On discovering Tatays old letters: There is a dead rat somewhere in our office. The place smells like hell and we have been searching for two days now, to no avail. But this morning, mother looked into a sealed old closet in my Tatays former office and instead of the offending rat found a stack of old letters tatay had written and kept hidden. Reading through them this morning had me in tears. I was always the closest one to him but these letters revealed a whole new side to the man I knew. They are beautiful letters, written flawlessly in his steady hand and sent from Moscow in the 1970s. They spoke of love and longing, his studies and beliefs. We found love letters to my mother, one, where he cornily quoted a favorite old song, had me laughing and crying at the same time. Agit na agit na aktibistang cornball nun si Itay: Not everything I do is wrong, you give me hope and consolation, give me strength to carry on, for what Im fighting for is neither yours nor mine but for our son John John. Most poignant were his letters to his parents, in one of these long letters he wrote passionately about communism to his very religious mother: Sa palagay ko ang moralidad ng komunismo ang siyang may pinakamataas na uri sa lahat ng mga ideolohiyang bumubuo sa daigdig. Kung tutuong may Dios at ang relihiyon at ibang uri ng ideolohiya ang mga sangkap na kanyang ikinalat sa daigdig, ang komunismo lamang ang tanging sangkap na umaayon sa kagustuhan ng Dios. I wonder what my mercurial grandmother thought of this back then? I wonder what tatay was thinking when I started writing my own long dramatic full-time-activist letters when my time came? Oh, if only he had shown these to me when he was still alive. Hay, Itay. Asan kana kaya ngayon Tatay? Thank you to that dead rat (even as we still must endure this awful smell of death in the office for however long it takes -- to find the rat or wait for it to decompose completely?) and the cosmic powers that be who sent these letters to me. It seems I still have much to learn about him whom I most loved.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 03:55:10 +0000
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