The enduring power of love letters

This week’s winner

MANILA, Philippines – Nena Orteras Tiukinhoy is based in Surigao City and was an educator for more than 40 years. She is mother to 13 children, grandmother to 36 grandchildren, and great-grandmother to seven. In February this year, she published her memoirs, Riptide of Memories, on growing up as a teenager in Intramuros, surviving the war years as a young bride and mother, and living with the love of her life and husband of over 60 years. At 87, she continues to be an incurable romantic.

Now that I feel my life is slipping at the age of 87, I find it the best time to reflect on the years when I was young and an incurable romantic. At the time, the books of British author Bertha Clay fed my youthful romanticism. Now, in my twilight years, it is the love stories of Nicholas Sparks that are making me feel young again.

Recently, I read his novel Message In A Bottle, a treat from a granddaughter. Oh, my, did I cry buckets and suffer sleepless nights! I have not been so shaken by a book in such a long time.

The story tells of how Theresa, a Boston-based newspaper columnist, discovers a bottle washed up on the beach during her morning jog. Inside the bottle is a beautifully written letter professing undying love by “Garrett” addressed to “Catherine.” It is a letter Theresa finds so moving she decides to print it in the newspaper. Soon after, two readers of the paper contact her to say they have found similar letters in a bottle addressed to this Catherine. Realizing that she had developed a crush on the writer of the letters, Theresa resolves to find out who Garrett is. 

Garrett turns out to be Garrett Blake, a sailor, scuba diving instructor and owner of a scuba diving shop from Wilmington Island, North Carolina. The first time they meet, they are instantly captivated by each other. When Garrett invites her to sail with him in his boat, the Happenstance, it is the beginning of a passionate love affair.

Theresa finds out that Catherine is the wife Garrett lost in a car accident three years before, at about the same time that Theresa was divorcing her husband. Unfortunately, Garrett is obviously not over his wife. He still aches for her, and Theresa wonders if Garrett can really love another woman besides Catherine.

“I think I’m in love with you, Theresa,” he tells her. He “thinks” he is in love with her? What does he mean by that?

I was upset for Theresa. But I couldn’t blame Garrett for not being able to let his wife go. As Theresa observed, Garrett was the sort of man who tended to “love deeply and forever.”

I very well know that sort of man for I had been married to one for 60 years before I lost him to renal disease eight years ago. It’s been eight years but I still cry at night, asking the Lord to forgive me for still missing my husband so much and not being able to let him go.

I met my husband Felix when I was 19 and he was 22. It wasn’t long after that first meeting that I ran away with him and secretly got married in civil rites because my mother deemed him unacceptable as a suitor and wouldn’t welcome him into our home.

That didn’t stop Felix from expressing his feelings for me through the most passionate love letters. “This afternoon your Mama stared at me with two sharp eyes that pierced through my heart,” he wrote in a letter, dated May 1942. “I know I didn’t commit a crime except for loving you. I hope you and your Mama will forgive me.”

“Ay, ay, ka-grabe!” my granddaughters shriek whenever I allow them to read their grandfather’s letters to me. They are surprised at what a hopeless romantic their Lolo Daddy really was. I tell them that they may never find another man like him and I think that may be true. 

I was reminded of him so much when I read about Garrett and the letters he wrote his wife. One heartrending message in a bottle reads: “Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face — I know it is an impossibility, but I cannot help myself. My search for you is a never-ending quest that is doomed to fail…I’m sorry, my darling, but there will never be another to replace you. You — and you alone — have always been the only thing I wanted, and now that you are gone, I have no desire to find another. Till death do us part, we whispered in the church, and I’ve come to believe that the words will ring true until the day finally comes when I, too, am taken from this world.”

I have since reread the novel several times and I weep every time I do. This has caused my grandchildren to tease me for being melodramatic. But I can’t help it. Garrett’s devotion to his wife is just too similar to my husband’s devotion to me. 

Throughout our long marriage and until his death separated us, my darling husband wrote me letters. He wrote me when I was away in Manila taking further studies in education while he stayed in Surigao City with the children. He wrote me during our anniversaries and my birthdays. When I was confined in a hospital in Cebu after an operation, he wrote a letter reminding me of everything I had survived, from the tragedy of losing my father and my siblings when I was 12 years old to the difficulty of bearing and raising our 13 children.

“God has always protected you,” he said. “Everything is fine.”

With most of my children based in Manila, I am left in the house in Surigao that their father built for me. My children think that I am lonely and they always ask to take me to Manila with them. But the truth is that I feel closest to my husband in our house, surrounded by our pictures together and of our children. At night, I pull out his letters from under my pillow and read them. His words always make me smile and weep at the same time. How I miss him! Yet his letters make me feel that he is always with me.

His letters, in fact, may be why I have managed to survive the past eight years without him. I thought it would be impossible to live without him and, indeed, for the first few years of his death I felt I was lost at sea. But his words have given me the reason to go on with my life and to continue to be a mother to our 13 children, a grandmother to 36 grandchildren and a “super lola” to seven great-grandchildren.

Like Garrett, my husband loved me “deeply and forever.” And I have his letters to remind me of that undying love until the day comes that I am myself “taken from this world.”