I’ve been grieving my sister’s death for about four months and I feel guilty because it seems I’ve somewhat adapted to this reality—a world without Victoria, or at least, a world in which she once lived but is now dead. Her first hundred days postmortem was around her birthday, so based on Buddhist beliefs, her soul has peaced out into the next stage of the cycle.
If somehow her soul had been lingering on earth, then at this point she is probably gone now. But to me, she has been gone for a long time already.
Although I addressed her body directly during the eulogy, I didn’t feel her presence at the funeral even when I saw her oddly flattened and reshaped (perhaps from the brain autopsy), grayish face in her coffin. She was long gone by that point. I didn’t feel her. All I felt was the presence of Presbyterians who were all too eager to use Vic’s death to denounce Islam, Buddhism, and individualism and freedom in favor of “conservative family values.”
She is dead now. And life goes on. It hurts to think that. I guess if I were dead I would want my loved ones to honor my memory but then I would want them to go back to thriving in their lives. I wouldn’t want them to be super hung up over my death. It would be really lame to watch them mope for like twenty years from the afterlife.
Beaches still make me sad. Because they remind me of losing her.
I’m tired of my face hurting from crying so much. I don’t want to cry over her anymore. I don’t mean this with anger. Just in the sense that I love, loved, and will love her. But she is dead now. Her own story ended and is now only filtered through the lenses of the people who knew her.
Perhaps the very act of writing this means I am not just throwing away her existence or the fact that she once existed.
Maybe writing this is both an act of remembering and an act of moving on.
Maybe writing this is an act of love, both for the Victoria that once breathed and lived, and for the Victoria that is dead and gone.
Eden Onpeng 
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