My grandfather died on the second day of this month.

It wasn't a surprise, really. He's been in and out of hospital for the past few years, even before the pandemic. He didn't die of COVID-19, though. He got struck with it, but powered through. He was strong enough to get vaccinated thrice. What he had was a long term respiratory problem. As the story goes, it was all those nights he spent in his youth developing film and printing photographs in a dark room in that home in Caloocan he shared with my late grandmother for decades. Either that, or it was his work at a paper factory, although I never really knew what he did there.

It wasn't a surprise. He died at 91. But he had just celebrated his birthday two weeks before he passed. It was the first time the clan was able to gather to celebrate the occasion. Well, not everyone. I wasn't there. It didn't seem like a good idea, considering that he just got out from the hospital that very weekend.

But, you know how, with each passing birthday - and especially when there have been so many of them already - you hope that the inevitable doesn't come? That he'd live to be 95, then 100, then who knows what? But then, the last time I saw him, he was resting in bed, only being assisted ever so often when he has to go to the bathroom. I remember having a good look at his legs. They were swollen.

When I heard of the news, I knew I had errands to run. My grandmother, who died almost ten years ago, was buried in a plot in Parañaque, the very plot that was bought under my name. Of course I don't want to dwell on the reasons why it's under my name, but in any case, my grandmother died first, and my father volunteered to bury her somewhere that's closer to everyone. Now, ten years later, my grandfather joins her in that same patch of land.

At the moment - luckily, perhaps - the death of a grandparent is the closest I've had to a death in the family. I cannot imagine the grief that embraces you the moment you realize a loved one is gone, and for good. But at the same time, I cannot imagine having to juggle that with the minutiae of funeral and burial arrangements. Here you are, dealing with the loss of a parent, and here you also are, making sure everything is in order for the days leading up to the final goodbye. Pick out a casket, sign the documents for the burial, find a place for people to pay their last respects, figure out their refreshments. All that food. The one thing I remember from my grandmother's funeral was how we all went back from Parañaque to Caloocan for a meal. Somehow, when we got back home, there was a big pot of lomi, among other things, waiting for us. Maybe they were distant relatives doing the cooking, or maybe they were neighbors. Or maybe the food was bought somewhere else.

But before you worry about all that, you worry about the immediate arrangements. As the "owner" of the plot I had to sign the documents myself. That said, I was only there for the signature: my dad handled most of it. He and his siblings had the date of the burial picked out, and the time. The guy at the memorial park apologetically told us that they had just increased their rates the day before. Cue awkward jokes about the potential savings if my grandfather died just two days earlier. The moment passes. No harm was done.

The next step was to see my grandfather's body. There was a somewhat long wait at the funeral home. My aunt and one of my uncles - the one whose home my grandfather spent his last years in - was there, looking calm, making some phone calls, making some idle conversation. And then, it was time. I never expected to be in a mortician's workplace - although, again, this will have to happen at some point - listening to the guys talk about how they made my grandfather look better. They did. He looks like the old guy I spent the first three years of my life with, the guy next door, bottle of beer in one hand. He looked handsome.

"Mga medyas ko 'to," my uncle said, pointing at my grandfather's feet, before inspecting the pockets of the suit he was wearing. There was a card inside, saying "table 3". It came from my cousin's wedding three years ago, a month before we all went into lockdown - the last time we all came together.

"Ser," one of the staff asked, "anong gusto ninyong gawin namin dito?" He was holding up some bedsheets. They apparently came with my grandfather's body when he was brought in.

"Iwan n'yo na lang," my uncle answered.

These are not the things you really want to remember a departed loved one by, so you dig deeper. I'm not particularly close with my father's side of the family. My perspectives are different, my attitudes are different. But I remember that one time my grandmother made me chop up vegetables for her lumpiang hubad - a memory I fondly look back on - and in the same vein, I remember my grandfather always gifting us with all these paper products just before school starts. I've just written about this, I realize. He'd give us pads of paper, no rules, which is perfect for my never-realized ambitions of completing a handwritten newspaper from cover to cover. There was also a lot of crepe paper, which we only really needed for the occasional school project. I was disappointed because I couldn't really write on it, but then, it was a very trivial matter.

I also remember my grandfather asking me, at every family reunion, if I already had a girlfriend. No, I'd answer, consistently. It came to a point that he actually gave me the phone number of a young girl he had met somewhere. I should talk to her, he said. See if things work out. I just humored him. I think that girl is a very distant relative, which was already weird as it stands.

One in-joke was that we called all of the boyfriends and girlfriends of his grandchildren as "inductees". At some point they will have to be brought to a family reunion, and at some point my grandfather will regale them with stories about the childhood of their potential parents-in-law. Shalla had that moment, but in extra-extended fashion, when I was asked to pick up my grandfather from my uncle's house in Parañaque and drop him off at his house in Caloocan, before I could drop her off near her place in Quezon City. There were a lot of stories on the trip, as I drove Roxas Boulevard and entered the port area, tracing a route I only remember as a passenger. When we did arrive at his place, he asked us to stay, had the house help make us some drinks, and dusted off old photo albums, with photos of my father as a younger kid. There's this one photo of him standing by what used to be a sari-sari store my grandmother tended to. Apparently if he didn't like what's for dinner, he'd just get something from the store's inventory and have it cooked. He only really earned to eat vegetables when he got married to my mother.

I went alone the last time I saw my grandfather alive. Shalla was at an art convention and, supposedly, I was going to bring her some prints that we had to print at the last minute. (The traffic meant I did not make it in time.) So I showed it to my grandfather. There's a nice the-universe-conspires twinkle here, about how I'm showing him something printed on thick paper stock. It's probably paper he encountered at the factory he devoted decades of his life in. It's why I came here alone, I told him. She's at work.

I think he'd be very disappointed when he learns what happened in the past month.