Walking without Gene: When A Co-Journeyer Goes Ahead

This collage of our photos taken in Thailand was made by Gene.

It has been almost five years.  Still, December has never been the same again.  I still remember the SMS message that came in at around 6:00 in the evening of 12 December:  Gene had passed on to the next life.  I found myself texting several common friends of ours and crying with friends on the phone.  Parts of us were still in denial – she could still be alive beneath the rubbles.  Several times I would look at my YM friends list (where she is still listed until now) and would think wishfully that she would buzz or send an instant message.  It would take a few more days and helping her sister, Lillian, choose Gene’s funeral clothes before I could accept the reality that one of my dearest friends had really passed on. 

Each year hence as my calendar page turns to December, I find myself thinking about her and that space in my life left empty by her death.  I cannot help thinking about her and the journey we walked together.   I miss the kind of friendship that we shared – how we could bark at each other and listen to each one’s pains and woes but always end up in laughter;  how we could comfortably stay with each other in silence;  how we would instinctively turn to each other for all sorts of concerns no matter the physical distance;  how safe it felt to know that each was accepted and that each one’s deeply held feelings and thoughts (and secrets) would always be respected and kept safe; how we could talk about the mundane but at the same time not shy away from talking about the spiritual and deeply emotional.  What a blessing to have her and that brand of friendship we had in my journey.  The lyrics in Kenny Rankin’s What Matters Most always reminds me of our journey together:

It's not how long we held each other's hand
What matters is how well we loved each other
It's not how far we traveled in our way
What we found to stay
It's not the spring you see
But all the shades of green.

Very few people understood my pain at her leaving.  After all, I was “just a friend” and not a family member.  Yet, ours is one relationship that I’d consider as thick as, if not thicker than, some blood relationships, for what we shared between us was a relationship based not on a shared family tree or household alone but on shared joys and pains, triumphs and failures, fears and hope, emptiness and fullness of life.

I still miss her but, as I think of her now, I also feel a deep sense of gratitude for having been gifted with such a co-journeyer even for a brief two decades.  The journey continues.  She may no longer be here physically but she remains a spirit-friend journeying with me in a different kind of relationship.  

(Gene, unassuming that she was, was on the headlines.  A UN staff member, she was the lone Filipino, who died in the bombing of the UN office in Algiers in December 2007. Gene is the generous friend behind most of my beautiful shawls.)