I wrote about meeting Dr. R in March 2012. We had just bought our Farm in Morong, and Husband was feeling glorious with all the plans of what he was going to do in his farm. Meanwhile, Dr. R felt he had failed miserably with his own plans, and he and his wife had health problems that were bogging him down.
Yesterday, we met in an open air restaurant in Angeles City, Pampanga. We were in the company of common friends, Medy and Ed, who were with us in Nairobi, thirty years ago. Dr. R and his wife were looking their age, not like when Husband and I met them five years ago where they looked ten years older. The burden of their non-performing properties was taken from them, freeing them. The assets were still unsold, but they had stopped worrying about them. My favorite saying has always been, “The absence of alternatives frees your soul tremendously.”–Abdul Rahman. This seems like a very minor saying, but it had guided me when I reached crossroads and didn’t know which road to take.
Again and again, I looked at them. I was glad the Wife was in pink of health, even taking care to dab her lips with a fresh coat of lipstick. Dr. R reported that he had been in an out of the hospital since November of 2016, but he was smiling and feeling jolly. I could tell they were now concerned about my new status as their friend’s widow.
We shared lots of laughter as I told them about my attempts to have a “love life”. There was an former boyfriend who tried to see if there could be a “possibility” once more, but my househelpers put their foot down when they saw that they would be inconvenienced with his growing Parkinsons’ disease. Then there was this persistent Facebook “befriender”, whom I dropped immediately when I saw he was forty years my junior.
Anyway, the thought that persisted throughout the lunch was — “They’re still alive.”
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