28/08/2026
“Kumusta ka na, Sir Anton?”
A simple question from a former classmate in my Master’s Degree, but somehow, it made me realize something.
I suddenly remembered why I was rushing to finish my Master’s Degree in the first place. I wanted to give Mama another moment she never got to have.
When I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree, she was already at the verge of death. Hindi nya ako nasamahan maglakad sa stage. Kaya siguro, when I started my Masters, I carried this quiet urgency inside me. I wanted to finish it while there was still time, so she could see me once again in a graduation gown. But life had other plans.
There were many times when I had to pause because tuition had to compete with Mamang’s medicines, laboratory tests, hospital needs, and everything else that comes with trying to keep someone you love alive. I’m self supporting kaya medyo mahirap.
Mistulang naibaon kona sa limot yung mga naumpisahan kong yon. The Master’s Degree. Even the almost two years I spent in Law School. Graduate narin sana ako ngayon. And somehow, parang nawalan narin ng saysay. Because the person I was doing all of it for was no longer here to see me finish.
And perhaps that is why, for a while, I wasn’t sure if I still wanted to redeem those dreams. I still don’t know. I’m not sure if I will finish everything I once promised myself.
But maybe I am slowly learning that not every dream has to be completed exactly the way we originally imagined it to still be meaningful.
Then she told me: “Thank you, Sir Anton. I saw and watched everything from that day onward. Your love for your Mama made me love my Mama as well. That day when I watched your video, I started loving my parents more. You inspired me so much, and I know other young kids as well.”
I honestly didn’t know what to say. Because while I was thinking that Mama’s story ended when she died, someone reminded me that perhaps it didn’t.
Maybe some stories don’t end with death. Maybe they continue in the people who were changed by the way we loved someone.
Mamang is still gone. I still miss her every day. There are still moments when the absence is painfully ordinary, the instinct to tell her something, the desire to hear her voice, the realization that there will be no more “Mang” on the other side of the phone.
But hearing someone tell me that loving my mother made her love her own parents a little more gave me a different way of looking at my grief.
Perhaps this is one of the few beautiful things death cannot take away from us, the love that a person taught us can continue to exist even after the person is gone.
Mama may never see me finish my Master’s Degree. She may never see me return to Law School. She may never sit beside me in another graduation photograph.
But perhaps her greatest contribution to my life was never supposed to be witnessing what I would become. It was teaching me why I wanted to become it in the first place.
And maybe that is what I am beginning to understand now. Sometimes, we think we honor our parents by achieving everything they once dreamed for us. But perhaps we honor them even more by carrying forward the values they planted in us, by becoming kinder, more responsible, more compassionate, and more intentional with the people we still have.
And maybe, just maybe, that is how some mothers continue to mother us, even after they are gone.
