14 years after Sendong: My debt to the dead

MY wife, Ai and I lounged inside her father’s old wooden home, thinking about Christmas. We were unaware that the night was about to upend our sense of safety.

Sendong

The lights went out in our neighborhood of Consolacion as if someone had snuffed a candle.

Rain hit the tin roof like fists. The wind tore at the eaves, a sound that filled the house and left no room for thought.

By ten that night the storm’s eye was over us. The downpour inundated half the city. The river, a churning slurry of mud and uprooted trees, began to climb the banks it had always trusted.

We gathered the children in the main room; I took out my guitar and played Christmas carols. We sang to cover the sound that kept finding its way through the cracks in the walls.

But the storm outside wasn’t something we could drown out. It was no longer measured in kilometers per hour but in the way a city’s memory was being rearranged.

On the roof

The water hit around two in the morning. It came so fast we had no time to think — only to climb.

Our family and some neighbors — nine children and six adults — pressed together on the corrugated roof, cold seeping through our clothes; breath fogging in the dark.

A four-door sedan floated past, struck the kitchen eave, and a wall tore away where the children had slept.

We stayed on that roof for nearly three hours while the river kept rising, the tide helping it climb into the streets and up the houses. At dawn the flood eased to waist level and the city revealed itself: Fourteen bodies on the street below, more than half of them children.

My youngest daughter stopped speaking for a month. She watched the bodies float past our house and closed the door on language.

I felt the same shut-down in myself: The words I owed the dead would not come.

The fragments

When the light came, the city looked like a place that had been unmade and then left to settle. 

The morgues were full. Streets were a slurry of mud, wood, and things that used to be people’s lives: splintered sala sets, muddy photo albums, a child’s sweater clinging to a fence.

Photocopied faces began to appear on light posts and walls — missing persons stapled to mud. People walked the streets calling names aloud, as if sound could pull someone back through the water.

The objects were the hardest to bear. 

A watch stopped at the hour the water peaked. A shoe, half-buried in silt, still had a bit of ribbon tied to it.

Each fragment was a sentence I could not yet write.

Naming what remains

I am a provincial correspondent. My job is to name what I see. I found a borrowed computer, sat at a desk that smelled of mildew, and stared at a blank screen. 

The cursor blinked like a small, indifferent heart.

After three hours I typed one line:

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY — By Cong Corrales, Correspondent.

[Layout: Leave a large vertical gap (approx. three lines) 

here to visually represent a long silence.]

I could not file a story. I shut the machine and went back into the streets. Unable to turn silence into copy, I let the city teach me how to listen.

My feet sank into the mud. I began the slow, terrible work of recognizing people from fragments: a shoe, a watch, a child’s sweater.

The city taught me how to listen for absence, how to read a face on a photocopy as if it were a map. The work was not about headlines; it was about returning pieces of people to the ones who still needed them.

Cagayan de Oro was eventually scrubbed and rebuilt. Streets were cleared, houses raised, and some of the dead were identified and buried.

We survived because of a roof that held and because something — luck, fate, a stubborn refusal to leave — kept us home that night.

Survival did not feel like victory. 

It felt like a debt: to the children who never spoke again, to the neighbors who did not come back, to the faces on the photocopies.

There is the watch whose hands never moved again. I keep a pen beside it.

These objects — left after the flood — are what remain. 

This is the work of naming what remains.