MEDIUM RARE

Funny, that funny girl Marissa Sanchez – comedian, actor, singer, all-around entertainer who cracks jokes at even the most inappropriate moments (and gets away with it) – should be the author of a slum book in which she asks impertinent questions like:

At your funeral, whom do you want not to be present?

Gerbera or chrysanthemums?

Which photo of yourself do you want displayed by your coffin?

As our funny girl explains, “Life is short. Time is fleeting. Death is certain.” She says 500 copies of “My Farewell,” priced at ₱950 on Lazada and Shopee, have been sold, mostly to people with lingering illnesses. One of the pages is left blank “where you can draw a broken heart” and name that hateful (!) person, if you wish, specifying “your sentiments” and grudges against him or her.

Marissa is a single mother to a 12-year-old girl. I have always known her to be a cheerful person with an ebullient personality, so this book is quite a revelation. Indeed, she’s merely revealing a new facet to her character, that she’s realistic and not afraid to live life to the full, moment by moment. It helps to ask yourself, as her book suggests, “What am I living for?”

Flip the coin and find a documentary series on Netflix where Dan, host-narrator, travels the world to discover the “blue zones” where live the highest concentrations of centenarians. Okinawa and Ikaria, a Greek island, and Nicoya in Costa Rica are among the bluest of the blue. What do their people have in common?

They don’t go to the gym to torture their muscles and bones. Instead, they work with their hands, they walk and walk. They do their own gardening, they don’t live alone but in small communities where they socialize, enjoy conversations, drink some wine (no chemicals) and dance and laugh, laugh, laugh. Some of their streets are hilly slopes where they walk up and down steep stairs, all part of the daily routine of staying young longer.
In Ikaria, they grow herbs for tea and flavor it with honey produced by their own bees. The Greek, i.e., Mediterranean diet consists of corn, beans, and squash; meat is sparingly eaten.

As Marissa Sanchez would say, “Life can be joyous.”