I was with you in the last few hours of your life. It pained me seeing you suffer so I asked the attending doctor to ease your pain and give you morphine. I hoped it would help but I still could see you straining with pain as I watched the rise and fall of your chest. And I wished so hard that I could breath for you. But my wish was not to be.
And so you took your last breath and now you are relieved of pain. And the pain is with me now and for ever will be. It squeezes my heart every time I breath. And it will always until I join you.
The projects we were supposed to finish keeps me going. I have all the help I can get from our comrades and friends. They give me comfort and company every day. And you left so many notes for writing projects that we planned, including requested interviews you had no more time to answer. And so, these will never be written as I cannot do all these without you.
Love bound us on the day we got to know each other. It is love that binds us and us to our four children and two grandchildren, to our comrades and friends and the people whom we have served all our lives.
I shall always love you. I shall always feel your presence with every breathe I take, in the air that I breathe, in the sunlight that sheds on me, in the water that I drink, on the ground on which I tread, and in all the things I do.
I love you as you loved me, your children and grandchildren, and the Filipino people that you served with determination to your very last breathe and even beyond as the following notes you left on your writing pad in almost illegible handwriting:
Notes (for a poem)
It is unfair that an entire society
Is called capitalist and yet so few
Can call themselves capitalists
And look down on the rest of the people.
It is outrageous
That the capitalists boasts
Of being the real creators
Of the wealth created by labor.
It is simply unjust and revolting
That the capitalists dishonor dead labor
To usurp power and wealth
And dominate and exploit living labor.
It is best to fight for society
Where everyone can call oneself
Like others as socialists
And live with honor in equality.
I have spoken on behalf of all our children. We all are devastated by your passing and they wish to bear their grief in privacy.
I shall read a poem you forgot all about but discovered in your notebook and found very beautiful, and I had it posted on your website.
As my tribute to you my dear husband and father of our children, I adopt the resolution of the the Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Philippines, “Great communist thinker, leader, teacher and guide of the Filipino proletariat and torch bearer of the international communist movement” on November 7, 2016.
As we grieve your passing, we turn our grief into revolutionary courage and resolve with ever greater determination to continue the struggle for national liberation and democracy until the Filipino people themselves win victory and proceed to socialist construction and revolution.
You will continue to live in the victory of the struggle.
You live in the continuing revolutionary struggle of the Filipino people! And likewise in the continuing revolutionary struggles of the peoples of the world!
Let us sing the Internationale! Let its revolutionary message resound as we bring Ka Joma to rest!
