The Remains Of The Day

"Time heals and makes things easier," Dad D would always tell me, I have yet to fully discover it. Clancy’s death anniversary is coming up in a couple of days and the whole month of October saw me reliving those days before he passed away.

There were days I felt like my heart would literally burst with all the pain. I often found myself walking the streets aimlessly when it rained, drenched to the core as if hoping my pain would get washed away with the rains that fell. Someone special used this line to express missing a person "But even time seems to be sleeping when rains fall like tears of longing," -- in my case time just sleeps and sleeps while the rain just falls and falls. Dear God, I am tired of having to be without Clancy.

This morning I awoke to my sobbing and having to catch my breath -- it's like being awakened by eloctrocution. And the remaining thoughts from my sleep were memories from that day Clancy went to see his palliative doctor on November 1. Today is November 1.

There are many things I want to forget and I have been living the past months trying to forget. But there are just some things I know I will never forget ... Neruda said it beautifully, "loving is so short and forgetting is so long."

I've been missing you so much Bidong, I don't know if anyone can imagine just how much. I love you darling and now you know with such certainty as I do that you are the greatest love of my life, my one true love. You always will be.

43 Things: I Have Done This --> Never, Ever, Ever Believe In The Word IMPOSSIBLE.

Impossible is just a word.

Whenever I feel discouraged and find it hard to keep going, I open my journal to a page from April 2004. It was quite a sad day as Clancy and I were going through a very terrible quarrel. I was having coffee and looked up the facade of a building which had this huge ADIDAS banner draped over it. The copy on the banner caught not only my attention but struck a chord so strong inside me that I scribbled what was written on the banner in my journal so that I could always remember … so that I could always read those words again when I feel beaten, broken and defeated. It reads:

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
~Richard Bullock~

43 Things: I Have Done This --> To Love And Be Loved In Return

Moulin Rouge.

I remember the lines from Moulin Rouge that goes “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.”

I don’t know where to begin to describe how it feels to love and be loved back, how it changes you, how it makes you feel so alive each day. I can only count myself lucky that I loved truly and greatly once in my lifetime and was loved with the same fervor. If I may borrow the words of Delphine de Girardin:

To love the one who loves you
To admire the one who admires you
In a word, to be the idol of one’s idol
Is exceeding the limit of human joy
It is stealing fire from heaven

43 Things: I Have Done This --> Go Out On "Date Nights" With My Spouse On A Regular Basis

Magic.

Out on a date in New Delhi Restaurant Boracay 1999

Often we let the overwhelming responsibilities of marriage, parenthood control us. We forget the small and big things that used to keep the passion going in our relationship. Dating regularly helps blow some of that magical pixie dust back. It reminds us and helps us to continuously fall in love with our spouses everyday.

Out on a date in Malaya Restaurant Sydney 2004

43 Things: I Want To Be Happy Again

Forgetting is so long as Neruda would say.

It has been quite awhile since I have been completely happy. I want to go back to my old happy self. People in my life need for me to be happy. I need for me to be happy.

43 Things: I Want To Be Less Sad & Melancholic Since Clancy Passed Away

Life Is Beautiful.

Life was once beautiful, it still is I think but I my sadness sometimes prevents me to see it that way. I know Clancy wouldn’t want me to be sad and I know he would want me to be happy. I have not been the same since he died and I miss the woman I was, the woman he fell in love with.

43 Things: I Have Done This --> Get A Job I Love

Loving it.

When you love your job or what you do for a living you can only but excel in it. I am fortunate that I not only have a job I love but also people I love working with. And in times of personal crises it’s about the only thing that keeps me sane and gives me a semblance of normalcy (aside from my daughters of course).

Here are photos with people I love from my workplace.

Office friends: Josell, Celine and Manny.

Clients and Office Friends: Noel, Bongo, Josell, Gilbert, Eya, Peter, Ricki.

43 Things: I Want To Take More Photographs

A Passage Through Time.


I have 2 digital cameras and 2 phones with built in cameras and while I have managed to chronicle my face day to day the last 3 months I have failed to take photos everyday of my two beautiful daughters. One day they will be all grown and I will forget where the time went.


Taking photos of them everyday will help me remember each and every single day they had if they were sad, happy, whatever was happening in their lives. When I am old and gray all I need is to look at these photos again and it will all come back to me.

43 Things: I Want To Learn To Live A Little

Baby Steps.

I stopped living when Clancy passed away. I feel like a drone waking up each day and going through the motions. I want to be able to taste the wine I drink, look at beautiful flowers and smile, appreciate the smell of clean air.

I want my heart to feel alive again. I want to know the words hope, believe, love, happy once more. I want these back because I want to be able to teach my children about it. I cannot give them what I do not have. They will have to learn these things by watching me. I do not want my daughters to learn about being BROKEN from me.

43 Things: I Want To Allow THe Joy OF Memories To Replace The Pain Of Loss

Missing Clancy.

I want to stop crying everytime I think about Clancy. I want to be able to be happy with the memories I have of him. I want to stop hurting from losing him.

43 Things: I Want To Wake Up Smiling

I miss this feeling.

I used to wake up smiling always. If there was one thing Clancy loved about me it was my smile. He used to tell me that my face was not made for tears, only smiles.

It was a great feeling to wake up smiling because each new day meant another day of living my dream with Clancy and my daughters. Since he passed away he has taken that smile with him. I miss it.

43 Things: I want to read more Poetry

Of Love and Neruda

I have been sad for a quite some time since Clancy passed away. I was told by my family therapist to write because it helps in the healing process. But it felt too painful to write and when I started reading Neruda again, it helped to read his words about longing, sadness, yearning. It’s as if he knew me and wrote all that I felt. For a moment I did not feel too alone.

Father's Day Twice Over

My Life,

Happy Father's Day. I remember how we would always laugh whenever I greeted you each year on the day the world would celebrate it because Australia would celebrate it some different day. I also remember how I would say that you deserve to be greeted twice in a year because you are such a good man, such a good father.

I've told you many times before and I want to tell you again -- I couldn't have chosen a better man to be the father of our girls. Because of you I realized that parenthood isn't about DNA, it's about the love and care you willingly give a child, it's the responsibility you willingly accept for a child's life. Someday when Sabrina is older, she will understand it too. You are the only father she has ever known.

The girls miss you everyday just like I do. Sabrina was just telling me last night how she misses you picking her up from school and that now she has moved to a school closer to home that it would be so nice and easier for you to walk her everyday. She was so proud of you darling, she was so proud to show you off to everyone, she was so proud to call you Daddy.

Nicole misses the good cop too. She was telling me how she missed your convys, how you were always interested in her hobbies, in her music. She realizes that you were more a father to her than her biological father ever was and that she was sorry for resisting the idea of you in our lives years ago. I think she secretly regrets never calling you "dad."

I don't know what good I might have done in some previous life to deserve a man like you but I thank the universe for the gift of you. And I thank you for loving my girls as if they were your own. Thank you for wanting to give them a future. Thank you for making them part of your dreams.

Happy Father's Day Bidong. We love you. Know that your presence is greatly missed.

-L-

x x x x x


Here's a card we sent you one Father's Day ... with it were fervent wishes that the girls and I would be able to spend it with you in person someday. Now, that someday will never happen.

Paradise Found, Paradise Lost

11 June 2004
Sydney, NSW

Beloved,

I patiently count the hours till I open my eyes and see your face next to mine first thing in the morning. Today is a month short of the day I first laid my eyes on you close to 5 years ago. 59 months seem like a long time to spend in a long distance affair. It is indeed crazy and yet here I am in Sydney typing this silly love note on your pc and there you are in bed in deep sleep waiting for me to lie beside you. It has been a long journey for me to finally get here.

My mind is running at an incredible velocity so let me apologize in advance for the incoherence of this letter.

I'm happy to be where I am today, in your arms; in a place you have made your home for more than half of your life. But what I am most happy about is that after all this time I find myself falling in love with you constantly every part of each day. I've told you many times before and I will tell you again, you and the girls are the best part of my everyday.

Where do I start to tell you about the things that keep me in this smitten state, the things that make me feel so good to be alive each day so I could love you?

Sometimes it's the way a cigarette sits between your lips, sometimes it's how you never forget to open the door for me, sometimes it's your hand reaching out for mine when we are walking, sometimes it's the way you embrace me with some pang of desperation, sometimes it's the way you look so deep in thought, sometimes it's the way you fight your sleepiness just so that you could be online to welcome me home, sometimes it's receiving an sms from you with just three words in it, sometimes it's how you always cup my face when kissing me, sometimes it's how you look at me with so much love in your eyes while we are making love, sometimes it's just as simple as you saying my name. I could go on and on, over a thousand things, over a thousand thoughts that keep me falling for you each day. It's all these little things which you probably are oblivious to but have no idea of the profound effect they have on my life

I picked up this bottle of happiness for you just to add to the thousand ways I remember you by. When I walk in Manila from now on and I smell this in the air, do know that I will be closing my eyes and thinking of the smell of your skin during winter in Sydney.

Happy Monthsarry Beloved, thank you for the wonderful past 730 days filled with laughter, quiet moments, tears and love. I love you always and no matter how the world turns and changes it ways, I will always be here for you. I will always be your best friend. And for as long as you will have me, I am yours completely ... heart, mind, body and soul.

-L-

x x x x x

Love of My Life,

How are you? What's it like where you are? Do you ever feel a little sad or lonely? Or are you shielded from all the sadness and longing? Does it ever rain where you are? If it does, then remember how envious I have always been with the rain that fell on you in Sydney as I am with the rain that falls on you where you are now because they kiss your skin in a way I cannot.

I wish I could say I have been great but I haven't and I've never lied to you so why start now. I know you're probably disheartened and feeling sad over the state of my heart. I'm sorry. It breaks my heart, too, having to disappoint you because I know you would've wanted me to be as happy as I could be. You always told me that my face wasn't made for crying and that I could light up a room with my smile. Of course, only you saw that and today I miss the way you loved my smile. I miss smiling for you, I miss smiling at you. I miss many things Clancy, but most of all I miss waking up so happy because each day was another day of living my dream with you and our girls.

As I was preparing to sleep last night, a letter I had written a year ago fell out of my old planner. I knew I shouldn't have opened it. I shouldn't have read it. I was very angry with myself for being careless, I thought I had put away all the things that would remind me of you so as just to avoid weeping incessantly. And yet, even that was a futile attempt. How I can run? How can I hide from you when you are all around me, in me, everywhere enveloping me.

Suffice to say I haven't had a wink of sleep. I just kept tossing and turning in bed, my head filled with thoughts of you. Oh darling, you have no idea how difficult the last 7 months have been. It's so tragically ironic that we used to count the months from the time we fell in love and today, I find myself counting the months since you passed away. And I know I will count many many more months and years till I'm with you again. A lifetime of missing of you. It just isn't fair. Please tell me it won't be like this everyday, it isn't right for me to be missing you this way and crying this way everyday. When will the pain of loss subside and the the joy of memories take root? I have become a very very sad person.

Hey listen, do you think if God knew I would be this broken, do you think he would still have taken you away from me so soon? I wonder. All the heartaches before you happened to me, was that not enough? I wonder when and where it stops. Am sure other people have had it harder and mangaed just fine. But I'm not them. I'm not strong despite the fact that I might've convinced others and myself that I am strong through and through. Even I am sorely disappointed with myself, with just how weak I have been. Any attempt to live, to move on has been fleeting and transient. I always feel empty in my quiet moments with you. What is living anyway? I don't think I know anymore. All I know is I need you, I need you to hold me.

I miss you everyday, you were my life. You still are.

Across whatever distance there is between where my tears fall and where you smile, I send you my thoughts and my love. Know that I am so in love with you, still.

Voices Carry

I have been reading much Neruda lately because I find comfort in his words. He manages to put into words what I cannot.

x x x x x

So That You Will Hear Me
~Pablo Neruda~


So that you will hear me
my words
sometimes grow thin
as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.



Necklace, drunken bell
for your hands smooth as grapes.

And I watch my words from a long way off.
They are more yours than mine.
They climb on my old suffering like ivy.

It climbs the same way on damp walls.
You are to blame for this cruel sport.
They are fleeing from my dark lair.
You fill everything, you fill everything.

Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy,
and they are more used to my sadness than you are.

Now I want them to say what I want to say to you
to make you hear as I want you to hear me.

The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.
Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.
You listen to other voices in my painful voice.

Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.
Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.
Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.

But my words become stained with your love.
You occupy everything, you occupy everything.

I am making them into an endless necklace
for your white hands, smooth as grapes.

x x x x x

And I wonder today as I wondered yesterday as I will wonder tomorrow .... across whatever distance there is between where I stand and where he lays, can he hear me? Hear the words every teardrop speaks in it's soft liquid voice; Hear the loud cries the silent broken heart screeches. I wonder.

My friend Dicay tells me that it is the world that is melancholic, not me. Yet somehow I feel it isn't the world that is melancholic. I am. I wish the yearning for Clancy would diminish as the days go by but I find that I just grow more hungry. He has taken everything, everything with him.