Unyo

Unyo died a week ago. He was an indomitable high school classmate — an icon. In the Philippines, death is not rushed. We hold a wake that lasts a full week before the funeral: a long, deliberate pause in ordinary life. The body is carefully cleaned, prepared, and displayed with quiet dignity. Dressed in their best clothes, surrounded by flowers, framed family photographs, and the steady presence of relatives and friends, the deceased is never left alone. People take turns staying awake through the nights, keeping company, sharing stories, praying, laughing through tears, and simply being there. It is an act of love and respect, a refusal to abandon someone even in death.

Just now, on the last night of the wake, my classmates gathered together. They spent the evening singing at a karaoke bar: voices rising, old songs filling the air, the kind of noisy, familiar closeness that only people who grew up together can create. I felt a sharp wave of nostalgia mixed with grief. I was not there. I could not sit among them, could not add my voice to the songs, could not fully show my sorrow or stand in quiet solidarity with the people who once shared the same classrooms, the same jokes, the same restless teenage years. The distance made my grief feel incomplete, as if part of it was trapped on the other side of the ocean.

That moment struck me with unexpected force. It is a feeling so many Filipinos carry when they live far from home. We leave, often for the sake of opportunity, stability, or family duty. In doing so, we make quiet sacrifices on both sides of the world. We leave behind parents, siblings, childhood friends. At the same time, we sometimes neglect the new relationships we try to build in the places we settle, because part of our heart remains tethered to what we left. We live in a constant state of divided loyalty: present in one place, aching for another.

And yet the hardest truth is this: once you leave, you can never truly come home. Either you have changed in ways that make the old familiar streets feel slightly foreign, or the people you left behind have grown into different versions of themselves. The places themselves shift: old hangouts close, new buildings rise, the rhythm of the neighborhood alters. The spot where you used to laugh with friends after class is no longer quite the same. Home becomes something you carry inside you rather than a fixed location you can return to unchanged.

Unyo’s wake, and the classmates singing on its final night, reminded me of both the beauty and the cost of that distance. We keep the traditions alive from afar as best we can: lighting candles, saying prayers, sending messages. But some absences cannot be bridged. And still, we continue. We remember. We grieve in our own incomplete way. And we try to honor the ones we lost by carrying a piece of home with us, even when home itself has become a place we can visit but never fully re-enter.