Jun Factoran, A Friend Forever
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Fulgencio “Jun” Factoran Jr. (Photo by RIck Rocamora)
Memories flowed. I knew him through many lunches and more than three decades of friendship and collaboration with women journalists. He was the king of the court, the Charlie to the Angels, the quiet benefactor who loved the best in art and literature.
I remember that before we were able to get our hands on a copy of Love In The Time of Cholera, Jun was already gushing over the ending of the story of two lovers old enough to be grandparents making love on a quarantined steamboat sailing on a river back and forth, forever.
Back then, in the late 1980s, he was a cabinet secretary. Democracy, victorious over a dictatorship, was young. He had always gravitated towards journalists, and I found myself in ritual lunches in which he held court, with two other journalists who had been around since the martial law years. I was in my twenties, Marites Vitug in her thirties, and Meiling Sicam in her forties.
“It wasn’t right that he died alone in a hospital, with only the presence of the nurse in the Intensive Care Unit. ”
Those meetings were like therapy sessions with good food and good wine, where we unburdened our private lives and exchanged political gossip. Jun, the lawyer that he was (UP Law and Harvard), dispensed with his generous advice, personal or otherwise. He led us to news stories, too -- it was because of him, as secretary of the environment and natural resources, that we discovered the denudation of the country’s forest. I once joined Marites, who was following the story for a book she was to write, in an epic trip to the mountains of Isabela province to see it first-hand.
Jun Factoran with the Women Writers in Media Now (WOMEN) at the launch of their exhibit at the Ateneo Library of Women's Writings (ALIWW) in 2013. (Photo courtesy of Ceres P. Doyo)
Later on, there were bigger group sessions in roundtable haute cuisine and off-branches of theater plays, musicals, art exhibits. The years went, with changes in governments and swings up and down in various crises, and Jun was always there to guide us into interpreting and analyzing the power plays, current events and future scenarios. His declining health, and his eventual death, seemed a barometer of what was going wrong with the country.
It wasn’t right that he died alone in a hospital, with only the presence of the nurse in the Intensive Care Unit. He had been rushed in and out over a period of time, with complications due to illnesses after a kidney transplant. It wasn’t right that it had to happen in the middle of the Covid-19 quarantine. It would have been a more fitting end if he were a character in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel – but it was, in fact, his wife’s passing a few years earlier that had weighed him down.
This time of the coronavirus has denied us funeral vigils of grief. We have had no choice in how to bid our farewells. We must express our outpourings online – and that’s not enough for a people that grieve openly – or stay mute in our mourning. By the time of Jun’s demise was announced in the chat box, we had already seen the rising number of deaths on account of the virus.
The country was also losing its best doctors and nurses, the heroes of the pandemic who are out there on the front line against an enemy that the government could have contained in the early stages. We count the toll, every day, when the Department of Health releases its latest statistics on the Covid-19. It’s not as staggering and mindboggling as it has been in Italy or Spain or the US or Iran (or do we not know of uncounted others?).
Jun had tested negative for the virus, but his death, as with the others, threw us in a state of helplessness. Jun’s passing would have occasioned a large gathering for eulogies. Staying at home, cornered by the protocols of quarantine, there was really nothing we could do except to honor the lives they had lived. The loss we express is sometimes over lost opportunities in our history, and I wonder if we would be able to carve out new hope and promises.
The last time Marites and I saw Jun, we were close to convincing him to write a book about the foregone days of fighting for democracy. It had perked him up; there was a glimmer in his eyes. There was brightness in the past, and so much uncertainty now.
We remember things that Facebook would not be able to dredge up in our memories. It won’t know the first time I interviewed Jun at a restaurant about the goings-on in the presidential palace, and the last time I talked to him alone in a chic Makati café for a story about the only son of the former president he had admired and served loyally, Corazon Aquino. It won’t show when he had been downcast or in a bad mood. It won’t be able to tell you the last books he had read and liked so much.
I know of only one title – A Gentleman in Moscow – which didn’t surprise me that it had a similar romantic ending as Love in The Time of Cholera. The thought that he was alone in the end was unbearable, but the thought that he had fulfilled many things in life is comfort enough. Rest in peace, Jun Factoran.
Criselda Yabes
Criselda Yabes is the author of "Below the Crying Mountain" set in the rebellion of the 1970s in the south. It won the UP Centennial Literary Prize in 2008 and was nominated for the Man Asian Prize in 2010. Her latest novel, Broken Islands, was published by Ateneo de Manila University Press in 2019. She is currently based in Manila.
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