Goodbye to a good and decent human being

Lorenzo A. Paradiang Jr. was many things to many people. But what he was to others is a matter I have no authority to say on their behalf. I can only speak for what he meant to me, and to a certain extent, to my immediate family.

Paradiang was an uncle of mine, a first cousin to my father. My earliest recollection of him was as a name. Whenever family conversations involved family relations, the name Loring often cropped up, especially when it came to matters of importance. He must be important, I thought.

The first time I can actually recall having personally met him was on his wedding, to a woman I would later come to know as Tia Virgie. I was maybe about five or six then, so God knows when the wedding was.

But as long ago as that was, on hindsight it also gave me the impression that I must have seemed important enough to Tio Loring to have been given such an important role in his wedding. I was the coin bearer on the day of his life.

To the best of my knowledge, and to the depths of what my heart tells me, Tio Loring never strayed from his marriage and remained faithful to the woman he gave his life to till the last living breathe he took.

Having said that, I can actually stop right here and say no more. For what better man is there than he who can stay true to a commitment even when no one is looking. And that man is my Tio Loring.

But that is between him and Tia Virgie. And for his children, my cousins Lorvette, Virlette, Leo, and Celeste and their families, who will eternally be blessed with the knowledge that for a time their lives revolved around the best human being they can find.

I count myself equally blessed to learn, in his own words, the great extent to which he believed in me, and to have kept the faith even when things did not always turn right in my own life. In my copy of his book “Footnotes in Time,” Tio Loring wrote this dedication: 

“It’s more than fondness that binds you to me. And it’s more than pride that I’ve felt at the status that you have attained. While I confess I had my own expectations some way back about what you would become, I’m now glad I was dead wrong and you were right. Keep it up.”

The expectations he referred to was my becoming a lawyer. As a topnotch lawyer and judge, Tio Loring probably saw some potential in my following his chosen career. But I had my other inclinations and went into writing. And I guess he respected that.

Tio Loring was a stickler for what is right and would not be hindered by anything in pointing that out. Here in The FREEMAN, he may be my uncle, but I am still his boss. Yet he would not hesitate to call me up and tell me what he saw wrong in the paper.

But if he was a stickler for what is right, he was damn fair and honest about it. That is what makes men like him so formidable. It is difficult, almost impossible, to stand against a man who is right, fair and honest.

I write but I do not write poems. As Tio Loring, a great lover of poems, is laid to his rest today, I hope he will appreciate my goodbye to him to come in the words of a poem by Stephen Spender:

“I think continually of those who were truly great/The names of those who in their lives fought for life/Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center/Born of the sun they traveled a short while toward the sun/And left the vivid air signed with their honor.”