Love Turns Distance Into a Bridge | Louela Cordova-Acedera, CPUCN Class 1994
For fifteen minutes, the woman everyone calls Love could do nothing but wait.
On March 13, 2020, a van carrying her 11-year-old daughter, Amira Denise, home from the National Schools Press Conference struck a tree in Ibaan, Batangas. Amira sustained a serious head injury, including a blood clot on the left side of her brain.
Thousands of miles away in Thailand, Louela Cordova-Acedera waited for the first clear word about her child. She was a nurse. She understood what the medical updates meant and how quickly a head injury could change. But she was also a mother who could not reach her daughter, examine her, advocate at her bedside or hold her hand. The first fifteen minutes without an answer felt endless. Love would later tell INQUIRER.net, “It was the longest day of my life.”
Only days earlier, her father had died. As the COVID-19 outbreak placed Metro Manila under community quarantine and stopped travel to the provinces, Love could neither attend his funeral nor reach Amira’s bedside. She followed her daughter’s condition through Messenger chats and video messages. Surgery was not required, but months of medication, evaluations and therapy lay ahead.
In the space of a few days, Love could not say goodbye to her father or sit beside her injured child. All her nursing knowledge could not overcome the miles between them. That season left her with a question she is still answering:
What do you build out of a distance you never chose?
Long before distance became one of the deepest sorrows of Love’s life, it was what first carried her toward a future she had never imagined.
She was born in Occidental Mindoro, the eldest of five children and the only girl. Her parents believed deeply in education, and her father gave her a standard she carried into nearly everything she would later do: If it is good, make it better. If it is better, make it best. If it is best, remember it can still be improved.
His words taught her to keep reaching and asking more of herself, although she admits they could also become a quiet burden. More than one project stalled because she could not release something merely good when she believed it could still be better.
Nursing was not her childhood dream. Love imagined herself in an air-conditioned office, dressed in an executive suit, with manicured nails and every strand of hair in place, the polished life she associated with women working in banks. Nursing was not the dream.
Independence was.
In 1990, Louela traveled to Iloilo with a cousin who was also preparing for college. They crossed the rough seas from Mindoro aboard the M/B Aida, then continued by Ceres bus until they reached Iloilo. For the eldest child and only daughter, the journey offered a chance to discover whether she could make a life beyond everything familiar.
She took the Nursing Aptitude Test at Central Philippine University. That examination answered two questions at once: why nursing, and why CPUCN.
It was at CPU that her classmate Riza began calling her “Love.” As Louela tells it, “Kay palangga ako kuno, halin sa kalayo sang Mindoro, dira ako nagtupa sa City of Love.” She had come from faraway Mindoro and landed in Iloilo, the City of Love. The nickname stayed. Even her given name carries family with it: Louela was formed from the names of her maternal grandparents, Pablo and Manuela.
When Love arrived in Iloilo, she spoke no Hiligaynon. She entered classrooms, hallways and conversations conducted in a language she could not understand. Then, about three months later, she heard herself speaking it. She could not identify the exact moment she had learned. Somewhere along the way, Iloilo had begun to feel like home.
After graduating from CPUCN in 1994, Love began a nursing career that would span more than three decades. She worked in operating and delivery rooms, emergency care, public health, government service and nursing education. Her work eventually took her to Thailand, where she taught students and helped develop nursing education across cultures and borders.
Distance followed her even into moments of celebration. When Love completed her master’s degree, no one from her family could be there. On graduation day, a university staff member helped place the academic hood over her shoulders.
What happened to her father and Amira years later changed the way she understood nursing. Caring across cultures was not only about the differences between a clinician and a patient. It was also about the family trying to remain present from far away: the mother waiting beside a phone, the daughter unable to return home, the nurse who knew what should be happening but could not enter the room.
During a difficult evening in lockdown, close to a depression she had not yet named, Love began scribbling on a page. Those notes became the beginning of an unfinished book rooted in what she had lived through. Her teaching, research and curriculum work continued to grow around the same concern: how to help nurses and families respond when culture, crisis and distance meet.
Love is writing the kind of resource she wishes someone could have placed in her hands in March 2020, not simply theory, but something useful for the person trying to decide what to do with the next sixty seconds.
After repeated invitations to teach at CPUCON, Love eventually agreed to serve as an adjunct professor, provided she could teach after office hours and on weekends around her work in Thailand. The College accommodated her, allowing her to return to the place that had formed her even while she remained far from it.
Her journey was never one she carried alone. In 2017, Geoffrey Leysa publicly acknowledged a handbook she had written for her students, and that simple recognition helped Love believe that her writing might matter beyond her own classroom. In 2022, Manay Easter Arora sponsored her return trip from Thailand so she could present her research at a CPUCN conference. She later helped with part of Amira’s tuition.
When Love’s son received a diagnosis requiring lifelong treatment, Professors Pornchai Jullamate and Darawan Thapinta stood beside the family with steady, practical support. Through it all, Love’s husband carried the fear, financial strain, deadlines and difficult emotions with her without once making her feel that it was too much. Each of them did more than tell Love they believed in her. They helped make her next step possible.
Today, Love continues to teach, write, conduct research and prepare nurses to care for people separated by language, culture or geography. Her unfinished book remains part of what she hopes to leave behind, not as proof that her suffering was necessary, but as something useful made from what she learned while living through it.
If she could speak to the young woman crossing the rough seas aboard the M/B Aida, uncertain about nursing but determined to find a life of her own, Love would tell her to grieve the losses ahead without forcing herself to find meaning in them too soon. She would also tell her younger self that standing alone would not be the only measure of her strength. There would be seasons when others would have to carry her, and because they did, she would learn how to carry something forward for someone else.
“I keep doing this because I know what it costs to be far from the people you love when they need you most, and I don’t want any other family, or any other nurse, to face that distance without something to hold onto.”
Perhaps that is the bridge Love has been building all along. Not one that makes distance disappear, because some distances cannot be crossed when we desperately want to cross them. Instead, it is a bridge made from knowledge, teaching, writing, friendship and the experience of having once needed other people to reach across the miles for her.
The young woman from Mindoro once crossed rough seas to Iloilo in search of independence. Years later, distance would separate her from some of the people she loved at the moments she wanted most desperately to be near them. Now she is trying to make that same distance a little less frightening for the nurses and families who will encounter it after her.
Love does not make the distance disappear.
She helps someone find a way across.
That is the light she carries.
