Thank you, Ma'am.

A blurred shot of our class's last day with Ma'am Simbulan

Forty days after someone dies—that is the time to say goodbye. It is the time the soul leaves Earth and makes its way to heaven. It is final.

It took me 40 days to accept Ma’am Lourdes Simbulan’s death last May 13. As the cliché goes, no one saw it coming. And finding out one of my professors died was a shock. Before her passing I had this illusion my teachers were immortal, veterans of the real world whose experience made them invincible. But hearing how Ma’am Simbulan died changed all that.

I learned my teachers are human. Their bones break; they bleed; and they can ride taxis on a “killer highway.” Their luck can turn against them, put their taxis in buses’ ways, and wait for inertia to do its job.

Everyone dies. It is just a shame that no one was prepared for Ma’am Simbulan to go and that we only had 40 days after to make up for it.

Waking up at an ungodly hour to get to the College of Mass Communication at 6:30 a.m., running along Commonwealth to UP Technohub in the rain, attending mass after months of not going, and listening to the tribute at San Agustin Church ‘til 7 p.m.—this was my way of making up for it. It was my way of saying “thank you and goodbye.”

It is not like I knew Ma’am Simbulan well; I was only under her for one semester. But it is hard not to be affected by losing someone I had learned from and had once thought would never die, at least not in the way she did.

But perhaps she is not gone completely.

“I will see you in every student and journalist you have taught to be upright and honest, and who knows the meaning of what you call ‘the right thing to do,’ Mahal, I will see you in others who will continue what you stand for,” Professor Roland Simbulan, Ma’am Simbulan’s husband, said to friends, family and students before her ashes were stored at the San Agustin columbarium.

Imagine how long Ma’am Simbulan’s memory will live if all her students did “the right thing” and stood up for what she believed in. She would live beyond 40 days. Her legacy would last forever. -30-

(Submitted for a class at the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication last June 28, 2011)