Pain spelled perfectly
The most serious damage inflicted isn’t always visible. It’s not just lives lost in encounters. It’s in family bonds broken, parents left in anguish, and homes permanently scarred by grief.
Daily TribuneThe most serious damage inflicted isn’t always visible. It’s not just lives lost in encounters. It’s in family bonds broken, parents left in anguish, and homes permanently scarred by grief.
Some sentences don’t need to be perfect to break you. Take this one, handwritten by parents Romulo and Rica Dingding on 18 May after they learned that their son Vince — a former student leader, once called Poy — had died in an armed encounter in Cauayan, Negros Occidental on 16 May 2026.
“P.S. We decided that we will no longer claim his remains in Negros Occ.” No mother or father ever dreams of writing those words.
Vince Francis Dingding was a UP Cebu student leader, later involved with Kabataan Cebu. By 2017, he had joined the NPA underground. Nearly a decade in Negros, moving through political and organizational roles, until a mountain firefight ended everything. His story isn’t new. It has been the pattern of bright activists becoming prodigal children, distanced from home, transformed from advocates to armed guerrillas. And families are left to pick up the pieces.
The Dingdings’ letter isn’t a press release nor a polished statement from a lawyer or an organization. It’s barely legible but is evident of raw exhaustion. That’s what makes it real.
They don’t ask for money or justice. They ask for one thing: coordinate through their barangay captain. Give them space. Because every call, every inquiry, every stranger asking questions causes “so much distress” to a colon cancer-stricken mother who was strictly advised by doctors to avoid stress.
Reasonably, that’s survival.
Then comes the P.S. about not claiming his remains. Maybe the physical distance is too far. Maybe the emotional toll is too heavy. Or maybe claiming his body means accepting he’s really gone — and with the mother fighting for her own life, they can’t afford that kind of acceptance.
We spend so much time debating ideologies. Armed struggle. Revolution. Who’s right, who’s wrong. But this letter isn’t about any of that. It’s about cause and effect. An armed movement recruited a young man. That movement sent him to the mountains. The cause led to an encounter. The encounter led to death. Now a sick mother can’t even claim the body of her son.
Who pays that price? Not the leaders of communist-affiliated groups who safely write manifestos. Not the New People’s Army. The Dingdings do… alone.
Again and again, families are left with the same questions: At what point did their children stop coming home? At what point did a child become unreachable? At what point did ideology become stronger than family?
The CPP-NPA-NDF talks about the masses, the oppressed, the struggle. But where are they for the Dingdings right now? Where is the movement when grieving parents need help claiming their own child?
You cannot recruit young people, pull them from their families, send them to die, and then act surprised when their parents fall apart. Call it collateral damage all they want, but it’s actually the blueprint.
The most serious damage inflicted isn’t always visible. It’s not just lives lost in encounters. It’s in family bonds broken, parents left in anguish, and homes permanently scarred by grief. Long after the shooting stops, families fight battles against pain, regret, trauma and loss.
No ideology, no political objective, and no false promises of revolution are worth destroying the bond between a parent and a child. No movement that repeatedly leaves mothers grieving and fathers broken can claim moral victory. The tears of families left behind tell a far more painful truth.
The message came through loud and clear. The pain is spelled perfectly by two broken parents — one of them fighting cancer — sitting down and writing through tears, through exhaustion, through grief so heavy their hands were probably shaking.
Beyond reports, operational accounts, and organizational affiliations lies a far more devastating reality: a family now carries unimaginable grief.
