I had recently come back from a trip to Philippines and South Korea. It was a wonderful experience and I should have been rightfully excited for it, but initially, I wasn’t. The last time I had gone to the Philippines was to bury my cousin – no, my sister. From my previous posts, you would be able to weave out a few things. 1) I’m fairly old (as I call the youth of my area “my kids”) and 2) I have younger brothers and cousins. In fact, out of 12 grandchildren on my mum’s side, I’m the oldest. My younger brother, Edward, is 6 years younger than me. So for 6 years I was an only child/grandchild, and thereafter, I was an older sister. Even in the community, since the time I joined, I always seemed to be one of the older ones.
Anyways, where am I going with this? Well… I just wanted to paint the picture of how, never have I really had an older sister. My older cousins on my dad’s side lived in the Philippines and it wasn’t until my early teens that the oldest of them moved here to Canada. She tucked me under her wing, and I became one of her 3 younger sisters. We had sleepovers, we would buy matching outfits when we shopped, she would do my nails, and we would talk about boys (LOL). Coming from a girl who played video games with her brothers, and then carried and bounced her baby cousins on her lap, taking part in these girly milestones with an older sister was something rather wonderful. She was incredibly strong, and even in our giggly conversations, this would always shine through.
A little over 3 years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Stage Three. What did that mean? How fierce the cancer was and how much it had progressed meant nothing to me. You can ask my family, I was so sure that she would push through. God is a God of miracles. This is it… I had stored all my prayers and this is Your time to pull through for me, right? I was so sure that she would pull through that even when it was time to say goodbye, the only thing I whispered to her was, “Just focus on getting better. I’ll see you soon!” I never had the goodbye that everyone else allowed themselves to have with her. In my care package that I sent with her I had included a prayer for healing and a shirt of mine she always liked (it has wings on the back) and I stuck a post-it to it saying, “for when you get better and lose weight, like you said!”
As my time for the Philippines grew closer this year, I wasn’t excited. It was difficult for me to even feign excitement, although I tried. The truth was: I was going to face the fact that she was gone. I had tucked away her absence in the back of my mind and somehow, went on pretending that she hadn’t really died. Each time I thought about going back home, I knew I would have to stand before her tombstone and face the hard truth. I wasn’t ready, I was never ready.
The morning of my arrival, the first thing I knew I had to do was go to the cemetery. During the car ride, every single molecule of my body wanted to turn back. As I exited the car and began to walk, my stomach was in knots and my heart was thumping so hard I could hear it. But as I stood before her grave, I felt… I felt nothing. I felt an absence of a feeling. She… She’s not here. She’s not here. I had expected the feeling to be exactly as it was when I was leaving Philippines the last time. The way I kneeled there and hugged her tomb (it was an above-ground box thing) and had placed my forehead against the cold hard marble and whispered to her that I loved her. I had thought it would be just like that. But it wasn’t.
I had left the cemetery that day with this over-abounding sense of peace. I remember walking back to the car, looking up towards the sky, closing my eyes and exhaling, “She’s not here.” And for the first time, rather than focusing on her absence, I was able to really understand the greater-than-Earth place that she’s at.
“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” 1 Corinthians 2:9