By Jaime Vergara
For Variety

JAIME E. Vergara, 95, erstwhile member of then Governor Ariyoshi’s Commission on Aging in Hawaii, died May 6 in Honolulu. His grandson, Shawn Maximo Vergara, was born 2 days before, Down Under in Melbourne. A year before, the Vergara blood co-mingled with the Irish in grandson Shawn Vergara Healy. The DNA moves on. The circle of life continues.
The last time I saw my dad a year and half ago, he thought I was his nephew David who is 20 years my senior. Vivid memories of days gone by occupied his lucidity. The recalling was always lively and poignant. But he would not remember if he already had lunch two hours before. Loved ones, including my mother, faded away from his immediate mental screen, though his visual acumen remained sharp.
My dad and I made peace long before his faculties began to decline. With bouts of gout and arthritis, not to mention a steeled leg from an almost fatal motorcycle accident when he was barely 50, the sunset of his years was not comfortable. But he was brought up well. The runt of the litter, a dozen of them, he picked up an aristocratic bearing from the tutoring of elder sisters and brothers ensuing in a lifestyle of the old school — of grace under pressure, of calm under any circumstance.
His life’s odyssey, culminating past his 95th birthday, cannot be regarded but as one full and spilling at the brim. Thus, the poetry of previous times comes as awkwardly inappropriate. This is neither a reproof nor a reprimand to the well wishers who have expressed sentiments of condolences and heartfelt sympathy. But clearly, the completion of his life is hardly an occasion for sadness and sorrow.
The late Fr. Gary Bradley, S.J., of Gualo Rai frequently commented that our islanders fuss over the dead but ignore each other when they are still alive. Given to subtle but dramatic gestures, he collapsed at the church’s Eucharistic table after exulting the triune formula of his absolute concern. “What a way to go,” I exclaimed then and received a spousal reproach for being socially insensitive!
The dualism postulated by the Gnostics was deemed unorthodox by Christianity but the dualism haunts Christian thought. It has calcified in the two-story universe of literalistic Christian piety that sees this life as the province of the flesh, and the life after as that of the spirit. In this imagined cosmology, of earth and heaven/hell, the transition from one to the other goes through the valley of tears. Thus, death comes not as a completion of a journey, but rather, a transition from one state to another.
Mine is the post-theistic poetry of the spirit. There is but one reality. Jaime Empleo Vergara, like each of us, is one unique unrepeatable gift of life into human history. There has never been one like him before and there will never be another one like him ever again. His 95-year journey is indelibly etched in the annals of local-cosmic history, thus, at completion, his permanent address is eternity.
“We come from the dark abyss, we return to the dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval ‘life,’ ” wrote the Greek Nikos Kazantsakis. At the completion of a journey, say, graduation from school, congratulations are in order. The spirit of joy and celebration abides. It is in such mood and spirit that I go bury my dad this week. L’achaim!