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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Friday, September 12, 2025

entry arrow12:31 AM | The First of Us to Go



This was not our first death in the family. My father died in 1997, when I was in college. Assorted relatives have passed on in the intervening years, including our beloved sister-in-law Efeb, who died in 2024. But Alvin was the first among us brothers to go, and that realization amounted to something tectonic—like a massive shift in our considerations of mortality, like death knocking too intimately at our family’s door.

On the day my brother died, Kuya Moe [Moses Atega] posted on Facebook—as he is wont to do with most alumni of Silliman University—that “the handsomest Casocot brother had passed away.” My Manong Alvin was certainly very handsome, but my brother Rey would probably disagree vehemently.

But let me break it down for you:

Rocky, our eldest, is truly the handsomest.

Edwin is the most ambitious.

Dennis is the most responsible one, and the architect of everything we do as a family. He is the one we turn to the most when we want to get things done.

Rey is the most fabulous and chaotic—and he will, I’m sure, also insist on being the handsomest.

I am, ehem, the most talented.

But Alvin, considering everything, was really the kindest and the sweetest among us six.

Truth to tell, if a gun were pointed at my head and I am forced to answer the question over who my favorite brother is, I’d most probably say, “Alvin.” But I only truly knew him when I was very young. I was in high school when he left for Switzerland in what turned out to be a brief sojourn, and which paved the way for him to eventually enter the United States as a tourist—and where, alas, he decided to turn TNT.

But when I was growing up—and straight on until I was entering my adolescence—Manong Alvin embodied being the “best kuya.” He was very kind, sometimes to a fault. He was compassionate. He was patient. Of all my brothers, he was the one who was most demonstrative of fraternal love—which is an anomaly, because the Casocots as a family is not exactly known for outward displays of affection. [Not that we are cold, either.]

I remember playing crazy rounds of ping pong with him. I remember that he was, among all of us, the best cook. I remember that he was also the most romantic—and always seemed to fall for the same type of woman. Perhaps the Tagalog word “maamo” describes him best—he was mild-mannered, domesticated, affable, possessing a gentle nature. When I ask his high school classmates their memories of him, they recall him as a quiet boy, also someone kind. But because he was very handsome and quiet, girls loved him.

He belonged to SUHS Class 1979, which includes, among many others, Alex Rey Pal, Mark Macias, Emma Ray Panaguiton, Jessica Lupisan, Burton Estolloso, Jun Datu, Vivian Ceniza, and my cousin Gil Moncal Jr. Pastor Jun Datu remembers once calling Alvin, “Tocosac,” a reversal of our family name—to which Alvin amiably retaliated by calling him “Utad”—which actually stuck as a nickname. He also remembers spending many afternoons with my brother in high school playing basketball. “He was not a tall guy,” Pastor Jun remembers. “But he made up for it by being very quick. He was like a cat.” Afterwards, resting from their games, they would troop to buy 25-centavo banana-q at the merkado. “In college, we still played basketball,” he remembers. “But we switched from banana-q to Coke. And also cigarettes. Because we were always hanging out at the house of Burton Estolloso, which had a store.”

I do remember my brother’s favorite cigarette—“Hope Short”—because I was always the one sent on errands to buy this for him when I was growing up. Another one of his high school friends, Adidas Cañete, remembers him to be quite the ladies’ man—but also one who was quick to share, not just the delicacy of baye-baye my brother would bring to Dumaguete from home in Bayawan, but also answers to exam questions. In college, they were also part of a clique they called Addax—a reworking of the word “barkada” which was apparently bestowed on them by former Dumaguete City Mayor Ipe Remollo. “Alvin was mostly the serious type but he got along well with the rowdy group,” Adidas remembers.

At his memorial last Thursday night, which was sponsored by his high school classmates, I couldn’t help but think about some of the “What If’s” of my brother’s life. Earlier that day, I had spent the morning choosing the best photo of him to print out and put in a frame, to grace the glass top of his casket. I chose the one where he looked the most promising—a choice cut from a family photo taken at a popular studio [Image Bank!] in Dumaguete, circa 1990. He was very handsome in this photo, and he must have been 27 years old. I think he had just gotten back to Dumaguete after spending a year or two in Manila, where he was hopping from one job to the next, never finding one that stuck. He had graduated from Silliman University with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1985, a year or two later than his original cohort; afterwards, he had failed the board exam—which surprised my family, because he was smart, and he was very good with numbers. He never bothered taking the board again.

A year or two after this photo was taken, he embarked on an OFW life in Switzerland—which, alas, did not pan out as planned. That’s when we found out he had gone to the U.S., ostensibly to visit—but had made the decision to stay on illegally. We would eventually find out he had married a Filipino immigrant, and had two children with her. [He also adopted her eldest boy.] We lost touch, only to find out again that they had divorced but that their sons were living with him and his mother-in-law, in difficult circumstances. The correspondences were not consistent, until we learned that he had gotten sick. In 2019, we had to bring him back home to the Philippines.

I asked myself: What if he did not study civil engineering? I don’t really think it was the path he wanted to take—only the path he was expected to take. What if he had become a chef? He was very good at cooking, and I remember him being passionate about it. But in the 1980s, I’m not sure that was even a consideration—certainly an “impractical” one. So he ended taking up civil engineering—which, alas, he did not come to practice anyway.

I asked myself: What if he did not go to Switzerland, and eventually to the United States? I knew he really wanted to stay in the Philippines—but there was pressure on him to leave, “to help the family,” especially in the direst of our financial worries—and truth to tell, there was also pressure to get him away from a girlfriend my family did not approve of. [So much drama!] His life never gained traction in America, especially considering his circumstances. But he did have family, and having his sons Bryan, Christian, and Darrell in our lives—albeit so far away in Los Angeles—is a blessing that could not have happened, if he had not gone to the U.S.

I asked these difficult questions because I love my brother, even when he became the paragon of potential thwarted. Because most of his life, he was always searching for himself and what he could be in this world. I think the life I have chosen to live is mostly a response to my older brother’s chosen pathway. For me, my Manong Alvin taught me—although indirectly—to follow my own dreams, and to carve out a path that would be the making and fulfilment of my potentials.

I do wish though that I was a better brother when he finally came back to the Philippines in 2019, more than twenty years since I last saw him. His body was already ravaged by Lubag, a type of Parkinson’s that comes from Panay. He could no longer communicate well, and I admit that made me uncomfortable, because the Alvin in my memory was someone active, someone articulate, someone who embraced me with so much affection. My heart broke for the man I saw in a wheelchair, and who could not speak.

In the early hours of September 10, in his bedroom at our house in Bantayan, his caregiver heard him mumble incoherently, a sound, she later told me, that sent chills down her spine. When she checked on him again by 5 AM, he was no longer breathing. A homecare nurse finally came by at 8 AM to officially pronounce him dead. To us and to many of his friends, it was a much-needed rest to what had been a physical torment. Knowing even that, it is never easy to grapple with a death in the family. There’s a hole now in each of us.

I still want to remember him the way he was in my younger years. In the summation of our lives, we are measured by the fond memories of those who love of us, who remember us in our best moments, in our fullest potential. My Manong Alvin deserves that.


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