People exhibit in different ways to different people. So, when I describe my father, it’s as the man I knew, not necessarily the one my mother, or my sisters knew.
For me, my father was a very jolly person. He was very simple in his choices, and he had a lot of friends from all over the province. He loved music and he would always sing his heart out especially when he had a little bit of his favorite Ginebra. I loved the way his sang and I envied his voice. He was gifted with a beautiful smile that could captivate the heart even of fairies and goddesses of beauty. However, when he got married to my mother, he also gave her his heart and his one hundred percent devotion. He adored my mother so much and loved us, his children unconditionally.
I have never known him to have an enemy. He was a stand-out in his friendliness and I cannot compete with him in this area. His patience extends beyond its limits while my patience extends to only a few inches away.
I know nothing about his young life. There were no baby photos or First Communion Certificates. No school records – no keepsakes – no mementos. All I have is a sketchy oral history that he related over the years of a carefree life and optimistic about his thoughts and plans.
He attended school only as far as a high school graduate (that is what I know about), then quit to help the family as a substitute truck driver to my grandfather. I know he enjoyed much of his bachelor life with his friends, and they would turn God’s night into day just to drink. He got spanked so hard by my grandfather numerous times because of his drinking habit. Well, I am just glad that, with me as my father’s son, the “history repeats itself” idea was never true.
I am at a loss regarding the love story of my parents. All I know is that they were married on June 06, 1970, and I was born, as their eldest, in July 1972. Looking at this span of time, from their wedding date to my birth, my father loved and respected my Mama. Their marriage gifted them with four children, one male and three females.
During my 6th grade at the CSC (now CatSU) Elementary School, I told him I want to enter the seminary, to which he objected and told me that my plan was directly contradictory to his plan. He said he wanted his name to be handed down from generation to generation. He loved me so dearly that was why he just let me go when it was time for me to enter the seminary.
Dependable to the core, he was an excellent provider. His mode of operating as head of the family was to let my mother take care of the meals and kids, while he served as the benevolent despot. My mother’s salary was bigger than his, but he took charge of all day-to-day expenses at home and my mother spent for our school needs and other expenses. My father was the head of the family, yes indeed, he was the Lion King… my mother was the trainer of the Lion, though.
We were never physically abused, and even when ‘bad’, we were seldom spanked. I learned to do homework and schoolwork and housework with very little prodding, and I tried more often than not to do my best. And so, my parents came to rely on me to take care of myself without oversight.
My father was a very good-looking man with a marvelously wicked sense of humor and a wonderful smile that would light up his face like a beacon. And he was smart! Even though he had no educational attainments to speak of, he would love to talk eloquently about optimism and the beauty of simple life and simple living.
Unfortunately, life aged my father early. He was a heavy smoker until the time when his blood pressure soared above the ceiling. He was also a heavy drinker, and with a friend on every block, Virac was not an ideal place for a man like my father.
Try as I may, I cannot remember a single childhood instance when he came to clap his hands for me because I mastered riding motorcycles at a very young age. Of course, he was my driving instructor and I always wanted him to trust and believe that I was good at what he taught me. He never once, as far as I can remember, said he loved me, but I’m positive that he did, and even though he remained largely quiet, I’m sure he was proud of me.
Papa was not ready to die and did not go gladly into the night. It was tragic to see so powerful a man reduced to the humiliation of incontinence and immobility, though for just a little while, and even more tragic to know the lost beautiful soul that lay untapped on the hospital bed.
He knew death was coming some weeks before it took him. One day when we were alone at the house, he told me to go on and find that joy that I always wanted to possess, to be ordained a priest. He did not want it for me, but it was only two years before getting ordained, so he finally gave me his blessing and support to become a priest. On his last days, he asked me to make a promise to pursue it, and I did.
I immediately began a rush of conciliatory statements, but most of all I wanted to believe he was wrong, so wrong that he was dying. He was my father, the monster of a man who battled and challenged all the storms in his life, in our life as a family. He was too strong to die. And if he could die, then so could I, and so could my mother and my sisters. And that is a cruelty beyond comprehension.
He died peacefully on 03 December 1996, while I was on regency and serving as a professor at the ICSA Pre-College Seminary. He was only 54 years old. A solid piece of my world crumbled that day. I miss his quiet strength and keen humility and kindness, and I often wish I had a chance to say a better good-bye. What he could not be, I have tried to become. His death diminished me in ways I have only now begun to see.
His death, though, forced me to become mature ahead of time. I mean, it fell on my shoulders when he died. I needed to grow up like the man he was. I needed to be strong for my mother and my sisters. I cried a lot when he died but nobody knew I was in pain and devastated. Living my life without him was like building a dream from the rubbles of loneliness and pain. He was my best friend, and he was my ally. My mother and my sisters were the usual villains in our life story.
Now, I only want to thank him from the deepest recesses of my heart. I am here today as I am because of him. I know I am not perfect, and I have committed a lot of bitter mistakes and made a lot of wrong choices in my life. My father is not the one to blame and nobody else but myself. I can only attribute to him the generosity and kindness and other beautiful traits that I have because I know I inherited those positive factors from him, from my mother, and they were products of a family who held on so tight to one another in the name of love.
If I will be given a chance to choose my father, I will still choose him, Rodulfo Vargas Arcilla, of a happy memory, because God picked him from all the rest to be my father. No one can ever replace him for he was the best father I ever had. All I can say now for you is: “I love you, Papa!” I owe you everything and I will always try my best to be just like you. Rest in God’s embrace, Dad… I am not planning to see you soon, though! In God’s appointed time we will be together again.