Where do I put all this love?

There’s this running joke where we always say, “process your grief, or it will process you,” as dark as that sounds, it made it so much lighter, not easier… but lighter. There is so much to say, to do… and there will always be so much. It’s true what they say, “you’re too busy planning something for the people that you love, not realising they’re growing old too.”

Grief will always chase you no matter how fast you want to run from it, no matter how much you want to set it aside convincing yourself “you’ll find time,” – you never will, by the way. Time finds you. It makes you busy. The fear of processing and actually sitting with it makes you feel powerless. Like you’ve lost control over the hurt, the guilt, the frustration. They don’t visit you one at a time, instead they’re all laid out at the same time, and you don’t even know where to begin. You doom-scroll, you read, you ask people what’s up, you tell people to take you somewhere indirectly, you pick up more workload, you fill all your hours during the day to forget about it.

But what happens when you wake up at 3AM and all your unprocessed thoughts chase you like a madman? What happens then?

I wanted to walk out of that room 10 minutes in but it’s a two-hour-long sit-down of unravelling your emotions. It’s a step towards learning how to handle yourself better, because it gets deep… and when you go deeper you start to scare yourself. It’s not a shame to ask for help, in fact it will never be a shame in knowing when to.

I took those 10k steps, said yes to going out, planned something months ahead, talked to people more often, picked up calls I don’t usually pick, cleaned a bit more, learned new hobbies, cleaned my gallery. I craved a type of noise I’ve worked hard to get out of, and I just knew I was out of control and unfocused when I came back to square one. I was so disoriented that even showing up to work felt like a loss.

I am better, so here’s to sharing a piece of my Lola with you.

I wrote the eulogy on an 8-hour flight. To the person sitting next to me, you are a star for letting me turn the night light on, for allowing me to be a mess the entire flight. For the first time in my life, I actually did not know how to hold myself together. That was one of the most hopeless I have ever felt.

In a little backstory, a huge part of my childhood was spent with my grandparents and their siblings. Maybe, eighty percent of the time was with them, not to mention that it’s a huge family - there are a lot of them, and I love these people to bits. The other twenty percent are with my cousins, aunties and uncles, my parents, and my siblings. I hold a piece of each one of them in me. And every time you lose someone, it somehow hurts more and less at the same time. Not because it becomes easier, and not because it’s lonely, but because you begin to understand where that love goes. You carry it, and you spread it gently to the people who loved them too.

This time, I have no idea where to place it because this belongs to her, and her alone.

I grew much closer to Lola some time in my late teens. There’s this unexplainable bond that grew even stronger in the distance. I do not know if my coming here made that, but if it is, I am content that I had that point in my life where all I ever wanted was to give her all this love the way she freely gave it to everyone. I didn’t think that far ahead, because right now, I’m in the dark. Where do you put something this massive in your core, when the one it belongs to is no longer there to receive it? Beats me. It is heavy because it’s full of her.

She is the epitome of love.

Love is even too weak of a word for it.

“There will always be one person in your life who would willingly sit at your table no matter how messy it gets.”

For most, they’d name their partner, or their children, or their parents. For me, at least, it’s Lola, and she’s shown me what that truly looks like more times than I can count. She didn’t just sit there, she built it. My values are hers. She taught me a lot about kindness, care, respect, empathy… agape. Because of the way she carries herself, and how she shows up for everyone dear to her, a lot of us learned how to make room for the people we care about even on our messiest days. She showed us that sometimes it’s okay to inconvenience yourself for others.

She’s seen us, her grandchildren, at our best… and on our worst days. I am blessed that she’s one of the few people I’ve ever shown how vulnerable I am.

And in all of that, she’s always instilled in us to go forward, to keep going, to be grateful because we’re given a foundation strong enough to take us further than we ever dreamed. That principle runs deep in us everywhere we go. And in every mile we take, there’s a piece of her in it.

It’s infuriating to imagine navigating this world without her physically present. That wild smile, those silly giggles whenever her grandchildren confidently shared something, that just makes it so much more worth it.

She’s our world.

We still have their siblings, but the line of our direct grandparents on both sides has now come to a close.

She’s the reason why birthdays, Christmases, New Year’s, and even the smallest gatherings meant something. We built our yearly traditions around her. All of these moments in the coming months will feel very fragile. Her role was something so big that it’s hard to reshape it.

How do you even comprehend that someone who felt so permanent can suddenly feel gone? The level of comfort Lola carries with her is something you yearn for every day, especially when you’re away. It’s one of the things I love about coming home, because I know she’s there. Her warmth is where everything in me feels at home.

Nobody ever tells you how to get back from this and it’s nauseating, it’s outrageous to even think that we just learn to live with it. Losing someone never makes sense. It never does.

At least not to me.

What do you mean I’ll never hear her teasing me over the phone telling me I’m the only one not present to where they all are, that I need to start packing and come home? What do you mean I’ll never hear her loudest applause in the room? What do you mean I’ll never have those tightest hugs to ever exist…. the sweetest kisses from my Lola?

I have always been told that the nearest person who could take away your pain is your Lola. You do not have to say anything; all you need to do is show up and she will know.

There was this one time when I felt so empty. I needed to be somewhere but nowhere at the same time. I went to buy some bread and biscuits and somehow found myself standing in front of her doorstep. I tried knocking, but she didn’t hear me, so I let myself in, and there she is. She’s wrapped in her blue robe in front of this small fireplace.

She had this look that said, “you’re stronger than this,” it didn’t matter what I was holding, because all I remember was her hugging me, tucking my hair behind my ear as she told me that it was okay, that I can give her the pain because she can take it and because “inayan pay,” (a Kankanaey concept and social taboo acting as a moral compass to prevent harmful, immoral, or disrespectful actions).

Lola has held so much in her, and she never felt overwhelmed by it, or at least not that I know of. She knows how to handle you when you do not know how to hold yourself. She’s the kind of person who doesn’t just love the people around her, she makes them feel held and safe.

I’m thankful that I am, in many ways, one of the places her love went.

One thing you should never, EVER, do at her house is pretend you’re full, because she will fully shove a spoon in your mouth just to make sure she saw you eat.

We all laugh about it, and there will always be an unwritten understanding that she does this because she thinks of you more often than you know, that this is her way of saying, ‘allow me to feed you because I’ve missed you.’ She even has this face of despair when you show up for a good five, ten minutes and leave… she’s in awe that she finally saw you, but she’s crushed that all she got was a hi-hello-goodbye. She valued people deeply.

She would never let you leave her house without a piece of something from her. She would secretly stick a piece of candy in your pocket or give you a piece of bread.

It’s her quiet reminder to take a piece of her with you and make sure you always stay full, in every sense of the word.

I remember the day when I went to see her and she didn’t recognize me. She was unusually quiet. Only then did I know the reason behind it when my aunt popped a message saying Lola thought I was my cousin’s girlfriend, which was funny, as she mistook my sister too earlier of the very same year. She woke up early the very next morning to see me, just to tell me off and apologise. Mind you she walks slow because of her age, and it’s quite a distance walking from her house to where I was.

That was my final breakfast with her, in fact, the final meal that I shared with her, and I’m blessed to have my mom at the same table too.

I adore this woman so much.

Her love is so active, she spoke less of it and showed so much more in ways she knew how. It’s a different kind of warmth, because you don’t come across that very often. She didn’t just allow us to love her, we felt her love deeply too.

She could be struggling, and she still managed to smile at you, wave at you. Well she was, and she still managed to smile at me over the screen and wave a couple times, days before she passed away.

Just when you’re starting to share a piece of the love she gave you, time robs you of that moment, and you’re left there with all the pieces, unsure where they belong.

I wish I could end this with something comforting. Something that makes it all feel lighter. But the truth is, I don’t have that right now. All I know is that she was here, and she loved us in a way that will never leave. And maybe, for now, that has to be enough.

This grief is harder to carry because I loved her fully.