2020 June 16, 3:25 AM

Here is the speech I gave during my mother’s inurnment and the mass in her honor. I recorded it too, just to have it.

For the past month or so, my grief has been very public. Over Mother’s Day weekend, I published an essay in Vogue about my inability to see Mom during the Covid-19 pandemic, about the perfume we share. It’s this green tea scent from L’Occitane, a favorite of hers when we immigrated to the United States, when we survived the highs and lows of growing up together. Whenever I wear it, it makes me feel that she is by my side, with me. I’m not wearing it today, but I know she is here—with us.

Then I published another essay—one for the magazine Condé Nast Traveler—about the almost assured possibility that I wouldn’t be by Mom’s side at the end of her life. I wrote about how I’ve begun work on one of two new books. Knowing what was to come, I began a novel that imagines a mother and a son traveling the world together, a world that she and I do not get to see. Her health had taken a turn just a week before we went to press and it was tricky to write something that honored two simultaneous truths: my mother was alive, and my mother was dying. 

Writing is how I process. It’s how I remember things, commit the facts of our lives to memory. It’s how I have deciphered my anticipatory grief, this liminal feeling—this pain that said now, but also not yet. When I published my essays, many readers shared their condolences, their love, their prayers. I was worried that, once Mom actually died, their sympathy would run out. I am glad to be wrong.

In the past seventy-two hours, I’ve received so many messages and calls from friends and family and strangers all over the world. So many flowers and kind notes—even meal deliveries and alcohol. (Food and booze are truly the universal love languages.) People also asked me if I planned to take a break from my scheduled work and activities. I did not. Mom, I am sure, would have wanted me to keep going. 

Today, I still went to one of my book tour events where I read a passage about Mom. This book is dedicated to her, and so I’ve the chance to keep honoring her, by sharing her story, our story. One of her primary desires has always been for me to never hold back in pursuit of my dreams—goals I can achieve, goals I am now achieving, thanks to her. I celebrate her in my book’s pages, always in my writing—and thus, all my life. I will not stop now.

And yesterday, I marched in a protest, in support of causes and communities I believe in. Mom’s driving mission in life was always “to help people.” So, in an action of resistance, in a gathering of fifteen thousand people, I like to think she walked with us too—number fifteen thousand and one. After the rally, my friend Angel told me, “With your love for her, you are making miracles.”

I’ve felt so much love all weekend, since Saturday morning, when I found out belatedly that Mom breathed her last in this physical realm with us. My phone had died at around two-thirty in the morning, New York time—around the same time Mom’s vitals began to decline in Manila. Though I plugged my phone into a charger, it didn’t turn back on as it normally should. It remained shut off for the rest of the night, when Mom passed away serenely, when Dad and the rest of our family tried to reach me with their texts and calls (fifty missed calls from Dad’s number alone). 

When I woke up and saw the black mirror of my phone, my heart dropped. I cried and screamed, apologizing to Dad. “Don’t be sorry,” he assured me on a video call. He was wearing a mask and a face shield at the funeral parlor. “I’m not mad at you, of course not.” 

After all, he and my friends—whom I called one by one on a beautiful Brooklyn day—were all in agreement: Mom was the one to turn off my phone, to give me a peaceful night’s sleep, to ensure I’d be virtually surrounded by my beloveds once I heard the news.

Since it was Mom who was at work, I don’t think technology failed me this weekend. I think it serves us well now, coming together however we can in the middle of a pandemic to honor a woman we all love. It’s thanks to the internet, and the tech savvy of people she loved—still loves—that we can gather here today, despite disease and distance. Here, in New York, it’s about three o’clock in the morning. Mom used to yell at me for staying up late on the computer. Now, I think, I have a good excuse.

It’s also through technology that we can share stories about Mom. I’ve shared many of mine already, in my essays, my photographs, my book. I can tell stories about Mom’s life as I’ve witnessed it. But since we got to share only twenty-nine years together on this earth, and we weren’t together for each one, there are so many stories I don’t yet know. 

So I am lucky to have titas and titos, ninangs and ninongs, and Dad and our family, of course, who can hold her too in our collective memories. I can no longer count how many times I’ve been moved to tears while talking to the women she considers her sisters, who called me to share their love and the stories I’ve loved and the stories I’d never heard. We carry with us still the inside jokes and the difficult days and the joy of it all, the light Mom shared with us throughout her life, the fire we must keep burning.

Today, I received a message on Twitter from someone who briefly knew Mom. They were a patient of Dad’s who made regular visits to his clinic, where they often ran into Mom. “She always smiled at me,” they said. During a check-up, Mom saw them, mentioned they were looking healthy, and gave them a compliment on their new haircut. In a dark time, Dad’s patient said they felt touched by Mom’s kindness. “Even though I didn’t really know her well,” they said, “your mom brightened those few months when I saw her frequently. Coach May was a wonderful soul.”

These stories are a gift. I want to hear them all. It’s through stories that Mom still lives, that our loved ones are given life eternal. I am lucky that my life’s mission is to tell stories, a mission Mom has supported her whole life. Every word I write, every sentence I speak—in each one, she rings. I am even luckier to have had her as a mother, to be blessed with her memory and her inextinguishable love.

To close, I invite you all to join me in this daily mission: Tell her story. Do as Mom did—spread the gospel of compassion and generosity, believe in the radical love of a simple smile. To help others was her goal. By doing the same, we honor her every day while we are here, while we have the gift of life.