Remembering the decency of Emmanuel Jose Pavia

For the third day in a row this week, I just came home from Emmanuel Jose Pavia’s wake.

While it’s understandable that several Filipinos never had, or will never have, the pleasure of personally getting to know Em-J, the local news, more or less, has given enough reason for his name to strike a chord when spoken and heard.

Make no mistake: it isn’t just because of the circumstances of his passing. While the behavior of a good number of Filipinos today seem to point towards being more accepting of summing up a person’s life based on the circumstances of his death, I, for one, refuse to do that, most especially to Em-J.

Too many people have lost their lives during the past few weeks, and so many of us seem to be content with just dwelling on how they died, versus remembering how they lived – or still could have lived.

His name deserves that bell-ringing in our heads not because he was taken away in cold blood – no, it should be because of this simple fact: he truly was a good man. He was a good, all-around person who made a colossal impact on the lives of his friends, family, students, and the Ateneo community, with his simple ways of touching people and making them feel at home.

The culture we have, and the culture we’re breeding

Em-J, like a lot of us, belonged to an age-old culture of Filipinos known to the world: a culture of warmth, hospitality, and love. He made all of that felt to anyone every time he cracked a witty [sometimes corny] joke, threw a Frisbee or basketball towards your direction, or greeted you warmly, sometimes in silence, when bumping into him – and it’s amazing someone is able to make you feel like that, considering that he towered over most Filipinos, who are short.

A good number of us have espoused that culture for as long as I can remember growing up, but now, we seem to be developing another one – a frightful, opposite one, at that.

With what has been making the news of late, could it be that our warm culture as a Filipino people is slowly being challenged by its opposite?

Could it be that this is what we seem to be breeding now – a culture of sadness that strikes heavy the hearts of many –from friends, to families, to even strangers whom we only encounter through their names on a news website or Facebook post? A culture of fear that plagues all people by instilling the idea that, at any time, one’s life could be defined in a news article, a picture, or even just words scribbled on a cardboard box? A culture of violence: where we think that the safety that we longed for as a people is best found at the owning and firing of more guns? Or, even, a culture of forgetfulness –where we refuse to acknowledge the mistakes of our already bloody past?

Can we fight to keep it?

While things certainly do seem bleak a lot of the time, mostly also because of recurring sad news, these also happen to be the times where I am extremely thankful to have the likes of Em-J’s life to remember. Beyond just the little interactions we’ve shared together and his random comments on the movements of the NBA that I enjoyed reading, a big chunk of his life I will always be honored to look back on, was how he managed to push people to be better and feel so at home by just sharing his life with them.

In particular and in one reflection he wrote earlier this month, he shared what it meant to be extraordinary and striving for it. He said it meant making extraordinary a habit. It meant simply having the desire to be it. And, sharing a part of his freshman life and talking about what he’d learned from his English teacher at the time, he wrote, “He taught me to believe that you don’t have to be doing something extra special, unique, or different, to be considered extraordinary. Rather, you can just continue to do ordinary things, but do them extraordinarily well.”

I suppose, in a lot of ways, that’s one of the reasons why I’ve never given up (or will never give up) on this country: because of people like Em-J—whose life was truly nothing short of extraordinary. He managed to do so many things so simply, warmly and selflessly, and the greatest of them all, undoubtedly: he loved extraordinarily. So, it’s no surprise he deserves to receive anything less than that.

It’s practically his life, one of the rare ones, that make me believe that the very warm, loving culture we both grew up with truly isn’t dead. In that sense, I think he lived more than a lot of us ever did, or ever will.

Where we have to go from here

Amidst this growing culture of sadness, fear, violence, and forgetfulness, remembering Em-J’s life tells me that I, for one, refuse to write off his own by just focusing on how he lost his.

I, for one, refuse to let this person’s cause of death overshadow the effect of his great life – a life that touched friends, family, students, and, for certain, an entire country who may have forgotten for a while what it means to be Filipino. A life that made people feel warm, loved, and pushed so many, in their little own little ways, to be extraordinary, too.

I certainly cannot tell if he realized it, but he was one of the truest embodiments of what it meant to be not just an Atenean or a Filipino – but of what it meant to be a decent, truly good person.

As we make our way towards the next half of the year, despite our dark start, I most certainly hope that we all make a stronger effort to be better people – to be good people. I hope we all try to remember how we used to be: loving, warm, and hospitable, and that we genuinely can’t do that without a deep, utter respect for human life. I hope we all fight and push ourselves to remember how people lived and not just how they died.

And, most of all, I hope we all strive to keep a culture we can all still be proud to call our own – an extraordinarily Filipino one worth living for and worth dying for; a culture Em-J himself obviously embodied until his very last breath. – Rappler.com

Serge Gabriel is a psychology graduate from the Ateneo de Manila University. He is an aspiring philosophy professor and restaurant owner who is currently training for his next triathlon. He is a proud friend of Em-J’s—a person who will continue to make him believe that there is an inherent goodness in all people.