‘The skies gave me you’
The enduring love story of Capt. Dionny Gonzaga and purser Joyce Uy Gonzaga
Love was in the air, on the ground and every space in between for Philippine Airlines veteran pilot Capt. Dionisio “Dionny” Gonzaga and his wife, the former Joyce Uy, a purser before she retired. They shared not just a birthday (July 29, 12 years apart) but a love that soared and took them to Cloud Nine—despite life’s twists and turbulence—and even long after they had unfastened their seatbelts.
“My favorite destination was anywhere with you,” Joyce, now an executive at Kenneth Cobonpue’s Fable restaurant, said in a social media post right after her beloved Dionny’s death nine days before their birthdays.
“The skies gave me you, the greatest love of my life. Today, with tears and gratitude, I give you back,” she wrote upon Dionny’s passing as friends and strangers alike responded with a downpour of sympathy and well, oohs and aahs.
“To know a love like this and lose it, is where my unbearable pain is coming from,” Joyce says.
Earth. Wind. Fire.
They met 38,000 feet in the skies on a PAL plane and when they were back on terra firma, he asked for her number from a fellow crew member.
Dionny would keep the lines between them burning.
“The crew used to joke that my phone needed a fire extinguisher because it was always on fire,” Joyce tells me.
“He was a B737 captain then, and I was the head cabin attendant. He asked me to sit in the cockpit for landing. Apparently, he used to do that with girls he fancied, he was quite the chick boy back then. Little did I know I would be the last girl he ever invited to the cockpit,” recalls Joyce, who had always wanted to marry an Ilonggo. And guess where Dionny hailed from?
Dionny’s feelings for Joyce continued to soar. He started visiting her almost every day at home. When she went back to international flying, he would call her while he was abroad. One of his calls lasted an hour and cost him ₱21,000. “The cost of love!” quips Joyce.
Joyce shared photos of both of them in the cockpit and in the passenger cabin.
“Once upon a time, this was our office. Yours in the left seat (of the cockpit). Mine in the cabin. My favorite destination was anywhere with you,” she captioned the photos.
Dionny and Joyce were married on Dec. 18, 2002 at the St. Alphonsus Mary de Liguori Parish Church in Magallanes Village, where Dionny grew up.
They held their reception at the Makati Shangri-La and spent their first night as husband and wife on—the 29th floor!
They share a daughter, Tricie, who works with the United Nations in Seoul.
On the wings of love
Dionny and Joyce continued flying together occasionally even as a married couple.
“We flew together once in a while on the trans-Pacific routes when he was moved to the B747-400, famously known as the “Queen of the Skies”—the beautiful double-decker. He would always request for me to work on the upper deck. And even though we were already married, we were still very much like boyfriend and girlfriend whenever we flew together,” Joyce shares. “He’s really remembered for how he loved me in a kilig way.” Move over Capt. Ri!
Joyce confides naughtily, “Sometimes he would sneak a hug or a kiss in the middle of my serving passengers. I remember one passenger actually looking quite disgusted because, I suppose, there is already a certain reputation that precedes pilots and flight attendants when it comes to romances.
“But when the crew would tell passengers that we had actually been married for many years, they would be shocked. I think what surprised people most was that after all those years, we still had that fire.” No wonder Joyce wanted to marry an Ilonggo, as Ilonggos have a reputation for being malambing (affectionate).
Their ‘seatbelt’
“Marriage, just like flying, has its bumps and turbulence. We had our share of them. What helped us through was knowing that we were always on the same flight, even when the skies weren’t clear. Our figurative seatbelt was our commitment to each other, to communicate, to forgive, to give each other space when needed, and most importantly, to never forget why we chose each other in the first place.
“Sometimes, you simply hold on, stay beside each other, and let the turbulence pass. This is so very Dionny,” she admits.
He also understood her unconventional schedule, both at PAL and at Fable.
“Oh, yes, as a pilot he understood my flying schedule, including my Fable schedule, when I’d go home at odd hours. And in my 16 months with Fable, he never slept till I got home. Every time I’d come home from Fable, be it 10 p.m., 12 midnight or 2 a.m., we always had midnight snack together,” she shares.
Humor was a big part of their marriage’s “seatbelt,” too. Dionny could make Joyce laugh even when she was annoyed with him. “Somehow, he always knew how to lighten the moment,” she smiles.
“Looking back, I think what kept us grounded was consistency. We kept showing up for each other through the good days, the difficult days, the changes, and all the different phases of our lives. We remained each other’s safe place. Perhaps that was our strongest seatbelt of all, not that we never experienced turbulence, but that neither of us ever wanted to get off the flight,” she recalls.
According to Joyce, Dionny, during his final days, kept telling his doctors that he wanted to get out of the hospital to celebrate “my wife’s and my birthdays.”
“The doctors promised him he would. But he never got out of the hospital,” she says in between tears. “I thought we were going to grow old together.”
But as she said in her eulogy, Dionny belonged to the skies. And painful thought it was, she was surrendering him back to the heavens.
