My brother would have been 26 today. Do people really stop aging when they die? Two years in twenties don't make a substantial change in your memory. But it's going to be strange to think of him if I make it to forties. Will he still be twenty-four in my memory? Or will I anticipate how he'd look/be like if he was in his thirties?

As time passes by, I've been finding myself wanting to remember more and more than to forget. When somebody passes away, the number of memories you have with them becomes finite. Your own capacity to remember is finite, too. The real struggle is to keep these finite memories in the finite capacity of your brain as you keep making more and more memories with other people/things. If I didn't have the voice recordings of my brother singing, will I still remember his voice? The recollection of episodic memory is much harder when it comes to voice. This could be an evolutionary adaptation. For pattern recognition, the face of a saber-toothed tiger and a generic growl was probably enough. There's nothing to dissect there. Or maybe we're just not paying enough attention to things that deserve more attention.

While it is true that shared rituals and support systems make the process of grieving easier, grief also has core elements of a very personal journey. The necessity of community in grief is to be with a person in their individual and unique journey, not to dictate or rush the healing process. The duality of grief is this, the aspects of community and oneself. Also, the tension between the ache of absence and the warmth of remembrance, to miss or to remember.

All grief becomes disenfranchised over time. - Kenneth Doka

As the world moves on and the initial wave of sympathy subsides, even the most profound losses can become invisible to others, leaving those still grieving to feel unseen in a world that seems to have moved on, forgetting that healing from loss doesn't follow a universal timeline. As the months pass by, I keep realizing how true this is when it comes to my grief and actually specially my mom's. It is unfortunate how society has expectations on who can grieve and when. The validation of loss wanes over time, making the grief become disenfranchised.

The importance of remembrances of someone who has passed is often talked about, but not so much about the importance of the absence of the said person. I like that I have all these photographs, voice messages, song covers or just objects he collected that I can pivot on when it comes to remembering him, but also the tangible presence of his absence is almost divine.

This absence manifests in unexpected ways - the WhatsApp contact that no longer appears on your contact list, the Instagram feed that no longer updates, your airport pick-up driver being a different person. It's in these moments of stark awareness that the full weight of loss truly settles in, yet paradoxically, it's also where a profound connection to the departed emerges. In navigating this absence, we discover new dimensions of our relationship with them, ones that continue to evolve even after they're gone.

The profound realizations in grief come from acknowledging this absence and letting it shape us. We grow around our grief. The goal isn't to shrink it.