Eulogy for Alexis

 

by Gang Badoy

5 Sept 2009

9am, Santuario de San Antonio

Makati City

 

You will never leave a conversation with Alexis with an aftertaste of his ideas in your mouth. He will leave you with a bigger sense of your own taste and your own thoughts. If you notice my testimony for him this morning seems to be all about me - but see that's what he wanted others to do. He didn't want you to remember him or laud his brilliance (though we often do) but no way was that ever his purpose for conversation.

 

When he wrote – he always focused on ideas and not on himself. I always felt he wanted us to re-visit our own thoughts - thoughts that he merely articulated for us and in the end we think the ideas were actually ours. That - is genius.

 

He spent my birthday with me a few weeks before Sep 1. We were talking about Pres Aquino's funeral, and then also Michael Jackson's memorial. I told him that I was so glad that he and Erwin and Quark and Lourd are much younger than me so that means I will have brilliant and articulate people delivering my eulogy.

 

We boxed around the joke that they should make up stories about me that made me look a lot better in life.

 

He and I laughed about that and never did it occur to me nor him that it will be the other way around. And yet here I am delivering a eulogy for Alexis.

 

I do not need to invent stories nor do I have to lionize him - he really is all that.

 

Alexis Tioseco is a great man, a brilliant mind, a thoroughly honest man. An honest critic. How often does the world get that?

 

Alexis is a man of sharp sense, wit and clarity.

 

A man who loved his friends deeply and his woman - indescribably.

 

The day before Sept 1 - we last exchanged SMS msgs. I told him that since Nika was leaving for a bit- he can move into my living room couch since Erwin was always there anyway and so was the big TV.

 

I sensed a faint whiff of dread from him since he is crazy in love with his Nika and he certainly wasn't looking forward to the separation- this dread he calmly masked in the characteristic Alexis way. With a shrug and a sinister squint of the left eye.

 

Alexis was blue flame. Quiet but hotter than red fire.

 

In a back to front way I am glad that neither of them will feel the pangs of being widowed by the other. In this senseless, lawless, uncertain scenario -the only thing I AM SURE OF is this -- that they are both comforted that they faced their 'great unknown' together.

 

'Knowing' happened for Alexis when Nika was around, though I didn't know her as well - I am sure it was the same for her.

 

------------------------
Nika je bilo zelo pomembno zame.
Zato nisem nikoli zapustila stran.
Ni bilo nobene bole?ine in da ne bo ve? bole?in.

 

Nika is very important.
This is why I never left her side.
There was no pain.
There will be no more pain.
------------------------

 

Thank you Alexis for the words you left behind. They are ours forever - as we are yours. Thank you Nika. Thank you Alexis.

 

We will remember.