A sister remembers

My mother died on Jan. 9, 2026, at 102. Nine months later, finally going through her letters—thousands of them—I found pages I had not seen in decades: copies of things I wrote after my brother Enrique Jr. died in 1978, at 27. My mother had kept them.

I read what I wrote. It dawned on me that she had pocketed my grief and had been carrying it for almost 50 years. She had visited and revisited my pain, absorbing it without a word to me.

My brother, Enrique Jr., was one year dead on Nov. 9, 1979. I wrote, then, about the drive to work in my father’s old black Toyota, a Simon & Garfunkel tape playing, the city sliding past on the way to the Supreme Court, where I worked as my father’s special assistant. He was chief justice. That quiet commute was the best part of my day, before the frazzled routine of the office swallowed it. I thought about Enrique Jr.’s Japanese girlfriend, Hiromi, alone now, and told myself I would call her. I rarely did.

That year, everyone in the family carried Enrique Jr. in different ways. My mother’s mouth quivered when she spoke of him. My brother Eric missed the clowning, the late nights when the whole house sat up until 2 or 3 in the morning while Enrique Jr., in his old white T-shirt, made fun of everyone. My brother Emmanuel had lost his closest friend, the one he went to the movies with, ate ice cream with. My sister Mia, whom my brothers fiercely guarded, was quieter.

We siblings rarely spoke of it together. We would sit wordlessly around his grave at Loyola Memorial Park. Then we prayed and stood and talked of this or that, and never mentioned the horrible emptiness inside.

By the second anniversary of Enrique Jr.’s death, life had strangely fixed itself a little. I had come out of the depression of losing my brother and was teaching again part-time. I asked myself, almost suspiciously, why things had settled—was it friends rallying around me, or my husband Pietro’s calm insistence that only a few things in life are truly earthshaking: birth, death, marriage? I turned 31 that year and, for the first time, more or less liked the person I had become.

What I understood then was that Enrique Jr.’s whole way of living had been to spend time with people—not just family, but clerks, drivers, secretaries, janitors, classmates, my father’s staff. He listened as carefully to a security guard as to a schoolmate. He was, simply, present with everyone, not hurrying. It was the lesson he left behind, and it was somehow enough.

On the fifth anniversary of his death, I stood at Loyola and spoke for the family to the relatives and friends gathered there. I remarked how grief, essentially a private matter, is rendered more difficult for a public man. After five years, when a father confronts the death of a son, even the power of thought is helpless against the transformation that death can impose upon him.

My father told us, “The boy I loved so dearly has been torn from me, you see, and you expect me to remain the same—I loved him as few men love their children, you know that.”

But for him, the tireless scholar, there was always the life of the mind. And to be thrown into the intricacies of public office seemed almost a deliverance. He established a foundation in my brother’s name, funding law scholarships at the University of the Philippines. In giving others the chance at the life his son had been blessed with, Dad found a measure of solace, if only a little.

For my mother, it was the contemplation of a beautiful object, a strain of music, or a finely turned phrase that made her wish Enrique Jr. were there to share it. Yet in that instant she knew he was probably in more magnificent company.

My siblings and I remembered Enrique Jr. in his ordinary, funny, unglamorous moments, and took from him the same lesson: that people, and the time you give them, are what matter.

I wrote, that year, about how being away from home—Mia and I were both abroad—felt like its own small death, a dismembering. And yet I also wrote that skies carry messages, if you let them: that life goes on.

Reading these pages now, I understand what I could not see then: that grief does not end; it becomes part of the life that follows.

My mother lived to 102, nearly half a century of it without her son. She kept my mourning of him in a drawer and never spoke of it. Somewhere in my mother’s devotion is the same lesson my brother left us—that it is the people we give our time to, even after they are gone, who make up a life.

Enrique Jr. has been gone close to 50 years. My mother has joined him. And now I am the one sifting through the letters she left behind.

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Estela Anna Fernando Reyes is the eldest child of the late Chief Justice Enrique M. Fernando and the late Emma Quisumbing Fernando, lawyer and bar topnotcher.