I STILL vividly remember our conversation at the dinner table, long after everyone else went upstairs: “You know Gap, there really are lessons in life I only could have learned after my mom died.” Barely 10 years old at the time, I didn’t know why I was being told something so morbid.
My mom was diagnosed with Stage 4 Colon Cancer back in 2006. After an additional five cancer recurrences, 11 years of chemotherapy, and countless visits to the hospital, my mom passed away on July 3, 2017. In retrospect, I guess it made sense why she was preparing me for the worst—she had gone through it and came out an even stronger person.
Although a considerable amount of time has passed since, I can’t say that dealing with the grief has been any easier. There are days that are harder than others. On some, calling a friend in tears and blabbering incomprehensibly is all I can do to try and alleviate the pain. On others, the grief stays like a candle-lit flame, alive and burning, yet a little bit warm as well. While it hasn’t always been this way, I started to find warmth in my grief once I thought about the kind of person I had to become without my mom around anymore.
When it came to my academics, my mom was a staunch believer that diligence preceded excellence. I was taught how to manage my screen time, to keep consistent tabs on my grades, and not to procrastinate. While I’m a far cry from that picture-perfect student that she wanted me to be, I eventually learned to become independent for the benefit of my studies.
As for household duties, I had to pick up a lot of responsibilities at home. These were tasks that, when handed to me, were second nature, mainly because I already had the chance to observe my mom do the same.
Even down to the little things, I know that who I am today is greatly attributed to the fact that my mom can’t physically be here anymore. I see it in the way I carry around a medicine stash at all times, on the off chance someone might need it, just like she did. I see it in food as our shared love language, especially since cooking and feeding the people that mean the most to me is how I show my affection. I even see it in our incomparable level of judgmentalness, in our shared side-eyes and eyebrow-raises when we used to have our weekday mall dates.
While these quirks—good and bad—act as a reminder that Mommy might not be around anymore, they are little bits and pieces of her I choose to carry within me. Looking at it from a different perspective, who I am today is greatly shaped by her physical absence—a desire to fill in the Pilar-shaped hole that she left. To me, one of the primary reasons I am who I am today is because of her death.
It might sound absurd, but I have always felt the need to reconcile an idea of me that also “died” with my mom and the person standing here today. There has always been this polarizing tension: words cannot describe how much I miss my mom, but at the same time, I can’t ascertain wanting her to have stayed either.
Hear me out, I would not wish the passing of a parent on my worst enemy. I just think that my experience of grief was always more complicated than pangs of sadness and I-miss-you’s. It included living a life in spite of my loved one’s death and navigating through a world where they could not physically share the same space with me like they used to. It also became about taking the time to appreciate the me that emerged, amidst all that darkness.
That being said, there are a lot of things in my life or characteristics about me that I know could have ended up better if my mom were around. Despite all these chinks in my own being that have surfaced over the years, I’m still content with how far I’ve come.
This year marks the fifth of many to come. I miss my mom dearly, but I’ve also grown to be proud of the person I had to become, now that she isn’t around anymore.
