Eulalia Lacaba; 75

Eulalia “Lalli” de Vera Lacaba, former media production specialist of the University of the Philippines Film Center (now Cine Adarna), passed away last Sept. 2 at her home in Pateros, Metro Manila. She was 75.

She is survived by her daughters Miriam and Emanwelga, her children by her late husband Emmanuel “Eman” Lacaba.

Eman the writer, whose name is inscribed on the Wall of Remembrance of the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, came to be known as a poet-warrior when he joined the armed resistance sometime after the declaration of martial law.

In 1986, after being captured alive during a military operation in Davao del Norte, he was summarily killed by his captors and his body dumped into a mass grave. His body was subsequently exhumed from that grave and is now in the Garden of Memories Memorial Park in Pateros, where his widow Lalli will be buried today after a 9 a.m. Mass at the Chapel of Angels.

Lalli herself was a prisoner of conscience during the Marcos dictatorship. She became involved in the protest movement in the early 1970s, joining the Progresibong Kaisahan ng Manggagawa, an alliance of workers and trade unionists in Pasig and Mandaluyong. Not long after the declaration of martial law, she and her daughters went with Eman to Davao, where she engaged in urban work while Eman was in the countryside. After Eman’s death, Lalli brought her daughters back to Pateros, but she was subsequently arrested and briefly imprisoned at Fort Bonifacio.

After her release, Lalli, together with the Lacaba family and their Pasig-Pateros friends and allies, was involved in the posthumous publication of Eman’s writings in the books “Salvaged Poems” and “Salvaged Prose.” It was Lalli who was primarily responsible for finding and gathering the manuscripts of Eman’s poems, essays, and short stories.