Watching Rain: A Short Essay on Grief
In the Philippines, where religion and spiritual folklore exist in the same space, there are plenty of presumptions about rain. You’re not supposed to use a certain umbrella color when it’s a storm. The damp grass smell will give you a stomach ache. However, one myth is a common folklore about a rare meteorological weather sensation: sunshowers. When the sun is out and the clouds are pouring or sprinkling rain, people say that it means that a mythical horse-hybrid creature, a tikbalang, is being wed. This type of weather, like the beast, is a tricky one; one that hardly happens but is full of strangeness. Many, outside of the Philippines, view rain as an interesting phenomenon. Some see it as the reason for their bad mood. Some look at it as a chance to dance and be reborn in the streets. Others want to exist alongside it, share a cup of coffee or two. It is a symbol of sorrow, of loneliness, something sad, but like the sunshower, perhaps it can also be something wonderful. For me, I can’t help but look at the rain sometimes as a sign from him.
In the spring of 2021, I lost my then-long-term boyfriend. It was sudden. Unexpected. One of those moments of ‘wrong place, wrong time’ that happens on the news, and you want to look away from the horrible tragedy, but sometimes, voyeuristically, you can’t. From an outside perspective, it was one of those. A news story. An unfortunate tweet with thousands of shares. I’ll spare the gory details, mainly because I wasn’t there to witness it. I was only there for the aftermath and the colossal collapsing of my world shortly after.
I’ve written my fair share of stories about grief. Google couldn’t tell me how to deal with it. There’s no good web answer for: “How do you cope with the unforeseen loss of the person you hoped to spend the rest of your life with before you even had your chance at forever?”. It’s a tough question, right? I’m about a year and a half into my new reality and when people ask me the how, it’s hard to answer. No folklore, no bible verse, no tacky Facebook post, no book on someone else’s grief could give me the exact answer I needed – and for a while, I had no idea what to do. I carried a tangled mess in my hands, and there was no instruction packet. Wikihow over simplified it. Self-help pamphlets didn’t understand all of it. There was no great lore on how a 20 year old college kid could get through something like this. A year and a half later, I am still picking up the pieces that shattered that one Monday morning.
I met him when I was 18, one month into my first year at undergrad. He was my first love, my first genuine love, far from the stupid surface-level love I felt with crushes on friends, the kind that took care of me properly and let me grow and promised me all the good and bad things that came with loving another person with the entirety of your heart. I got two and a half years when I wanted forever. The worst part is that he wanted that too. There is no worse feeling, dealing with a heartbreak that wasn’t on purpose.
There are a slew of complicated, hard-to-explain-over-brunch-when-someone-asks-how-you’re-doing parts of the grief experience that would take hundreds of pages to dive into. No bible, holy text length could equate to the mess of a collection someone would create trying to describe every little thing they feel and think and say when it comes to their grief. It is a journey with no end. Sentences with no punctuation, roads that go on and on. Grief is a funny thing, but when we talk about memory, trying to look back on the ‘thus far’ aspect of grief, it works in the most bizarre of ways. It is both beautiful and strange. A trick. A sunshower of an experience. In the early days it feels like an ongoing cycle, sifting through the vaults of your memories and replaying everything they’ve ever said to you. In the beginning, I could hear his laugh so clearly, feel the weight of his body take up the other side of the bed, smell the eucalyptus shampoo scents he’d leave on my clothes. I could replay over and over again the days we spent in tangled bedsheets, the nights of deliriously and happily wandering the downtown streets of our college city. The memories of us at 18 years old, kids, barely adults, navigating an exciting new companionship, completely unaware that we would become something so permanent. There were times, though, where he would feel like a distant whisper, details of his scarred hands and funny habits difficult to remember. I always hated those moments. Someone once asked me what we did for our first anniversary. I hated that I couldn’t immediately remember. I pushed the food around my plate, mentally trying to rewind back to years ago. Memory and grief are a complicated duo, but when it’s good to me, I am grateful.
During the time we were dating, there was something funny that would happen. When we planned out elaborate outings, very specific dates that weren’t spontaneous, it would always rain. Always. I remember leaving fancy restaurants we finally got to try after a long busy week or afternoons we’d spend at local one-time events, and the rain would be there. At first, we joked that perhaps it was a bad sign that we shouldn’t date, but as time went on and that stupid, silly, smiling boy of mine pulled me deeper and deeper, I knew it couldn’t have been bad. He used to call it our good luck days. We were college students, young and all over the place. We didn’t have the most luxury, but we made it work. When we walked out the door on those planned days and the rain would cover the streets, trickle down our faces, we knew the stars and the clouds were showering down on us.
When he passed, I forgot about it. Small details, things that were so inherently ours, sometimes slipped away as I tried so hard to remember the things that were clearly him. On the day of his birthday, a few months after, it rained. Not the whole day, but only during my hour-long drive from campus to his gravesite. That’s when I remembered. On the six month anniversary of his passing, it rained. It rained on our dating anniversary date, on the one year passing mark, and briefly on my second birthday without him. Memory no longer felt like something I was pulling into my present. It wasn’t and isn’t like opening a box, taking out echoes of the past one by one. In grief, memory has weaved through time and shown up in the most unexpected of ways. Before him, the rain meant nothing to me. After him, and beyond his life, the rain has only ever felt like him again, always arriving at the most pertinent of times.
Grief is an interesting thing. It can embody everything you feel, everything you wish you didn’t, and everything you thought you wouldn’t. I am no expert on grief, but I do know this. It does not look like the five stages. It looks like hours spent looking at the ceiling wondering why, crying in the shower, laughing at bad jokes. It’s screaming in your car while it’s parked in the driveway, thinking you look different when you probably don’t, not paying attention to the conversation, making dinner plans on a whim, making no plans for weeks, bad decisions, even more bad decisions, buying gifts and celebrating birthdays, stargazing with friends you just met, potlucks with friends you’ve had for ages, having a drink in the afternoon, maybe two, wishing you could turn back time, learning how to go a day without wanting desperately to turn back time. Perhaps the five stages are part of the universal grief experience, but the details, the little things, are so much more than you think. Not every day we experienced together was a sunshower, nor has any rain on important days been a sunshower. Sunshowers are rare by nature, a tricky little phenomenon that makes anyone look at rain differently. Even in folklore, we have tried to come up with reasons for why this happens the way it does – just as I have done with the rain that has happened after. Perhaps they are all coincidences, or serendipitous accidents my grief-clouded mind has made connections with. Perhaps it means nothing or everything or somewhere in between. In the Philippines, people have tried to associate the strangeness of rain with an even stranger reason. Grief works similarly. It is painful and unbearable at the same time it is moving and hopeful. Rain in the sun.
