One of his sons once expressed doubts to one of his father’s sisters-in-law: "If you believe his stories, you'd think he was The Man back in the day.”
Without missing a beat, she replied matter-of-factly: "He was."
Even a streamlined version of his life covers a range of experiences few can claim. Born on Feb. 10, 1937, he was not quite 5 years old when the Philippines was invaded, and spent a good chunk of his childhood in the jungle hiding and fleeing from the Japanese military; "Lots of running, running, running," he recalled. The experience taught him some survival skills that he never lost -- even in middle age, he could catch a bird with his bare hands for a meal later.
He was 11 when his father, a civil engineer, uprooted the family and moved from the main northern island of Luzon to help build a new town in what was then a largely unsettled jungle of southern Mindanao. He grew up in the construction industry working under his disciplinarian father and alongside his younger siblings, a group that ultimately included seven brothers and a sister.
After graduating from the Notre Dame School of Marbel in 1954, he attended the University of Santo Tomas in Manila and returned home in 1960 as a surgeon, working at the local hospital under the man who would become his father-in-law. Diosdado succeeded him as administrator within a few years and married his oldest daughter at a wedding that he later claimed was attended by 2,000 people; the number has never been verified, but photos of the affair show a massive crowd in and around the church.
As the top doctor, he overhauled the rural hospital by introducing practices such as the use of general anesthesia and installing modern beds and lights. Somehow, while running the hospital, working long hours as a practicing physician and surgeon, and starting a family, he found time to try to help start a credit union, buy a small bus company and launch a local newspaper that occasionally ruffled a few feathers. All before the age of 32.
He emigrated in 1969 to the United States with his wife Priscilla and their 2-year-old son, living in Philadelphia. The couple started again as medical interns — he also worked as a janitor on the side to help make ends meet — and expanded their family, with their daughter born months after their arrival in America, and a younger son born in 1971. When the time came to choose a specialist residency, Diosdado opted for a new career as a pathologist, noting that the hours were better than a surgeon’s.
He spent the next few years working in Philadelphia as a resident at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital while his wife resumed her profession as a pediatrician, and they moved into a suburban home. But just as the Nons seemed settled in the United States, Priscilla developed brain cancer and died in 1974.
When he became a board-certified pathologist, he went to work at Freehold Area Hospital, in central New Jersey, where he met Christine, who would marry him in 1976.Not long after their wedding, they bought a medical laboratory in Ocean County, N.J. It became the family business, with Diosdado as director and Christine as manager, though he continued as a hospital pathologist in Philadelphia for several years while also working at his own lab.
Yet for all the time spent on his profession, he never stopped indulging his real devotion: working with his hands. Growing up in construction instilled a lifelong passion in him, and after he and Christine moved to an old farm in central New Jersey in 1978, he devoted much of his free time repairing, tinkering and building, with his weekends occupied by saws, drills, wrenches and hammers. If he wasn’t clearing out and refurbishing spaces in his barns, he was re-roofing them, or designing new windows, or fixing something in the heaps of old equipment that he acquired. He overflowed with ideas for projects, from building new windows for the barns, to planting rows and upon rows of saplings for a tree farm, or, late in his life, trying to farm crawfish. If most of them never quite panned out, the effort was still worth it for him because it was effort -- for Diosdado, activity was a virtue in itself. “They work hard” always remained among his highest praises for someone.
As his father did with him, he made sure to keep his kids involved in his activity, not only to instill that work ethic, but also simply to spend time with them. Outside of school or homework, if they weren’t cleaning the house, helping him cook on weekends or tending to the gardens, they spent most of their weekends and summers at his side in the barns, or helping him and Christine at the lab.
But he also shared with them an interest that he only acquired after coming to America: football. He never saw the sport until he left the Philippines, but it didn’t take long to get him hooked, particularly on Notre Dame football -- he was, after all, a graduate of a Notre Dame high school. He never stopped rooting for the Fighting Irish, which led to a long interest in the San Francisco 49ers because of Joe Montana and the Washington Redskins for Joe Theismann, although he eventually came around to Christine’s devotion to the New York Giants. (But not until Montana was long retired.)
Even when age slowed him as he underwent triple bypass surgery and endured several treatments for cancer, Diosdado stayed busy. He grew vegetables in a large greenhouse, refurbished old microscopes and lamps, set up large vats for the crawfish, and filled his yard with heavy equipment such as a tree remover that he spent more repairing than actually using. And he never stopped working as a pathologist, reading slides every morning until the day he went to the hospital for the last time.
He died Aug. 23, 2020. He is survived by his wife of 44 years, Christine; three children: Diosdado, Priscilla and Sergio, and their spouses Naomi, Rodney and Maria; four granddaughters: Rina, Alisa, Hana and Elizabeth; and six siblings: Teofilo, Lourdes, Alberto, Celso, Daniel and Alfredo; and many nieces and nephews.
Donations in his name can be sent to Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center, 1275 New York Ave, New York NY 10065; Jersey Shore Rescue Mission, 701 Memorial Drive Suite 1, Asbury Park, NJ 07712; and Help Heal Veterans, P.O. Box 5025, Hagerstown MD 21741.
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