By Sophia Roco-Avancena The Manila Times www.manilatimes.net “Mourning is the language of memory…the passage to recovery.” (Canon Without Closure by Rabbi Ismar Schorsch) On August 5, my father, Raul Roco will be with our Lord for three years. It seems longer to me, his daughter, who misses him terribly. Time is supposed to ease the loss and heal the pain. Maybe not enough time has passed. Maybe his passing gets harder with time. But surely, in mourning—I am on my passage to recovery. He loved reading. He memorized by heart his favorite poems and works from his favorite writers—Plato, Aquinas, Shakespeare, T.S. Elliot, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Alan Poe, Lewis Carroll, Pablo Neruda in the original Spanish—among many others. He kept reading and when he could not manage to hold a book anymore began to recite for his pleasure and my amusement whole passages from those literary giants. I inherited his passion and love of reading. He believed everything could be learned with perseverance, har...