The day my father gasped

It was an auspicious year, 1912. On the 21st day of March a century ago was born my Dad, from whom I was named and who receded as stately a senior while junior grew in professional wisdom and became a man of his own. My Mom used to say that my Dad would rather wear his sons’ worn clothes than let them wear his! Much of his life was a celebration of the present and a hopeful anticipation of the future.

1912 birthed China’s first republic and the formation of the Guomindang, a long shimmering caesarean delivery by means of a bloody revolution that festered long after the manifestos of many combatants were sheathed on cabinet folders. The ill-fated Titanic made its maiden voyage.

A century before, Napoleon Bonaparte’s undefeated French army met Russian resolute defenses that later led Tchaikovsky to scribble his 1812 Overture, which our Madison Avenue mind lords did not hesitate to mine for the world-renown Lone Ranger and the Marlboro Man!

The Philippines finally emerged after the American occupation with a national identity and its Illustrados quickly merged their pocketbooks with the imperial designs NYC’s captains of commerce and industry, and married their oligarchic privileges with the shakers and movers of Washington, D.C.

Jaime Sr. was the runt of a brood of 11 children. He was two years older than the first of many nieces that followed. In fact, the family story goes that as an infant, he was cared for by his eldest sister who had already been married but seemed to have difficulties conceiving, and her care of my father apparently got the maternal juices flowing enough to bring forth her first-born. My Dad’s first playmate and later close friend of his family was his niece but belonging to his own generation.

There is nothing special about recalling father’s birth other than our historical sense of calendar markings. The use of “gasp” rather than “birth” is our literary rendering of the moment of birth and death—the first gasp into life, and the last out of it.

We recall his centennial for what he left deeply embedded in my psyche, that is, the facticity of one’s birth is sufficient for the lifelong celebration of life in all its entirety. This was not a religious belief or a theological understanding. It was an intuition that seemed to inhabit every cell of his flesh and bones, an insight gladly shared in his teachings, mostly in the form of a pastoral ministry in the United Methodist Church. This was no Pollyanna optimism, nor was it devoid of real regrets and deeply felt disappointments.

He would have been at home with Jeremy Rifkin’s definition of “faith” in his book The Empathic Civilization:

…faith (is) the belief that one’s life is worth living, and for that reason alone, it (has) meaning in the larger scheme of things and therefore (needs) to be lived fully in deep connection with others.

…faith…can be purloined and made into a social construct that exacts obedience, feeds on fear of death, is disembodied in its approach, and establishes rigid boundaries separating the saved from the damned. Institutionalized religions, for the most part, do just that.

Having myself taken the journey of perusing the width and breath of the Judeo tradition, I happily landed on its genuine ecumenical side and thereby afforded the chance to appreciate the rest of the world’s religions, its metaphysical evolution when it turned religious metaphors to become seriously secular, to the wisdom of the scientific revolution that is the legitimate offspring of the journey of human consciousness itself!

My Dad stayed with the religious metaphors of his upbringing, which I forsook when “open hearts, open minds, open doors” became cynical shibboleth suited for superficial heart-warming Wesleyan experience but found wanting in the current realities of my time.

Our latest complete family picture of the first generation siblings (with Mom) was taken on the all-family dinner after Dad’s internment, memorable to me since Dad was interred at the same time I was on my back while four holes were poked on my belly to deal with an oversupply of gallstones. More religious relations were aghast when I characterized that moment as a tête-à-tête between Dad and I while he was getting the shovel and I, getting sliced with a scalpel!

In my decade-long visits to the CK P.O., I had a nudging acquaintance with a retired Mr. Blanco who, I believe, is the father of a former government functionary named John. The son later went back to active military duty; I made his acquaintance while engaged in one of Saipan’s voluntary social services. With Mr. Blanco’s blue-hatted graying mane and autumn canvas jacket, we would nod at each other; I did not ask what was on his mind, but he was surrogate Dad in mine.

It has been awhile seen I last glimpsed Mr. Blanco at the P.O. In a week, Ching Ming (the dusting of the gravestones) is a time in China when we remember and honor the beloveds who have gone before. More than the “thanks” that profoundly burps from the bowels of my being, for Dad and Mr. Blanco, I live my life because by their quiet and ordinary living examples, they managed to convey: You may live likewise!