Lolo

          My maternal grandfather died last week at the ripe old age of 95.  Since he played only a very little part in my growing up years, I did not find it proper to deliver a eulogy.  Listening to others who did give eulogies, as well as hearing the family stories after the funeral, enabled me to know more about Lolo than I ever did when he was still alive.

          Atty. Franklin S. Guanco was one of the very first lawyers that the province of Leyte has ever produced.  Leyte's Congresman even hosted dinner in a first class restaurant when he and one other Leyteno passed the Bar exams.  I've seen a picture of that event, and it was apparently at a time when lawyers were not yet a dime a dozen as they seem to be now.

          He was the third and youngest child of a Chinese-mestizo family.  His father, Candido, was a very wealthy businessman and the son of a Chinese immigrant named Yu Guan Co who married into a landed Filipino family.  His mother, Sotera, was also half-Chinese.   Lolo was apperently close to his mother who did most of the raising of the three children.  This might be why he viewed it as one of his worst personal tragedies when she died when a boat they were riding on capsized on open sea.  He tried to rescue her and was able to recover her body but she was already lifeless.

          Candido was an absentee father who came home only once a week - he spent a lot of time in opium, gambling and possibly prostitution dens.  I remember Lolo himself telling me that his mother was very patient with his father, even when he was gambling away the family riches (entire rice sacks of money on each trip.)  His father used the entire name "YuGuanCo" as his last name, but lolo was advised by his law professor to shorten it for reasons of brevity.  For some inexplicable reason, he chose "GuanCo" as his surname instead of "Yu" which was culturally more proper.  At that time, the rules on name changes were still not as strict as they are today.

          Like most Filipino families, they were reduced to poverty during the Second World War.  Candido's numerous debtors were not in a position to make payments, and years later denied they even had debts due to the lack of proper documentation of such loans.  These life lessons instilled in Lolo the value of money and was known in the family to be very stingy.  However, he probably had too much of his father in him because he was also known as quite the opposite to his friends and needy neighbors.

          When my mother and her brothers were growing up, they were living in a third class area in Paco, Manila.  My mother remembers the difficulty of asking Lolo for money school projects and house expenses, while every morning, he always makes it a point to give money to neighbors who claim to have no cash to buy rice with.  This had an unintended benefit because no one, not even their most violent neighbors, harassed my mother and her siblings.  They were collectively known as Anak ni Attorney, and were given the same respect that was accorded to Lolo.

          Although Lolo believed in God, he wasn't a particularly religious person.  To him, as long as one believes in God and does good works, one has already fulfilled his obligations to God and man.  In fact, he's an Aglipayan who never formally converted to Catholicism.  But this never stopped him from marrying a Catholic, and raising his children as Catholics.  It's all one to Lolo, and he would have viewed religious debates as a complete waste of time.

          Perhaps because he himself experienced poverty, he was capable of great personal sacrifices.  My mother and her siblings all remember a time when their mother (my grandmother, Celing) was the strict disciplinarian whose methods of punishment would all be considered child abuse today - e.g. hitting, making one kneel on salt or munggo while holding heavy hard-bound law books on each hand, and even hanging one of my uncles by the feet outside the window for all the neighbors to see.  At that time, Lolo was the silent type who was viewed as the welcome respite from Lola's wrath.

          But things changed when lola had her seventh or eighth attack.  She apparently had a heart condition that made her short of breath and consciousness whenever she experienced extreme anger.  The doctor advised her to change the way she deals with her children if she wanted to live longer.  Lolo and Lola had a heart-to-heart talk and from that point onwards, the responsibility of disciplining the children shifted to him and he then came to be known as the strict disciplinarian in the family (though not as sadistic as lola, one of my uncles jokingly added.)  This developed into him being an authoritarian figure who was very difficult to reason with, and who frequently was abrasive with others.  A lot of times he would say things that would come across as insulting to people, and he never apologized for this behavior.  

          As for lola, she began to loosen up and became known as cowboy.  This complete reversal of roles existed until their respective deaths.  I'm now thinking that if things were different, a lot more people would have looked more kindly upon lolo.  As it is, lola was probably the most loved member in the family, and lolo the most "hated", if such a word can possibly be applied in families.  This was probably the greatest thing he did for lola, and it's a pity that most of us grandchildren only knew about this after his death.

          Lolo contracted a particularly virulent type of pneumonia three weeks ago that resulted to him being in and out of the hospital almost non-stop.  A younger person would have been able to recover from such a sickness, but Lolo's 95 year old body simply could not stand up to it anymore.  I guess that makes his death as being due to old age, and not pneumonia.  I had a chance to visit him a few days before he died and it was apparent that he didn't have long to live anymore.  He was very weak, and could no longer speak due to the sickness and the repeated insertion and removal of feeding/suction tubes as part of his treatment.  His handwriting was also already illegible so sign language and eye contact was resorted to just to know what he wanted to express.  

          Throughout his whole ordeal he wanted to do just one thing - he wanted to go home.  He repeatedly expressed his wish in the past to die at his house in Kamias Road, Quezon City.  To this end, he gave the doctors and us a hard time when he would violently remove his tubes and dextrose injections whenever he was told that he needed to stay in the hospital a while longer.  He also kicked, pinched and punched us whenever we told him that he can't go home yet.  When he made signals to me that he wanted to go home, I didn't have the heart to tell him that he can't yet, so I simply pretended that I did not understand him.  

          I do wonder if the family did the right thing in trying to save him.  He was, after all, already 95 years old.  As it turned out, Lolo did not get his last wish, and instead died feeling miserable in a hospital room with just one relative beside him.

          Lolo's funeral was yesterday.  Goodbye Lolo, R.I.P. +