MANILA, Philippines – Publicly he is Mario Taguiwalo or MMT to people he worked with, or Mar to close friends. But he was Nonoy to our parents and to us, his 6 sisters.
He was Tito Noy to his nieces and nephews, many of whom were born and grew up in the States. Almost 6 months to the day after he turned 60 years old and 10 months after he was diagnosed with colon cancer, Nanay’s only son and our only brother passed away last April 22.
Inday June, my daughter born in Camp Crame and who is the god daughter of Nonoy, wrote upon learning of his death: “Rest in Peace Tito Noy. You always wrote beautiful eulogies for your family and friends who went ahead of you – no one will be able to do that for you. So sad that I wasn’t even able to bid you farewell, give you a tight hug and a peck on the cheek. I will always remember your kindness, corny jokes (which you delivered really well!), and your beautiful writing. RIP.”
And this is true. It will be hard to find someone like Nonoy who will write a eulogy as beautiful as those he wrote for our sister Manang Cely who died in 2001 or for his two sons. But I have to write to channel my grief over the passing of a beloved brother and so this is my way of saying goodbye to him.
Nonoy was barely 13 years old in 1964 when he was accepted as a member of the first batch of Philippine Science High School (PSHS) scholars. Already enrolled as a first year student of the Negros Occidental High School (NOHS), he hastily left for Quezon City. Our first cousin Ann Marigomen, who was his classmate in NOHS, would always say it was a good thing that Nonoy went to PSHS because this made it possible for her to become valedictorian of their class.
He would be the first in the family to study in Manila. I would follow him the next year when I entered UP Diliman. I think we started our involvement in student activism at around the same time but in different settings.
Even before the First Quarter Storm of 1970, his PSHS batch held rallies in Malacañang to demand for a permanent location for the high school which at that time was renting the Philippine Government Employees Association (PGEA) in the compound where the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines is now located. By the time he enrolled in UP, he already had a good grasp of the history of nationalism, and in his first semester he also became a member of SDK, my own mass organization.
SDK, which stands for Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan, resonated with us as our father was named Democrito. That was not the real reason why we both ended up as SDK members, but our father was not unhappy with our choice of organization.
Prison and theater
We both returned to Negros in 1971 to continue our political work. But even before martial law was imposed in September 1972, he had become politically inactive. He got married and went back to school.
Even then, he was not spared by the military. He got arrested and spent several months in a Philippine Constabulary prison which was just then 10 minutes from our home in Bacolod. After his release, he enrolled in La Salle, Bacolod, where his acting skills were honed under the tutelage of Peque Gallaga. I believe his role as the Mad Hatter in a production of Alice in Wonderland was his first theater role.
I went underground during martial law and got arrested. After my escape from prison in 1974, I had two clandestine meetings with Nonoy. One was when he brought to me my P10,000-share in the GSIS benefit of our father who died in 1975. The other was when I visited him at his office as hospital administrator of Medical City sometime in the early 80s. It was his first stint as an administrator – in a hospital at that – but he said that Mao’s organizational principles which he learned as a student activist served him in good stead.
I asked him for some money so that I would be able to watch “Oro, Plata, Mata” as our limited underground allowance was just sufficient for transportation and food. Of course, he gave it to me as he was proud of his part in co-writing the script of a movie about Negros hacenderos in a time of war.
By the time of my second arrest in 1984, our father who was my regular visitor during my first detention was long dead. Nonoy was the family member who visited me in Camp Olivas several days after my arrest in Angeles City. Later on, he would tell me that he was to afraid to go to Camp Olivas given his own record of detention, but he had to put up a brave front since the lawyer who accompanied him was not a human rights lawyer and was more scared than he was.
He became my regular weekend visitor when I was transferred to Camp Crame, usually bringing along Freddie, his second son. He was usually tired and would take a nap on the hard wooden bench for visitors while Freddie would roam around the Pook Bimbinan. Nonoy’s visit was a welcome one breaking the buryong (boredom) of prison life even as I was raising an infant who was born inside the camp.
Laughter, stories
I was present when he took his oath as Undersecretary of Health, with then President Cory Aquino administering the oath at the Malacañang Guest House. I was just then released from prison and was wearing one of the shift dresses that some members of the Women for the Ouster of Marcos and Boycott (WOMB) had given me. My sisters were aghast at my outfit when they saw the picture of the oath-taking. But Nonoy laughed it off saying that Cory herself wore what appeared to be a house dress.
After his stint with the Department of Health (DOH), he would become a consultant for the World Bank and USAID, among others. His monthly earning was equivalent to my annual salary as a UP professor and he was generous when my sisters and their children from the States or my mother who lives in Bacolod would come to Manila for a visit. There would be lunch or dinner in upscale restaurants and tickets for shows such as Miss Saigon.
He would regale us with stories. One of our favorites is that one on his visit as DOH undersecretary to the Provincial Hospital in Bacolod. He told the staff that every time he peed, the hospital came to his mind because he was circumcised there.
Another family favorite is the story of how he sang “Bigala” when he was asked to sing in Vietnam where he was a World Bank consultant for the privatization of the country’s health care system. “Bigala”, an Ilonggo song we learned from Tatay when we were children, is about Bigala, a woman who had a bad attack of diarrhea while exchanging her wedding vows. The vernacular is funny as it contains sounds that imitate such an attack. And Nonoy explained to his Vietnamese health workers’ audience that the song was about the importance of sanitation.
Aware of his extensive participation in Edsa 1, I was puzzled by his lack of enthusiasm for Edsa 2 and his non-participation in the 4–day protests in Ortigas which my daughter and I participated in daily. He said he knew Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and he was not optimistic that the country would be in better hands under her.
He became politically active again as a moderate during the Oust-GMA protests after the “Hello, Garci” exposé in 2005, and we would see each other in Ayala or when he dropped by in our anti-GMA Quezon Hall rally on his way to a meeting of the Black and White Movement in Ateneo. But we have different perspectives on neo-liberalism and he proved consistent in his belief when he became a member of the Liberal Party and an adviser of Mar Roxas and eventually of now President Noynoy Aquino.
Unbearable grief
In 2003, Nonoy was devastated when Mike, then only 18 years old and thoroughly enjoying his first year as a UP Fine Arts student, died of a heart attack. Last year, Ikoy, his eldest son and a graduate of UP collapsed at their home and never recovered.
Nonoy’s pain in the loss of a second son was evident in his loving eulogy for Mark, Ikoy’s formal name: “Mark is the child of the times that laid some of the foundations of the person I am today. He embodied the passions, mistakes, good intensions, unanticipated side effects, bright ideas and wrong-headed notions that made me for better or worse the person I am. When I lost him, I was truly losing a great part of myself. This is a source of my unbearable grief.”
Ikoy died on May 20, 2011. In July of that year, Nonoy was diagnosed with colon cancer and on April 22, Earth Day and one of the hottest days in Manila, Nanay’s only son and our only brother followed Tatay, Mike and Ikoy, our sister Cely and our other departed loved ones to a place where we all eventually would go.
Asta sa dason nga pagkit-anay, Nonoy! Palangga ka gid namon! – Rappler.com
(The author is professor at the UP Women and Development Studies.)
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