Christmas potpourri

Life is truly complex but never more so than these days as we try to cope with the dizzying pace of a changing world. The thought is especially poignant to me this Christmas without my husband. We were married for 41 years and did not spend a single Christmas away from each other or without our children, even as they became adults and had their own families. Christmas and reunion were special. It had never occurred to me that the time would come when although we would celebrate with the same rituals and traditions year after year, there would come a time when he would not be there anymore to celebrate with us. The celebration had its solidity, but all that went to pieces when he died last August. So I am left remembering odds and ends, bits and pieces that made up the hours of Christmas holidays this year.

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La comedia. The Spanish cleverly brought “comedia” to entertain the masses during their colonial rule. The “comedia” was sometimes also called moro-moro because it was a musical skit depicting a clash between the Christians and the Moors (Moros) of Spain. Although serious wars were being fought in reality in a futile effort to defeat recalcitrant Muslims in the South, the art form ingeniously fictionalized battles that made the Spanish the victors. Even if these were merely pretend conflicts, I suspect there was a more sinister purpose: to make it sink in the minds of the colonial subjects that any attempt to revolt would only make them suffer the same fate as the moros. Still, the essence of the art form of “comedia” is more than its comic ending. It was to pretend.

These days we are regaled by similar “pretend” battles between politicians but it can have disastrous and unforeseen endings. Take the latest “comedia”.

Some couldn’t believe their ears when they heard former president Cory Aquino apologize to Erap for Edsa Dos. In other words, she did not really believe nor understand why she had joined others to oust Erap, once dubbed the ‘Bucaram of the Philippines’ in Edsa Dos. Neither was Senator Noynoy Aquino credible when he tried to save the situation by saying it was only a joke. If I remember right when still a congressman, he and others like Senator Chiz Escudero, Alan Peter Cayetano tried to waylay Erap’s impeachment by keeping the hearings in the justice committee. They later retreated and Erap was subsequently impeached.

It might be more helpful perhaps if we accepted Aquino for what she was and had always admitted — she was no leader and had no pretensions about being a leader. But a more serious failing was whether she even had a mind of her own. How and why did she govern? A more candid answer is she behaved like a puppet who moved with the strings that were pulled to make her act by those who thought her useful for their political agenda.

The theme of the political drama today is how to paint the incumbent president in the worst light. Aquino has been counted on to reenact her roles in Edsa 1 and 2.

Embarrassing as it is, it was not so much the apology to Erap and the disappointment that she did not understand why she had joined Edsa Dos in the first place. More reprehensible is that she should allow herself to be used. The opportunity today was how to put down President GMA and sound clever to please her audience.

She must thought it would be safe after all, in the convivial company of those who were also at Edsa Dos. “Magkakasama tayo noon,” “magkakasame tayo ngayon.”

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Eulogy for a warrior: Whatever may be said about Ricardo Manapat, he was a warrior. He fought bravely, if at times naively. He might have misjudged the attempt to dislodge FPJ as a presidential candidate by questioning his citizenship but this does not matter. He will be remembered for writing Some Are Smarter Than Others. He may have made errors in this work but his courage made up for the mistakes. As I said in a previous column, his book should have been the basis for a Commission of Truth of sort at the time. As it is, with no real closure of the Marcos regime, his work remains the closest we will get to an accounting of those years.

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It’s funny but when we were in exile abroad, we pined for Filipino Christmases. We missed the ‘simbang gabi’, the parol and the kakanins at the Church’s courtyard. We often joined Filipino workers in London for their noche buena feasts. At the same time, we also had the rituals and traditions of an English Christmas for the children — roasted turkey, Christmas pudding, mince pies, brandy butter and brussels sprouts with chestnuts.

But since returning from exile, we have continued with the English rituals and traditions in memory of a long exile. As we sat around the table and pulled our crackers (a decorated paper roll with surprises inside that pops when pulled apart).

Among gifts I received was Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. My daughter gave me the book in the hope it would help me to heal from my husband’s recent death.

From a short synopsis written by her publishers: “Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, just after they had returned from the hospital where their only child, Quintana, was lying in a coma. This book is a memoir of Dunne’s death, Quintana’s illness, and Didion’s efforts to make sense of a time when nothing made sense.”

“She’s a pretty cool customer,” one hospital worker says of her, and, certainly, coolness was always part of the addictive appeal of Didion’s writing. The other part was the dark side of cool, the hyper-nervous awareness of the tendency of things to go bad. In 2004, Didion had her own disasters to deal with, and she did not, she feels, deal with them coolly, or even sanely. This book is about getting a grip and getting on; it’s also a tribute to an extraordinary marriage.

I have began reading the first pages and I am not sure if reading Didion’s story can help with my healing. Indeed, it only leads me to re-live the horrific moments when I tried my best to bring back my husband to wellness. I had presumed that if I tried hard enough and wished as mightily as I could, I would succeed in making him well again. But as I told my children, it was not to be and in the end, I finally accepted the lesson that it is not within our power to stop death when it comes.