Twenty-four years (and some amount of days) ago, I started my freshman year in Philippine Science, in the Diliman campus. Ma'am O'Dell was my Math I teacher, and would be my Math II (Geometry) teacher the following year. I remember that the impression that my classmates had early on was that she was a strict teacher (in fact, a friend had left the school for failing Math II), and even with her short stature (I think I was coming up to eye-level with her at that point), she could hold a stern gaze. Her heavily-accented English was carefully enunciated, but we would still get tripped up on some words (I remember we had a hard time with "cotton"), and I had, by the middle of that year, gotten the hang of hazarding an imitation of her voice, usually when demonstrating how she called my classmates by name, and me by "you" - to be fair, that was definitely no longer the case in sophomore year.
In both years, on days I had her class, it would be the last class of the day. I remember that in freshman year, we originally had three-hour breaks on Thursday and Friday, but she had allowed us to take the classes earlier so that the externs could get home sooner. I remember very fondly a day we had the proof of a single theorem in Geom class that ended up with one particularly bored individual throwing wads of paper all almost everyone else - and we had paid that person back in spades, despite the fact that Ma'am O'Dell had served as an inadvertent shield. In the aftermath, I personally felt ashamed to approach her, but classmates who did said that she had shrugged it all off and laughed.
Ma'am O'Dell had a keen, wry sense of humor, which we students occasionally got to see, and she had a warmth just below the professional surface. I had only, with the news of her passing, come to realize that her bearing and her attitude have been what I have been practicing - been trying to emulate - since I started teaching, at Pisay, and have served me well for all my teaching stops since. (This is counterpointed by the excited, almost manic, air I share with another sophomore year Math teacher of mine, Doc Banjo Bautista.)
The last time I remember seeing her was a year after I started teaching at Pisay. I knew that she had retired the year I came in, so we never had professionally overlapped there. She still had the humor and warmth I remembered from nearly a decade before - only that her grayish hair had already turned mostly white. I'm sure we were both smiling.
Of my mentors who have passed on: Sir Alex Alix, only years after I left for UP, with my maturity insufficient to sustain me at Pisay; Doc Jose Marasigan, who I was with during my grad assistant time at Ateneo, just a few years ago; and, Ma'am O'Dell; remembering her takes me back the farthest, to my most hopeful, to my most exuberant, exultant years, when possibility was still waiting for opportunity. I heard that she may have been characterized in the Aureas Solito film, but I have not watched it yet - if that is true, I will likely want to find a copy soon, again.
It is hard to say how I feel about her passing, when it boils down to it. That she is no longer in the world, for me to reconnect with at a future time, I cannot deny - there is sadness, but my memories of her feel like mint, like a breath of fresh air from a time past. I don't want to take a deep breath, to hold it in, but I know that I will feel it again when I do remember her, time and again.
EDIT: Adding a video from FB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTtgqghLNaQ
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