I remember standing in the ocean as a little girl, with my cousin Marcela right behind me.
We were at the beach, at this private club where our families spent so much of our childhood together. I was still learning to stand against the waves, and Marcela, who was taller than me (as a lot of people still are), would position herself behind me. Whenever a wave was too strong, she would turn around and let it hit her back instead of mine. She always took care of me; she was so motherly.
I hadn't thought about that memory in years.
Marcela was my cousin, but we grew up as sisters. Our mothers were sisters, our fathers were brothers, and our families shared practically everything. She and my sister Kelly were born just weeks apart. They went to school together, danced together, and grew up alongside one another.
Kelly was always moving, dancing, playing sports, finding something new to do, sell, or exchange. She was a businesswoman since we were little, hyperactive and full of energy, but also incredibly protective.
I remember being bullied by a classmate in eighth grade. As the youngest of three sisters, I had always been spoiled and cared for. I didn't know how to defend myself because I'd never really needed to.
I walked toward Kelly's classroom, where she was in tenth grade. She saw me from the other end of an open hallway and started walking toward me. I began crying as we got closer. She opened her arms and kept them open until we reached each other.
She hugged me and asked what was happening. I could barely explain through my tears.
"Whatever it is, I'll take care of it. Don't worry. Everything is going to be okay," she said while holding me.
And she did take care of it. She always did.
This year, I lost both of them.
What I'm sharing is my personal experience, not a universal truth. We all experience life, death, love, and grief differently. This is what I've lived, what I've felt, and what I'm still discovering.
More than ten years ago, Kelly's life changed after two critical medical episodes left her with serious neurological limitations. The sister I used to run toward whenever I needed protection became someone who needed us to care for her.
Our family learned to navigate a reality we had never imagined. There was love, frustration, exhaustion, hope, and the difficult understanding that loving someone doesn't mean we get to decide how they should live.
On December 15, 2025, I graduated as an end-of-life doula. By the last weekend of January 2026, Kelly was critically ill.
I had spent months learning about death, dying, grief, and accompaniment. I understood the importance of difficult conversations, asking questions, and supporting families through decisions.
But I had never accompanied someone who was dying. And suddenly, that someone was my sister.
Knowledge is important, but knowledge is not everything.
Nothing I had studied prepared me for seeing Kelly in those hospital beds, watching her body deteriorate, and feeling completely unable to change what was happening.
As an end-of-life doula, I understood what I was witnessing. I knew that her body was shutting down, that she was dying. And yet, as her little sister, I desperately wanted her to survive.
I searched for stories of people who had survived similar conditions. I spoke with my peers, nurses, and people with medical knowledge, hoping someone could tell me something different, something that would give me a reason to believe she could recover.
But nobody could give me the answers I was looking for.
And still, I wanted to believe.
I knew I needed to make room for the possibility of her death. I understood how important it was to have difficult conversations, to ask questions, and to help my family navigate what was happening.
But emotionally, I couldn't imagine a life without her.
I was living with two realities at once. One was everything I knew about death and dying. The other was the little sister in me who still wanted her big sister to be okay.
Every time I visited her at the hospital, I tried my best not to cry in front of her. But whenever I left, I would completely melt down. Sometimes I couldn't breathe. Other times, I walked outside feeling as though I was walking on clouds. Everything was so surreal.
There were doctors who explained things with compassion and clarity, and others who left us struggling to understand what was happening. I spent hours researching, asking questions, and talking with my family about decisions none of us had imagined making.
And I kept wondering: Why do we, as humans, wait until we're in the middle of something like this to talk about death?
We talk about finances, relationships, health, and plans for the future. Why don't we talk about THE one thing that makes us all equal? And THE one thing we all know for certain we'll experience? Death… Why don't we invest time in asking how we want to be cared for when we're seriously ill or as we grow older? About what matters to us when we're dying?
During Kelly's first hospitalization, I asked what she wanted for her funeral. She wanted butterflies released at the cemetery, ranchera music from Pedro Infante because that was some of our dad's favorite music, and everyone dressed in purple. I gave her two of the three; nobody had purple clothes haha.
And as the warrior she was, as her condition worsened, she continued telling me she wanted to fight.
And I wanted to fight with her.
On August 15, her mind started changing; she could not recognize her oldest son, but on August 17, the last day I saw her, she recognized me when I got into that hospital room. I played her favorite songs, brought her strawberry jelly, and we talked about her children, and I gave her my word that I would do my best to take care of them, even though nobody would ever care for them as well as she would.
I placed my forehead against hers, told her that I loved her so much, and apologized for not being able to exchange places with her; she said she knew.
I remember wanting her to know that being her little sister had been the greatest honor of my life. I think I told her. Those final days are still so foggy in my mind that I cannot say for certain.
On that day, when I asked whether she wanted to continue fighting, she squeezed my hand three times.
"Okay," I told her. "Then let's continue fighting."
When I said goodbye, I was sure I would see her again.
Two days later, Kelly died.
Marcela had died only a short time before her. Her final months were different, and I didn't have the opportunity to be as close to her as I wanted.
The last time I saw her, I brought her a margarita pizza. We had always enjoyed eating together and drinking beer, but she couldn't drink alcohol anymore, so we shared pizza and juice with our family.
I didn't know it would be our last meal. And that's something I carry with me.
Looking back, I don't believe having conversations about death would have made losing Kelly and Marce less painful. Nothing could have prepared my heart for their absence.
But those conversations could have helped us understand their wishes, recognize the support available, and navigate difficult decisions with greater clarity.
I wish more families knew that palliative care isn't only for the final days of life. It can support people living with serious illness by helping manage symptoms and suffering alongside other treatments. End-of-life doulas can also provide nonmedical emotional, practical, and informational support to individuals and families.
I knew these things because of my training. Living through Kelly's illness made me understand their importance in a completely different way.
I also learned something about accompaniment that I hadn't fully understood until I needed it myself.
I couldn't change what was happening to Kelly. I could ask questions, advocate for her, listen to her wishes, and love her through it. But I couldn't make her body stay.
And I couldn't hold everything together on my own, either.
My best friends, family, and community were there when I couldn't hold myself and everything else together. They listened, supported me, and reminded me that I didn't have to navigate everything on my own. I confess that I tried, but it was impossible.
I had learned how important it was to accompany others. Now I was experiencing what it meant to be accompanied.
Because no matter how much knowledge I had, I was still a little sister and little cousin who didn't want to lose her big sister and big cousin.
Our roles and titles don't protect us from being human, because at the center of it all, there is love. So much love.
Long before losing Kelly and Marce, I learned and believed grief was not a visitor, but a lifetime partner. We experience grief throughout our lives. We grieve relationships, dreams, opportunities, and the many changes life brings. But losing someone physically again has brought me into a much closer relationship with grief.
There's something incredibly painful about knowing that the people we love don't want to leave us, but their bodies simply cannot stay anymore.
It's a love story that didn't want to end, but had to.
And yet, I believe love continues beyond physical death, and that love stays with us as much as it goes with them.
I've been reflecting on what it means to continue living when someone we love is no longer physically here.
To me, life as I knew it was laid to rest when my cousin and sister were laid to rest.
But life doesn't stop when someone dies. We still wake up, go to work, take care of our families, laugh with friends, make plans, and experience moments of some sort of happiness.
And sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary day, their absence becomes so present and heavy that you realize it's true: this is a new life that you're now just discovering.
I am learning that I don't have to choose between missing them and continuing to live. Both can exist within me. I can laugh and still be grieving. I can feel grateful for my life and still wish they were here to share it with me.
I don't have to move past my grief to experience those things.
Because of who I am and what I believe in, I still talk to Kelly and Marce. I feel them with me all the time. I carry them into the places I visit and the life I'm continuing to live.
Our relationship has changed, but it hasn't disappeared.
Do you remember the movie Coco? That beautiful orange bridge where the spirits cross to visit the ofrendas prepared for them?
Well, nowadays, to me, grief is exactly like that bridge.
It connects the love I experienced with Kelly and Marce while they were physically here with the love I continue experiencing now.
And I've come to understand that crossing that bridge means allowing myself to feel what grief brings, even when it's shitty and uncomfortable, even when it confronts me with things about myself, my life, or our relationships that I would rather not face.
Because if I spend my life being afraid of grief, trying to avoid the pain, or refusing to acknowledge its absence, I feel as though I would also be closing myself off from a part of the love I carry for them.
Not because pain is the only way to experience the love of someone who has died, but because, for me, grief is part of how that love continues to exist.
The more I allow myself to experience grief in my own way, in my mind and in my body, the more I understand myself. And the closer I feel to Kelly, Marce, and my ancestors.
Befriending grief doesn't mean I enjoy the pain or that I've learned to accept every part of their absence. There are moments when I miss them terribly, when I wish things had been different, when I think about everything they won't get to experience.
But I don't want to spend the rest of my life fighting against something that was never under my control, and that is now part of my relationship with them.
I want to make room for it. And I want that to be one of the ways I honor them with my life.
One of the most important things I've been discovering is that grief doesn't have to become my entire identity to have a place in my life.
I can grieve without being only grief. I can continue growing, loving, and experiencing life while carrying the absence of people who were, and still are, such an important part of it.
That's why I don't see grief as an enemy. And I don't see death as an enemy, either. They're part of our human experience, whether we feel prepared for them or not.
And this brings me back to the conversations I wish we had started long before Kelly became ill.
Because talking about death isn't only about preparing for the moment someone dies. It's about understanding how we want to live, how we want to be loved, and how we want to care for one another while we're still here.
It's about recognizing that we don't have unlimited time together.
I know, bummer. But what a raw reality check, right?
The way we live and love today is already becoming part of the memories someone will carry tomorrow.
My intention in sharing this story isn't to tell anyone how to experience death or grief. This is my experience, my understanding, and the relationship I'm continuing to build with both.
I share it because I want us to become braver at having conversations about life that include death, asking questions, understanding the support available, and listening to the people we love before we're faced with decisions we never imagined making.
And I share it because, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I wish for us to allow ourselves to be human, to be happy, to love, to be loved, and to live life to the fullest for as long as we can. The sooner we allow ourselves to do so, the better.
Not according to someone else's expectations, not within a specific timeline, and not as though grief were something we needed to overcome before we could continue living.
We don't have to be completely ready for death to acknowledge that it's part of life. And we don't have to stop grieving to continue loving and living.
I cannot return to that beach and stand in front of Marce while she protects me from the waves. I cannot walk down that school hallway and find Kelly waiting with open arms.
But I can remember how it felt to be loved by them. I can recognize the ways that love shaped me, and I can carry it into how I love and care for others today.
I'm still discovering who I am now, who I've become through all of this, and what the future holds for me. Most of the time, everything feels so uncertain. Life as I knew it has changed, and I'm still learning how to live within this new reality.
But there's one thing I know for sure: I want to dedicate my life to opening conversations about death, because everything I've experienced has made me even more passionate about life.
About living it fully, loving deeply, and remembering that the time we have together is precious, no matter how long or short it may be.
My Kla and my Matelita were already in this world when I came into it. They were part of who I was growing up, and they remain part of who I am today. I will carry them with me until the day we are reunited again.
They are no longer here in the way I wish they were.
But the love we shared is still alive in me. So am I. And so are you.
With gratitude, Cesiah.