I never really got to know my grandparents. When I was seven years old, my mother and I moved from the Philippines to live with my father in New York City. As you can imagine, a long distance relationship spanning an entire continent was a little difficult for me to maintain at that age. I only have a faint recollection of them, knowing them only through pictures. Even today, I can not even clarify whether my memories with my grandparents are actual memories, or something I relived through a photograph.

On my father's side, I am one of 29 grandchildren. My grandfather passed away before I was born, leaving my grandmother and 11 children - my father being the tenth. I remember my Lola (meaning grandma in Tagalog - Philippine language) Loling as a soft, and gentle woman. She had this incredible smile. Her eyes would light up, her cheekbones would rise, and the corners of her eyes would wrinkle into deep valleys of skin. I don't doubt that she loved me, but it saddens me that I can not recall a concrete memory of her words to me. The only thing I have is a photograph of the both of us. We are sitting on a white metal chair, in the porch of her house in Capiz. It was my last summer in the Philippines, and we were having a reunion. I was seven at the time, sitting on her lap. I was fairly large for my age, so I'm sure I was crushing her to some extent. In the picture, she was smiling that deep smile, and I was shyly looking into the camera. Now that I think about it, I remember feeling anxious, wanting the photo session to end quickly so I could go back to playing with my other cousins. I was not hugging her in the shot. I wish I had.

She died a few months after our first visit to the Philippines. I had just turned 14. When we got the phone call, my father plopped down on the black sofa and sank into its softness. Tears started rolling down his cheeks and I was scared to see my father cry for the first time in front of me. My mother walked out of the kitchen, and stood there for a few moments before asking what was wrong. I don't even remember if she went over and hugged him. I don't think I did. Showing emotion has always been difficult for us. We knew love through discipline.

At that time, my entire family was living in a large 10 story apartment complex in Woodside, Queens called Park Plaza. We went upstairs to the fourth floor to Tita (aunt) Baby's apartment. She was the oldest of the siblings living in the United States and therefore reigned as matriarch of our clan. She was cooking when we arrived, and the rest of my aunts, uncles, and cousins were scattered in the living room grieving in their own way. I was not crying, but my younger cousins were. I remember feeling guilty, feeling as though I was a bad granddaughter for not being able to shed any tears for my dear grandmother. I was sick that week; I had a slight cold and rationalized that the numbness I felt was due to sinus pain. The truth is I just did not know how to grieve for this woman. I knew she was my grandmother, but she was also a woman I did not know. She was a stranger in a childhood picture, someone I met while on vacation in the Philippines.

Tita Baby told me that my body had sensed my grandmother's passing, even from thousands of miles away. My sickness was a sign of her death, she told me. She said that she herself had felt a little under the weather. To this day, I dread falling ill, even if it's just a little cold - for fear that someone close to me will die.

The most distraught person was my Tito (uncle) Edwin, because his youngest daughter Erica, never had the opportunity to meet Lola Loling. My father was bewildered. He could not understand why her heart failed, when just a few months ago when we were there for vacation, she looked strong and healthy. Tita Baby theorized that she was waiting to see us one last time before passing. And that thought only made me feel even more guilty. We did not visit for seven years since the migration. Was she suffering all those years? If we didn't come, would she still be alive? If we didn't come, Erica would have been able to see her.

The first time I grieved for my Lola Loling was a few weeks ago, when I read Liz Elayne's post about her grandmother. Her profound love for her grandmother was something I treasured, envied, wanted for myself. Reading about her memories about the laughter and love they shared brought an onslaught of emotion to me. I was so deep in my own sadness and self-pity. I was so deep in my longing for a love like that.

I knew that I could have forged a relationship with my grandmother. Everyone in my entire family expressed so much love for her. This past summer, we went on our second visit to the Philippines. We stayed at her house in Capiz for about a week. Tita Panda was living there now, on her own. Her oldest son was married and lived a town or so away. Her only daughter Manang (older sister - way to address older sisters/cousins) Laarni was married and had moved to Manila, a few islands away. And her youngest son moved to Manila as well. My grandmother was fond of saint statues, and in the dining room stood an almost life-size statue of Jesus' crucifixion, flanked by smaller statues of the Virgin Mary and Santo Nino. We ate meals, with Jesus' thorned bleeding head among us. The statues used to be in Lola's bedroom. On our first trip there, when my brother was five years old, he had asked why there were small dead people with their hands cut off in that bedroom. Lola let out a little laugh when she heard him and told him that their hands were cut off so that we could do their good works for them.

The morning we left, Tito Cesar drove us on his motorized tricycle to the cemetery where Lola Loling was buried. Her coffin was in a tomb, a burial vault made of white stone. The greenery was not maintained and long blades of grass caressed my legs. The cemetery was crowded with tombs like her own, stacked one on top of the other. The ones by the entrance made a huge wall of tombs, creating a barrier between this land of the dead and the rest of Capiz. She slept next to her husband. To her side was the miniature tomb of her great grand-daughter Samantha, Manang Laarni's child who died in infancy. I had brought a camera along, wanting to keep a photograph of where my grandmother lay. But when I stood in front of her tomb, reading her name "Dolores Fernandez" engraved in white stone, parts of it weathered, chipping, and turning grey, all I could do was stand in silence. My uncle was the one who spoke aloud, introducing us. My mother spoke, telling her we were here to see her. I stopped myself from crying, but I was overwhelmed by how close we were to one another at that very moment. I spoke to her in silence. I told her I loved her, I missed her, and that I was sorry I didn't know her as well as I should.

We walked out of the cemetery. Tito Cesar stopped me before I sat in the tricycle, and pulled off sticky burrs that had attached themselves to my skirt. On the ride back, he told us a story of Tito Jhun's trip a few years back. He had gotten drunk, and slept in the cemetery next to Lola's tomb. He laughed when he mentioned that my cousins were scared to follow him into the cemetery in the middle of the night. I let out a huge exhale, not caring about all the dirt flying into my lungs because of our open air ride on the tricycle. I read later that when certain plants die off, burrs hold on to the dead plant until the following season.