The Manila Times

The happy Celia Diaz Laurel

MD BONOAN MD Bonoan, former faculty member of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, is the writer and administrator of the Celia Laurel Facebook page.

AS her official Facebook page’s content writer, I have probably read and written hundreds of items about her. The routine, however, does not reach any point of boredom. Astoundingly, every aspect of her life constantly leads to finding something invaluable. I was running through our archives for her upcoming 95th birthday this May 29 when I stumbled upon her handwritten inspirational thoughts on happiness that are worth sharing here.

Celia Diaz Laurel, a patroness of the arts, mother, wife, former second lady and civic worker, believed that a happy life does not mean one that is devoid of sadness. Crisis, she said, comes every now and then, and we could never escape or really prepare for it.

Like everyone else, she had an equal share of low moments in her life as well. Tragedy first struck in 1981 when Kristipi, her youngest son, was left paralyzed following a freak accident in their famous Shaw Boulevard home. Then lymphoma claimed her husband Doy in 2004, followed by daughter Stella in 2006 from breast cancer, and lastly Kristipi in 2008 after nearly three decades of being in a vegetative state. Politics, with all the vicious ill-will and discredit directed toward her husband, deeply wounded her too.

Nothing shielded nor cushioned her from this pain. However, she chose to focus on the good memories because those kept her from feeling, hoping, doing, loving and living more.

She had portrayed over a hundred roles in her stellar 60-year theater career, but the audience’s warm applause after each Repertory performance never failed to give her great highs. True happiness, she understood, unfolds when “one is able to do what she likes and be able to do it well.”

Yet, of course, the universe would not always tilt in our favor and unhappiness would always find its way to weaken us. Not for her, though. “Sad experiences help us to understand and be more considerate of others.” This is how Mrs. Laurel, a UP fine arts graduate mentored by great Filipino art giants like Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero, Fernando Amorsolo and Guillermo Tolentino, profoundly saw it. As a sensitive artist, she used the bittersweet communion of both experiences in deciphering her character’s pathos or seeing through her painting’s model or subject.

Art is a shared interest among Mrs. Laurel’s brood. Her children and grandchildren were all showered with the power to create. Many, if not all, became painters, actors, singers, composers, musicians, poets and orators. The greatest sin, she therefore believed, was to neglect and not harness these special abilities.

When it comes to her family, Mrs. Laurel had always refrained from being modest. She always took pride in how they have beautifully grown inside and out. She and Doy did not impose. “To be able to look back and appreciate how the children have gone on ahead is happiness enough,” she said.

Mrs. Laurel did not hold any government position. At one point, though, she concurrently headed 18 nongovernment and charitable organizations. She provided water wells in depressed areas, offered educational scholarships, put up libraries and supporting centers for the destitute, gave free health check-ups and medicines, supplied milk for undernourished children, granted artificial legs to paralytics, and donated Braille writers and speech apparatuses for the visually and hearing-impaired — few concrete reasons that made her only one of few Filipino women recognized internationally in this field. As her prestigious “Woman for Peace” award given by the Together for Peace Foundation in 1991 aptly confirms, the recognition was for her “noble and generous feelings which are always inspiring in helping peoples in need, the unhappy ones, and the victims of natural calamities and wars.”

Mrs. Laurel’s mantra was simple: “Happiness is to be able to use one’s gift to make others happy.” If this was so, we could only approximate how much more joy she could have offered to the world if she had been blessed with a longer and healthier time or lifetimes perhaps to use and share her God-given talents which, by the way, were so many.

On this, she profoundly submitted: “I believed that if I have been given more, it is so that I could give more to those that have less. That if I were made stronger, it is so that I could help the weaker.” The greatest happiness, she avowed, “would be to know that I was the source of another’s happiness.”

Sadly, in a world where earthly possessions, accolades and social media stretch seem to matter most, happiness has become trivial and elusive. How and where do we find it then? Happiness, she held, “is simply realizing that me is alive and well and being useful to mankind and to one’s country.”

Happy Birthday in heaven, Ma’am! We will always try our best to be happy.

Opinion

en-ph

2023-05-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-05-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://manilatimes.pressreader.com/article/281608129802393

The Manila Times