‘Exeunt omnes’

This is a traditional stage direction specifying that all characters should leave the stage. Carmen Guerrero Nakpil’s last volume of memoirs was titled “Exeunt”; the news that broke on Monday that she had passed, was, in many ways, simply a formality. Not for her to take a French leave, as her contemporaries might put it. But, really, she had said her farewells and left the stage after her collection, “Heroes and Villains,” came out in 2010.

In retrospect, we know now that her long farewell began in 2006, with the publication of the first volume of her memoirs, followed by the second and third installments of her life story. It was—again, obvious only in retrospect—the only kind of farewell she could have made: eloquent, honest, refined.

So, to repeat the obvious, hearing of the death of Tita Chitang did not surprise. It saddened, yes—but what did surprise me was discovering the year of her birth (1922). Oddly enough, I found her both older and younger than I expected, perhaps because my parents were contemporaries of hers. But since both have already passed, it made me realize with a jolt how, in many ways, their friendship with her was the kind that only contemporaries make—deeply, with one another as adults (four and six years’ age differences matter greatly when you are growing up, but hardly make a difference once you’re in your 30s and beyond); and how their generation is well and truly far beyond where we keep them in our minds, at least.

Perhaps this is a coping mechanism, both for the young and the old. To keep someone fixed in your mind, at the age and in the condition you best knew them, is a wonderful emotional preservative—if it is a kind of universal characteristic of knowing, as I think it is, and not just a personal eccentricity for some, which I hope it is not.

Charles de Gaulle famously said that old age is a shipwreck. But something in the way we remember and see—in our mind’s eye, at least—rejects the encrustations of time and preserves, in vivid colors, sounds and even smells, those we love and are fond of, as they were in our heart’s prime.

In a similar vein, growing up observing the gatherings of elders, and now, slowly joining the ranks of the elders of one’s self, one can’t help but notice that, when among their contemporaries at least, people don’t age when they’re among members of their generation. Some very special people don’t age at all, in the sense that they remain actively interested in people and what they do.

This is something that struck people about Washington SyCip, for example. It was something that was also very much the case with Tita Chitang, which is why, when she passed, despite her having been offstage for close to a decade, her passing was marked by a palpable sense of loss among her contemporaries. Her having lived in the here and now in her time meant that the list of her contemporaries extends to, and includes, Generations X to Y.

Not for Tita Chitang the kind of passing that comes far too late, in the sense that no one is left who can remember and, more importantly, vividly feel what it was that’s going to be missed because of a person’s passing. Her death did not softly ripple over our society or occasion only vague recollections, like a faint breeze gently rustling the grass. Instead, social media lit up with praise aplenty, based on people’s personal familiarity with the words she’d penned once upon a time.

Perhaps she’d find it of interest that the words that were most quickly found had to do with her once asking, “Where’s the patis?” It was in an essay that apparently made it into into a textbook, but continues to strike a chord because it asserted that the true patriotism of our people lies in our palate.

For many of us, there will come the thought of her smiling wryly, and making some witty response in that tremulous voice of hers, with that piercing, direct look only the truly self-possessed (in contrast to the self-obsessed) could make.

They are nearly all departed from the stage now. How could it all have gone so slowly, yet so quickly, too?

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