I will always love you

Whitney Houston in our throat comes either as praise or complaint. The complaint issues from despair over the deterioration of a career splendidly accompanied by an undeniably wide-ranged and deeply moving voice. The praise emanates from the unequalled experience of being transposed and transformed by a transcendent voice into the realm of eerie euphoria and goose bumps.

Daughter of songstress Cissy Houston, of African-American-Native-American-Dutch descent, Whitney grew up with impressive singing influences. Niece to Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick, and goddaughter to Aretha Franklin, influenced by the likes of Gladys Knight, Roberta Flack, and Chaka Khan, makes her a singer of impeccable pedigree. Her influence on those who followed her on the microphone is just as immense and comprehensive.

We remember her most with her signature song I Will Always Love You from the movie The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner. Also, she left an indelible mark as a fashion model before becoming a singing sensation when she refused to have anything to do with companies doing business in apartheid South Africa, earning Nelson Mandela’s eternal gratitude. When the ex-prisoner and later SA President visited the Clinton White House, he specifically asked that Whitney did the entertainment honors.

The timber of her song went beyond the quality of her voice. We were particularly touched by her rendition of the 1988 Seoul Olympics song, providing us with a singular statement about the nature and direction of our life. While One Moment In Time alluded to an Olympiad’s attainment at the medal stand, the song struck at the time as an affirmation of the totality of our existence.

From then on, I started characterizing my one 86-year long journey from womb–to-tomb as my “one moment in time.” In 1988, we trained new college graduates in the task of soil and water conservation in three watersheds in the Visayan Islands, the Philippines, challenging our young colleagues with the question of vocation rather than a paycheck since we asked them to live in remote communities where the task was to engage community people to protect, maintain, and sustain the integrity of the natural resource in their communities, from the nearshores to the uplands.

One Moment In Time was one of the songs that 40-some young people sang together when they synergistically met quarterly to report on and plan for their locations. It also became my own mantra when rehearsing my beginning as the product of a creative duo, from the moment of my conception making it out of 200 million sperms to fertilize an egg who we now know emitted hormonal juice to assist the chosen sperm that I was. In union, the sperm and the egg created a most incredible and complex organism that would be me, all in only nine months! The 86-year journey image became our one moment in time, from conception to the achievement of our dying in 2031.

That we come to celebrate the completed life of Whitney Houston when she is not yet 49 attests to a stormy life challenged by the turbulence of marital relations and the easy access to drugs in living a pressured existence. That her death does not come as a surprise to associates does not come as a surprise to her followers either. Tragedy after all seems to be the strongest pull on the heartstrings.

That her terminus comes in the love month of February when the world normally celebrates the ways of heartbeats and heartthrobs is poignant, more so in our China where beyond the chocolate and red roses of commercialized 14th of February is the indelible practice of its real Heart Day the Qi Xi Jie, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. China’s Valentines Day is the sad story of a common cowherd and a royal weaver girl, falling in love, forgetting their social responsibilities and obligations in the force, power, and passion of their romance, thereby earning the ire and condemnation of the Emperor for them to meet only once a year during the double seven.

Whitney Houston’ I Will Always Love You blares in China’s commercial loudspeakers this week in the same way as Michael Jackson’s moonwalk videos dominated visuals not too long ago when the singer himself evidently succumbed to the false comfort of prescription drugs.

Our archive is graced in images of Saipan’s Mt. Tapochau, of memories hard to forget but now confined in digitized frames and celluloid dreams. Our love longings lead to our nephew’s room in a two-story residence out of Aloha’s Ewa Beach, though we are now ensconced in the cold of Dong Bei where the promise of spring is only in the calendar while our veins still brave and endure minus 25C weather.

Thus, the pathos of Houston’s tragic cessation of breath and song remains simply now an item in our memory, much as our lives are mostly lived in what has been, at once regretted and praised. Still, because we once loved and are enabled and empowered to love again, Whitney’s voice will be with us a long while to remind us of that fact.

So now, to Whitney and her fans, because she sweetly and angelically elevated and expressed the yearnings of our romantic soul, she will always live in us, even as we dare to sing and love again!