A POEM FROM HER FILE

AFTER the funeral, I seem pretty numb and restless and not sure what to do with the personal things that my wife had left, mostly in our bedroom. I can still feel her presence with them, and as if she has not left us after all, that right now she is still in the hospital, or recuperating in their family house in Malate, Manila.

Two weeks after the funeral, I started sorting out the house and gathering all her belongings. Clearing out belongings of the dead, someone says, is a way of trying to move on. But clearing away belongings can be more painful this very early. Just now I feel a hot blur of pain in my throat when I look at her things. Holding her personal things again and feeling her presence—or absence—brings me to malignant grief. I have had some sad experiences in my life so far, but this one of holding the things of a loved just after her death, is one of the most heart wrenching and saddest for me.

My wife’s sister told me that I have to wait for 40 days, or a year, after her death before parting her personal belongings totally. Would that make things slow and painless on my part? Right now I had to pack away things but only those I think would be too impractical to leave around. But I’m not in a hurry to make a move to get rid of every last item that had belonged to my wife.

Actually, I began sorting out her papers, or documents, that exclusively belong to her a week after her death. I went into her personal files and gathered records of her birth and marriage, our kid’s baptismal certificates, and other important employment records that I could use for my application for death benefits in SSS and for other purposes.

But then it’s not all that easy. Other than those documents, there are letters, messages, special photos that she kept, and some of her personal notes that I had browsed. Memories came in a deluge, and I was overwhelmed with grief. Yet I must not allow myself to fall apart because to do so would only accomplish nothing.

From her brief case I saw an original copy of a poem that I had written for her barely a month before our first anniversary. It’s only now that I realize I had written just one poem, and not even a single love letter, for her in our 14 years of marriage. There were times she spoke about me not being as sweet as before; she must have missed receiving letters, or poems, that she used to while we were still young lovers and in the early years of our marriage. SMS or text messaging was an unknown animal then. Defending myself, I would remind her of my kind of job, and those family matters that keep me busy all the time; or perhaps as between us, a familiarity and complacency that made me unaware of any storm to come. How could I’ve known that her life is as short as an epigram? Are words not really enough then?

Going back to the solitary poem from her file, I remember why I put into words my thoughts for her. It was the very first night after our wedding day that she did not sleep beside me. She attended a church activity somewhere with her sister and mother that night and they had to stay overnight. I couldn’t sleep, so instead of fretting about her absence until the wee hours, I scribbled lines for her.

When I handed her the poem, I even read it for her and explained what it means, tears welled in her eyes. She embraced me while expressing her appreciation and love to me.

So I had to read the lines again… for her.

your absence one night(to Rosalie)

it seems eons had gone by
since i made my last one
all thoughts on love, my beloved,

but what are words on a white sheet
when i could sing life sans the storms
and stress, the daydreams
i turned off?

why should tears now flow from the pen
or why should my olympia whine
when I had the bliss of your touch and
tender eyes?

do i really need angst
or halcyon days, or those little pains
to weave verses again,
once hanging in void, now so special
when voiced out in silence deaf
with sighs of love

but tonight, even for the briefest time,
i explore the throb, the deepest
the best that pumped out from
the letter keys when i searched
your eyes on roomy space, a ghost
of touch on steamy breeze

missing your love is burning me

when you finally came to our bed
the next after sundown
all the more i embraced that profound
beat, overflowing, flooding
but no longer on the sheet
in the mechanical feed,
but my own.

loving you more than i feel

and when bliss at its utmost reveals your love
i rather stop the flow of verse, from a void,
than I speak of your love again
in my silence

november 1997

She's gone now. Yet I had to fight and continue moving on, to dispel this ugly grief—but all these things take a great deal of energy or conscious indifference to pain.

I need something to hold on. Perhaps I must resort to writing verses again, about our past together or my future without her.