Watercolors

When I was a little girl, I was so utterly convinced that I was a gifted painter and was destined to be the next Claude Monet or someone of that calibre. I always had this thin, rectangular watercolor palette between my fingers (I even remember the brand: Artex) and I spent endless hours lying on our wooden floor, swirling colors on paper after paper after paper.
Once, I left one of my "masterpieces" out in the garage to dry. About half an hour later, I heard rain pummelling our roof and I immediately thought about the "painting" I had left outside to bake. I watched in horror as the fat drops of water crashed into the piece of paper like bombs, each one literally exploding into a gazillion microscopic droplets of color.
The rain eventually ceased its campaign on my artwork and all I had left was a drenched piece of paper with some streaks of color here and there. Everything I had painstakingly drawn was gone. As I peeled the wet paper off the cemented path, I stopped to examine what was left. Right under the paper lay an entire spectrum of colors glistening in the sunlight. The rain had washed away the watercolor from the paper but a significant amount of it was trapped under the wet paper. The myriad of colors on the cement path, a harmonious medley of blues with greens, reds topped with yellows and purples highlighted with pinks, was a far more beautiful sight than my attempt at a painting. A couple of minutes later, I watched as the watercolors slowly started to disappear as more water from all corners began to spread itself over the area, stripping my personal rainbow of its very essence. After a couple more minutes, the colors were gone.
Yesterday, on the day of hearts, I saw those colors once again almost immediately after the lives of two well-loved people ended in a manner more vicious than torrents of rain attacking a helpless piece of paper. In the morning of February 14th, one of the pastors in our church, Rev. Kevin Alamag and his wife Belle were killed when a passenger bus slammed into their Nissan Sentra in that junction in Commonwealth and Tandang Sora in Quezon City. He was 37 and she was 46, parents to two very young children below the age of 12. They were both literally rays of sunshine. Ate Belle, as she was known in church, was always radiant and I could never picture her without her warm smile. Pastor Kevin was enlightening. He was profound in his speech, meticulous in his work, passionate about his country and consumed with his love for the Lord. He was dedicated to the ministry and I almost always imagined him outrunning the Energizer bunny anytime anywhere. They were both as vibrant as midsummer's day.
Then they were gone. It was just a couple of weeks ago that I sat in a meeting with him in the church choir room and he was plopping one butterscotch after another into his mouth while announcing, "This would be great with coffee." Just like that, just like watercolors disappearing into flowing water.
I've been to a lot of funerals and I usually hear a lot of this: "He was a good man," or "She helped me in this way." Maybe it's just me, but I rarely hear about people talking about going beyond the act of helping by actually touching people, by connecting with them. I don't know if there should be a distinction since helping partakes of an element of giving some part of one's self away but I think there are certain ways of helping wherein you go beyond what is required and actually make a commitment to another person. It's like that line from a song by Nicole Nordeman: "I wanna leave a legacy, how will they remember me? Did I choose to love?" That kind of love rivals rainbows and miles of wildflowers.
My friend Banana (who's now on another offshore project in Vegas) was more alarmed. "It's so weird," she said. "He ministered to us in my mom's funeral service last year and he even attended her burial on February 14. Exactly a year after, he's gone."
My cousin Tren was one of the many people Pastor Kevin ministered to in Church of the Risen Lord. Pastor Kevin apparently led their Bible study group. She called him "PK" (as opposed to my more formal way of addressing him). "He taught us so many things," she said as she ended her text to me with a ':(.'
It was one of my classmates who was deeply affected by Pastor Kevin's untimely death. She headed a bible study group with Him in Church of the Risen Lord and much of what I know about Pastor Kevin's life and testimony I learned from her. Once, she told me a rather interesting story. When he was with CRL, Pastor Kevin used to drop off some of the members of his bible study group in their homes, my friend included. He would insist that all of them would sit in the backseat, leaving the front seat vacant. "He didn't care if he would end up looking like a driver," she related. My classmate asked him why and he answered that the seat was reserved only for Ate Belle.
It was her thoughts after I told her that he died which made me believe that there was a semblance of beauty in the midst of a death as a tragic as his and Ate Belle's. "He believed in me," she said of Pastor Kevin. "He was the kind of person who wanted to be proud of you."
And the stories abound, enough to rival rainbows and miles of wildflowers even as watercolors disappear into the flush.

Rev. Kevin and Belle Alamag's memorial service at the
Church of the Risen Lord earlier tonight