“The faintest ink is better than the best memory.”

I’ve always found the idea of archiving your life important, whether it’s journals, photos, home videos, etc.—it’s a way of keeping the memory alive when hearts and minds aren’t enough. I grew up pretty disconnected from extended families, something that’s always seemed ironic to me, given that I was raised partly by aunts, uncles, and grandparents whenever my parents had to leave the country to work. Now, when I met my wife’s family, they were pretty much the opposite. See, this is a big family, maybe even bigger than both of my sides combined, at least as far as I know, and they are by no means perfect, but the connections, the memories, the shared experiences—they keep everyone, even the great-grandparents who walked our streets before it was paved, alive and remembered. The stories they tell can fill volumes of biographies and memoirs.

I attended a reunion this one time, between my mother-in-law’s side and their maternal cousins. This had been a long time coming, I was told, and I was pretty excited and honored to be invited to join. I mean, this is history we’re talking about, right? Anyway, we walked in, my wife and I, and the first thing somebody handed to us was nametags and a couple of markers—we had to write down our names and what our relation is. So for me, it went something like this:

Cedric

Minette’s Husband

My wife’s looked something like this:

Minette

Belle’s Daughter

That was crazy. Maybe it’s not that weird or new for some of you, but for someone like me, that was pretty extraordinary. This family, not having seen each other or gathered together for so long, needs nametags to keep introductions easier. It was genius. I’ve never seen something like that, so it got me thinking about my side of the family, and what memories of them I have left.

When I was 1, my mom left my dad, taking me and the little belongings she had with her from our house in Batangas, my father’s hometown. From then on, I would have no connection with my extended family from my father’s side until I was almost an adult. My mom’s side of the family, on the other hand, was kind of diasporic—when my maternal grandfather died, my mom and her siblings sold their house, the house they all grew up in, and scattered. I’m sure there were a lot of memories that went along with that house, memories that my mom or my aunts and uncles might still have in their hearts and minds, but to their kids, my generation, those memories might as well have never existed.

What little I knew about that side of the family came mostly from stories my mom told me, which, of course, were pretty exclusively about her generation, and of course, pretty exclusively about her and her childhood. My aunts and uncles never really told me any stories as far as I can remember, and my grandfather had died long before I was born. But my grandmother told me stories, some at least. When I was pretty young, and my grandmother was still alive, she bunked with me whenever it was my mom’s turn to take her in. Lola was… not completely well mentally at this point, hence her kids having to take turns housing her.

She told me stories, most of it already forgotten, I’m afraid. She was pretty hard to understand. We never knew what it was that afflicted her, but by that point, she wasn’t completely lucid, and even if I could understand some of the context behind her stories, she was a pretty confusing narrator—prone to meandering, going off on tangents, pretty much like me when I get out of control. To add to all that, most of her stories were usually lore-dumped on me in the middle of the night, when she couldn’t sleep and I was the only other one awake in the house. Sometimes I would wake up and get unskippable cutscene’d when I just wanted to take a leak or get water. Things like that don’t help with memory retention, I assure you.

But there’s one I do remember: she had this sweetheart before she met my grandfather, a soldier who, by today’s standards, was admittedly far too old for her—she was barely a teenager, if memory serves. He either died or got separated from her after, I’m not sure. I remember her telling me that they had to pack up and leave, some urgent thing I can’t even recall. That or he died. Or maybe he got married to someone else. Anyway, that chapter of her life was gone. Her parents, my great-grandparents, arranged for her to marry my grandfather, and here we are. That was one of those stories hoisted on me pretty unexpectedly, so much so that I can’t even remember the beginning and end of it, but I do remember asking if she had regrets. One of my greatest regrets about my lola is that I can’t even remember her answer. That’s a part of my lola I’m not even sure anyone else still knows, and for the life of me, I can’t quite remember, not even a name or anything I can cross-reference with facts I can gather. And the answer, it died with her.

In the end, I could’ve been the only person who knew that secret, but that secret is in the grave, along with everything else that once was her. And then I look at my wife’s family—fifty, sixty people, retelling the same stories about their lolo this, or lola that. Some of them are probably not even that close, but they’re all connected by the same stories, stories that manage to keep people alive even when they’re long gone.

This might come as a tiny bit of a surprise, given the blog, but I don’t like writing about myself. I don’t like taking photos of myself either. Videos are a no-go, too, because of all the things I dislike about myself, it’s the sound of my voice that takes the cake. But I regret not having enough of those things because I feel like I’m perpetuating this familial tradition of letting our memories die with us. I may not be able to salvage the history of my family, but I know for a fact that I’ll try my best not to let that happen again in the future. My fear from Day 6—it’s not so abstract when you look at it with this lens. It’s not just dying alone in the dark room. It’s dying, and then having the people who loved you die, taking their stories with them. Because nobody bothered to write the damn things down. Whole lives—loves, jokes, heartbreaks, favorite curses, the way someone stirred their coffee—gone like tears in the rain.

We now live in a pretty different world from the one our ancestors did. The family reunion I mentioned earlier, they had this old photograph of my wife’s aunt—she’s around 80 now—as a baby, together with their grandmother, the singular ancestor tying all these families together still, almost a century after. She lived through the tail end of the Spanish occupation, the Filipino-American War, and the literal birth of my nation. And by some chance, someone managed to keep a photo. Now we live in an era where photos and videos are so ubiquitous that not taking one can be considered a virtue. Our history was partly cobbled together from journals and other written accounts that somebody took the time and energy to write down, and now we live in a time where a lot of people don’t bother writing or reading anymore. I don’t have a judgment to dispense here, but it’s a pretty interesting thought to consider, don’t you think?

I don’t have my lola’s answer anymore.

But the next kid—maybe mine, or yours—will have mine.