Dear Ave,

I went back home for your 2nd death anniversary. This time, I could see a light at the end of the tunnel. It didn’t feel as heavy. Is this acceptance? I didn’t expect to ever get to this stage. It has been a turbulent past few years. I miss you, and there are still very, very bad days. But there are more good days this 2026. Going home this year was a good idea Ma. I’m glad I did.

I don’t know how the past 2 years passed Ma. Heck, I’m. not sure how the past 5 years have passed. When I think about Papa’s death in 2021, the beginning of it all, or was it Ama’s (papa’s mama’s) death which started it all, it makes me think that there are a good succession of years and then suddenly, the next years where it’s all bad things happening. This, I think on my own. I think life events come in groups. When the rain drops, it pours. Something like that quote.

It poured didn’t it? Papa died in August 2021, in the midst of Covid, and then you died in February 2024 and Harold died in June 2025. In between, I got engaged, Tom and I bought a flat, I had my big heart operation and Tom and I got married. Harold became ill a few months after you died and Mav was born, and was ill for a year before he had a sudden cardiac arrest at Michelle’s house. Mav grew, all the kids grew, my siblings continued living their lives. Hannah built her beautiful new house, and showed it to us earlier in February 2026. You would’ve been proud, Ma.

Grief is personal to everyone, and I can only write about my personal meeting with it. I don’t think I really fully grieved Papa’s death; I think I put up a wall, and that wall was anger. With your death, I felt it more viscerally. and these are the things I remember feeling when you died:

I felt like something had been ripped apart from me. I felt like half of me had died, and I didn’t know who the other part was. I remember thinking how I could be alive when you were gone, how it was possible that someone who had birthed me was dead but I was still alive. I know it’s stupid, and the answer is simple, but at that time, I couldn’t fathom this disconnect between your life and my life. Surely, my life force would be depleted and I would die too?

There was this desperate need to be with you, no matter how, in what form any dimension. I wanted to die. I remember telling Tom to take the oxycodone that I had leftover from. my heart surgery away, because there were days and weeks they were so bad I was afraid I would take it.

I remember being filled with guilt. Did I do enough, did I not do enough, have we made the right decisions about your treatments in hospital, did we cause you to suffer or did we shorten your life? it’s stupid, but because I was there from the first day of your hospitalisation til the end, and was speaking ton the doctors on a daily basis, in person, on viber, I knew every single thing that happened every day you were there. Had we done enough? Did we do everything we could? Had we failed? I will never truly know the answer. All I remember was you touching my face with both your hands, and saying “ikaw na bahala” the night before you died. And when I think about that these days, I don’t know how I feel. Should I feel privileged? I should, I guess. You trusted me because I’m a nurse. But all I really felt was guilt, in the aftermath.

There were times I also felt disconnected from the world. At one point, I looked at Tom’s face and I couldn’t recognise his face. I felt like I was not really living, and everything around me was strange and alien. The brain fog I felt was real after the first year was great. After you died, I spent one year doing something every single day I was not working– I was always writing, keeping myself busy, doing something work-related, reading e-mails, writing angry work emails masked as diplomatic (never sent and reading back on my drafts they were just long and insufferable, I would’ve clawed my eyes if it was sent to me), keeping my thoughts busy. But the year after you died, I noticed how I would forget things easily, how I can’t remember stuff that had happened. I’ve always had goldfish memory, but this felt much, much worse.

The day that you died, I couldn’t get any comfort from my siblings. The only comfort I sought was from my friends back in the UK and from the doctors who looked after you at Cardinal Santos. Someone medical who knew how difficult to treat terminal cancer was. Someone who would understand and could empathise. I guess this is the price for choosing to be far away. I couldn’t open myself up to my siblings, to show them my grief, anger, guilt, sadness, to seek comfort from them. I didn’t feel safe. In hindsight I think it was to protect my relationship with them.

There was also this sense of fear, of doom, that Tom would die, or I would die, or someone close to me would die. And life confirmed this fear, by taking Harold. The whole year that Harold was ill, my sibs and I barely talked. We were still grieving and reeling from the massive loss of your death, I guess.

When I landed back in the UK, 7 weeks after you’d died, and started living my days again, I couldn’t find any comfort from anything. There was very little reminder of you in the UK. there was that time that you visited with Dichi in 2017 and I remember going around Brighton and London and just retracing/visiting all those places we visited. I saw the hotel we stayed at near Trafalgar Square and burst into tear, I stayed in Covent Garden for a bit where we had our photos taken, I went to the the jewellery shop in Brighton you peered at and was captured in a photo and vowed that I would buy jewellery from there. All I could do was wander those places. I missed Yaya Juaning, who was with you all the time back home, I missed the people who you spent the most times with back home.

I cried a lot. but I also went to work and put on a smile. And pretended I was OK. I kept thinking of that quote from Franz Kafka (not sure if it’s really him, either him or Charlie Chaplin, but my reference is insta memes which we all know is never accurate): “I was ashamed when I realised life was a costume party, and I attended with my real face.” and so I pretended so much. I pretended that I was okay and I remember thinking life is all pretend. All I wanted was to die, you see. But I kept on living.

I remember talking to one acquaintance at work whose aunt had died a few days ago and he mentioned it to me suddenly, out of the blue, in a busy hospital corridor. And I remember fully understanding how he felt. And I told him how we must just live everyday and move forwards, because the other choice would be to perish, like our loved ones. But how life makes sure we live before our time is up, or how unless we have the courage to do something to ourselves, we are stuck. So we live on.

Every night, I would have an impending sense of doom, snd I still do, to this day. Just the other day I felt like I was going to die, just as I was about to sleep.

I was also physically ill a lot. and still am. I don’t think I am well, physically or mentally. But I am alive, here, now.

I was angry about work, everything annoyed me, irritated me, made me angry. No one impressed me. Everyone around me was either stupid, inefficient and I lost all interest in another person. I couldn’t find anyone inspiring o admirable. But this was me criticising myself, being too hard on myself, projecting.

I felt so lonely, so I reshared reels and reels about grief. Probably annoyed my friends, but that was the only way I could cope. I had too much emotions I couldn’t express.

Today is March 31st. Spring is here, evident with the changing of the clock, the blue skies, the milder weather and the colours around me. I wrote the above a few weeks ago, I can’t remember when. This is a draft, but I will post it. Because it’s been quite some time since I sent you a letter Ma. (I know you’ll never get it, I’m not stupid.) But I started this in 2024 and here we are now, in 2026. I can always pick up where I left off, and I guess that’s what I’m trying to do. Picking up where’d I’d left off, going forward, standing up again. This is what it is about I guess. Life is filled with those moments where you pause for a bit and then come back to it and resume.

I miss you Ma. I keep dreaming of Papa this year too. I had a day this month where I just cried and cried, still asking the same questions I have always asked myself. But I know I will never get any answers, so it is up to me to my narrative, taken from bits and memories of my childhood. Most of the time it’s a bad story, sometimes it’s not. No one really knows.

This is a quote from the movie Jojo Rabbit which helped me a lot:

Thank you for everything.

Love,

Hershey