Lent 2026 · Day 3: Mothers, Love, and What It Means to Be Happy

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!