Sonnet XCVII by William Shakespeare
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease;
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans, and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.
I am re-posting this sonnet, which is one of my enduring favorites, on the anniversary of fg’s ‘decease’ and the birth of this website. Thanks mainly to the efforts of Faye, the past year has seen a constant flow of postings in all categories, but esp. in the words of fg, as written in his letters; in photos, both new and old, and in ‘borrowed words’ which can’t help but remind us of the universality of human emotions like love, grief and joy.
FG’s gone. It behooves us, then, to carry on as best as we could in his physical absence. We are helped by the fact that before he went, he had already firmly laid the foundations of our family, and it is to this that we owe the feeling that he continues still to be present, pervasively , in all facets of our collective lives.
There are certainly times when we long for his steadying presence. These are parlous times, what with the recent upward spiral in oil prices and prices of basic commodities, the unrest in Mindanao, the perceived attempts by the present administration to extend its term beyond its expiry in 2010, and all the consequential hardship these exert on our day-to-day lives.
I am reminded of that time in 1971 when I was pregnant and alone, with just my 3 small children and my mother-in-law to keep me company. FG had just returned to the US to resume his postgraduate studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. The UP campus, where we lived, became the battleground of student activists and the state police, in what would become known as The First Quarter Storm. A simple act of posting a letter to fg at the UP Post Office, then located at Vinzons Hall, meant avoiding a long black line of gunpowder across the road, a line which, a well-meaning bystander told me, could erupt into flames any time. The back of our house, with its portion of the UP Perimeter Wall which a typhoon had blown down, became the passageway through which activists with molotov bombs came and went. No one on campus could go out for any reason. It was so thoughtful of him that before he left, fg had stocked our freezer full with food. We survived the FQS, and the first years of martial law as well.
In 2 years’ time, fg finished his Ph.D., and he returned home to resume his role as the head of the family, an uninterrupted period of 15 years during which we weathered the continuation of martial law and Ninoy’s assassination, and found joy in our growing family and growing children. The political scene culminated in People Power, a matter of national pride, which we almost celebrated in the hospital where our son was confined for a broken femur; incurred when he fell from a caimito tree.
Memories…
We thus hope that, in a similar manner, we shall survive this present round of crises. Any and all sufferings could and should only make us stronger.
In that frame of mind, we look forward to another fruitful year in this website. Let it be our monument to fg’s memory.
Ethel P David
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