A loving tribute to an absent father

I have been without a father since 1989. That year, on May 25, while I was on a summer break, going into my junior year in college, he died on the way to work. We lost him to a massive heart attack.

In a taxi, I was pinching myself, telling God, “it’s not too late, you can take it back, only I know what happened.” My mom and my elder sister had left before I received a call that my father had been pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. I didn’t go see him when I made it there. At reception, I was told he was in the morgue, so I left. God did not listen.

In those days, death was a stranger that barged in on us while we were in the middle of a lifechanging plan. All our bags were packed—we were leaving for California for good. My dad’s lifelong dream had just come true. Looking back, I realize it might have been the pressure.

I took solace in the epigraph Truman Capote chose for the title of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, whose “La Côte Basque 1965,” a part of the book released in 1975 as a sneak peek, caused so much uproar among New York society A-listers Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, Slim Keith, and C.Z. Guest, all Capote’s close friends, from whom, as a result of his revelations through the thinly veiled characters of “La Côte Basque 1965,” he had been estranged. He and Babe, his very best friend, never spoke again. Unable to foresee the repercussions of betraying confidences, Capote in his social isolation descended into a whirl of drink and drugs. It is said that he was never happy again. He died in 1984 of liver disease and an overdose of Valium, Codeine, and barbiturates.

But I digress. The book title was from a quote attributed to Saint Teresa of Avila—“More tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones,” but I grew up with all these American writers, the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, John Cheever, and Edgar Allan Poe, thanks to my father, who was the consummate Great American Dreamer, if ever there was one.

My father wasn’t a writer, but he wrote well. He was a fan of the written word. I’d like to think that, against my better instincts, I became a newspaperman because I grew up with a father who always had a newspaper tucked under his arm. He made influencers (before the word lost its charm) of the opinionmakers of his time, whether on print or on the airwaves, like Nelson Navarro, Nick Joaquin, the young Teddy Boy Locsin, F. Sionil Jose, Manong Frankie, who would decades later become a father or—in his own words—a grandfather to me, and Jullie Yap Daza, who would become my mentor.

My discovery of Europe was also thanks to my father, to whom the world was all-American, straying only to Paris because it called to the heart of American writers, beginning with literary pioneers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 1800s and then in the 1920s, when the “Lost Generation” of writers, such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, expatriated to the French capital to escape Prohibition in America.

So that was how my father opened the world up to me—the West versus the West, America versus Europe—while I myself, as my life would have it, would be rooted in place here in the Philippines, from where once upon a time he dreamed of taking me away.

In fifth grade, I was assigned to report on the Balkan Peninsula in geography class. More than Paris, I would consider Balkan cities like Sofia, Prague, Belgrade (before Yugoslavia dissolved into Bosnia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Serbia, etc.), and Bucharest as my gateway to Europe.

As a child, I dreamed mostly of Bulgaria, not knowing that, in my adulthood, it would be with the Czech Republic I would be most familiar. If my father were alive, he would be happy to know I have a story translated in Czech and that at the end of this month, whose third Sunday is annually devoted to honoring fathers like him, I am mediating a discussion on European history, particularly in the context of current tensions between Ukraine and Russia. The talk, anchored on Czech-French writer Milan Kundera’s personal and creative account of Soviet invasion, is between French and Czech scholars, whose countries have taken their turns at the helm of the European Union in recent years.

My father’s house shines hard and bright. It stands like a beacon calling me in the night. —Bruce Springsteen

Although he focused his gaze on the US, my father showed me a much larger world in a way similar to what my idol, Vogue editrix Diana Vreeland, an American in love with Europe, once proposed in her Harper Bazaar column “Why Don’t You…”—“Why don’t you paint a map of the world on all four walls of your boys’ nursery so they won’t grow up with a provincial point of view?”

How is it that a father like mine—who, in life, being a distant parental figure back in the day when parenting was typically like that, and in death, having died while I was barely out of my teens, had been for the most part absent—be ever-present in my every day?

Like the characters in the books he made available to me, or the movies in which he idolized the likes of Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and John Wayne, my father was larger than life, part myth, part mystery, part secret, part revelation. Although on occasion, he did carry me on his shoulders so I could see more, so I could see farther, so I could reach higher, he wasn’t the type to do so. He ushered me into a world so big I could have been dwarfed in it, but he didn’t hold my hand, so I knew I’d have to walk tall, think large, dream big on my own.

My father was a star, distant, quiet, and—since 1989—out of reach, but somehow, he managed to make me feel I was 100 percent loved. That was the most important thing.

He taught me that in Europe or America or anywhere in the world, I could get lost, but I would always find my way home.