Tito Gio

Written on March 14, 2007:

A close friend of mine died last Friday of an aneurysm. Mr. G. I call him Tito Gio IRL, but it seemed weird to do so in writing. Funny how in Filipino there's no default mode of address for older people who aren't your blood relatives but with whom you share a degree of closeness. Everyone inevitably lapses to 'uncle' or 'auntie.'

I'm rambling, I'm sorry. I guess I'm trying to elucidate the nature of my friendship with Tito Gio and what it meant to me and I'm making a mess of it.

He was 48 when he died, so he was much older than I was, but in the year we spent together trying to launch the Cabuyao Literary Society, he never tried to use any of that against me. Not his age or his experience or even his considerable abilities. He was always very supportive and generous of his talent. He had a great love for the arts and he believed that there was a place for it in our community despite the lack of support and funding.

Before I met him, he already had a long record in civic work. He had served on the PTA board of our community high school for many years. The school was severely under-funded. It was often short of teachers, equipment, and basic services, so the PTA had a proactive role in trying to keep it together. As president and director, Tito Gio spearheaded fund drives, launched information campaigns, worried about break-ins and wayward students and no books in the library, wrote the student handbook, took photographs of important school events. He had a profound concern for the welfare of the students and yet felt impotent in the face of the odds stacked against them. He studied them minutely, these despairing, endangered young people, noting the lack of structures for socialization, the teaching of ethics, the right to self-definition. But he was frustrated in his efforts to channel his ambitions into a coherent plan for action, until, he said, CLS came into his life.

We used to joke in the group that we found each other by 'kismet.' We would have run into each other sooner or later, but when we did, it was at the right time and at the right place in our lives. Hence the crappy jokes about planetary alignments etc. Tito Gio always claimed that we were a bunch of lunatics, the biggest fools in town, but, typically, also approached our 'antics' with deadly seriousness. He had a really intuitive commitment to the group. There wasn't much to base your faith on, anyhow, except for intuition. Because he was right, we were fools, right from the beginning. We had high-minded ideas but he knew that our follow-throughs could sure do with a lot of work. And yet he stayed. He was there for the balagtasan, went around town talking about the website and promoting the group, finessed the founding of the theater, linked us up with people we needed to know, planned and dreamed.

I didn't know him for very long. When I went to the wake, the only people I recognized--aside from the other people in CLS (Kuya Mark, Dee, Tito Elmer)--were his wife and mother, so you could say that I didn't know him very well either, at least not in the conventional sense. Our circles of acquaintance outside of CLS did not intersect. He was much older, there was that, but there was also the fact that the work we wanted to do, our beliefs, were enough to bind us and establish a camaraderie that would otherwise be hard-earned, if not impossible. We shared not so much friendship as a communion. He said that he had always been hoping and waiting for something like CLS to happen. If he had not married young, if he did not have a family to support, he would have tried this long ago, but he was afraid to do it alone. So the group gave him the courage he needed. Kismet. He believed in it.

In some ways, CLS had been something that was private among us. Our families were usually disapproving of our 'activities.' It was not as if we had decided to overthrow the government, but, in a community which valued and inflated notions of propriety, asserting oneself, declaring difference and change merely through initiating something 'new', meant that you did not have to take up arms in order to be considered improper. It's hard to appreciate and project the importance we gave to the group. I think if I were to die now, my parents would consider CLS as just another one of those 'things' I wasted my time on. In the same way, perception of Tito Gio's part in the organization would probably be all out of proportion to how much of himself he gave to it. So I'm using this opportunity, on the record, so to speak, to make clear that he gave, and he gave a lot.

I passed by his house last Sunday and we outlined our plans for the summer. It was the last time I saw him alive. He wanted to develop a website covering candidates for the municipal elections this May (a print version could also serve as our newsletter for the summer), set a date for an initial meeting with prospective members of the classical guitar circle we both had an interest in setting up, plays for the theater, a possible photography exhibit the sinakulo in Bigaa. I told him about my trip to Hong Kong, the vagaries of my illness, how weak and discouraged I was after RodCon, and that now, for the first time in what seemed like a long, long time, I felt like I could enjoy the world again. He said, in his sincere, gentle way, that he was very happy for me. And also that it was a good thing I was up to snuff because there was an awful lot of work to do and he didn't think I was the sort to wallow in self-pity. Now, back to that newsletter idea.

We were supposed to have years to watch this thing unfold, you know. Make costly mistakes and pay for them, laugh at politicians behind their backs, meet every Sunday at the local McDonald's or Saturday nights at Mang Iking's and gossip interminably about our projects, how the kids were doing, winning the lotto. Kuya Mark was devastated when he heard the news. I still can't talk to him about it. Dee refused to believe it at first. I learned about it on Sunday via Tito Elmer (I had been trying to reach Tito Gio through phone for our usual weekly meeting) and thought it was a horrible joke.

I am grateful that I met him. I am grateful that in the last year of his life (it is exactly one year, how strange), being involved in the group managed to bring him a measure of happiness and fulfillment. And beyond this... I guess we have to continue moving forward, carry on. On my part I feel that his presence in my life was a very important lesson that I had to learn, only I don't know if I could ever figure out how to deconstruct it, commit it to heart.