I've Lived Through Four Deaths
The first time I witnessed Death, it was on a random weekday. I was slouched against my grandmother’s well-worn wooden cabinet, TV colors flickering across my eyes. Mama was watching with me, just as absorbed as I was in a talk show whose name I can hardly remember now. I knew I had school that day, my hair was still wet, and I probably had about an hour or so left to get ready for my afternoon class.
And then, without warning, it all happened right before my eyes.
Mama rushed downstairs. The urgency in her footsteps sent a sudden wave of panic through my chest and I didn’t even know what was happening. The TV hosts kept blubbering their lines in the background. I glanced at the spot where Mama had been sitting moments ago, and a shiver ran through me when I realized how much emptier it looked. I was frightened and clueless, my ears throbbing as if trying to catch some hints from the earful murmurings of our neighborhood.
I don’t know exactly how I got my body to move, but in an instant, I was by our gate. My neighbors were there, yet they seemed unaware of me, as if I didn’t exist. I searched their faces, their moving mouths, but their voices were muffled. Despite the unwanted cacophonies, I managed to catch fragments of words, just enough for me to piece them together and regain my bearings.
Patay.
Ngayon-ngayon lang.
Tatay.
Doon sa kabilang bahay.
These were the words I caught in the air as I tried to breathe as normally as I could in that insane moment. I may be around eight or nine years old then, but I was already old enough to understand what those words meant. Then, I just found myself running so fast I could no longer feel my legs. I caught up to Mama, and her back was crying. She wasn’t exactly running, but her body moved so quickly that the people we passed blurred into a swoosh of color. I called for her to slow down, but she was somewhere else entirely.
The closer we got to my grandfather’s house, the heavier my heart grew. It stood taller than my grandmother’s hard-earned home, but the height only made it look awkward. Its walls were painted with negligence and damp, and the steep stairs looked slick. The smell inside was fishy, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had visited him. Their room was upstairs. Mama slipped from my mind for a moment when I saw my cousin at the bottom of the stairs with his friend. He was wiping his face with his white sando. He had likely heard the news before we did and had already gone there ahead of us.
Then, a loud series of whimpers echoed through the house. The sound was so raw and painful that I felt another pinch twisted my skin. It was the kind of pain that stays with you. Even now, I can still hear it whenever my memory drifts back to that moment.
When I went upstairs, I saw a tableau of crying women, my grandmother slumped limply on the floor, holding her former husband dearly with her trembling hands. I had always been familiar with the sounds she made: the sharp tsks of her tongue, the breathy psst between her teeth, even the weighty silence of her angry face. But that day, I heard a sound from her I had never known before. I had thought I would never hear her cry, because to me she was a warrior. I had long since accepted the impossibility of her tears, but seeing her shoulders shake from deep sobs felt so foreign that I could never have imagined her cry would sound like that… heartbreaking.
I think that was the first and last time I saw her cry.
While watching my grandmother, I caught a faint but lasting glimpse of my grandfather’s lifeless frame. I can still recall how halo-white he was. His skin held that unusual white stillness. His co-ords looked bleached white, and everything about him was so ethereal that he seemed to camouflage into the white bedding on the floor.
Just as my grandmother stood up, my mother appeared from nowhere. I had been so absorbed in everyone’s crying that I had forgotten who I was chasing when I left our house with the TV still on. The weight of her steps seemed to sink into the floor, so heavy with grief that she had to drag herself toward my grandfather. I thought he was already gone, but he was still hovering between life and death. Maybe, he had returned only to say farewell to his only daughter. With his eyes closed, he gathered what little life was left in him and whispered something to Mama.
Then everything went completely silent.
The next moment, Mama was crying so hard. So hard that, even now as I write this, I can’t help but swallow the tears rising in my throat just from remembering it.
I knew my grandfather was dying, and I knew that was why everyone was crying. As for me, I cried only because Mama was crying. My understanding of death back then was shallow. I knew that once you’re dead, you’re dead. What I didn’t know was the weight it leaves on those who remain.
My grandfather’s death didn’t steal away my mother’s light, but whenever I watched her closely, I could see the traces of his death still resting on her. I saw it in the quiet that followed her laughter, in the way her mind traveled somewhere far while she was scrubbing fabric between her hands, even in the stillness as she waited for hot oil to settle when she was cooking something.
I thought that would be the last time — until ten years later, I experienced Death for the second time, this time through my grandmother on my father’s side.
I also had school that day, but only in the afternoon. That morning, I woke to a sound— the kind that pulls you out of sleep before you even know what it is. It was my father’s voice, restrained and trembling, carrying a grief I had never heard from him before.
Like my grandmother on my mother’s side, I was only familiar with certain sounds from my father — his uncharacteristic sneeze, the crisp whuff of his shirt before he put it on for work, the rhythmic knock of his knuckles on the door, and the steady, almost melodic thud of his hammering. That’s why hearing him cry for the first time felt so strange, like the sound didn’t belong to him at all.
I wasn’t as close to my grandmother on my father’s side as I was to my mother’s. So, even though it came as a shock to hear that she had passed away, I wasn’t as devastated as I thought I would be. Maybe it was because we grew up with so little of her presence. She lived in Davao, far away from us, so it was understandable that we never had the chance to bond as grandmother and granddaughter. We only saw her a handful of times in her lifetime, mostly during her rare vacations to visit us.
Still, the few memories I have of her are fleeting but sweet. I remember her easy yet demure smile, her lovely and soothing voice. Whenever she and Papa sang karaoke, she would always sing “I Have a Dream.” I never sang it myself, yet I memorized the lyrics just from hearing her sing it so often. Even now, whenever I hear that song, it’s her I think of.
Just like how I felt my grandfather’s loss through Mama, I only felt hers through Papa. I guess seeing people out of their usual and familiar temperament, in my parents’ case at their most vulnerable, was something truly heartbreaking to witness as a child. I never used to see them break down, so whenever I did, in those rare moments, I saw them as children—small and unshielded.
After Papa came home, I never saw him cry again. It was as if nothing had happened. We were never close, so I couldn’t begin to guess how he carried his grief. All I know is he carried it in silence. And I can’t help but wonder if he still does.
Then, four years ago, Death visited me for the third time—through Nanay.
She was the grandparent I held closest to my heart. I grew up with her as she grew older with me. I’d met Death twice before hers, but never once did I imagine that one day it would be her I’d be grieving for.
I think it was Nanay's warrior-like demeanor that gave me the otherworldly confidence that she would grow older yet remain the same. I only had one passing thought about her death when I was a kid, when I asked Mama, very innocently, when Nanay would pass away. After that, the thought never came to me again. It slipped so far from my mind that I began to believe it would never happen. So when Nanay became bedridden from senility, I thought it was just a phase and that she would recover in time.
But that time never came. What did come was her sudden passing on the 28th of April. That night, the neighborhood fell flat, only punctuated with the muffled echoes of our labored breathings. I tried to revive her with gentle urgency, hoping that my clumsy, diffident attempt could buy me a sliver of her life, just enough for her eyes to stay on me even for that thin shred of a moment.
Her death devastated me the most because I didn’t experience it through someone else’s grief, I went through it alone, inside myself. Then, the silence became the only sound left in me. I thought that grieving for her meant hushing the remaining life in me. I felt like if I smiled too soon, or allowed myself the tiniest flicker of joy, it would mean that I had already forgotten her. That it would mean betraying what I lost and what I would miss, betraying the weight of her passing. So, I choreographed her loss with muted grief, holding it close, afraid to spill it out loud.
Little did I know, what I was doing was not grieving but imprisoning my capacity to honor what I would miss and praise what I lost—which was her.
I read a short book called The Smell of Rain on Dust by MartÃn Prechtel. It was a tough read for someone who has just gotten back into reading. It was difficult because it was poetic and philosophical, but mostly because it spoke the truth—and it spoke to me directly. This book helped me start making peace with myself (no, not completely yet). But it helped me forgive the parts of myself that claimed responsibility for everything that happened in my life, and in someone else’s. I learned that grief is not silence, but a sound—a sound of being alive.
They say that when someone dies, a big part of the people they leave behind also dies with them. But for me, it was the other way around. I felt like Nanay left a big part of herself with me, and I carried it with guilt. It was like this automatic reminder every time I’d feel even a tiny spark of joy—or in other words, when I felt like I was “not grieving.” I thought grieving for her meant burying myself in the deepest pit of loneliness, keeping the same grief we felt when she died and carrying it forever. I thought holding on to that loss was how we immortalized her, how we gave her some kind of second life. But that book made me realize I wasn’t grieving. I was punishing myself for her—someone who wouldn’t have wanted that if she were still here. The book says, “To not grieve is a violence to our own hearts and especially to the dead,” and maybe that was true. I wasn’t really grieving because I was hurting myself, and that wasn’t what grief was meant to be.
Grieving is giving back to the life we had with our loved ones. It is celebrating the life we still have ahead, knowing we have eternity to miss them and remember that we once loved. If we do not grieve, we stop remembering them. Missing them is our way of staying connected to them and their memories—whether those memories were joyful, sad, angry, or painful—because all of that is part of who they were.
Everywhere at home reminds me of Nanay. It still stings, but I keep trying to tell myself that the things that make me sad are the same things that keep her near. Maybe I am hurting because I loved her so much. Maybe I have lost so much because I loved her so much. And this pain reminds me that, despite my unwillingness to believe it, my grief for her means I am still capable of loving.
