given us some good reminders on the importance of rewriting. So whenever I felt dissatisfied with my writing style or couldn’t finish a story or an article, their advice on rewriting comes to me like fresh air into my humid desk.

Now every time I open my document, I would edit here and there and try to take note of things I want to change. But if there's no progress at all, then I rewrite and, when necessary, change almost everything in the document. As one author says, it is perfectly okay to write garbage, as long as you edit brilliantly.

It’s a big advantage living when easy-to-use computers and word processing software are readily available to every writer, and they have simplified immensely my rewriting task. I couldn’t imagine how much Michener labored with his typewriter and painstakingly writing and rewriting long notes to complete drafts for his manuscripts before releasing the final version to his publisher. According to Michener, he went very slowly and needed constant revision in writing his best-selling historical fiction Hawaii. He had to type about three million words to only trim down to about half a million in the final version for another round of draft writing.