To Those Who Gave Their Lives

Conrado De Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer

21/22Sep97 Front page

Lifted from the two-part article 

STRANGELY enough, I caught a glimpse of the meaning of what we are commemorating today the other day. Today is the 25th anniversary of martial law, the other day was the 10th anniversary of the death of Lean Alejandro. Seemingly two disparate events, they are in fact linked together as surely as the future is linked to the past.
      The 10th anniversary of Lean's death—by murder—was also the gala night of Gary Granada's musical, "Lean." I went to the UP Theater to see it, as did a horde of people, many of whom had marched with Lean in the streets not very long ago with fists raised at the face of tyranny. It was a reunion of sorts for them, which they marked with a brief program at the lobby of the theater before the musical itself started. Several people spoke, and a group sang, but though they seemed inspired enough, they could barely be heard through the din of laughter and remembering that echoed through the walls of the lobby. I had to strain to hear what they were saying, or singing, as did the crowd that pressed around them.
      Yet there was a lightness in the air, a spirit of bonhomie, that made up for the seeming boorishness of the groups that met and broke off at the periphery like bodies clinching and separating in a dance. People were telling this or that story about Lean, or betting what he would have said about today's events. Clearly, Lean, barely past the flush of youth when he died, was not just well known, he was well loved. He had touched a secret part of people's lives. And then suddenly it wafted in my brain, this thought, like a wisp of smoke from a woodpile.
      We've heard it said many times: The dead are never really dead but continue to live among us in our recollections, in our dreams, in our struggles. So at least for those who have lived well, or died well. Those who have lived badly, or died without having lived, only slip away into oblivion—as they should. It is an unshakable truth, but it is one that often lodges only in the mind, like a vague memory. It is rarely one that leaps in the heart like a spasm of joy.
      This was one of those rare times. There was something in that recollection that went past ritual and became living breath itself. Strange because there was nothing intense or resolute about the tribal remembering. On the contrary, it was casual and low-key. But it was that very casualness and quietness that enabled Lean to slip unnoticed through the haze of the past into the glare of the present. At some point, the people who were talking about him were no longer talking about someone who had been there once, they were talking about someone who was there still. The past flowed into the present like streams feeding into the sea. Lean might as well have been there. He might have pushed his way into the room, cigarette in one hand and a handset in another, and it would have been the most natural thing in the world.
      I swear there was something incredibly physical in the whole thing. It gave whole new meanings to the concept of living memory. In its deepest sense, that scene told me, living memory is something that goes past metaphor.
      Yet another scene that I saw that night offered another, but intimately related, thought, which bears as well on the event we are commemorating today.
      It was a scene from the musical itself. The scene was the Mendiola Massacre. Lean (Chikoy Pura) is cradling the body of a dead woman in his arms, and he sobs out a song. There are many things (paraphrasing Granada's lyrics liberally), he sings, that give life to our struggle, but in the end it comes down to one thing: human life. What gives life to our struggle is the exemplary life, the life that is lived in the service of other people, the life that is often taken away from us. He has uttered those words before, in less strenuous times, in the heat of discussion and debate.
      But now they take on a whole new meaning, in the vast quietness of death, amid the torn and bloodied bodies strewn around him. It is something that no longer merely lodges in the mind, like a fierce argument. It is something that pierces the heart, like a spasm of grief.
      Again, we've heard that said so many times before it's become almost commonplace. It's (human) life that gives life to our dreams, to our struggles, to our quest. It's the sacrifices of those who went before that animate our own life, it's the blood of those who fell in the night that courses through the veins of our freedom.
      But it is one thing to say that in ritual commemorations, like the yearly anniversaries of martial law and the yearly anniversaries of EDSA, and another to sob it out before the cold and rigid faces of the dead. The lesson is clear. To plumb the truth of that truism, we are compelled, like the Lean of Granada's musical, to come face-to-face with those faces—like the half-blown face of the Lean of real life.
      That brings me to our commemoration of the 25th anniversary of martial law today...