by Glen Andrea Omandam
“December 18, 2025, 10:23 a.m.,” someone in the hospital room announced as I held onto my mother’s lifeless hand watching her take her last breath. I felt tears run down my cheeks and my body trembling. I felt numb. My mind could not comprehend her death. The weight of the loss was too heavy for me to carry all at once.
A few months later, from Pagadian to Dumaguete City, I went back to university. I despised how normal everything seemed. I hated how I was still expected to excel, as though nothing happened.
The hardest part about grief is it is invisible. You cannot walk into a clinic and ask for a medical certificate that says, “This student is grieving.” Indeed, some who grieve become clinically depressed, yet some move through life on autopilot and could even make a joke with friends. People often assume that if you can laugh, you must be okay; I used to think that too.
I laughed until my stomach hurt and cried myself to sleep. I celebrated achievements while wishing I could tell my mother Maria Rollen. I posed in photographs and broke down minutes later. Grief can look like a smile.
For a long time, I felt alone. Then, during organization work, I had a conversation with a friend who recently lost a loved one too. As we talked, I heard familiar things: the numbness, the exhaustion, and even the guilt of laughing. For the first time in months, I felt understood. I realized I was not alone.
There were students around me who also sat through lectures while thinking about hospital rooms. Students listening to Anatomy & Physiology class, while discussing the disease that killed their beloved. Students who take examinations while grieving their Lola, their Papa, their Ate, or even a barkada. They looked perfectly fine, just like me.
When someone asks, “How are you?” it often feels easier to utter “I’m okay.” Not because I am, but because “I’m not okay” will not bring my mother back. Grief just feels too overwhelming for small talk. There is no simple response that encapsulates the emotions.
We often discover parts of ourselves through the people we meet, yet less often do we speak of the parts we lose when they are gone. I know this, because I live with it every day. Grief split my life into a before and after.
I have also come to appreciate Silliman University’s culture of care, where mental health initiatives and the strong sense of community affirm that vulnerability is part of being human, not weakness.
People often ask how I am, truthfully, there is no simple answer. A part of me is still kneeling in that hospital room, holding my mother’s hand as I watch her last breath. The rest of me is keeping up with deadlines, while learning how to live a life she could no longer witness.
