Today marks six years since my mother died.
“Are you happy?” I asked my mother.
“I’m happy if you’re happy,” she said.
It was one of the last fully coherent sentences she said to me. It was also what she said when I came out to her in my early twenties. Love, distilled. No theology degree. No conditions. Just love. Mothers teach us this first.
They carry us into the world, and in time, we carry them out. They feed us. They worry over us. They teach us what care looks like long before we have language for it. And even when their bodies fail, their love often remains clear. Death does not erase love. It rearranges it.
Grief becomes a kind of companionship. Love shifts from presence to memory, from voice to echo, from touch to responsibility. We live differently because they loved us.
I asked her if she was happy because I knew she was dying. I wanted to know if she felt she had lived a good life. Our relationship was complicated. Less so than my relationship with my father, but still layered. She loved me in ways that were always undeniable, even though she was a woman I didn’t fully know. What I do know is this: she lived for us. She worked hard. She sacrificed. She stayed in a marriage that betrayed her so that we would be okay. She loved him until his death, for us.
After my mother took her last breath and the funeral home took her body away, I got into a cab and went straight to the Dumaguete airport. I spent sixteen hours, which felt like a thousand, holding my grief inside my body. Holding the tears. Holding the greatest loss of my life so I could get home. Crossing oceans, continents, and time zones.
When I arrived, what followed was the deepest internal injury I’ve ever experienced. I had just spent three weeks watching the only woman I truly loved die in front of me. I came home to another bitter ending. And people wondered why I was so upset. Try not to have a complete breakdown in front of hundreds of strangers, traveling internationally, so you can get home, sleep in your own bed, and grieve your mother in a house you once shared with a woman you loved and planned a life with. Pain has a way of making reality unavoidable.
When people are given the opportunity to show kindness in the face of someone else’s suffering and instead choose cruelty, that tells you everything you need to know. As Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, believe them. My mother was dying and said, “I’m happy if you’re happy.” My ex waited three weeks for me to come home and then chose to tell me how much she hated me.
Both women were mothers. Only one chose love.
That contrast changed me. I could never intentionally hurt someone in that moment, knowing what I was experiencing with grief, and what it does to the body and the soul. Whatever love I had left for that woman disappeared in an instant. Not out of anger, but clarity.
Because of my mother, I know what love is supposed to feel like. And because of her, I know what love in action looks like.
And that was not it!
What hurt almost as much was realizing that some people around us couldn’t see it either. Or wouldn’t. That silence taught me something, too. Grief strips things down to their truth. It shows you who wants your healing and who can only tolerate you when you are whole, quiet, and convenient.
Be gentle with people’s hearts. The world can be unintentionally cruel, especially to the strong, quiet ones. Most people don’t know what others are carrying.
Years after my father died, when no one was controlling my mother or telling her how to live...
Me: “Are you happy?”
My mother: “I’m happy if you’re happy.”
Lenten Reflection:
Lent reminds me that life and death are not enemies. They are part of the same story. Endings make room for new beginnings, not by erasing what came before, but by carrying it forward.
May we live in ways that honor those who loved us into being.
May we care for one another as we were cared for.
May grief soften us, not harden us.
And may we trust that even in loss, love continues. “A humble and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (Psalm 51:17)
Grief does not disqualify us from love or from God. Tenderness is not something to fix. It is something to honor.
Lent asks us to sit with endings. With dust and breath. With the truth that life is finite and therefore precious. But Lent also reminds us that endings are never the whole story.
Lent asks: how will you live with what you’ve been given?
What does it mean to be happy in a world where people we love die? Where nothing is guaranteed? Where joy and sorrow are not opposites, but companions?
Maybe happiness isn’t constant joy.
Maybe it’s alignment.
Maybe it’s living in a way that honors the people who cared for us.
Maybe it’s choosing presence instead of numbing, connection instead of escape, love instead of fear.
Mothers don’t usually ask us to be perfect.
They ask us to be okay.
To be safe.
To be loved.
To love.
Today, I remember my mother.
I remember her love.
I remember her care.
I remember her.
Mahal Kita, mommy!
Six years ago, my life looked very different.
My mother was dying. I had just ended a long-term relationship. COVID was hovering at the edges of the world, not yet fully realized but already being felt in Asian countries. Everything felt unstable, heavy, and unfinished.
I think about that version of myself often. Not with judgment. With understanding.
Grief does strange things to people. It makes you reach for sensation when the sadness feels unbearable. There’s that scene in "High Fidelity," where Laura asks Rob to sleep with her after her father dies, not because it makes sense, but because the body wants to feel anything other than grief. I understand that now in a way I didn’t then.
When we were in the Philippines, my nephew and I ended up at a bar one night. We ran into a group of tourists. I met a man. Of course he was a scuba instructor. Of course he was Irish. Of course it was cliché. We made out. I almost went back to his hotel. And then I didn’t.
I was a responsible aunt. Or maybe just protected by the old saying that God looks out for fools and babies. I’ve probably been both at various points. Yes, I’m very gay. No, I’m not interested in unpacking the spectrum of sexuality here. That’s not the point.
The point is this: that wasn’t the first time I made questionable choices while drowning in grief. And it wasn’t the last. Grief doesn’t ask permission. It shows up in your body, your decisions, and in your longing to escape yourself for even a moment.
Six years ago, I wrote this:
"We are born of love; love is our mother.” – Rumi
"Our mom’s health has been declining quickly in the last six months. That is why my siblings and I have been in the Philippines. Not for vacation, but to see our mother. To tell her we love her.
We traveled 5,000 miles to kiss her, to say thank you. Thank you for your sacrifices, your strength, your resilience, your bravery. Thank you for loving us the best way you knew how. Thank you for letting us love you back.
Watching one parent die from a terminal illness is hard. Watching another forget who you are is something else entirely. Navigating a country where your language skills feel like a four-year-old’s, while handling culture, laws, and banking, is overwhelming.
We were sad. Frustrated. Exhausted. But we had each other.
My mother lived many lives. In the Philippines and in the U.S. She raised four stubborn children and, in her 60s, helped raise our nephew. Even in her weakest moments, she still made sure we ate. Because that’s what good Filipino mothers do. They feed you."
I read that now and feel tenderness for who I was. I was raw. Unmoored. Doing the best I could with a broken heart and a body carrying anticipatory grief.
Six years later, I am different.
Not untouched by grief. But more honest about it. More patient with myself. More aware of how loss lives in the body and leaks out sideways when it isn’t tended to.
I still miss my mother. That never goes away. But I carry her differently now. In how I show up. In how I care for people. In how I feed others. In how I try to choose presence over escape.
Grief didn’t make me weaker. It made me more human. It made me better.
And if I could tell my six-years-ago self anything, it would be this:
You’re not broken. You’re grieving. Be gentle. Stay. Let yourself feel it all.
I’m still learning.
Still healing.
Still loving.
And still grateful for the woman who taught me what love looks like, even at the end.
❤️❤️❤️
Lenten Reflection
Lent reminds me that God and Jesus are always in the margins. In grief. In confusion. In the moments we don’t recognize ourselves and make choices we don’t fully understand yet.
When you feel abandoned, maybe you aren’t. Maybe God is sitting beside you in the ache, not rushing you through it. Maybe Jesus is closer in the mess than in the moments when everything looks put together.
Lent doesn’t ask us to be perfect. It asks us to stay. To pay attention. To trust that even in wilderness seasons, we are not alone.
May these days be gentle.
May they be honest.
May they lead us toward wholeness, one small step at a time.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
I was raised Catholic, though my faith has changed many times and in many ways over the years. What has remained constant is this, my faith shows up in how I try to be a good neighbor. A kind, compassionate witness. A helper when help is needed.
If there is a God, I believe she would want us to do everything we can to make the world more whole. Even through all the bulls#it. Especially through it.
The Bible stories that have always stayed with me are the ones about being different. About choosing what is right even when it’s unpopular. About acting with integrity when people disapprove, as long as no one is being harmed. In the end, we are the ones who have to live with our choices. Every day.
For seven years, I was with a UCC pastor. We were engaged, and the main reason I’m in Rochester is because Kayla was called to serve as an associate pastor here. In many ways, I lived the life of a pastor’s “wife” for a long time.
We’ve been broken up for fifteen years now (which is crazy to type), and she recently marked ten years serving her two churches in OKC. That relationship was spiritually formative in my life. It shaped me deeply. Faith during those years wasn’t theoretical. It was lived. Practiced. Argued over. Wrestled with.
What I learned is that belief isn’t about certainty. It’s about responsibility.
She once said something to me that never left, "We create our own heaven and hell. We don’t have to wait for the afterlife to experience either. We live them now." As someone who actively manages my mental health, I know how true that is. Many of us have lived in a hell we built in our own minds.
Ash Wednesday is a reset for me. One of the few practices I still faithfully keep from my upbringing. Lent gives me a container. A pause. A chance to let go of what no longer serves me and to make space for something better. This year, that feels especially important.
In 2026, faith cannot stay abstract. It has to show up in how we respond to injustice. In how we organize locally. In how we protect our neighbors when systems fail them. In how we care for the Earth like it actually belongs to all of us, not just those with power and profit.
For the next 40 days, I’ll be sharing reflections and highlighting local people and groups doing the quiet, necessary work of mutual aid. Neighbors helping neighbors. Repair instead of indifference. Presence instead of denial.
We are made of stardust. We will return to stardust. What matters is how we care for one another and this planet in the time we are given.
Ash Wednesday Lenten Reflection:
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?"
— Isaiah 58:6
Ash Wednesday isn’t about shame or self-punishment. It’s a pause. A truth-telling. A reminder that our lives are finite and therefore meaningful.
The ashes don’t say “you are nothing.” They say, “you are responsible.” Responsible for how we show up. For who we protect. For what we refuse to normalize. For how we love our neighbors and this Earth in real, tangible ways.
If Lent is a fast, let it be a fast from indifference. If Lent is repentance, let it be a turning away from harm. If Lent is preparation, let it prepare us to act with courage, clarity, and compassion.
May these forty days loosen what binds us, strengthen what grounds us, and move us closer to repair. As above so below.
Be well.
Stay safe.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
