Death Of A Muse

Dear Jenny,

You will surely be missed.

I know that the past several years have been rough on you. You really gave it a good fight though. You defeated breast cancer with such resolve. Then came colon cancer, but you knock it down too. But pancreatic cancer is a different beast. And yet you went down swinging, giving it your best shot. In the end it proved to be such a formidable foe.

Despite of all these, you lived your life as normal as can be. You continued to work as a writer and journalist. You kept your position as a professor in the university, inspiring young minds how to think, how to write, how to dream, and be creative. It is a testament that you love what you do. You carried yourself with such poise and grace that on the last photo I saw of you, I cannot even tell that you have been trading punches in the ring with cancer.

Thank you for persuading me to write and to blog. After all, you are the one who encouraged me to start a blog. I don’t know what you saw in me or what you read on my letters to you that you thought I could be a writer. I know my grammar is imperfect, but you told me it is the content of my work and how it impacts the reader is what really counts. Well, 14 years and counting, and I am still blogging. It is just so sad that I am writing this piece dedicated to you, and you’ll not even able to read it. I am laying it like dry flowers at the foot of your grave.

Thank you as well for allowing my articles be published in your newspaper. Though I owe it to your friend, the literary editor, who polished my works to make them print-worthy. I know that you have been coaxing me over these years to have my articles published in a book, even though I still have my doubts that they are book-worthy. In fact, before you went to the hospital last month, you again asked for my manuscripts through your daughter, so you can edit them. I don’t want to trouble you though as you have a bigger task at hand. I may not be writing a book, but your memory will be on my book of remembrance.

Lastly, I want to thank you for just being a friend. Thank you for listening to my silly thoughts when we were much younger and foolish. You even kept the stupid secrets I have told you. I also remember the time you tagged me along to Araneta Coliseum to watch a basketball game. I was so excited to see Jaworski with Barangay Ginebra and and even sat at a court-side seat! Because you were a sports reporter at that time, I was able to experience it. I will be forever grateful.

I will miss our time together. I will miss our long e-mails back in the days. I will miss reading your newspaper articles, your fictional works, essays, and your blogs. Though I wish we stayed connected as much as those days, now that we are older and wiser.

Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for the confidence. Thank you for the encouragement. Even so, I wish I was there for you more, when you were needing encouragement.

Oh how I wish we had more time to reconnect. How I wish we had more chance to talk and meet in person again. And how I wish that I wrote you this letter in your living years. Now it will be like a song playing on an hollow auditorium.

Goodbye to you my dear friend. Our season just ran out of time.

your friend,

Pinoytransplant

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*P.S.: Here’s what I wrote when my friend visited me here in Iowa in 2012 (read article on this link).