Grief is the thing with claws

Sometimes I think I spot the dead at the mall, coming down the escalator or pushing a cart in the supermarket. Of course it's not them, there's not even a slight resemblance.

I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be shouting into the void, so I’m taking requests. Karla wrote: “Could you do one on grief? My dad just died and I’m trying to make sense of it. Trying to navigate grief and getting clobbered by it.  My dad was probably a hippie—I can only tell from his music and his books. He told me I had hair like Robert Plant. I was 8 and had no clue about Led Zeppelin. He married young. Did respectful parenting before it was a thing. Eventually found meaning through public service in a small coastal town in Ilocos.”

These last 17 months we’ve all been working on advanced degrees in Grief. This is for Karla. This is also for the people who loved Leo Abaya.

Leo Abaya (1960-2021) with his sculpture, Missing Slider

I shouldn’t have answered the phone, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. The call log says 26 May, 2021, 1007am. Before that I was fine. My lockdown had been peaceful and weirdly productive. Some friends had gotten covid, but they all had mild cases and recovered completely. I’d published my novel and gotten my first vaccine dose. A single phone call threw my orderly quarantine into chaos. I’ve thought about that call so many times that the details may have been embellished in my memory.

The caller was my gallerist friend Dawn. She said her cousin Marya had received a call from a hospital. Leo Abaya was there, his condition “unstable”. The hospital had called Marya because hers was the last number Leo had texted. Dawn may have tried to tell me more, but I replied that I would find out what was happening. Maybe I cut her off because I didn’t want to hear the worst of it. Yeah, that sounds like me. I deny the mortality of my friends. When my best friend Gail died of lung cancer in 1999, her boyfriend Bud called me and said, “Gail’s gone.” I replied, “Where?” It seemed more plausible to me that my friend, who had never smoked a cigarette in her life, would sit up in her hospital bed, rip out the ventilator tubes, then walk out of the room—past the pious who exhorted her to “Offer up her pain to heaven”, and pausing briefly to punch the doctor who told her family within her hearing that “The patient doesn’t have enough time to get addicted to morphine”—to life and freedom.

I have lost several friends, but the idea that I will never see them again does not get through my thick skull. Sometimes I think I spot the dead at the mall, coming down the escalator or pushing a cart in the supermarket. When they get close I see that it’s not them, there’s not even a slight resemblance. Or I’ll see a very dirty car in traffic and I make a mental note to tell Ruthie that there’s competition for the “grottiest car on the road” title for her dust-encrusted Nissan Sentra. Then I remember that Ruth died in 2002.

After I got off the phone with Dawn I tried calling Leo’s housemate Jay, our friend Ricky, anyone who might have a clue. I called Jeffrey who introduced me to Leo 20 years ago, but he was out of town shooting a TV series. I continued to think that Leo would be alright. Something similar had happened to me in 2014: I was discovered unconscious on the stairs and taken to the hospital (It was hyponatremia, the opposite of dehydration). Later it occurred to me that it was seven years to the day since my hospital incident.

Leo designed and contributed an essay to the book, The Bohol We Love.

I found the number of the hospital and explained the situation to the operator. She kept asking me over and over if Leo had covid, and I kept saying I didn’t know. Finally she connected me to the E.R. No one answered. I called and texted Leo’s phone in case the E.R. staff had it. No one answered. Twenty minutes later Dawn called to tell me that Leo was dead. I heard the words, but they meant nothing. Then I got through to Jeffrey and the inconceivable was confirmed. Leo’s invincible heart had exploded.

Leo had been my friend for 20 years. I remember our first conversation, at a café in Malate after he had walked out on a movie production. He was willing to educate the ignorant, but he had no patience for dishonesty. At the time he was doing production design for movies and TV commercials, but his true vocation was teaching. We hit it off immediately, two people who shared a reputation for being nerdy bitches. With Leo I could talk about absolutely anything and feel the underutilized areas of my brain being electrified. We hoarded bits of information and tried to find connections in the most random things. I sought him out constantly, which wasn’t easy because he was doing so many things, and then I had to share him with his students, who looked upon him first with awe and terror, and then with love.

When Leo was at work on his art he disappeared into himself. Photo by Nathaniel Salang courtesy of Tin-aw Art Management.

When Leo was a demure boy from Bohol newly arrived in Manila in the early 1980s, it was Jeffrey who urged him to get a job in the movies. Jeffrey, Jay and Leo made a pact that I inserted myself into: whoever died first would be laughed at, and the last survivor would have literally the last laugh. I’m still waiting to hear the laugh track. Jeffrey and his sister made the funeral arrangements, the cremation was scheduled, there was nothing for me to do. I took a long walk to keep from running amok. I kept thinking that if I could just burst into tears I would get some relief, but I have trouble weeping. Maybe I used up all my tears from crying in pre-school whenever my mother was not standing by the school gate the moment that classes ended. At the funerals of my friends, at the funeral of my mother, I had to think of sad scenes from the movies in order to squeeze out a few tears. And yet my eyes leak at the cinema over scenes that aren’t even particularly sorrowful.

I had so many questions. Why was Leo alone? When did the chest pains begin? Were there any signs before that, and why, goddamnit, did I not know about them? Why didn’t I drag him to a cardiologist? What happened at the hospital? Unable to weep or find answers, I fell back on my old default setting, rage. My friend is dead. The world is crawling with people who would make the world better just by leaving it, but Leo who loved art and books, Leo who gave so much of himself and was a beacon of clarity in a muddled world, Leo my friend is dead. There are people who just occupy space and consume oxygen, but they continue to infest the earth while Leo is gone forever.

Leo and I on the set of The Sanity Maintenance Program with Jessica Zafra. I wrote and presented, he directed. It was our official reason to hang out once a month. The diptych behind him is his self-portrait.

I never got a last look at Leo. The hospital had not had time to give him a covid test, so they assumed that he had covid and put him in a sealed casket. During the cremation all that we saw through the window was the outline of a body under a sheet. I could just deny that Leo is dead. I could tell myself that the hospital made a mistake, and one day he will knock on the door, looking fresh and well-rested, having woken from a coma or recovered from amnesia.

Grief has sunken its claws into me many times, and I have learned absolutely nothing. Each death, each sorrow, each loss is different. It never goes away, it just stays in the back of your mind until some random detail, smell, melody, turn of phrase (“Merlie, don’t take liberties!” was our private joke) brings it all back as raw and overwhelming as the moment it first arrived. Over time it becomes less shattering, but the thing is I don’t want it to be less shattering. I don’t want the people I love to become fond memories, I want them to be here.