Just Another Saturday Evening...

If this is going to sound like an entry to a diary, I beg your indulgence.

I was reading the weekend paper very leisurely when I got a text on my cell. It was from a family friend, bearing tragic news. A childhood friend of mine who was blessed with a second chance in love (her previous marriage got annulled the other year and then she got caught up in a whirlwind romance that ended at the altar last year) and a second chance to be a mother again (she became pregnant immediately and was due to deliver within the second week of January 2006) gave birth to a stillborn baby boy.

Very tragic indeed. The little boy, named Theodore Lorenzo, has been dead inside her mom's womb for 24 hours already. It was another case of cord coil -- while he twisted and twisted inside his mom, the umbilical cord got caught around his little neck and then around his left leg. So he literally strangled himself with every movement.

It is truly sad that while technology enabled all of us to view pictures and videos of the little boy with the cord twisted around his neck and leg - all the technology and science couldn't, didn't save his life. It seems there are still many mysteries about life that can not be fully explained or remedied by science.

I meant to stay at the wake for only a few hours, but there was something about being in the wake of a little angel (he had to be an angel -- he didn't get exposed to the outside world so he must have gone straight to heaven) that seemed to draw all of us together in comfort. Of course, there was this unspoken feeling of "sayang" hovering in the air, but gone was the usual morbid sense one gets while in a wake.

I still can not make sense of little Theodore's death. But I am a little comforted at the thought that there is a little angel up there watching all of us.

***

At midnight, I dropped by Krocodile bar in GB3 to meet up with former students from Benilde. It was comforting to note that many of them are doing well in their HR careers - and they brought more comforting news about their colleagues (former classmates) who have also embarked on a career in HR.

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