Music and family

My mother’s youngest sibling, Dr. Ted Braganza, passed away Sept. 22 in his nursing home in Virginia. He was 88 years old.

Tio Ted was best remembered by his nephews and nieces, in our exchange of e-mails with his daughter Lia and sons Bobby and Ernie, for his gift for music. But behind Tio Ted’s piano playing lies a story full of pain, tragedy and ultimate triumph.

Before his birth, the family was rocked by the death of our eldest aunt, Purita, a child musical prodigy who, at the age of five, was already being asked to play the organ at Sunday Mass, even if her feet could barely reach the pedals. Although my Lola Eming, who had studied music in Manila and had given piano lessons to the children of the elite of Alaminos, Pangasinan, nurtured Purita’s gifts, she and her husband Ambing soon realized she needed more rigorous training in Manila. They packed the 12-year-old Purita off to a convent school, where she was to further hone her piano artistry. But Purita was felled by appendicitis, rushed to the hospital too late to save her. So angry was my Lola, already tempestuous by nature, that she slapped the first nun who greeted her upon arrival at the convent school. For his part, Lolo took an axe to the prized piano, smashing it to bits, and decreed that no daughter of his would ever study under the tutelage of nuns.

Fast forward to the birth of Ted, whose coming lifted the fog of unspeakable grief that had settled over Lola Eming, even if three daughters and two other sons had followed soon after Purita’s passing. Early on, Ted showed that he shared Purita’s musical gift, and Eming soon hired a piano teacher to further nurture his talent.

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But the young and restless Ted chafed under the discipline of a teacher and preferred to “play it by ear,” dabbling in jazz and learning the standards by oido. Even if he rejected formal lessons, Ted remained Lola’s distinct favorite. Which is why, even if his siblings and other members of the family would remember Lola Eming as a stern disciplinarian, Ted nursed a very different impression of his mother, remembering her as “a sweet and loving mother” who took time to read her youngest to sleep with “stories about our ancestors and from the Bible.”

Soon he was known around town as Lola’s little companion, tagging along as she made the rounds of businesses and lands that she and Lolo had accumulated. When his older sisters went to Manila for college studies, Lola packed Ted and an older brother, Tom, to the city as well. In time, Ted would discover a calling for medicine, winning a scholarship to the University of the Philippines, and then becoming a Fulbright scholar for his postgraduate training in psychiatry at Duke University.

It was here that Ted met Agnes Logan, a nurse of Scottish stock who soon discovered an intense interest in psychiatry, although Ted writes that “I don’t know if that was because I was her instructor!”

When Lola Eming fell gravely ill in 1958, Ted and Agnes came home, with Ted staying by her bedside “playing song after song on the piano” to comfort her. Although they stayed in the country for two years, Ted and Agnes decided to return to the United States where they raised their small family.

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Tio Ted and Tita Agnes, with our cousins Ernie, Bobby and Lia, would visit the country from time to time, and it was during such occasions, and in get-togethers when any of us cousins happened to visit Virginia, that Tio Ted would liven our gatherings with his piano playing.

He would play one standard after another, asking for requests but demurring that he may not know some of them. “But what do you know, he would inevitably know how to play whatever song we requested,” recalled my cousin Chevy Gavino.

At a recent memorial Mass and in our dinner gathering afterwards, we cousins in Manila recalled a gentle man, soft-spoken with a wry sense of humor and a soft laugh.

When Tita Agnes passed away in 1990, Tio Ted continued his psychiatric practice but had to sell the home in Virginia, taking up residence instead in a community retirement home in Newport News. He retired in 2000.

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It was Tio Ted who got us involved in a “dream project” of his, a book on the “Gabriel and Emilia” family story, with the history of Alaminos as a backdrop.

He came up with the seed money to finance the initial interviews and planning, and then would send in more infusions of cash as the project got underway, exhorting his siblings, children and nephews and nieces to contribute their own stories and recollections. It was mainly my fear that the older members of the clan would soon get too frail to enjoy the fruit of our labors that I took a month’s leave from the Inquirer to work full-time on the book. He even journeyed to the Philippines to preside over a clan gathering to speed the book to fruition.

Even if a few ends still needed to be tied, I brought a draft version of the book to Virginia to hold a “book launching” there and in California for US-based relatives. A few months later, we held the formal, final book launch in the family’s “Big House” in Alaminos, with memories of Lolo, Lola and all our deceased relatives filling the air.

A year or so ago, Tio Ted stepped out of his car at his retirement home and collapsed. He lay on the hot asphalt for many hours before someone spotted him, and from then on he had to be confined to a nursing home for closer monitoring.

His children, says Lia, are by turns happy and sad at his passing, comforted by thoughts that he is now reunited with Agnes, “whom he missed every day.” We remember our uncle with fondness and nostalgia, his piano playing echoing in our heads and hearts, his love of family a lasting legacy.