NOTE: I wrote and read this speech on the 30th of June 2021 for my late fiance’s first angelversarry. With his family in South Africa, we celebrated the whole day and we wrote something to ‘update him’ about this first year. 

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Dear Mikey, my love, my sayang,

Here I am with your family we’re celebrating your first year of being free as well as celebrating our strength to survive this far without you. 

I guess we’re doing this more for us than for you, because you’re already free from any needs, while we’re still having a lot of needs; including our needs to heal from grief, I talk to you a lot because I need to, even though our conversation has been one-sided. It feels like as if we’ve been married for 25 years because this one year, Im the only one who talks and you ‘re like a tired husband who never replied. LOL.

It has only been 365 days since you’re gone but it’s been more than a thousand times I wanted to scream “I miss you” and I wish you were here. But I couldn’t scream because my walls are not sound proof, it makes me more sad that how come I can’t afford a sound proof house. 

This year I’ve been officially older than you. You were my baby, but in five years, you’re gonna be my sugababy and I’m your cougar. 

Even though I’m older than you now, you’re still far wiser than me. There are things that I’ve done this year that I knew that you would have done differently. Many times I had to put my self as you when I had to decide something, “what would Mike do?”, “how would Mike react?”. Even though you’re no longer here, I am still finding and learning something new about you every now and then. Sometimes, I found it when talking with your family or your friends, or sometimes from random people on the internet who found your content or people who had been helped by you before. You left a legacy.

Ever since you passed away, I don’t know why I’ve been having weird experiences with lights. I miss you every day, but on the day that I missed you more than other days, the lights in that room became weird. They started blinking. Is that you or the municipality trying to mess with me? People will think I’m crazy to feel this, but I am crazy… in love with you.

Sometimes, when I see birds, I feel that you’re around. Because you’re like a bird, you’re free and you fly high. I get excited when a bird visits your parents house, like yesterday, but that bird shat on me, right on my Asian face. 

I don’t cry as much anymore. But when I do, I still don’t know whether I cry because of the past that we had or for the future I’ll never have… Or the present that still feels unreal. 

As much as I dislike the grief, in the end it’s the crazy amount of grief that pushes us to greater things we didn’t plan before. The grief brought your parents to this new beautiful house and Georgie just bought the next door house. The grief pushed Georgie to build her pottery dreams – she’s been making wonderful things, you must be proud of her! Grief is what push Nicky to start going to gym, now she even has her home gym l living room. And for me, it’s the grief that pushed me to move to a new house. You would hate my house, because now I have the liberty to decorate it as pinky as I want. It looks more like kindergarten. 

It’s the grief that pushed me to go on stage and start my career as a standup comedian. You were right, I have a wicked sense of humor. You will not believe how many performances I’ve done in less than a year. I got compliments from people, but I wish I could hear them from you. Sometimes I forgot, and I looked for you among the audience. I’ve made many people laugh and it made me realized that the only laugh that matters for me is your laugh, I made you laugh until the end of your life, the laughs I got and will get after that, even if one day I can perform in front of thousands of people, are just a background noise. I ticked my goals before I even started.

Since you rest in peace, I rest in pieces. My dreams were shattered with almost little to no strength to rebuild it. It took so much power to be able to stand again, and look, here I am still standing and slowly walking. I’ve done many things in just one year, it may make me look too strong in front of other people. I wish there were you whom I can be weak to. I miss the comfort of your protection, the wisdom of your advice and the warmth of your presence.

Mikey, as you can see, I’ve started dating again. There have been a few guys I met, most of them are nice and good people and some are like, “WTF am I doing with my life?” moments. I wish I could ask for your opinions, but that will be weird to help your fiancé looking for another man, right? However, when in a relationship, when it’s hard for me to be objective, I asked myself, “Would Mike be happy seeing his wife being treated like this?”. A few times I felt that you gave me your answers. And thank you for always trusting me with my decisions, all the mistakes I made are the mistakes I need to have. 

It took me 27 years until I finally found you and now that I’ve lost your physical company, I don’t know how long until I finally have that person again, or if I will never. 

I have loved you until the end of your life, I will always and miss you for the rest of mine.