IN A TIME of peace their union would have been described as a marriage made in heaven. She was an ex-nun, he an ex-priest. In each other they discovered not only a deep love, but a shared cause that was greater than themselves.

But it was a time of war, when a marriage of rebels fighting an oppressive regime could hardly be described as rapturous. In fact the marriage lasted five years, ended  abruptly in 1985 by the bullets of government soldiers who also denied the dead man's family his body for proper burial.

Nilo Valerio's body was never recovered. Every year his wife Daisy and his two sons, Chris and Jeng, mark his death anniversary together with all the other families who have lost loved ones through military acts of atrocities, their loss made more painful because no bodies have been found.

Desaparecidos they are called--the disappeared.

Life in a peaceful farming community in Abra did not prepare Daisy Timbreza for the turbulence of her adult years. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a nun like some of her teachers in high school. She did enter the convent when she was 19, after having had a taste of student demonstrations while at the Philippine College of Commerce, then a hotbed of youth activism.

Daisy was already a postulant of the Sisters of the Holy Spirit when she earned her education degree at Loreto College. She enjoyed the religious life, even when she was sent to live at various Mindoro  provinces.

She says the "problem" started when she attended the Sister Formation Institute (SFI) after taking her temporary vows. There she learned about the many problems of Philippine society.

With the other nuns enrolled at SFI she went on exposure trips to slum areas, indigenous communities and political detention camps. Thus exposed and enlightened, she began to refocus her own religion classes on "Christ's bias for the poor, the deprived and the oppressed" and to tell her students about "the urban poor who were squatters in their own land, the indigenous peoples who were losing their precious ancestral lands to multinational corporations, and the plight of political detainees."

Soon she began to feel that despite her peaceful and happy life as nun, something was missing.

It was not easy for Daisy to leave the convent. She agonized over the decision, but after seven years, in October 1976, she bade the sisters good-bye.

Wasting no time, she went to the Cordilleras where the tribal communities were waging a struggle against Cellophil Resources Corp., a multimillion-peso logging concern controlled jointly by the Philippine government, the Americans and the Japanese.

The company was operating on 200,000 hectares, more than half of Abra's land area. Daisy says that the residents were being pressured by officials of both the corporation and the local government, and even by members of the Church hierarchy and the military, to sell their land for P1.10 per square meter.

Daisy recalls that the upland families were soon forced to leave their land and their leaders arrested and tortured, while Cellophil bulldozed their palay fields and cut down the big trees.

The logs were floated down the river to the company plant in the lowlands. As a result, the ricefields near the river were flooded. The river was polluted, too, depriving the people of a source of food and additional income.

It was in the mountains of Abra in 1977 that Daisy met Fr. Nilo Valerio, parish priest of a community of Tinggians, as well as Fr. Conrado Balweg and two other parish priests. Father Nilo headed a collective whose members were deep into organizing work in different parts of the province.

Daisy was to be the newest member of the collective and she had a letter of introduction for Father Nilo from a mutual friend of theirs. She was surprised to find a young, boyish-looking priest.

Nilo, the eldest son of Manila-based government employees, entered the Society of the Divine Word seminary as a high school freshman. His dream was to be sent as a missionary to a foreign land. But first, as a seminarian, he was sent to live with the Mangyans in Mindoro, the Tinggians in Abra and sugarcane workers in Cavite.

By the time he was ordained in 1975, he had given up his dream of being sent to a foreign country. He asked that he be assigned instead to Abra.

Later he would tell Daisy that his day-to-day exposure to life among the Tinggians deepened his commitment to the poor, deprived and oppressed. It also explained why he was drawn to the revolutionary movement.

Daisy says that as members of the collective trying to know and understand the social, economic and political life of the people so that they could be organized effectively, they had to live with them in their barrios using aliases.

They organized secret barrio liaison groups in preparation for building guerilla zones in the areas, as well as support groups in the town centers.

"Civilian Home Defense Forces elements and spies roamed freely, ready to pounce on any outsider. I learned how to speak the dialect and dress like the women in the area to make me less conspicuous. But it was difficult, especially when I had to walk alone for hours over mountains and solitary trails in order to reach a barrio," Daisy recalls.

Nilo worked in the northern part of Abra, Daisy in the provincial center at first and later in the southern part. In the beginning they would see each other only during the monthly meetings, but later on Daisy had to go to Nilo's area to coordinate work with him.

In early 1979 Nilo left his parish. With the blessings of the revolutionary movement he and Daisy were married the following year in a ceremony whose essence, Daisy says, "was commitment within the context of commitment to society."They gave each other new names: Rommel and Daria.

"Life was hard," Daisy recalls. As they became more active in the movement, they learned to sleep anywhere, on rice sacks laid on the ground when necessary.

During the rainy season they would sometimes sleep soaked to their skin and shivering from the cold. Some days they went without food.

Daisy remembers a harrowing two-week walk from Kalinga to Abra when she was two months pregnant with her first child. Unable to take the roads because they were being hunted by the military, the group had to walk through the Cordillera mountains and when their supplies ran out, ate whatever root crops and vegetables they could find along the way.

Daisy says she knew no fear, although she and Nilo were always aware of the risk they were taking. The thought that was uppermost in their minds, she says, was "if what you're doing is right, you won't be alone."

Daisy bore two children a year apart from each other. After her second child was born and with the military situation becoming more risky for her, she was given an assignment in Manila.

On Sept. 5, 1985, eight months after she had last seen Nilo, the newspaper Malaya bannered the headline "Rebel priest killed in encounter." That was how Daisy learned of her husband's death. The news report said Nilo and two others were killed by the military in Beyeng, Bakun, Benguet, on Aug. 24, 1985. He was 35.

Immediately, with the help of Daisy's friends in the various human rights organizations, some of whom did not even know that Nilo was her husband, a fact-finding mission was dispatched to Benguet.

There, eyewitnesses said that the bodies of the three victims were paraded in Beyeng and that soldiers had cut off Nilo's head and used it for target shooting. No one could give a clue as to where the bodies were.

Nilo had promised his two sons, then aged 4 and 3, that he would be home that Christmas. He had been with them in Manila until January that year because he was holding consultations with the leadership, and intensified militarization kept him from returning to his area immediately.

Daisy was looking forward to his joining them for good after a year; they had agreed that he would work in the city so he could be with his family.

Daisy says she almost lost her mind after Nilo's death. She would go to the bus station every day for about a month and wait for every bus, hoping Nilo would be in it. Chris and Jeng had to undergo rehabilitation therapy to help them cope with recurring nightmares about their father.

Chris is in college now, Jeng in high school. Far from dulling their memories of their Tatay, the years have only sharpened the boys' longing for him. Even now Jeng says, "I hope father returns, maybe he's just around." At gatherings of human rights advocates, Chris sometimes speaks of how he misses his father, especially now that there are questions only his Tatay would have answers to.

Daisy herself finds solace in writing (she has already produced an autobiographical book) and strength from her work as secretary general of FIND (Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearances).

Talking about how Nilo died, she says, is no longer painful. But for her and her sons, as with the thousands of other families of FIND, closure is an elusive hope.