Sometimes I find that I begin my days with a strange ritual: stretching my bones in bed, and reaching out for something on my bedside—to open my phone, and steel myself for obituary notices.
These are often not for anyone I would know personally—no aunt or cousin or friend or a literary acquaintance from a writing workshop—but almost always for people who have shaped the contours of my interior world. David Lynch. Joan Plowright. Gene Hackman. Marianne Faithfull. Pilita Corrales. Nora Aunor. Ricky Davao. Mario Vargas Llosa. Pope Francis. These in 2025 alone. One after the other, falling like the slow cadence of autumn leaves.
I would sit with my morning coffee, a little too bitter, watching their names trend on X (formerly Twitter, a name I still resent), the posts framed in eulogies and digital candles.
It makes me feel absurd, really, how I grieve for them as though their deaths have punched a hole in the fragile structure of my day. I never met David Lynch, but didn’t Mulholland Drive teach me how to love disorientation? Didn’t Pope Francis, in a gesture of quiet inclusion, once make me believe that even the Vatican was capable of grace?
Why do we mourn these people? Is it because they touched our lives? Is it because of their legacy?
These are questions we ask ourselves now, in a time when the algorithm delivers loss with astonishing efficiency. Death scrolls down with the speed of a thumb.
There is a peculiar intimacy in mourning a celebrity, a person whom you know without knowing, whose voice has accompanied you in headphones, whose face has aged with you on your screen, whose songs or performances or books have wormed their way into your memories. And perhaps it is this—this unspoken companionship across time and space—that makes the loss sting.
When Nora Aunor passed, I remembered the first time I watched Himala. I was too young to understand its politics, but even then, there was something about her voice—raw, vulnerable, aching—that unsettled me.
And I understood, in my own young way, that this woman was more than an actress. She was a mirror to our Filipino griefs, our impossible hopes. When she cried “Walang himala!” in that final scene, it was as though a nation collectively exhaled, admitting something it had long been afraid to say.
And then there’s Mario Vargas Llosa. His novels are often dense, winding labyrinths of time and memory, but The Feast of the Goat once gave me nightmares—visions of tyrants and complicity, of how literature unearths the things we bury too deep. He reminded me that fiction is not just escape, but confrontation.
We mourn, perhaps, because we feel orphaned.
Orphaned not in the literal sense, but orphaned in the mythic sense—that these figures once stood as pillars in the temple of our becoming. They made it okay to be strange, to be passionate, to question.
Pilita Corrales and her elegance, a time capsule of a glamorous Philippines that could sing in perfect vibrato. Ricky Davao, whose steady presence in teleseryes gave us a template for decency in a world increasingly cynical.
Even Pope Francis, whose reforms sometimes felt like gentle ripples in the ancient river of the Church, gave us pause to hope.
I remember a friend, an old seminarian who left the vocation because he loved another man, telling me once: “At least this Pope won’t call me an abomination.” That meant something. That still means something.
These recent deaths also remind us of our own time passing. They confront us with our own mortality in the most inconvenient of ways. We are no longer young. If Gene Hackman is gone, then surely, so is the 1990s, and maybe so is that version of me who once wore too much plaid, and rented VHS tapes from the video store near the tianggue, along Maria Christina Street.
We mourn them because, in mourning them, we also mourn the people we once were when they mattered to us most.
That’s the secret of legacy, isn’t it? It’s not so much what you leave behind, but the echo of how you made others feel. The indelible marks you etch on the private walls of someone else’s interior life. That is legacy. And that is why we cry.
Sometimes I imagine the afterlife not as some pearly-gated, cherubic affair, but as a waiting room with books and movies and music playing in the background. And I imagine entering it like a literary conference, or a Cinemalaya gala night, and spotting Joan Plowright reading Virginia Woolf in one corner, Marianne Faithfull humming to herself, Nora adjusting her shawl, waiting for the lights to dim.
And I would sit with them, perhaps timidly, and say, “You don’t know me, but you knew me.”
And that would be enough.
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Author’s email: icasocot@gmail.com
