Parents.

It's never easy when parents die. For obvious reasons. They are the people closest to you; they know everything about you, and their love is unconditional. It's a big loss. There goes your comfort zone. Your safety net. Your Plan B.

In our culture, being an "ulila", an "orphan", is something that all children are warned about. "Take care of your parents, because if you don't, you will lose them, and when you lose them, everyone will walk all over you."

Parents protect you.

It's even harder when your parents are dying. To witness their pain. To be helpless. To want to protect them in return and yet be unable to.

My condolences to anyone and everyone who has lost a parent. Especially to those who are far from their parents, who have no means of closing that gap and paying their last respects to the people who raised them.

My condolences to my brother Z, who was raised by my grandmother, who is devastated by this feeling of helplessness.

My condolences to my mom.

My grandmother may not have raised us, but her spirit resounds in all of us her grandchildren, in the way we were raised by our parents her children, in the way we respect, the way we are.

We might not know much about her life or how she spent it, but she must have been an incredibly strong woman, to have single-handedly raised her children and some of her grandchildren, to have instilled such compassion in her children that it seeped through to us.

May God bless her and lessen her pain.