“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple… And pick flowers in other people’s gardens and learn to spit.”
Few months ago, UP professor and veteran journalist Lourdes Estella-Simbulan read these lines in front of her colleagues from a poem translated in Filipino.
Poetry was among her sanctuaries with the comfort she found with it. The lines above were from a Jenny Joseph poem titled Warning.
It spoke of unfulfilled childhood fantasies – to horseplay in shops, eat pounds of sausages, and learn to spit – waiting be real when the person gets old.
It sounded great, but relatives, friends, and colleagues of Simbulan would never see her spit in her purple dress anymore, at least literally. When a road accident killed her last Friday night, she left hundreds grieving.
Fifty-four-year-old Simbulan has doubtlessly, in the words of the clergy, completed her life’s mission. Being a writer at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Pinoy Times, and The Manila Times, she was an exceptional journalist, a modern Joan of Arc as she renounced her job in replace of the journalist’s creed during the trying Erap era.
The UP Journalism Club (UPJC) where she served as president, pays tribute its alumna, in a four-part series with bits of her life as an Iskolar, as a ‘mother’ to her students, and most intriguing hurdles faced as a journalist.
The thrusting words “I love UPJC” were more than perfect for her.
UP and Chit
They say, it takes time to know one, as much as it takes time for someone to make a name. But for Simbulan, it’s taking a perfect blend of passion, responsibility, and right decisions.
“Chit is a batch before me in UP Diliman,” said Noemi Lardizabal-Dado, 53-year-old features editor of the Philippine Online Chronicle, “I never knew her, but word gets around in the campus when one is quite active.”
With a general weighted average of 1.5, she finished her master’s degree in public management at the UP Open University after graduating with a undergraduate degree on Journalism, according to faculty personnel papers her colleague Marichu Lambino filed in her blog.
She also became writer at the Philippine Collegian during the 1970s, the most crucial years the University has faced.
After she graduated, she started writing for a human rights magazine before becoming a reporter at the Manila Evening Post, Tempo, and Malaya.
Meanwhile, UP College of Mass Communication dean Roland Tolentino remained in his expressive and gloomy tone yet bound with optimism in his latest tweets.
He said in a May 14 post, “Hindi kailangan ng yumao ang pabaong iyak at lungkot. Mas magaan ang saya…”
Tolentino also said when he got to the Prime Funeral Parlor, he saw some students who ‘braved going to the morgue’ just to see her, as quoted in an Inquirer article.
Simbulan’s dream of becoming a mother has long turned into reality. She found strength with her students whom she treated as her children – among those finding it difficult to let her go.
One that lets them take pride of being a Simbulan student was her legacy as a journalist. A point in her career even made her choose between keeping her image or keeping the people at pace with truth.
Sources
The contents of this post were retrieved from a Wayback Machine snapshot of UPJC’s old website dated Aug. 31, 2011, 22:36:06 GMT.
