Typhoon Heartbreak

I couldn’t sleep. I am tired, my back hurts, my head is starting to hurt and I really, really want to sleep now, yet my mind is still awake. So let me just segue a bit from the usual mommy journey that I have been blogging about lately.

My country has been hit with what was declared as one of the strongest typhoons Friday last week, leaving a lot of places totally devastated. I have tried to avoid watching the news but to no avail since my Facebook page newsfeeds was full of news. I have browsed some of them just to get an quick update. But yesterday, I couldn’t stop myself any longer from watching the news. I was reading news articles online from local and international news websites, looked at photos posted in Facebook, watched video clips as well. I was reading and watching and looking at everything that even if I cannot take it anymore, I still go look for more.

It is truly heartbreaking what the people in the Visayas area are going through right now. If there is a word that will describe heartbreak times ten, I guess that is how I have felt. People are left homeless, families separated, dead people everywhere. I can only imagine what these people are going through.  How do you move on after that? Just a week ago, you have a house and a car with your family in tact. Then comes the strong typhoon, lashing out angrily bringing too much rain and very strong winds (I read that it felt like being inside a washing machine), destroying your house, washing out your car to God knows where and separating you from your family. For some reason, you all get separated and when you are able to reconnect again, you find that one, or a couple or  a few or even all of your loved ones – the ones you have just laughed with and probably had a party with just a week ago – have all perished. How do you recover from that?

There are a lot of photos going around the social media of dead people on road sides, dead people amidst the rubble, dead people literally everywhere. What totally breaks my heart is to see photos of dead children (especially babies) either being carried by their parents, hugging them tightly as if wanting them to start breathing by doing so, or even babies and even older children dead beside their parents. There’s this one photo that I saw in passing that almost made  me cry (had I not been at work when I saw it, I would have probably cried buckets of tears already). I am going to spare you from seeing the photos of the devastation but I am sure that you have seen the news, anyway. It was a photo of a father and a baby (probably a little less than a year old), lying amidst the rubble, dead. The man had his arm around the baby. Even if I only had a glimpse of it, that image is going to haunt me for a long time. You see, I just became a parent myself and just hearing my son cry in pain breaks my heart. Your perspective really becomes different when you become a parent. My son cries in pain and I want to cry myself. For the surviving parents who had to bury their children, I would imagine that the feeling is a whole lot worse. As they say, no parent should bury their children. It should be the children who will bury their parents. But this typhoon took that option away from most of the people in the Visayas.

I am grateful that we have been spared by the raging typhoon because I wouldn’t know what to do if I lose my son in that kind of devastation. I think I would literally go crazy. That is why I have very high respect to the parents in the Visayas who were able to bury their children and tries to survive with the remaining family they have around them. My heart goes out to them. I grieve with them for the loss of lives of loved ones. I just hope that there won’t be any other storms that strong that will hit this country.

I came home and did my usual routine prior to getting in to bed. I could’t help but carry my sleeping son and hug him. If only I could bear hug him, I would. It didn’t even feel so good putting him down on the bed beside me.  I just couldn’t let go. As much as I would want to smother him with kisses and prayers that we were spared from the storm and haven’t had to go through what people in the Visayas are going through, I didn’t want to wake him.

To my readers out there, if you have a strong grip on your emotions, go check out the devastation brought about by typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda. And if you are a parent, regardless if you watched the news or not, go hug your kids and tell them how much you love them and send a little prayer of thanks that you have them beside you, alive and well.

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  1. I am so sorry for this. I did see everything via the news and social media and it was/is heartbreaking. For this type of event, a tight hug filled with tons of love yous is so necessary. Life is precious and we must appreciate what we have, while we have it.

    xoxo
    Carica
    stopping by from Bloggy Moms.

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