By Dr. Dencio Acop
his was my eulogy for my beloved father, Rodolfo Acop Sr who passed away on January 25, 2022, at the SLU Hospital in Baguio. Dad is now back home with our mom Caridad. He just turned 89 last January 3rd. I suddenly feel grateful to the Lord for having given me the opportunity to spend time with my father these past few months. I do not like the circumstances of his passing but he lived a full life attested to by its longevity and how it touched lives above and beyond the call of his ordered responsibilities. He carried his own cross through silent illnesses that lasted years. At times we tested each other. To me, his greatest attributes will always be his humility through pride and his steadfastness through the ups and downs of this life. His industriousness unhampered by lack of education and poverty from the war. His unwavering faith. He will be remembered by those he cared for. I happen to be one of them. He will always be loved by me. By us.
How should I talk about father? This is a time in our lives which we always wish we wouldn’t have to deal with but still know deep down that we will. It is that time again for me today. I had known such a time in 1967, then in 2001, 2006, 2018, and now 2022. I guess I will just have to speak from the heart. Whatever comes to mind. But always from the heart. Someone once spoke in parables to communicate life more to the heart that could not lie and was the core center of the human person. Shalom. Peace be with you.
I am sorry dad that I am not with you now in your death. But at least I was with you in your life. That is my consolation in this hour of great loss for our family. There is an ongoing snow blizzard now outside where I am at as I speak. I remember too that there were incessant monsoon rains when I first drove up to you just in early October. Someone in New Zealand had asked me if I had a premonition of your death because of what recently happened between us. I said I did not. But maybe you did, dad.
Dad was a real human being. The worst and the best. The strictest and kindest. The perfectionist but likewise flawed. The hated but also the most loved. Poor but also rich. Proud but likewise humble. Broken but never down. There was no gray with him. Just black or white. Right or wrong. Success or failure. Ordered or disordered. But in the end, better loved than feared. Better ordered to his Creator than perish a proud but lost creature. I like to speak in the same terms. Mincing no words. As with life. Sinful or sorrowful. But redeemed by love in the end. As the mourners for him manifest today.
As with each of us, his biography is really a chronology of the human drama. Of lessons learned from every phase of a man’s journey through life. I may not know every detail of my father’s life. But I know the ones that matter. That he was born into the perfectionist culture of a Japanese father reveals his very high standards in life meant to be replicated as a tradition more than to be understood as merely a matter of personal choice. The Furukawa household was a mini-Nippon land embedded in a foreign land complete with names and language imported from the Land of the Rising Sun. Dad and his siblings were raised in that unforgiving and intolerant upbringing. This is something we need to understand. Before we misjudge his all too familiar penchant for ultra-conservative stubbornness. I had understood this even if there were times that I tested him and challenged him, a father to a son. A son to a father.
Like his siblings, he was very smart. But even smartness could not deliver him from unfinished education or the ravages of war, the last great one. The war and his foreign blood had condemned him to a life of forced ignorance and undeserved poverty further betrayed by his own kind. But that’s altogether another story. If there was ever any pride in him it was because it had already been there before he was humbled, his intangible and tangible properties forcibly taken away before he was mature enough to fully comprehend what exactly that which he lost. With an invalid mother and a dead father, dad in the post-war had to be surrogate ‘dad’ to older women and younger men siblings who were suddenly like him — orphans. This is another fact of his life that we need to understand and reflect back on in regard to how we experienced him.
No matter all the burdens lodged upon his young shoulders in early life, dad in his teenage years already had to earn a living to support core and extended families alike. As I have said, dad was steadfast in the ups and downs of this life and struggled unhampered by a lack of education and poverty from the war. Difficult circumstances forced his industriousness all the more as it was the only way to survive for him and his family. He was once incarcerated in old Baguio’s Boys Town for stealing food as they had nothing to eat. He punched boys his age there in order to protect himself. Another factoid in dad’s life that we should all bear in mind when we think of how fiercely he protected us, his family.
The difficulties of survival were the reason why dad and mom supported the education of younger siblings on both sides of the family even while they raised their own growing family. The kind of education they never had. Such noble intention however was not enough to keep the recipients of that charity in school who squandered away the golden, hard-earned opportunities they were being gifted with. My parents did not want the younger ones to experience what they both had gone through and wanted to help them by giving them a fighting chance. My aunts graduated. But not the boys. They were such knuckleheads and dad’s temper and strict upbringing at times couldn’t hold out. I saw his kind of discipline as a young boy. In hindsight, I still agree.
Despite their own lack of education, or perhaps because of it, my parents very well understood its value and therefore financed our education in the best schools in Baguio. Hard work and having a good heart made my parents very successful businessmen. So successful that they had a variety of investments going for them and whose proceeds were enough to support core and extended families and friends. Throughout the years.
How did dad and mom meet? He was working as a conductor (not in an opera) of Dangwa Bus Lines. And she was a frequent passenger traveling between Baguio and Sayangan along the Mountain Trail to source and market vegetables as a businesswoman. I guess it was love at first sight.
Kosaku Furukawa and Clara Acop were dad’s parents. The Furukawas are from the Toyama Prefecture in southern Japan. My late wife Joji and I had a chance to see that place of our ancestral roots in 2001. Lola Clara was from Acop, Tublay, Benguet. Dad’s siblings are Uncle Philip who was a soldier, Auntie Nena, Auntie Halo, Auntie Josephine who migrated to Canada, Auntie Aida, Uncle Alfredo, and Uncle Paul. Only Uncle Fred now survives.
Lolo Kosaku was arrested and deported back to Japan as all Japanese were following the defeat of Japan in World War II. But prior to deportation, Lolo Kosaku died from severe tuberculosis from incarceration in Muntinlupa and was buried in a common grave for the Japanese in Canlubang, Laguna where a huge Japanese military base used to be. They say they hanged many Filipino guerrillas who had been caught there too. When I worked for Wyeth which had a factory in Canlubang, I actually tried to locate where that mass grave was in 2008 but was unsuccessful.
I recall when we were kids, we would travel with our parents to Kabayan, Benguet to procure vegetables from farmers which would eventually be sold to middlemen in Baguio and on to Divisoria. We would help out with packing, repacking the vegies, sometimes carrying them on our shoulders. So if Sheng and I didn’t grow up to be six feet, you know why. I loved the countryside. The country roads whether they were along the Mountain Trail or Kabayan Road. The dust from the dirt roads notwithstanding. I remember us eating corned beef and warm rice by the roads on quick lunch stops with dad and mom. I recall Sheng and me assisting dad on seemingly incessant vehicle repairs. Mom would complain that dad liked to repair his vehicles even if there was nothing wrong with them just to have something to do!
I had to leave my family at 17 to go to the PMA then shortly thereafter, West Point in New York. I had left home for good that time and never really settled in it any longer except for holiday visits with my family, And the period from Oct 11 last year until Jan 1st when I stayed at home with him while I was having my own house repaired. I was very happy when mom and dad were able to attend my graduation from West Point in the Spring of 1983. Thereafter I toured them around the States for a month before we had to come home for my return service with the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Dad and mom supported my (and brother Rollie’s) serving our country without question through all those years until I optionally retired in 2009 while Rollie continued on. They saw me through my married life with my late wife Joji and our three kids Jacqui, Deo, and David. Dad saw my first grandchild Johan in 2018 when we came up to Baguio after Joji died. He met my daughter’s husband Eric during his wedding to my daughter in 2012 and Johan’s baptism in 2015 before Jacqui’s family moved to Australia. The pandemic prevented him from meeting Josef, his 2nd apo sa tuhod. But Josef sees him now on zoom in Australia. Dad has missed mom since 2001 and also lost my sister Adelina in 2006. It had broken his heart that Manang Adel died way before her time. She had been a doctor to us all, especially to dad.
Dad took in his grandchildren Vince, Sylvia, Sabrina, and Suzanne when the kids’ mother my sister Carmelita became incapacitated and estranged from her husband. He nurtured them like he and mom nurtured us until they became what they are now: all accomplished and independent. He provided shelter to all who needed sheltering including my siblings and uncles. Especially our sister Carmelita who has been ill for years. And Fatima and her son Nathaniel.
Mom and dad were generous people. Especially when mom was still around. Oftentimes our house was like that of Forrest Gump which sheltered extended relatives and townsfolk on their way home to Bagong, Sablan (mom’s hometown). As our house was strategically located along the main road before the Alno / Alapang junction which travelers took toward Bagong. You could practically step on people sleeping on the floor as every space of the house became occupied. My parents then would send off people back on their way complete with pabaon and everything they could give away.
Dad struggled to be happy again as a widower since 2001 after mom died. I guess he focused his remaining years and energies on nurturing his grandchildren and seeing them grow. The feeling of which I also now know. The choleric personality in dad brought out from him a strong will to live for some meaningful purpose. He took care of himself so he would be around for some time to live out that purpose.
Dad loved Hollywood movies and oldies but goodies music. He especially loved the westerns. When I was a kid, dad would take Rollie and me with him to the movies and we would just see one movie after another, transferring to different theaters which were all street-side back then. Doing such in Manila, when it was summer, was especially challenging not only because of the heat but because there were ultimately a lot more cinemas there in Santa Cruz or Quiapo. And by the time we were done, Rollie and I were so dizzy we couldn’t recognize each other while eating merienda burgers on a quick buzzer.
Until today I could still hear the sounds of Marty Robbins, The Brothers Four, Everly Brothers now elderly, Nat King Cole, The Platters, Elvis, Ray Conniff, etc. In fact, Rollie has more to say about this since he has in possession now dad’s old phonograph and records!
We visited dad and mom in Baguio from Manila often when our own kids were growing up. I remember mom’s cooking, picnics, and the festivities at our home in Cruz. For years, Holy Week, summer, and Christmas holidays were almost always spent with mom and dad in Baguio. I also remember the New Year bonfire barbecues and fireworks there. It always broke my heart when it was time to say goodbye to drive back down. There was always that eerie feeling of melancholy in my heart each time we departed from mom and dad given how happy we were the past few days.
Dad had unwavering faith. If I later became a devout Catholic who took his faith and moral values seriously it was because I experienced it first from my upbringing modeled by our parents. If we took the Holy Mass seriously every Sunday and prayed before and after meals, it was because such was ingrained in us by our parents until they became habitual. Dad and mom not only sent us to good schools but to catholic schools. Not just to have a good education but also to be influenced by strong moral values. The Holy Bible was dad’s only book until he died. I tried to reinforce this by gifting him with an oversized Biblioteca (that had been at our home in Manila) during the time that I stayed with him just this October until New Year’s Day while fixing my house. Suddenly i feel that Divine Providence led me back to father before he would be taken.
Being with him in the house that I grew up in for three months was the longest I have stayed at Cruz since I left home for West Point 43 years ago as a bumbling 17-year-old straight and thin from hazing at the PMA. The house he lies in now has seen three funerals: Lola Clara’s in 1967, mama Caring’s in 2001, and now his. I saw dad break down over his dead mom as a child right in that same sala he now lies in. True to form, dad has always honored tradition that is why you see him in a wooden casket now. And why he lies not in a funeral home but in ours. That he wants to be buried beside mama, not cremated. He has talked of death since 2019 and increasingly so since then. He was always bidding goodbye whenever we would have the chance to talk. He kept saying his time was at hand. And that he felt it in his bones. He carried his cross silently. Dad had suffered not only from prostate issues and hypertension but more so from anxiety and depression through most of his life which were debilitating at times especially since mom died. To lighten up our conversations I would kid around and respond to him with the most preposterous utterances only a son could have the gall to say. When he said he had insomnia, I would advise him to take more coffee or wine. Dad, like my brother Rollie, never drank because he was allergic to alcohol. He smoked once in his younger years. When he said he couldn’t eat something, I would offer him what I was eating which was almost always not in his rigid diet. When he said he didn’t want to leave the house, I would say that my car was ready to take him anywhere he wanted to go in Baguio. Especially after he had voluntarily washed it while parked in his house. That was just in October and November. Which is why I cannot for the life of me believe that he is already gone just a month since that conversation of ours took place. But when I was irked about something like the carpenters being unable to work fast enough to finish my house in time, he would be the one to console me saying that the chief carpenter, whom he knew, would finish the job before Christmas as I had pre-planned.
It almost felt anti-climactic and sad when my house finally got done around Christmastime just before my Dec 26th birthday. Because then I felt it was time for me to leave. As he probably also felt. Our conversations then became more frequent and intense days leading to my departure. He had asked me what my plans were going forward. He knew i was leaving for the States on his birthday Jan 3rd. I had told him earlier that I met someone, Joy, and I was going to her in Boston. He gave his blessing saying that he understood where I was and to go for it. He said he knew how inseparable i was from my late wife Joji when she was alive and that I was still a young widower. That my kids are all grown-up and independent. He asked about my children aware of the fact that we are now a global family. Deo, my second, is there among you now. He has a girlfriend, Nikki, a would-be lawyer. Jacqui, my eldest, is zoomed in from Australia along with her husband Eric and sons Johan and Josef. David, my youngest, also joins us now virtually from the US. Not to put David on the spot here, but when Lolo daddy heard that David has a girlfriend, Jessica, he said he’d be having a Caucasian apo sa tuhod. How cool is that? And dad said that. Okay, I think I have babbled on enough. But everything said was to honor dad, Masayuki Furukawa, and the life he lived on this earth. With all of us. After all, honoring thy father in life and in death is God’s fifth commandment to us. Jew or Gentile. Doing what is right in this world the best way we can. So, sleep on dad with your ancestors as the Good Book would say. You’re home free now. No longer be afraid. And be without pain. For God has not only been in you in life. But that you are now in Him in death. Your eternal life. We, your children, 13 grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren bid you farewell. Until we are reunited again. All in Him. I love you. We love you. Be thou at peace.
Indeed, there are special people in our lives who never leave us .. even after they are gone.
