Days to Mourning Glory

"Days to Mourning Glory"

August 25, 2025

A Memoir by Yang

@pamiganaka

As I spectate my vision to the luminescence of the moon, I realize that it is almost the middle of the night. For days, I never notice that I absentmindedly began to see the essence of peace only in the warmth of dusk and dawn. For weeks, for months, and until this very time, it became years, years of escaping the wonders of my mind.

Darkness is my one and only friend, and I embrace its solace like it is mine.

In the momentum of melancholia rushing over me, I am suddenly driven back to that night. Like an unknown trance of metamorphosis, the cascading mist runs down along the streams of my eyes.

Since the pandemic constrained the remaining years of junior high school to no longer take place at the halls of Ivy, a few of my classmates have decided to host an online conversation to cure the immense effects of boredom through playing around. It was a renowned game of lies in the name of finding out the hidden mafia among us.

Little did they know, I was already a master of that game from another perspective, a liar after all this time.

While some were determined to unfold the mysteries of this game, I was behind my screen with the typical persona that I have always showed them before. As usual, I have surrendered to my innermost numbness, alone in the quiet corners of the dining room. I was the only one awake in the premises of our household. Another day was just another time of flowing away from the pillars of hope, and sleeping could never be the remedy to mend it all.

In the middle of fake hilarity, a phone call, with a reverberating noise of nothing but despair, has compelled my aunt to storm out of her room and surge near my forlorn disposition. Before she even got the chance to finish her switchblade hearsay, I immediately cried the blues. That was the moment I knew. With an agonized heart and a shattered faith, I have shed tears like a rivulet over and over again.

"Wala na si mama mo.” She whimpered in the most heart-wrenching declaration.

Just like that, my entire world has fallen into its fragmented pieces beyond repair. Like a candlelit rushlight evanescing its own luminosity, I grasped thereafter the edging truth of surrealism. The search for longing is indeed over. Like an exiled antihero in the furthermost woods of Neverland, I am in the most anguished cages of misery and morose ruins of self-destruction.

Locked, abandoned, left behind, and has never gone out to this very day.

Five wandering years already passed by, yet the grieving torture of bereavement is still withstanding from within. Grief is such a drastic ailment with no cure and a forgone conclusion of what lies even more in reality. For all one knows, is there something to yearn for in living when the very last person who sincerely understands everything about you has freed herself above the bounds of the great unknown?

Before the day of farewells and goodbyes, there was a lingering battle between the dearest person I have ever known against the daunting corners of a hospital ward. My mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 Breast Cancer, a metastatic suffering extended by its lethal severity. Without wishing to be included in the personal concerns of others, she has tolerated every pound of excruciating pain, every shadow of a fading tomorrow, and every sharp-edged step towards her limits, all by herself.

No one has ever expected the end of it all. Losing a beloved figure is a tormenting truth that is unfathomable to finally let go even with the last words of acceptance and apperception, most especially if that person of character is the only one whom you can lean onto in this world of otherworldly expectations, stereotypical people, and unjust mistreatment. In the same way that my father breathed his last more than a decade ago, succumbing to witness history repeat itself is similar to a dash of salt gushing over one’s long-standing wounds.

The wounds that will never heal are deepened and excavated with another patch of mirroring affliction.

On another day of facing the unvarnished truth of reality, keeping company by the calming breeze and evergreen meadow in the gardens of eternal rest, my eyes blur towards the memorial of my parents with their engraved names in a shade of gold, but for some reason, its shimmer appears to be a forsaken ray towards an only daughter’s wishful thinking. Like a flashback from a cinematic epilogue, I relive the scenic view of my memories with her.

When I was at the peak of adolescence, my mother gifted me the simplest grace of an introspective, joyous, and one-of-a-kind life. Because of her, I have committed to a memory of conquering the ultimate rendezvous of my fears, the very reason that I have found the courage to withdraw from seeking the validation of others who are forcing me to be someone I am not. Being by her side, I have ascertained to always stand by righteousness and whatever the truth is, even if I would become a crestfallen oddball to many. In every ascending horizon of doubt, she is my only reason. No matter what possibility, in every split second of my life, she is there. She never left, not until everything happened.

If a parallel universe exists, I set one’s heart to wish for a chance to be with her all over again.

This wreath of flowers was meant to be a crown on her head. At this moment, I am offering it beyond her final resting haven to where she was led.