I’VE been a listener. I’ve listened to stories of people of all walks of life. Stories I used as materials for my own articles with SunStar Davao.
With deadlines dictating the pace of my life, I’ve learned to recognize which part of the interview will require all my listening powers to process as it can form part of the news story.
Now that I left this fast-paced, daily deadline driven life, I’m listening more and truly seeing the other as a human with aspirations and purpose, and that is when the stories told evolve to become magical.
This is no longer about deadlines. This is about life. I’m just glad that my whole adult life prepared me not just how to listen more, but to ask where the gaps in the stories are, to get the full picture and in the process, dig up the treasures of a life well-lived or the pitfalls of a life wasted.
This rumination into listening and people’s lives was spurred by an hour and a half of listening to Doc Im-im. Doc Im-im is Rojim Sorrosa, a trail-blazing young palliative care doctor at the Southern Philippines Medical Center, and his story is the story of how it is to listen with a purpose.
I’m not quite sure if I will ever achieve his level. I doubt. As palliative care doctor, you listen and engage the patients, the dying, their families, and their what-ifs.
Palliative care is very new in Mindanao. When Doc Im-im first came home from his fellowship on palliative care from the Philippine General Hospital, there was but him and no one else, and the patients’ last hours were like death sentences, mechanical, heartless, until the wails of those left behind stab the air.
But imagine, listening to the dying. That is another level. Imagine being given that privilege to know a person’s deepest fears and dreams and remorse. It’s a calling reserved for the chosen.
That doesn’t mean we cannot give our full attention to others while they are brimming with life. Let’s do that. Let’s listen with our hearts.
saestremera@gmail.com