Bye for now, Mom

We lay Mom to rest today in Dumaguete. Everyone lays her to rest, after final rites in Silliman University. She will join Dad in the memorial park where, 15 years ago, a troop of veterans fired shots into the air as he was laid to rest, to honor his guerrilla bravery.

We must all be brave today — even those who will not be there physically. Such is my fate. I could only say goodbye to her three nights ago, at the Silliman Church. 

Maybe it’s just as well. In 1996, after Dad’s interment, I made sure to stroll over to the grassy area where the arms-bearers had stood in a line and fired at the blue skies over Dumaguete. And I picked up two spent shells — as final souvenirs that would tangibly stand for all my memories of the good man, Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo.

Now that his partner Edith Lopez Tiempo joins him, there may not be anything left in whatever fanciful quota of token tributes to bittersweet memory this son has been assigned.

It may be enough for now, today, as I traipse off towards the shore of another island, to know that I have hugged my siblings Rowena and Maldon, right there where our home lies.

And it is enough for now to recall, oh so freshly, how Sawi and Susan and Marj and Danny and Bobby and Myrna and Ian and other writer-friends shared present grief and past joys as we paid vigil last Friday night.

Tears can only come again. Elsewhere. In other times. Maybe whenever we recall Mom Edith’s love and grace, her words on the page or as she uttered them to our face, addressing the ever-expanding family that came to grow and roost, in her very home.

We all lay her to physical rest today — all of us, wherever we are — all her sons and daughters whom she fed and nourished as we took our little steps in that big world that is the republic of letters. We know we’ll never see her again, never hear her actual voice — that lilt of diction, articulation, emancipation for all of us whenever we were caged by too much theory or doubts, or a little less loving.

Edith L. Tiempo with fellow National Artists BenCab and Rio Alma

And there will be more chances to pay tribute to Mom Edith even as we keep bidding her farewell, even as we keep rebirthing all her bright words that strengthened and inspired us.

Many of us last saw her only three months ago, in May in Dumaguete, in what could only have been a fitting occasion: the 50th anniversary of the National Writers Workshop our mom and dad had established.

On our first night there on May 15, eve of the third and last week when Jimmy Abad and I would serve in the panel, Mom joined us for dinner at Gabby’s Bistro together with Rowena and her niece, the steadfast caregiver Helen. Mom looked so elegant in her dress and shawl, and we remarked on how she had regained her health — poundage, mien, voice, twinkle of eye.

At 92, she really did seem extraordinarily in the pink. Our comment referenced the last time we had embraced her, five months earlier, in December the previous year. 

Two nights later, at the Director’s Dinner in Silliman Hall, she was in fine form again, partying with everyone even as she stayed on a vintage wooden chair handcrafted by an American missionary probably around the same decade of her birth. Everyone assembled in various groupings around her for Pinoy photo-ops.

In hindsight now, it was as if we were all being presented a final time to gather around her for posterity.

She spoke spontaneously to the merry assembly, ending with these words:

“What else do you want me to tell you? You can ask of any writer and they will try to come up with the goods. Would I dare to say that writers indicate to everyone what it is to be openly human, would I dare to say that? Yes I do, yes I do.

“Tell me of any other entity of society, outside of course the cultural centers, tell me who can say as much? Ask the writer any question you want answered. The writer is not all wise, but he welcomes being asked something he cannot answer. He will like that because he tends to even more extend himself beyond the group of writers like himself. 

“What else can I say to you except that I am happy, happy to be with you as I have always been happy all these fifty years with writers, And I hope that each one of you will be happy to say that, Oh, I was last night with a 92-year-old woman who claims she is a writer.

“Welcome. Welcome.”

A final program, Gaudeamus: Gala Night, ended the golden anniversary week. Mom Edith was given special recognition. At the farewell dinner outside Luce Auditorium, she was asked to say a few words from her table. Donning her chutzpah smile, she raised both hands and declared: “Let’s do it again!”

Oh, yes, we’ll do it over and over again, Mom. Every one of us will keep on honoring you, even those who have not partaken of the beneficence that is the Maytime workshop. Your words, on paper, will live on and shine wisdom on the chaste reader.

As for the images, well, it’s been a treasure trove.

Personally, I’ve collected them since 1968 when Eman Lacaba, Donel Pacis, Cesar Mella Jr., Armando Ravanzo and I — the “fellows” from Luzon — were welcomed by Doc Ed and Edith at the workshop, where we would bond with our Southern brothers Rene Estella Amper, Dionisio Gabriel, Urias Almagro, Lamberto Ceballos and Rene Bonsubre.

That summer, when I stood impatiently by the gate of the Tiempo residence in Piapi, her admonition was offered in the gentlest manner: “Hijo, let’s be Christian.”

Months later, I met Mom Edith at Magellan Hotel in Cebu City, where she attended a literary conference with her daughter Rowena. The next summer I went back to Dumaguete, and the next, helping break in the new fellows.

Late in 1970, she told me I should teach poetry in Silliman. I complied. She’d visit in Banilad where I stayed with writer Tony Enriquez and his wife Joy and their daughter Vanessa. Kerima Polotan Tuvera would also come with her brood, and we’d have such happy picnic lunches by a fishpond, with the sea a breath away.

Flash forward three decades: she received the National Artist award from President Estrada in Malacañang. Poet Ernie Superal Yee and I sat together in a back row, among her escorts.

Another decade passed. Last December I found out her real name. Helen said it had been Editha in Mom’s baptismal certificate. The last letter was dropped somewhere long the years.

Mom was nursing a cough then, and looked quite weak, so that Helen and I forced her back to bed despite her resolve to welcome her surprise visitors, including a younger Editha. That was how Helen recalled that they were actually namesakes.

Mom looked so frail then. She worried us all. But came the 50th workshop five months later and she socialized beyond Montemar, her hilltop haven.

Oh, I’ll also remember her singing bawdy songs after the usual dinner of lechon and prawns when she received a new batch of workshop fellows at her home.

We go back and forward in time when we recall our precious moments with her.

Two years ago, she asked me to write the Introduction to what she said would be her last book, Commend & Contend, a poetry collection published by UP Press.

“Wizened Bounty” became the Intro’s title. Here are excerpts:

“Edith L. Tiempo borders her end-lines with infinitives and willfully violates her own precepts emphasized at writing workshops through the years, telling young poets to avoid employing too many words depicting but abstract notions.

“But she has the cachet, eclat, or ‘K,’ having long and consistently earned her seminal keep. So she can actually use a mindbender like ‘cogitative recognition’ in a poem. Only she, as casual progenitor, has earned that right. 

 “Ah, wisdom. When it comprises the very texture of poetry, the largesse resonates with the sound of gold coins clinking on the broken pavements of an informal settlers’ community. We are all prole and pedestrian before such winking, bling-bling magnanimity.

“Tiempo’s poems early provided illustrative examples of how verse can elevate itself into a convergence of Apollonian and Dionysian modes, layers, tiers of plenty. Cerebration began the quiet celebration in her works. It still does, but now both substance and technique issue from well beyond a lofty perch, ivory tower, cloud, maybe even Olympus. 

“Here is philosophy as poetry, wisdom as poetry — with such wizened control over initial insights that are then ushered into a vizier’s pass of very thin air and the whitest light….

“While coursing through mighty conundrums, she suddenly utters, ‘Ah, bahala na!’ We see her, lips puckered like a child’s, still, because her mind is like a child’s, always seeking the end-all of exploration….

“‘No wonder we wince at our gross imaginings...’ — she observes of death-to-life processes, before turning teen-ish with her soft eureka over a ‘kinky counter cycle’ — just as she declares in another poem how she is ‘openly pissed.’

“Plato’s question on ‘appearance’ versus ‘realities’ pins him in ether, too, or does it, as ‘Plato at a floating window?’

“The tidy, cleverly punctilious letter-perfection of describing a room and its tests of neatness segues into a pensive rhetoric on the nature of true ownership: the carpenter’s, or the owner’s? Behold, she says, ‘... we stay outside/ of it, that we can enter it,/ to take ultimate possession.’ 

“She may as well be describing our reverent regard for her poetry, which we stand outside of, not so distant but hovering over a keyhole, now bending on our knees, peering in, and seeing our mother beckoning us intuitively into her chamber. She smells us, she knows we are making silip, and she says come in, enjoy the proffer, you need not be too respectful of parameters in this daytime ether. Do enter, and share in, learn from, my well-ordered bounty.”

Bye for now, Mom. See you and hear you and hug you again tomorrow.