Rose-Colored Grief: On Post-Election Mourning

Words will not be able to do justice to the grief we are at odds with right now.

It has been a week since the majority of the election results came in, but like gray clouds hanging heavily in the otherwise vibrant blue sky, the disappointment still lingers. We have tried to alleviate the sorrow with memes and humor, a very Filipino way to cope, I’m proud to say. However, we would be lying if we said the temporary band-aid of playful banter has remedied the wound that has pierced too deep and has healed too little over time. So, please, allow us to cry. Allow us to mourn for a government we could have had, but didn’t.

The world is not exactly kind to the young people who voice their opinions. They think our judgment invalid because we, and I quote, ‘’were not there”. We were not there. But that does not exempt us from learning about it. We learn all the time. That is the beauty of history. It is there for us to learn from and so we do not make the same mistake twice. Us not being alive to witness it does not diminish the struggles of those who were there. Just because this side of history is ugly, does not mean it did not happen. It only means that it is now within our capability to learn from it.

They say there are five stages of grief– denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Five. As if grief is something that is manufactured in an assembly line, processed and packaged, until finally sent out in cardboard boxes to be shipped all over the world. We do not simply move on, we learn. Grief is a process for sure, it’s just not a neat, cookie-cutter kind of process. Sometimes grief is being sad about all the time and effort people put into fighting for a better country, but being happy you got to be a part of it regardless.

Years from now, we’ll be able to tell the next generation we were here. We will show them the pictures and we will play them the videos. We won’t criticize them for having opinions of what happened today. We will let them learn. Whether we like it or not, what has happened will inevitably become history. It will be written down in books and will be immortalized on the internet. People in the future will talk about it and we will let them. Gone will be the days where we chastise young people for using their voices. We will learn so that they will.

We are still grieving. Maybe we always will. But grief does not have to be a bad thing. And it certainly does not have to yield pessimism or foster hostility. Like history, grief can be a learning experience. It is sad that it has to come to this, from a loss as deeply felt and devastating as this, but we should not let history be rewritten again. Doing so will only drive the dagger deeper into the flesh. What we need to do is not to lose hope.

So keep grieving. And fight anyways.