Pacita Guevara-Fernandez
November 27, 1922 - November 29, 2005

In Jacques Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, there is the twin dynamic of exhibiting both fidelity and responsibility in any text of mourning to the friend who has passed on. Fidelity involves letting the dead speak through us who were left behind. However, there are two pitfalls to this: on the one hand, merely quoting the dead is empty and only, as Derrida puts it, “points to death, sending death back to death.” On the other hand, to not quote the dead and let loose only our own voice is also a form of death in which “one risks making him disappear again.” Here lies the responsibility of the one left behind to the friend who went first. Derrida imposes a double injunction: “How to leave him alone (and let the friend speak) without abandoning him (as the friend speaks)?”

I rephrase the question: How do I leave Pachot Fernandez alone to let her speak for herself without abandoning her?

Do I let her speak through my anecdotes, such as the first time I met her? Will I mention that semester in 1998 when I took her Aesthetics class and I was her only student, thus eliminating any thought of skipping any of the sessions, lest I be flooded with guilt of letting a 70-something woman take pains to head to Faculty Center and not find me waiting by the door of her room? Or how about that stormy October morning when I had to go to her house in Sikatuna Village (coming from Marikina) to submit a rewritten final paper (upon her behest), only to linger through the rest of the morning, onto lunch and through the afternoon, listening to stories of her dear son Manny Boy, UP during the First Quarter Storm when one by one her colleagues were being picked up for questioning and stories on some of the more notorious people in the English Department whether dead, retired or still teaching.

Do I let her speak through the notes she scribbled on all of the cards, letters and books that came my way, notes that intimate a certain regard, a hint of affection? Affection for me whom she considered “a fellow traveler, fellow sufferer, fellow striver?”

Is this the narcissism Derrida warns us of?

I will not say how I am at a loss for words, as how the genre dictates. There is no need to say that I have to break the silence for I did not begin with such silence. I will be stubborn and crowd this with anecdotes, memories, images, words, laughter, tears.

Still, I know I truly cannot speak about her and for her for this is, after all, an infidelity, an infidelity that must nevertheless be risked anyway, and so I will let her speak through a piece she read to colleagues on her 80th birthday:

On my 80th Birthday – November 27th, 2002

DEO GRATIAS

I have long been on this planet Earth – so long and yet, it doesn’t seem that long really.

My days and nights have been multicolored with impossible, hopefully-possible dreams, a few of them vague and amorphous, but on the whole, quite definable partially; my months and years packed with stress and tensions, light or deep-seated anxieties, and a host of basic inquietudes reminding me that I am blessed, and alive.

Thank God for the unpredictability, for it is this that has always kept me hoping, trusting that inspite of its being precarious, this business of living is worth all my striving…My wheel has turned full circle but for the sake of one defenseless, resourceless little soul – I could have gone Home…

But here I am, still sitting among others in the Front Row of the Departure area, waiting for my name to be called. I look back on the extended stretch of time: the joys and tears, the pain of loving, even the embrace of the Absurd, the definitely, I have no regrets – only humble thankfulness to GOD for the Gift of Life…

PACITA GUEVARA-FERNANDEZ
Professor Emeritus
Dept. of English and Comparative Literature
College of Arts and Letters
UP Diliman


Certainly, a friend cannot speak of an entire life, moreso in my case, for I only came to know her in the last seven years of her life. But is it really a question of length of time for one to know a friend? What is really the difference between seven years and, say, seventy years? As Derrida says in his text of mourning for Jean-Francois Lyotard, friends are “forever unknown and infinitely secret.” More crucially, we are forever indebted to our friends, the degree of our indebtedness “incalculable.” It is this part of our friends’ lives, as well as our indebtedness to them, that remain unknown. And it is because of this unknowability that our friends truly remain in us, however great the risk of their voices being drowned out by ours. In a sense, we are tasked to continue speaking of them, for them, with them (and without them) because that is the only task left for us to do.