By Manny Piñol
Death is something that we all cannot escape from.
But the unpredictability of death is what makes it all the more cruel.
I was out of the country to visit a dear friend who is critically ill when I received the news that a fraternity brother who was like a real blood brother to me passed away.
Lawyer Efren Cachuela was the third person whom I consider as part of my life who died during the Christmas Season.
Earlier, two other friends, town mates and loyal supporters, Harold Santillan and James Bayog, died on the same day – December 15.
Harold was a young man who belonged to a family who supported me and my brothers in all of our political battles.
So was James, a town mate who in 1998 left everything he was doing to campaign for me when I ran for Governor of North Cotabato in 1998.
Even when I was already out of politics, James and another friend, Panoy Diazon, would keep me company in the farm and play “tong-its” with me which was more of a fun game than gambling.
I was able to visit the wake of Harold and James but I was never able to pay my last respects to Brod Efren, who was called Jigs by our fraternity brothers in the Alpha Phi Sigma.
To say that Jigs played a prominent role in making me what I am today is an understatement.
I was a “probinsyano” who just left the seminary and studied in Davao City when I met Efren who was working as a front desk clerk of the old Imperial Hotel along Claveria Street to finance himself as he studied law at the University of Mindanao.
We stayed in the fraternity house and shared whatever food there was.
Since I was the youngest and the newest frat brod, I did almost all of the household chores like cooking, washing the dishes and even the clothes of the older brods.
The older brods, including Neopito Magno, a city prosecutor now, supported me and the other younger brods with our allowances.
When there was no food in the frat house, we would go to the Imperial Hotel deep in the night and Brod Jigs would sneak us into the kitchen where we had all the food we wanted.
That “nightly covert operation” was apparently never discovered by the hotel management because Jigs was not fired and he went on to become a lawyer.
When I was in politics, Jigs was always there to support me in all of my legal battles.
I am sharing this story with the followers of this page because I will never be able to tell Jigs, Harold and James how much I value their friendship.
I will not be who I am today without these people.
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