Remembering Bonnie

It was the late afternoon of December 18, 2010 when I was driving for work. The car music blurted “One Sweet Day” by Mariah Carey and Boyz 2 Men, a song that celebrates the life of someone who has moved on sans the drab and drear of your typical funeral music. I even thought it was a love song the first time I heard it over a decade ago until I listened to it closely.

“And I know you’re shinning down on me from heaven, like the many friends we’ve lost along the way. And I know eventually we’ll be together, one sweet day…” belted Mariah and the boy band.

I have that song on CD as part of my 90’s audio memorabilia. This time though, I listened to it more intently. I just got news that my dear friend Bonnie has passed away. It was not the kind of news one wants to receive on Christmas week, but there it was on my cell phone, a short message from her brother-in-law George telling me of her untimely demise.

It was real, Bonnie is gone.

Now Bonnie would have found my listening to Mariah Carey in connection with her passing, tacky. “That’s so corny…” I’d imagine her saying with her trademark smirk. She would have preferred a more profound George Elliot quote, “our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them”.

Bonnie does not like tributes in general. She would have been squeamish with all the attention her friends and loved ones are giving her now. She would—as much as possible—do everything she can to take away focus from herself. She always wanted to stay low key—her Facebook page does not even have her profile picture on it.

The only time she would endure public attention is when she is singing her heart out. And she can do Mariah Carey one song better. All of you who knew her well are also aware of her powerful singing voice. Back in the 80’s she was one of the first people I knew who had invested on a bulky karaoke. At her duplex in Asico Compound in Iloilo, she would sing while I listened and smoked. As a mischievous teenager who’s not allowed a vice her duplex was where I could indulge in cigarettes, away from my own parents’ prying eyes.

At that time Bonnie was not the doctor that you all know her to be. Fresh out of college, she was a poet, a storyteller, a lover of literature and art. She was a free spirit in the non-hippie way and teeming with idealism. Bonnie was bubbly and exuded an inexorable zest for everything that touches the heart.

She wanted to make the world better with her words. It was her mission. She would show me her old notes, yellowed pages that dripped with poetry, prose and her own thoughts about the world. She encouraged me to write and use the unyielding power of the pen in expressing thoughts and feelings.

She loved books and poetry and adored those who wrote them. Bonnie had the innate love for the humanities and humanity itself. She would whip out a Franz Kafka promptly when she needed to explain life and what lay ahead: “anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old,” she’d quote.

Later on, Dead Poets Society would be our favorite movie as we spent hours discussing Robin Williams’ “barbaric yawp” when one runs out of words to express indescribable passion. On days when we felt less cerebral, Bonnie would just go through lyrics of popular music “I’ve never been to me” by Charlene Duncan even if there was nothing between the lines to read. Most of the time, she just shared literature, small notes and one liners from the world’s greatest thinkers.

As an impressionable teenager barely out of high school and hardly certain which path to take in life, I assented to her dare not just to write but pursue a life of writing. In college I found myself enrolled in Comparative Literature at the UP Humanities Department where Bonnie herself graduated. I would write—she would critique. We spent lazy afternoons at the grassy lawn of St. Clements and would sometimes venture out in Villa Beach for an afternoon of poetry in between puffs of cigarettes or chomps of oysters, which she also taught me to like. I was not a fan of seafood back then.

Today, I am a 42-year old writer among other things and I earn my keep selling words. I could not imagine myself doing something else. If Bonnie was not that importunate about writing, my own life would have turned out differently. That’s why in times when I scour through my blessings Bonnie is smack in the middle of it. Having a friend who believed in me and inspired me to harness my gifts is a rarity.

Maybe Bonnie encouraged me to thrive in a world she would have wanted to flourish in. By then, she was at the peak of med school to follow in the family line of doctors. We would laugh at her major career shift which she described as punishing, especially when (in her words) “one is doing something that the heart desires less”.

Looking back, I think med school was the most trying time for Bonnie. It was a time of great adjustment. When most girls her age thrived in rewarding careers, her head was buried in books. Where there could have been love life, she was incarcerated in hospital duty. She badly needed friends and I fit the role perfectly as UP and Iloilo Doctors College are close. Bonnie could just holler when she needed a friend.

Even when she moved to pursue higher studies in Manila and eventually practiced medicine in Kalibo our friendship never waned. We kept in touch through what we did best—writing. When people take different paths in life, it is very easy to lose touch but Bonnie never allowed that. With her gift of writing we stayed friends. She told about her new life, the unremitting challenge of starting a practice, and even the loves in her life that came and went. This, as I imparted with her, my own life stories. Such had been the case in the last 28 years of bonding, confiding and friendship.

I may have known Bonnie that long but with her sudden passing, I now reckon life is really just fleeting. We can only take comfort in her favorite quote by William Blake, “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower holds infinity in the palm of the hand and eternity in an hour”.

So let us all seize the day while we still can. Express those feelings of love and caring to those we value. Write them. Tell them. That’s Bonnie’s gift and if we all do that, she is assured she’ll always be remembered.