the anatomy of a happy spinster: May 2007

Thursday, May 17, 2007

my tito bing's demise

his full name is sergio diokno silo, to his military subordinates he was maj. silo, to his siblings he was the "kuya" but to me & my cousins, although he wanted us to call him uncle serg, he was simply our funny tito bing.

tito bing died of colon cancer on may 10, 2007 until now it all seems so surreal, just like what i felt when my own dad died 2 years ago. at that time, uncle boy, tita ni, tito lito, tito bing & his wife tita da (my mom's sister) were with me waiting at the funeral parlor until my dad was ready to be taken home for his wake. i remembered that i was not able to bring my dad briefs so he went out in the wee hours of the morning to buy him one. tito bing was always like that, dependable.

its quite ironic how fast his disease progressed, when he was always slow in doing things. tito bing always takes his sweet time in doing things. he takes long baths, long trips to the toilet, walks, talks & dances slowly too. when we were young, we never liked riding in his car because he drives so slow that we always end up arriving last at the destination whenever we have a family gathering some place far away. he drove so slow that it has been a perennial joke in the family about the PUJ that he once owned that was smashed by a train because they said that he was too slow in crossing the railway

it's also ironic that he is now dead & is lying in a coffin, because he was always scared of the dead. he never looks at dead people in coffins. he said that he stopped doing that since his dead kumpare winked at him.

being sick did not stop tito bing from being funny. although tito bing was in pain, he still cracked jokes. i never saw him at the hospital because of my work schedule. but his sisters were telling us about his last few days of confinement. apart from tita da & their son shernan, his 2 sisters, tita espie (their bunso) & tita susan (eldest sis, next to him) were also staying with him. tita susan was with him day in & day out, while tita espie had to go home to laguna from time to time to attend to her patients (the silos are a family of dentists). so for conversation sake, they asked tito bing "sino love mo?" he then replied: "si espie" "sino pa?" "si eda" "sino pa?" silence... thinking maybe he just forgot about tita susan, they asked him the same question, but got the same answers. so tita susan felt bad about it because she was already absent from work for 3 wks, and yet he still does not love her. so they asked him again, "sino love mo?" & he again replied: "si espie at si eda" so my tita da then asked him "e si susan?" tito bing replied: (after a moment of silence) "sige na nga love na rin." hahahaha that's my tito bing, even in the midst darkness he can still make us laugh.

but the best thing that i remember about him is how affectionate he was with us, especially to us girls. all of our uncles & titos call us by our first names, but not tito bing. he would call us "my niece/ my nephew" in this really funny tone that is distinctly his. he also calls by younger sister lianne, "my daughter" because he always teases her that she is really his daughter and that he only lent her to my parents when we were young, but she never gave her back. so lianne in turn calls him "De" which is how his 3 sons call him. maybe he is like that because he never had a daughter, so he treats us all like daughters. whenever we paid him a visit when we were kids and he sees us for the first time, he'll tell us to kiss him by saying "my niece akitykitkitkitkit sa tito bing..." and he would say that to each & every one of us until were all done in kissing him. so when we were already teenagers he would now tease us "my niece dalaga na, hindi na akitykitkitkitkit sa tito bing" to which our response would be

of course whenever i talk/write about my family i could go on all day & night.... too many memories to document... but i guess this would be good for now. i hope my tito bing is happy wherever he is, i hope that he finds peace there, he made a lot of people happy when he was alive, so i pray that he is safe & happy with the Lord.