Personally and in terms of calendar, the month of March has already been weeks and days of saying goodbye. Two uncles and a cousin passed away.
The condolences and the decision between a mass card and a flower, a bountiful can of biscuits and a wreath figure wracked my social life. In between these little crises in grief aesthetics and faith, there was the graduation of a niece, a graduation lunch for a friend's daughter, and the interminable invite to listen to a guest speaker in several commencement exercises.
The great lesson: graduation ceremonies and funeral rites draw parallel lines in our social universe.
As I write this article, I just learned that in one of the schools in the city, an adjunct ceremony to the main graduation ceremony started a few minutes after noon and ended at 8 in the evening. In the wake of my uncle, a cousin's husband said that was not bad compared to the graduation of his son a few years back in another local university. People had to leave the campus to eat a bit and came back to find the speaker still speaking. In that case, ranting.
Our conversation soon and became a contest about the longest ceremony, the lousiest ceremony, and the longest speech, and also the lousiest speech. I just had to tell him the incident in that old university, where the people were almost booing the lady speaker who would not stop.
On record, no local graduation speaker can equal that which was set by a certain Lluis Colet who spoke nonstop for 124 hours. He talked about Salvador Dali, which was surreal but not really surreal if you think of the painter as closely linked with that movement in art called Surrealism.
The culprit in many of these ceremonies is really our difficulty with ceremonies and our kindness to speakers. We have difficulty always with ceremonies and rituals when they are enforced. When ceremonies and rituals are also needed, we invent the most ridiculous of formations and the emptiest of collective gestures.
Speakers are another matter. Guest speakers are privileged to be full of themselves. That surplus is what made us choose them in the first place. But that surplus - the overflowing of charm and accomplishment - has to be managed. They must not flood and wash away the audience. Speakers must be told about the excellent 20 minutes and the generous 30 minutes they can give to themselves.
Perhaps, we could listen to Howard Hibbard, an art historian, who told his students after they had written their art essays: "Take your favorite word and strike it out." For Hibbard, we compose essays and use our so-called favorite words not for clarity but for vanity.
If speakers could only heed this advice (Take your favorite story about yourself and strike it out), then speakers would have a short tale to tell.
The uncle who passed away was a man of few words. We fondly called him Papa Poding, quite far from the formal Florencio Bernal Valiente written outside the funeral home. I remembered him as the tallest of my father's brothers. My mother said he danced a mean boogie when he was young, when he was a dashing young man.
At the end of the requiem mass, my cousin, Maricris, went up and uttered with such disarming simplicity a few brief words of thanks. Brevity can be beautiful. Simplicity is a grace. Very much like the father that said goodbye.
Very much unlike the graduation ceremonies that could go on and on without meaning.