In every family, there’s an unspoken arrangement about grief.
One sibling will show up for everyone’s funeral. One sibling will be absent from them all. And one will die alone.
At first glance, this might seem like a riddle, a morbid curiosity scrolling through your feed that you move past without a second thought. But sit with it, and it begins to feel less like a punchline and more like a quiet prophecy, a tragic, haunting one.
I thought about this recently as I looked back on my childhood memories, and an echo of silence that’s only grown louder over the years. We’re a bit spread out now, not by distance but by different lives, different time priorities, different phases of life. I send the occasional meme; someone reacts with a heart. Sometimes days go by without a word. Sometimes no one responds at all.
And yet, despite the quiet, I can’t help but wonder. Who will show up for the others? I don’t know who should go first or last in this unspoken arrangement. All I know is, there’s always someone who’ll be there. Someone who’ll light the candles, who’ll prepare the food without being asked. Someone who, even in the years when loss hasn’t touched them directly, knows how to prepare for it, how to carry that quiet weight.
Then there’s the one who will be absent, not out of neglect, but because absence has become a default. Maybe it’s the one who gets caught up in the rush of life, who forgets to reach out until it’s too late, or maybe it’s the one who’s quietly withdrawn, always with the excuse of “next time.” The ones who forgive them too easily might one day feel the sting of their absence when it matters most.
And me? I don’t know which one I’ll become yet. Will I be the one who shows up, the one who stays present? Or will I be the one who fades away in silence, like a message left unread? Time, it seems, is the only thing that will tell.
I’m not sure which sibling I’ll become yet. Maybe that’s what disturbs me most.
There’s no manual for how to become the one who dies alone. No signpost appears one day to say, “You are now the forgotten one.”
It happens slowly, over time, in the gaps between family reunions, in the messages half-written and left unsent, in the miscommunications that linger because someone always said, “I’ll call later,” and never did.
We like to think of Filipino families as tight-knit, as warm circles of support. And in theory, we are. But in practice, we are held together by threadbare group chats, fading wedding photos, and unspoken grievances nobody wants to confront. Our mourning may be loud, but our alienation is quiet.
As a culture, we are no strangers to rituals—lamay, novenas, the pa-siyam. But for all the customs we perform in grief, we avoid discussing death as though the very mention of it might hasten its arrival. We grieve with abundance, but often love with conditions. You earn your place back. You explain yourself. You apologize first.
But death doesn’t wait for apologies.
In the past year alone, I’ve heard far too many stories of people who died quietly, uncles found days after their last messages went unread, neighbors whose wakes were attended by only a handful of relatives, or none at all. I think of a 27-year-old from Narra who left an empty chair at the dinner table, unanswered questions, and nothing more.
We keep repeating how young he was, how tragic it is, how unexpected. But we don’t say it out loud, because we thought we had more time.
We always think we have more time. More time to visit. More time to reconcile. More time to heal the wounds we think will last forever. And so, we wait. We assume someone else will reach out. Someone else will call first. Someone else will show up at the funeral and say the things we should have said ourselves.
In Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Eddie, the main character, learns the hard way that there is no more time to reconcile the regrets of his life. His journey through Heaven brings him face-to-face with the people whose lives he touched without ever realizing how deeply.
Albom writes, “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and let it come in.” I think about how much we take love for granted until it’s gone, and how we don’t realize what we should’ve said until it’s too late.
Until, one day, we’re left with only a photo, a memory, and the haunting awareness that our silence, too, had consequences.
The sibling who dies alone isn’t always the one who wanted it that way. Sometimes, it’s the one who grew tired of asking to be understood. Sometimes, it’s the one we loved too quietly, whose absence we only recognize when it’s too late.
Eddie meets the people who shaped his life, and through them, he sees his own impact on the world in a way he never could have while alive. The book teaches us that the small acts—the ones we overlook or dismiss, are what truly matter. Albom writes, “You can’t be loved if you don’t love yourself,” reminding us that giving love is the greatest gift we can offer to others. And in a way, showing up, whether for a funeral or just to reach out, is one of the purest expressions of self-love.
This write-up isn’t asking for grand gestures or sweeping reconciliations. I’m not asking anyone to undo decades of hurt with a single phone call.
But maybe, just maybe, it’s a reminder to check who’s been missing lately. Send that meme. Reply with more than just a heart emoji.
Remember that grief doesn’t wait for the funeral, and sometimes, neither does forgetting.
We all want someone to show up.
And if this riddle holds any truth, the least we can do is make sure we’re not the ones who waited too long to decide which sibling we’ll become.