Friends going

 It was a rainy Saturday afternoon when my telephone suddenly rang.  My land line hardly ever rings except for wrong numbers or those telemarketers I am always terse with.  But this time it was my old friend Bobby who sounded hesitant or confused.  He sounded different, not his old cheerful voice.  He said he did not know how to tell me so he was just going to tell me.  “Ed was murdered yesterday,” Bobby said.

  “Omigod,” I said, feeling lost and panicked.  Ed Pacheco was one of my dearest friends.  How could he have been murdered?  By whom?  It just did not make much sense.  The first thought that popped into my mind was – why now?  I have been car-less for about three weeks. His wake was going to be somewhere on Araneta Avenue and I did not have a car.  I just knew I could not make it to the wake.

Why does that always happen to me?  Why do my best friends die when I don’t have a way to go to their wakes?  It’s like they don’t want me to come, like I am being asked to deliberately stay away. 

 I remember the year I had a stroke, one of my daughters took me to Guimaras with her family.  The cell phone signal there is very weak so I just turned off my phone.  But the next morning I woke up early and decided to turn it on.  It beeped.  It was a message telling me one of my closest friends had died. I got a royal headache, took two pills and went back to sleep.  I think maybe this happens to me either because I am naturally an escapist or because I feel death is just taking a step into another world, a nicer, kinder, more peaceful world where you can rest, gaze at clouds and smile for a while.

 Anyway my dear friend, Ed Pacheco, has gone ahead of me.  I always thought I would go ahead of him.  He thought the same thing.  He was openly gay so we always had a good time together.  Either he would be parked in my office at the two places where we worked together or we would be on the phone talking a long time, laughing and giggling a lot.  Once he dragged me off to a far-flung furniture store in Pampanga.  Another time we ate at an Indian restaurant with friends.

 Once he dragged me to The Cenacle to take a seminar with him.  I thought it was on broken hearts because his heart was broken then but apparently it was on the Enneagram, a system for reading and understanding personalities.  I enjoyed the seminar, learned many things.  He kept waiting for the part on broken hearts.  It never came so he was disappointed.  But I carried it forth telling my friends I was a Seven.  I told a friend he was a Five and he got extremely annoyed with me though he did not know what a Five was.  It led to many funny experiences.

Why am I writing this?  It is my tribute to Ed, whom I used to call Patch.  He set me up to play mahjong with him and Bobby and Bert, all gay guys, then it began to include Annie, Bing, and a girl whose name I can’t remember.  I’d like to slap myself into remembering her name, which will emerge from my brain after I’ve sent out this column to catch my deadline.  Then I will want to die because I forgot her name.

 We had fun though.  But the truth is mahjong bores me after a while and eventually I stopped playing with them.  But I play it alone on my computer now, a kind of Old Maid mahjongg where you pair off your tiles in layouts that get more and more complex as you go along.  I ask myself — what could be more boring than this?  But I am lazy now, don’t want to stay up until one or two in the morning and sleep that late.  I’d rather read myself to sleep.

It is sometimes not easy to grow old, to have senior moments and the fear of getting Alzheimer’s disease (following my mother’s tracks), descend on me.  Every time I look at the mirror I get alarmed at the old lady I see there.  But at the same time I am sick of wearing make-up and put on as little as possible when I go out.  I think I may need a cataract operation soon.  That happens when you are ancient.  Then I think of my age and whoa – I am there.  And nothing forces you to face how old you are getting except your friends crossing over ahead of you. 

But I guess we are all in the pre-departure area.  We must be ready to go.  I am.  I have been sitting and knitting waiting for my flight to be called.  Then I remember another friend who died and lived again and told me death was a multi-orgasmic experience, that death was beautiful.  So I think Patch had a beautiful experience, one that I admit I envy, and may he be very happy in his other life.

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