THERE IS NO DJ AND SOMEONE’S ON THE PHONE: The best worst eulogy I have ever heard

Nom De Plume

The night is cold black. Every point of gaze is a blurred nothingness of slum houses, but the church, in front, tried to break the autonomy with its olden bricks, desperately kept alive with its unevenly coated baby blue paint. It was the only place kept lit with unnatural white luminous lights, some flickering as if half-dead, half-alive.

Though such a dreary scene, the place was flocked with a crowd of almost a hundred people. All, intently listening from a poorly modulated speaker, a crying lady on a cellphone. What could have been a worse eulogy than this? Somewhere in a poorish apartment in Manila, someone is delivering her last message, to a barrio in General Santos, to her mother in a coffin through a video message.

Well, it could be looked at from another angle where it’s somehow fairly rich from the eyes of the people. They’re seeing the eulogy through a brandnew smartphone. But I don’t care if that smartphone is new, I’m more concerned about why the lady on the phone is not beside her mother, physically.

Covid, darling. That’s the answer. And the moment she finished her eulogy, it was not even literally finished as the phone ran out of data. It could not get worse, perhaps? So, I just take a cup of instant coffee from the usher’s tray, roaming the church once in a while to give a novelty drink. Ah, I think it’s Kopiko Brown, but I’m having second guesses as I barely can smell the aroma from my pandemic mask.

I don’t know if you’ve got the idea but we are attending a funeral — the last night of the wake. You might think we are all in ties or plaid skirts or slacks and black shoes, but you’d be surprised to find the mass wearing colored clothes ranging from sleepwear to sweaters to ragged mishmash of clothes. It’s casual province men crowd and oops, the phone had its electronic load backed, we find the crying lady weeping again on a glass screen.

The crowd from the back hurriedly stood up again to watch the phone displayed by the pulpit with daisies and candles and a yellowish dirtied linen of what we could describe as a cover. I sat back because I got tired standing up from the back. Anyhow, I can still hear the eulogy. It’s eerily crispy, something that would remind you of a radio with a DJ hosting a caller. But the caller is crying and there is no DJ this time.

So why a hundred people? Can someone be too loved to be visited by that number of people? Yes and no. It’s a casual thing here in the province to have that number of people attend your wake, erhm, I mean, a wake. Just don’t be surprised if their sole reason is to actually visit the dead body in the casket, no no no... They came here for the food after the mass, ranging from biscuits to, as I’ve mentioned earlier, coffee, to rice cakes and orange juices blended from a sachet pack and a drum of heavily watered-down liquid.

‘Mang! Ngano mo ‘ko gibyaan, nag-promisa pa ka sa’kon na hulaton mo pa ko matapos trabaho diri sa Bulacan,’ this is somehow so dystopic but also pitiful. ‘Mang...!’ and the static haptic cry over a bass speaker breaks the autonomy of the sharp chilled night.

This is the worst yet the most melodramatic eulogy I’ve heard in my life. I sip my Kopiko Brown and realized it was Kopiko Blanca all along.