Today, we gather, not only to celebrate the astounding legacy of our legendary five-time Speaker of the House, Jose de Venecia Jr., but to sit humbly with the complexity of a man who was larger than life but also in many ways, human. He was the epitome of a bright rainbow –he was many hues to many people across the political spectrum. He was a consensus builder but I suppose our biggest consensus was that we all fondly called him JDV, myself included.

My siblings and I also called him Dad. But actually, I called him JDV more.

As I am the second to the youngest and came much later on in his life, JDV and I had a 50-year age difference. An entire half-century of history, of wars being waged, technological turnovers, cultural revolutions, and political upheavals, separated the world he lived in and the world I grew into. I’m now UK-based. But he lived there for years apparently. It is probably the reason why he fondly called my sister Sandra “Dun-dun-dee” and my brother Ipe “Ipswich” as these were places in the UK. And we didn’t know that until recently, care of Manoy Ipe.

I’m turning 40 this year and I feel like the world has happened to me, beautifully but also quite painfully. And yet, I still am a decade short of his age when he and mom decided to have me, and then a year later, my sister KC who died in a fire in 2004 but is now reunited with JDV. What experiences he must have gone through himself and what wisdom he accumulated!

Our age gap felt not only chronological but generational. It shaped how we related to each other; how we disagreed (he hated Book of Mormon and said this Tony award-winning musical was an insult to a proud people. I’m like dad, it’s a satire, chill) and sometimes agreed (after a Broadway performance of An American in Paris, he was in such euphoria. Quite literally, at the theater lobby, he thanked the Lord in front of us for the opportunity to witness to such wonder. I agreed).

The age gap shaped how we understood the country but also misunderstood each other. I was a golden child, prima facie because I was born when he was 50.Not because I was some golden boy or whatever. What people didn’t see was the difficulty of trying to relate not just to a dad but to a statesman whose time was taken up by the public. He was a public servant in every sense of the word. He felt to me like a form of public good. Non-excludable, non-rival. And yet — that distance was also strangely, a gift.

In cultural memory studies, the French philosopher Jacque Derrida theorized the concept of pharmakon in his 1972 essay “Plato’s Pharmacy.” It is a Greek word pertaining to something that is both poison and cure. Memory and the act of remembering is a pharmakon.

Memory can hurt.

It hurts to remember JDV’s final years; as signs of aging slowly veiled the brilliance of his mind. It hurts to know that as I stand here today, I am not able to exact from a deep well of intimate conversations to paint you a picture of who he was in his own words. And to know that now, he is physically gone and no longer with us.

But memory can also heal.

It is healing that he is no longer confined by any earthly condition. That in his twilight years, he could still astonishingly recite poetry from memory, word for word. He could sing his favorite tunes, with gusto. Art is truly healing and it granted JDV with the gift of remembering.

It is healing to know that the man, who debated, negotiated, legislated, and dreamed an impossible dream is whole again in a way we cannot fully comprehend. We are, after all, human in the face of the unknown and Knightian uncertainty.

Most of all, it is healing to realize something I have understood more and more these past few days as messages of love and support poured in. Even Sigmund Freud couldn’t come to terms with it through his psychoanalytical obsessions. Romain Rolland referred to it as the oceanic feeling, the boundless sense of unity with something larger than oneself that scholars often associate with religion, or with encountering a great piece of art. I realized, in the course of this lifetime, JDV was never really mine to begin with. He was always collectively ours.

Speaker. Fisherman. Rainbow Joe. Comic book salesman. Mentor. War survivor. Boss. Colleague. Orphan. Ally. Negotiator. Brother in law. Peace builder. Tatay. Wordsmith. Businessman. Statesman. Superman. Friend.

When I entered Congress, people saw me as a continuation of JDV and Manay Gina’s legacy. They saw a golden thread connecting generations of public service. JDV stood on foreign affairs, the peace process, and interfaith dialogue. Manay Gina stood on women and children’s rights. I stood on culture and the arts and the belief that imagination is not peripheral but central to development – that it is its cornerstone, and not just a decorative or nice to have. That advocacy was mine. And yet, the courage to stand, and stand for something in this arena was something I learned from him and mom.

He loved the musical Man of La Mancha. He loved singing “The Impossible Dream.” He believed in dreaming big. “To fight the unbeatable foe,” as the lyrics went, “to bear with unbearable sorrow. To reach the unreachable star.”

There was something celestial and also oceanic about the way he engaged with that piece of music. It felt like an expression of his dream. JDV was always orientated towards that vast horizon — toward institutions, peace processes, and ideas that outlived individual lifetimes. Alexander Hamilton, in the famous musical, rapped about legacy. “What is legacy,” he said, “but planting seeds in a garden you will never see?” JDV, though not always understood by the public and the people he wished to serve, was truly a visionary and ahead of his time. Perhaps this is why our half-a-century gap sometimes felt less like a chasm and more like a coastline. He was always standing at the edge of a much larger sea. Nay, an ocean.

These past few days, I felt that oceanic vastness again – as we walked through a sea of loving Dagupeños who offered him a hero’s welcome and whose lives he’d touched. As I found myself to be a fingerling in a room full of fish, big or small, who felt seen by him, whose lives he touched, and who hold a piece of JDV in their hearts.

It hurts that I do not have a simple father-son vocabulary to fall back on. But it heals to understand that love does not always look like closeness. Sometimes it looks like a simple nod. An admiration from afar even when you’re up close. A special name that only he has for you, like he has for many of us in the room. He called me Tupispis kawayan and Topherus Haponicus Tabanicus Iyakinus. Sometimes it looks like soldiering on, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far.

Memory wounds because it reminds us of what we did not have.

Memory heals because it reveals what we were still given.

JDV gave these country decades of service. He gave institutions structure. He gave debates civility. He gave colleagues patience and understanding. He gave staff mentorship, kindness and love. He gave family his presence, however imperfectly, across the arc of a long and truly consequential life. And he gave me something quieter but no less powerful: he gave me the capacity to see the ocean. And then, he gave me bangus.

Today, as we bid farewell to JDV, I hold both sides of the pharmakon — the ache and the balm. JDV chased the impossible dream. Not because he was naïve. But because he believed that striving ennobles us — even if we never see the full horizon. But then again, what is a horizon but the limit of one’s sight?

With a life truly well lived, may he now swim in the ocean’s vastness. From whence he started as the proud fisherman son of Pangasinan, may he once again set off to sea – knowing full well that at the end of a turbulent storm, there is a rainbow? And fluttering, amidst its bright colorful hues, a butterfly. KC, you are in charge now.

We love you JDV. Rest in power. You will be missed.

(Christopher "Toff" de Venecia, son of the late Speaker Jose de Venecia, served three terms as representative of the 4th district of Pangasinan (2016-2019; 2019-2022, 2022-2025.)