ETHER DIARIES

It is September in the Philippines, which means Christmas has already begun its slow takeover. Somewhere out there, Mariah Carey is being ceremoniously thawed from the Arctic ice, and “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has started leaking through every available speaker. I went to the mall the other day and found fully dressed Christmas trees standing in neat rows, all glitter and confidence, waiting for homes that had not yet recovered from last year.

There has always been something comforting about the season for me. It gathers warmth from small, ordinary things: roasted chestnuts, cinnamon, hot cocoa, green garlands softened by warm lights, red ribbons tied with unreasonable optimism. Even peppermint coffee, which I once drank with full conviction during my sticker-collecting era, seemed to belong to that same category of seasonal reassurance.

But more than the lights or the coffee, it was always the music that found me first. Christmas jazz, especially, softened the edges of the world. A familiar melody with a little swing could turn an ordinary room into somewhere safe, somewhere almost remembered. For years, those songs meant warmth. They meant December arriving gently. They meant I could be comforted without needing to explain what I needed comfort from.

Today, while I was getting ready for work at the cancer hospital, a jazzy Christmas tune floated through the PA system in the dressing room. On any other morning, it might have softened the space and lifted the day a little before it had even begun. Instead, I stopped moving. I stood there half-dressed, suddenly aware of the sink, the mirror, the pale light, and the heaviness rising inside me. The song had not changed. I had.

Before all of this, I truly thought I was living one of the best seasons of my life. Things were falling into place with an ease that almost felt suspicious. My career was thriving so much that I had to turn work down, which, frankly, was the kind of problem I had always hoped to have. I was physically active, losing weight, and finally seeing proof that the promises I made to myself every January were not entirely decorative. I had time for skincare, self-care, and all the other maintenance rituals that make adulthood feel like owning a very demanding houseplant. I was productive clinically and academically. Most importantly, my depression had not relapsed. For the first time in a long while, my mind felt quiet. I remember driving home one evening, absorbed in a solemn internal debate about which car to bring to work the next day. Halfway through the drive, I caught myself laughing. So this is what peace does to a person, I thought. When life is going well, the brain refuses to rest and invents problems with leather interiors.

Then my mother called.

It was around this time last year. The season had started early, as it always does here, with public speakers and radio stations playing jazzed-up versions of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” My mother told me about a pain in her back that traveled down to her leg. Earlier that year, she had mentioned a milder hip pain, something that came and went, the kind of ache one could easily blame on sleep, age, posture, or any ordinary explanation that keeps fear politely outside the room. But this was different. This pain stayed. It changed the way she walked.

As an anesthesiologist, I responded in the only way I knew how. I gave her pain medications and referred her to a doctor I trusted. When the pain eased, a part of me wanted to believe that relief meant distance from danger, but another part of me knew better. I asked her to undergo further workup. That was when the images began to say what none of us were ready to hear. The MRI showed suspicious metastatic lesions in the spine. The primary was breast cancer. It was the day after Christmas in 2025, the year I had quietly believed would be mine. A year that had felt bright and promising suddenly folded in on itself. I remember New Year’s Eve after that. I have always loved fireworks, always looked up at them with the uncomplicated wonder of someone willing to be dazzled. But that night, I could not get out of bed. Outside, the world erupted in celebration. Inside, I lay under the sheets, staring at the wall as colors from the fireworks passed through the window, touched the room for a moment, and vanished.

The months that followed were heavy in a way I had never known before. It was not my body carrying the disease, not my life placed directly in its path, and still the weight of it settled into everything. I moved through confusion, worry, overthinking, and the strange exhaustion of waiting for the next result, the next symptom, the next phone call. The good days were the quiet ones, when she slept comfortably and the room allowed us to pretend, for a few hours, that nothing urgent was happening. The bad days were the days pain returned, or another complication appeared, or hope had to make room for another difficult truth. Even after her death, I felt as though I could no longer return to the version of 2025 I had been living before the diagnosis. That feeling of being at the peak of my life, of having finally become steady, had become unreachable.

That was why the song in the dressing room felt so disorienting. I used to play Christmas jazz whenever I needed to lift myself out of sadness, whenever I needed warmth, whenever I wanted comfort that did not ask questions, even when it was nowhere near December. Today, it offered no such kindness. It sounded like a door opening to a room I had been avoiding. It brought me back to that season, to the bright music in the background, to the lights that kept glowing while our world quietly changed shape, to the moment my mother’s cancer stopped being a possibility and became real.

Memory changes ordinary things quietly. It does not announce itself. It simply returns something familiar and asks you to hear it differently. A song becomes a date. A melody becomes a room. A season becomes the place where everything changed. I leaned over the sink with my head bowed, my arms holding up more of me than they should have had to. I stayed there for a while, aware of the ache without trying to hurry it away. I do not know if Christmas jazz will ever sound only like comfort again. Maybe, in time. God, I hope so. When the song ended, I straightened up, packed my bag, and walked down the operating room hallway, where another life was waiting to be saved. There was something almost cruel about the contrast. I was walking toward the work of keeping someone else alive while my own life still felt paused at the exact moment I lost my mother. But the doors opened, the monitors hummed, the first case was waiting, and the world expected my hands to be steady. So I stepped inside. Sometimes life moves on before the part of you standing still has learned how to follow.