Our Domini

Domini. I must have been nine years old when I first saw her. At the time, she was in college at Silliman, my parents’ student, and she was part of a Shakespeare play their class was staging at the school’s oldest building, at Silliman Hall. She spoke the words of the Chorus in “Twelfth Night,” as I recall it and she gave a deep bow. I gazed up at her, and thought, “When I grow up, I want to be just like her.”

I didn’t know that in a decade and a half, she would be my sister, and because of her, I’d have a wedding dress created by Christian Espiritu, its jusi panuelo collar an early iteration of the distinctive design that later appeared on the gowns of a First Lady. She made it happen, I felt, with ease. That was Domini: making the seemingly impossible an attainable truth, in matters both quotidian and consequential.

That search for truth, and articulating it with the effortless grace she brought to all she did – that’s what her millions of readers found: the steadfast integrity of her writing. One afternoon, at her office, I listened while she was interviewing a government personage; in her approach she was not probing or intimidating, but it seemed to me she was apparently disarming the subject with that understated, soft-spoken curiosity, simply listening. And I thought. So that’s how it’s done: let them speak, and in time, the key words will be spoken, which she’ll record exactly as they were said. And the consequences could be devastating, but she wrote steadily, undaunted and without the strident agenda propelling much of the journalism of those fraught times. Our family saw it as a badge of honor when, at the onset of martial law, she and the newspaper were hit with what was then a record-breaking lawsuit because of her investigative report into corruption and wrongdoing in the military and the government.

Vastly gifted, a pioneer, champion of human rights, one of the first journalists to write from places difficult to access, as in her visits to what was then Red China and South Africa. She went across the world throughout a brilliant career, giving voice to the human story implicit in the merest gesture of a stranger who was dispossessed, or telling us of a community coping with injustice and disaster. Domini did not see herself in that crusading role, but that was indeed what she did. Her clear-eyed gaze, steadfast in its humility.

From her I Iearned grace: the vast generosity with which she saw the enduring loveliness in each encounter, and which she then transformed into gifts for all. Among the lifetime of gifts she gave me, a sister proud to bear her family name, I treasure the purse she sent to Iowa, following her visit to the T’boli in Mindanao: a shoulder-bag pouch beaded and hand-stitched and today still in faithful use after two decades. “Hand-crafted by women of the tribe,” she wrote. I see it now as the distillation of her ethos, the heart that, for her, made her work meaningful.

She made it attainable and accessible for us all: the elegance and skill that baked a sans rival with the same ease with which wrote the words. Her words that gave us confidence that the world was good, and could be made even better by us all. She showed me how it might be done, our Domini.

Rowena Torrevillas is married to Domini’s brother Lem. Most of her life she’s lived in Iowa City, where she taught nonfiction writing and transnational literature, and administered the International Writing Program for two decades. Now retired from teaching, she’s the grandma of Mikey and Juliet Seamans, and continues to write poetry and fiction, while trying to define for herself the meaning and form of the personal essay.

This tribute was sent through STAR columnist Krip Yuson.