Making up for chances lost forever (Updated)

THE MOMENT we gripped hands Roland Simbulan and I were brought back to the same occasion.

There, many months earlier, with our better halves, namesakes as happens—his own Chit Estella and my own Chit Roces—we had sat at lunch in one kindred circle with other friends in the home of a couple among them. We didn’t rise for goodbyes until five hours later. In fact, we didn’t really say goodbye. The conversation had been so lifting, so self-affirming,we promised to meet again, and soon, before this new momentum of comradeship became worn in the hustle of the living we had found ourselves in—we were all journalists or academics or both.

That promise hangs now—and forever—unforgivably unfulfilled. Roland has lost his Chit, her life snuffed out in one reckless instant on the road, and without the slightest sense of comparing our loss with his own, which could only be presumptuous and ridiculous, we’re all the same left regretting, mourning, our own lost chances with her. She was only 54.

But what to do with chances lost forever?

Always trust our dear, most prescient Dr. William Shakespeare to have the most assuaging, redeeming, indeed the perfect prescription for victims of tragedies, issued here through Constance in King John and now all ours for the desperate grabbing:

I will instruct my sorrows to be proud…

And so, here’s the volume of our own proud sorrows, The Chit Estella Reader, her words collected by Roland surely especially for the sake of his own orphaned heart and more generally for a proper memorializing of one of the nicest and most edifying souls to have been known by us.

I feel myself to have only begun to know Chit. It’s a sense doubtless heightened psychologically to an extent by her premature passing and its consequent ending of any further personal relationship with her. What Roland has come up with is definitely the next best thing—a Reader containing just about every word Chit herself published or set down as well as remembrances of her by friends and associates.

Chit Estella was a journalist, a journalism teacher, and a rights advocate, roles she performed with equally high competence and conviction easily evident on reading her. A breath of view and a depth of understanding not half-achieved in today’s run of journalism distinguish her reportage: a mere four socio-political articles and nine profiles leave one feeling regretful and angry that by fate’s judgment she could produce no more.

Her Editor’s Notes (in the PJR Reports, then a monthly publication of the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility) and other writings on the media as both a profession and a business can constitute in themselves a text for a side course to journalism.

What more, indeed, could she have done!

Ah, but we just must instruct our sorrows to be proud.

 

The piece above has been written as a foreword for The Chit Estella Reader.

 

No nicer man

ISAGANI YAMBOT possessed two qualities not normally compatible with his serious, brawling profession: he was gentle and given to jesting.

How he managed those qualities so that they took nothing from his professional competence demonstrates a sensitive sense of place: it was strictly business when he was digging for truths he was expected to turn up as a matter of public duty.

He kept his jokes out of copy for one thing—out, for instance,of the editorials he wrote for the dailyhe published—the (Philippine Daily) Inquirer. But he dished them out again on the first suitable occasion that presented itself. He did so sometimes to the point of corniness, and if he didn’t get his laughs he still got his endearment—there was no nicer man.

Neither did his hard of hearing in one ear, left unaided, I would guess, in order to preserve the purity of special sounds—it could not have been vanity, for he didn’t mind being seen cupping a hand to his ear to catch diminuendos—indicate any diminution of his appreciation for concert, opera, and other theatre: he was a regular, a sort of cognoscente even.

That’s why we wondered about his absence at La Traviata that Friday evening. The tragic text flashed on my phone during the first intermission: apparently the curtains had come down on him before they came up for us. His heart gave out after two recent surgical attempts to mend it—first to free an arterial block, then, when that scarcely worked, a quadruple bypass to create new passages to feed blood to the heart. He died at home. He was 77.