“Who was that woman, fussing about how she hadn’t fixed herself in the mirror? How ridiculous!”

We could laugh about it then, but days earlier, many of us lost all humor at what was taking place.

It was hard to tell who was talking from the little boxes on my MacBook screen that Thursday morning in May. Among the familiar faces of extended family and in-laws were complete strangers.

Then a man’s voice, an in-law in New Jersey, wedged on the couch between his wife and daughter, who just caught herself midyawn: “Who’s that next to you, the one with a mask? Is that Ate? Hello, Ate!”

His voice overlapped with an aunt’s voice, in Chicago, who was instructing her sister in Toronto to switch from her iPad to a laptop so she could see everyone.

“I think I’ll stick to my phone,” said their brother, who could be seen on his couch at home in California, but who proceeded to loudly call his teen son’s name: “Can you bring over your laptop?”

I could see my mother seated in front of the TV at her house, where my sister thoughtfully cast the Zoom call so she wouldn’t have to squint. She was quietly complaining that she couldn’t hear anything.

In one of the boxes, an unfamiliar older woman, a man presumably her husband by her side, leaned close to her screen: “I’ll tell you all now: His tests came out good, so we only have to go for a checkup in six months,” she said. A chorus of relieved sighs.

Then another unfamiliar face shoved a photo to her screen: “Look, this is their youngest! He just graduated.”

Tragicomedy

In my sleep-fogged brain, I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. It was just past 8 a.m. in Manila. It felt like I was in the middle of a tragicomedy.

Amid the overlapping chatter and shuffling, a private message from a cousin, in Italy: “This is so disrespectful. This is a funeral, for Chrissakes!”

I understood her displeasure. This was no ordinary Zoom call. It was the funeral Mass of her dad, my mom’s older brother, who died suddenly from non-COVID-related illness in his Antipolo home.

My cousin couldn’t come home; neither could her brother, who was now hosting the Zoom call from home in New York City after the airline canceled his flight to Manila. He forgot to mute everyone in the lull after the slideshow of their dad’s photos.

No one could have imagined we would be saying goodbye to a loved one this way. And many of us said goodbye to loved ones this year. And many said goodbye also this way: suddenly, remotely, without the loving comfort of relatives and friends.

When my widowed aunt announced on Facebook the details of the wake, she wrote that, because of the pandemic, she understood if family and friends couldn’t “join us physically.” General community quarantine was up, and the wake was for only a few hours a day.

There were no eulogies at the funeral; everything was done on the express.

My late uncle’s siblings are scattered all over, so no one could be present physically to send him off. But they were all there, on Zoom, in different time zones, making do with their respective tiny screens to say goodbye to their brother.

On my screen I could barely make out those present at the funeral Mass, their faces covered in both masks and face shields. They were relatively only a handful, not what you might expect of the funeral of a man who had eight siblings and a close-knit extended clan.

At the Zoom funeral, nobody quite seemed to know how to behave. You could tell no one meant disrespect by all that chatter—after all, paying respect to the dead never before meant staring at a tiny blue screen.

Luckier

Not to diminish our loss, especially of my two cousins’ who couldn’t be home to bid their dad farewell, but we were in a way luckier to have given my uncle that kind of send-off. His wife and two other children, at least, got to give him a hug when he breathed his last.

It’s the kind of goodbye that was denied those who lost loved ones to COVID. And unlike those who died of COVID, my uncle didn’t suffer long. Small graces.

We’ve heard many say that the lockdown gave them an opportunity to reconnect with family and loved ones. Our extended family was no different.

We observed my uncle’s ninth and 40th days of passing on Zoom calls. By then, the nuisance from his virtual funeral had become a running joke.

Our family group chat had never been busier. We reminisced, some stories funny, others achingly sad. This was my uncle who showed me New York when they lived there, the same one whose habit it was to go to the nearby McDonald’s to read the Inquirer, and the same one who came home one day on the public commute because he forgot he drove when he left that morning.

Old photos were dug up and shared; stale stories told and retold. Once more we took part in the familiar, and often not-so-gentle ribbing we didn’t know we sort of missed. We laughed and we cried. How us kids have grown; how much older our folks have gotten.

It has been seven months since my uncle’s passing. In November, his son was finally able to come pay his respects, though his daughter still yearns to come home. The group chats go on and the Zoom calls have become a welcome habit.

In our loss, we bonded, even if remotely. Rather than mourn alone what—whom—we had lost, we held on to what we still had: each other.