Borrowed Sadness, Offered in Love

It feels strange to admit this:
I cry not only because I have lost someone I love,
but because I feel the sorrow of those who have lost what they cannot replace.

My grief is real, yes.
But it is also borrowed.

It is the borrowed sadness of watching my sister carry a pain that has come in waves, one after another, without mercy.

Our mother died in March 2024.
Her husband followed in November 2024.

And then 2025 arrived not with celebration, but with devastation.

She welcomed the new year with a sorrow too heavy for words. Life had already been difficult, already fractured in ways that only families truly understand. She had been trying to survive heartbreak, disappointment, and strained relationships.

And then, as if her heart had not endured enough, death came again.

This time, it took Marionne Joy.

I also carry borrowed sadness for my older nephew.

Because I cannot imagine this kind of loneliness:
to lose a father, to watch the world change, and to cling to the nearest person who still feels like home.

For him, that person was his brother.

They processed their grief together.
They built a small world where only the two of them stood — two boys learning courage through sorrow, finding strength in companionship, making plans, dreaming forward.

And now, one of them has been left alone.

That kind of silence is unbearable to even picture.

I cannot make sense of why God has taken three members of my family in such a short span of time.

And I find myself asking questions I barely know how to hold:

Why him?
Why not me?

I have been vocal about my weariness, about not wanting a long life. And yet the ones who seem most innocent, most full of light, are the ones called home.

I do not have answers.

But as Christians, grief does not cancel faith — it becomes the place where faith is tested, where surrender is hardest, and where prayer becomes nothing more than a cry.

All I have are trembling thoughts, and the language of offering.

Because don’t we always give the best when we offer something to God?

The freshest and ripest fruits.
The young and strong livestock.
The flowers that smell the sweetest.

In Scripture, the Lord asks for the first and the finest — not because He needs them, but because they signify love, trust, and reverence.

And sometimes I wonder, with a heavy heart,
if heaven receives the purest and most beautiful souls first.

The Bible tells us of Enoch, a man who walked with God, and then suddenly was no more, because God took him (Genesis 5:24).

And in the Book of Wisdom, we are given words that are both mysterious and consoling:

“He was taken away… lest evil change his understanding or deceit beguile his soul.”
(Wisdom 4:11)

There is a kind of mercy we cannot yet comprehend — that perhaps God, in His tenderness, gathers some souls early, before this world can wound them further.

Maybe God welcomed Marionne because he was precious, innocent, and ready —
a life so short, but so full of light.

And so I return to where I began — with borrowed sadness.

I carry it for my sister, who has endured too much in too little time.
I carry it for my nephew, who has lost the person who made his grief bearable.
I carry it for our family, still learning how to breathe again.

This sadness is not mine alone, and perhaps that is what love does:
it mourns with those who mourn.

Maybe that is what borrowed sadness becomes in the end —
an offering too.

Even if I do not understand why Marionne Joy was taken so soon,
I entrust what I cannot hold anymore into the hands of God.

Rest now, bunsoy.
And may the Lord also hold the ones you left behind.