2 women living proof that true love, even in the face of death, is eternal

Even death can’t part these women from the love of their lives.

Rosa Vallejo, 83, and Juliet Suarez, 77, are living proof that true love endures and can go beyond the grave.

The Inquirer chanced upon the two women who were separately visiting the tombs of their husbands, both military officers, at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

Vallejo would always remember her husband, General Benjamin Vallejo, as the soldier who wrote her a hundred poems that always began with the line, “To a Rose.”

“Poetry and love letters are the ingredients to a lasting marriage,” said Vallejo, a former dean of the University of the Philippines (UP) School of Library and Information.

She added that her husband would write poems as he waited for her or whenever he was alone. Upon his death on All Saints’ Day in 1991 due to a cerebral stroke, she gathered all his poems and love letters and placed them inside a box, which she now guards closely.

When she went to Australia to take her master’s degree, she told her sister: “If something happens, you can leave everything but save this box.”

Fittingly enough, the couple met during high school at UP through a poem. The two, however, vowed not to get married until they finished college.

But just a month after their wedding, her husband was assigned to fight in the Korean War while Vallejo had to leave for the United States to start her doctoral studies at the University of Michigan.

When her husband returned to the Philippines, she stopped her studies and came home to be with him.

The couple were later blessed with four children.

“Love is undefinable,” Vallejo said. “We had chemistry.”

For Suarez, it is the simple things that her late husband, Gen. Feliciano Suarez, did for her when he was still alive that has made her love for him endure.

“He always brought me something after every assignment,” she said. “Things as simple as candy or a rose.”

There was a time when his husband could not find any flower so he gave her a plastic bloom instead, she recalled.

“He’s from Visayas so he was really sweet,” said Suarez, who used to be a Red Cross regional director.

With her husband’s death in May 2010, just four more years before they would have celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, she is now returning the favor by bringing him white flowers every time she visits his grave.

“He liked white flowers,” she said as she recalled a time when he told her: “Mommy, the flowers smell good.”

“Wives should always make the most of their time with their husbands,” she said.