No One Prepares You for This

Words on exhausting days in the hospital, and then the aftermath.

The Funeral (1984, Juzo Itami) | Photo: Janus Films

No one prepares you for this.

My life took a massive turn on April 11th of this year, when my grandmother was admitted to the hospital. In my family, we’ve been bracing for the worst to happen anytime soon. Whether it’s sudden, or it is to be expected, you can never be prepared. After all, no one prepares you for this.

Then another wave of tragic news came. We found out that my uncle has Stage IV colon cancer. It came as a shock to everyone in my family, as he was only in his late 50s, so we imagined that he still had a lot left inside him. And then, I finally saw him lying in his hospital bed. Even looking at him had hurt me, because I felt the pain which he was experiencing as it was slowly killing him.

How exactly are you supposed to prepare to handle this bad news happening all at once? Really, even after seeing it all happen, I simply do not know. There’s nothing anyone can say to make this much easier. The acceptance of death as an inevitability isn’t something we easily heal from, when it’s happening so close by to people that you have loved for most of your life.

The morning when I started writing this, we got the worst news. My uncle has lost his fight with colon cancer, and was joined by many members of my family. When I got this bit of news, I was seated on a bus heading down to Toronto. The first thing I thought to myself was, “should I just go back?” Truth be told, I felt some level of guilt from knowing that I was not around to spend those final moments together with him. It’s not even made any easier just by the fact that this was all so sudden. It just hit us like that, then went.

When I first prepared to write this piece, both my uncle and my grandmother were still alive. Yesterday, both of them have been laid to rest – and another aunt of mine has also died. I can’t exactly say that I have the proper words in order to encapsulate what these past few weeks have felt, especially with the long period of grieving that has followed since. I can’t say that I’ve felt much peace from knowing how closely these deaths had occurred next to one another, because it haunted me for so long.

And of course, by the time this piece is published, they both have been cremated. Initially, I had wanted to publish something about this before their respective funeral ceremonies, but I had delayed it for so long. If you’ve been reading my own reminiscences during my weekly pieces on Fridays, my procrastination didn’t come out of a lack of productivity. Instead, it simply came from not even being sure what to write about how to handle all of this happening so quickly.

Putting it lightly, it’s also something that no one can really prepare you for. I’ll only find that this repeats itself over time, because the death of people you love, even when you know it’s about to happen, is not something you can process as immediately as you’d hope to. From the moment when I saw my grandmother at her own wake, I wasn’t sure how to process it all in the moment. It brought back memories of seeing the corpse of my uncle on my mother’s side when I was only seven years old. The news about his death caught many of us off guard at the time, because he was only in his mid-50s at the time. When you’re that young, how exactly do you process something like this right away?

Everything maybe started to make more sense to me after seeing my maternal grandmother making it to 91 years old, before dying in 2019. I think it might have been around then where I had gotten a better understanding of how much I ought to value the time with family members who make it to a certain age. We received this news right before I had been accepted into Sheridan’s own Bachelor of Film and Television program. The celebratory mood didn’t exactly last very long, though I felt like it was giving me more incentive to ensure she’ll have something positive to look back upon in the coming days. After all, she’d looked out for me as I was growing up, and the last thing I’d want to end up is a disappointment.

Where I am now in life, I just wonder what she would even make of the kind of person I would grow up to be. With both my uncle and my grandmother on my father’s side now going away within only a few days of each other, and me feeling stagnant in life as is, I wonder what more can I offer up. Perhaps that’s the most overwhelming thing to grapple onto, especially when I think there’s only so much in the present that can be done. It’s all happening so fast, that you don’t even realize you’re keeping yourself stuck for so long – and that’s certainly not the kind of person our loved ones would have wanted.

By the time their funerals had taken place, I was perhaps a lot more stable than I was at first. Maybe it’s the ample time I had preparing for the moment to say a final farewell, or it could very well be the sentiment of wanting to ensure that I’m able to live my best in the circumstances. After all, it’s what they would have wanted most in life for someone like me, as I’m trying to get a better grasp on things. When I read my own tributes to them at their services, I felt their energy over me, as they look back on where I am now. Perhaps that’s enough of a motivating factor for me to say that I’m sorry I didn’t become the person they thought I was on my way to be, right away – only because this economy is keeping us here.

It won’t defeat me. I’ll just let it push me the right direction, and hopefully, that’s going to keep me going, and avoid procrastinating out of grief. I’m doing fine, maybe.

To my beloved uncle, Joseph Edwin Rebanal, and my beloved grandmother, Nora Santos Rebanal, thank you for everything. I hope you both are resting peacefully.