After Six Years

Dear insansapinas,
I was looking for one of my best friends for more than six years. I found her at last. She is buried in the Manila Memorial Park. She had been dead for six years now. Breast cancer. No one knew. She made her daughter promised not to tell anybody.


I met her in the Graduate School. She was teaching Marketing Management and I was handling Management Accounting and Financial Management. Together with a lady lawyer, we formed a triumvirate. Mas maganda raw siya sa akin ng isang paligo.


Our children became close to each other. While we were in our classes, they're playing or just talking inside the cars.

One night she came to me. She was depressed. Her irresponsible husband left her to live in with a starlet who is a relative of a popular actress. I allowed her to crush in my couch. My friend who can not leave a house without even the basic make-up looked  like she did not have bath for days. I made her go to Quiapo Church to seek for solution to her problem. 


Later that week, I learned that she burned all the clothes of the husband. Her youngest son stopped talking and smiling. He became a trouble maker in the exclusive school in Alabang.


Then they reconciled. She helped him go to the US. He was able to get a greencard and petitioned for my friend and their youngest. A  woman from the US met her in the Philippines and confided to her that she was having relatiionship with her husband. She promised to give her a lot of money if she would divorce her and allowed them to settle as husband and wife. Little did the woman know that my friend had two houses in Ayala Alabang and  the bread winner of the family ever since. She owned a company. 


But what my friend did not know was, her husband and the starlet were seeing each other even in the US. When he got his citizenship, he divorced my friend. 


I saw her last when I visited the Philippines in 2003. The three of us, the lady lawyer spent the whole day in Tagaytay doing nothing but talk. We were trying to match her daughter with a bachelor friend of mine. We're all down to earth. She was from Ayala Alabang but you listen to her shout invectives when her car was blindsided by another car. Paalala ko sa kaniya,pare, professor ka, and she would answer, oo nga pala ano pare. TAn#$%^&&. buti pinaalala mo. Our lady lawyer is more refined having graduated from an exclusive girl's school and her law from UP. The most that she can say is Anak ng pating talaga... Ako ang pinakaconservative. Ang masasabi ko lang ay itong batok gusto mo? Ooops.


She came to San Francisco and we had a lot of girl moments. She was dancing with her Pjs and role playing some starlets while our videocam was on. We were not drunk of apple juice.




After that she vanished from the face of the earth. The phone line was disconnected. I tried to contact her thru friends.... Nobody knew where she went.


Until tonight, when my lady lawyer friend asked me if I am depressed, I thought she will be seeking advice how to avoid depression.  Since my other friend (classmate in the Graduate School) had a stroke, I felt sorry for him for being unable to talk. He did not want to be pitied so he avoided talking with anybody. Last September, another friend died of stroke. There was a time when I do not feel like talking to callers. 



Now I understand my MIL's fear when her friends were dying and leaving her alone in this world.


My lady friend had a sad life when she was alive. She took care of her mother and  her siblings who were not as financially independent as she was. She sent her children to expensive schools and she told me that she is  willing to welcome back her wayward husband if he comes back.


To you Nellie, may you rest in peace.


Pinaysaamerika