“Every extra sunset is grace”
I don’t know what the ethics are in writing about someone who writes on these same opinion pages, but I am taking my chances. After all, it’s not just “someone” – it’s Dean Tony La Viña. I’m not writing about him as a fellow columnist here, but as someone who recently published his memoirs. The book, Ransomed by Love, touched me in many profound ways.
I first met him at Ateneo in 1995. I was looking for an elective and in those days not much was known about Environmental Law and Policy. So I enrolled; he was then an undersecretary at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources while teaching. Our class was every Saturday so sometimes he met us in his office on Visayas Avenue. Many years later, I heard that he was an active figure in the Philippine climate change negotiations; in one of those meetings, he got to know and mentor my daughter who was a youth delegate in that year’s Conference of Parties in Lima, Peru.
These days, despite his packed schedule, Dean Tony is always gracious enough to talk to my opinion writing students at UP – he did so online during the pandemic, and last year, face to face, even though he was rushing from an appointment and was heading to another. He made time; he always makes time. He is indeed a consummate teacher, always imparting something whatever the circumstances. In the book he writes about conducting classes even if he was in the hospital or undergoing treatment.
But that is getting ahead of the story.
Like many autobiographical works, Ransomed by Love begins with Dean Tony’s childhood in Mindanao. He described his family and friends, his boyhood and student days, his influences, and the beginnings of his social consciousness. The succeeding chapters delve into his life as a human rights lawyer, environment and climate justice activist, a global citizen (he worked as a caregiver in Italy and studied and did research and negotiations work in the United States), a teacher, a governance academic and advocate. He writes about his love story, describes his family life, and shares journal entries during the early days of the pandemic lockdown. In near isolation he mourned what was happening to the country and what was happening with the people consumed by the virus.
And then came his own medical diagnosis: a routine procedure yielded alarming results which eventually revealed his cancer diagnosis, and that it had metastasized into other parts of his body.
Such a revelation could explain the urgency with which he wrote his memoirs. Not everyone gets a warning, a time check. But while others could spend their days in denial, anger, or bitterness, some are able to inch toward making peace with the inevitable. Not making peace instantly, but inching toward it. I get how the process could be slow and painful.
Throughout the book, Dean Tony goes back to the word “finitude.” The word is defined as a state of having limits or bounds. And, in this sense, aren’t we all finite? We have limited time on earth, yes, but even before that, we are limited by our own backgrounds, abilities and skills, personality traits, shortcomings. We are constrained by hubris — fanciful thoughts of our own importance. We are overcome by our desire to be in control and to cling to what is familiar and comfortable.
The acknowledgment of our finitude is humbling. If we think we matter that much, or that we are the only people who can do the things we are trying to do, or that we can never be replaced – then we would be wrong. Sometimes we get so arrogant that we believe we are invincible. A medical diagnosis, or any other crisis with similar earth-shaking effects, will do enough to whack us in the head and disabuse us of this notion.
Nonetheless, anybody who is given ample time to step back and take stock of his/her/their life as they have lived it is blessed. And this is why we must not only read La Viña, but attempt a similar reckoning in the best way we know how. It could be a morbid exercise but it could also be surprising, sobering, and liberating. Imagine suddenly being told you are afflicted with an illness or slapped with a similar “sentence.” How would you look back at your past and atone for the hurt you have caused others? Who would be in the list of people with whom you meaningfully interacted? How would you live the rest of your days?
In the end, it is the acknowledgment of our finitude that will set us free as we are held hostage by hopelessness or fear.
adellechua@gmail.co