LOS BAÑOS, LAGUNA?Not knowing whether her missing daughter is already dead or still alive, a woman will again commemorate All Souls? Day on Monday by lighting a candle and offering flowers for her.

Since 2006, Erlinda Cadapan, 60, has been going to the Redemptorist Church in Baclaran with relatives of other victims of enforced disappearances to share their plight and seek the support of churchgoers in their search.

?It is an agonizing moment, especially come Nov. 1. When I meet my relatives at the cemetery, they keep on asking me if Sherlyn has been found. I can never accept that she is gone because for me, she was taken alive so she should be returned to me alive,? she said.

Sherlyn, a University of the Philippines student and community organizer for the militant group Anakbayan, was abducted in June 2006 in Bulacan, together with Karen Empeño, another UP student, and Manuel Merino.

Sherlyn was in her senior year at the UP College of Human Kinetics while Karen was a senior Sociology student when they went missing.

Candles, flowers

Cadapan said she would light a candle for her daughter every Nov. 2 so it may enlighten her daughter?s captors. Flowers would show that her relatives still love Sherlyn and they would never stop looking for her, she said.

?If my daughter ever committed any wrongdoing, the captors should surface her and let the case go through the legal courts,? she said.

At their small house in Los Baños town in Laguna, Cadapan lights a candle before Sherlyn?s picture on an altar every night.

Pictures of her daughter are also found near the door, on top of the TV set and in her room so that everywhere the woman looks when she enters the house, she would eee her daughter.

Cadapan said she would talk to her daughter?s pictures. ?Sometimes, I see her in my dreams,? she added.

There are signs of hope and of life, she said, recalling a reported sighting of Sherlyn at the house of her boyfriend?s mother in Calumpit, Bulacan.

Worries

Cadapan said she couldn?t help worrying for her child?s safety when Tropical Storms ?Ondoy? and ?Pepeng? struck, especially since her daughter could also be detained in Pangasinan.

In March 2008, Nanay Linda requested the body of an unidentified woman found in Pangasinan to be exhumed, but the remains were not Sherlyn?s.

The case of Cadapan and Empeño is still pending at the Supreme Court.

?I do not know what else to do for us to come closer to finding Sherlyn. Sometimes, I think of going to the Supreme Court to hold a sit-down protest for one week so the case will be acted upon faster,? she said.

Amid these thoughts, Cadapan said she had also begun trying to put back pieces of her life.

In June, she and her husband put up a small hut in front of their house to serve food for extra income. Clarice Colting-Pulumbarit, Inquirer Southern Luzon