THAT WOMAN, UNSTOPPABLE.

For Te-ddy Bear, the gentlest person I have ever known.

You are standing at Arrivals, arms crossed, scanning the crowd. I find you before you find me, and then your eyes land on mine and your whole face changes — not a jolt, not surprise, but something quieter. A smile spreads, your eyes crinkle into that knowing look, as if to say: oh, there you are. Like you'd simply been waiting for me to find you, or for you to find me.

I pick up my pace. You stretch out your long arms, and before I've even fully arrived, you've already pulled me in — the sniff-kiss on my cheek, soft in a way I've never felt from anyone else, and then the hug. The biggest one. The warmest one. Somewhere in it, your perfume — maybe rose, I've never been sure — and I wrap my arms around you just as tightly, and we stay like that for a few long seconds.

I exhale. My breathing slows without my telling it to, like my body has always known whose arms these are, and has never needed reminding how to rest in them.

When you hug me, I feel at home.

Te-ddy Bear. That's what my cousins and I started calling you one summer, trying out nicknames like it was some kind of game. I don't remember who said it first. I only remember that it stuck — to me most of all. Maybe because it was clever in the way only family jokes are clever. My dad and his siblings have always called you Te, short for Ate, and we'd grown up calling you that too, small copies of our parents. So when someone landed on Te-ddy Bear, it already made sense. You were there when we came up with it, amused, smiling, like you knew exactly why it fit.

I still reach for that name — greeting you, talking to you, talking about you, remembering you. Maybe I still reach for it because saying it lets me be a little girl again. The one who doesn't have to be anyone, or do anything, to be loved by you.

You have always been there for us, even before we were born. Before my mother had married into this family, you and your sisters were already at the airport waiting for her, the first faces she saw in a country she didn't yet know as home. You helped her get ready for her wedding. You helped throw her and my father their baby shower. And for a while, before my sister and I even existed, you drove her to work each morning, because you happened to work in the same building.

Then we arrived — two of us at once — and you were the one who bought our first car seats. You lived nearby, South City or San Bruno, I was never quite sure which, close enough that we saw you constantly: birthdays, Easter egg hunts, Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas, school events, any excuse for the family to be together. Which back then was often, since we were all still in California. On your days off, you made time for us. And when you visited, you'd bring small gifts — always two of everything, one for each of us, the way it goes for twins. Trinkets from somewhere you'd traveled, or toys, or clothes. We still laugh about the Garfield toys that dispensed Raisinets, random yet endearing.

That's when the hugs started. Years before the nickname existed, I already knew you by them.

During one summer back in the Bay Area, you came to see us and told us you had gifts. I wasn't expecting anything — it had always been enough just to be together — but you pulled out a bag, and inside it was a digital camera. A point-and-shoot, a little larger than the compact kind, one that used to be yours. By then you knew how much I loved photography, though I'd only been experimenting with it a few years, still finding my way into the art form.

In the moment, I felt only grateful that you'd thought of me. The meaning came later. It was the understanding that you had seen the thing I loved before I'd fully grown into it, and decided to hand it to me anyway. I didn't have to be good yet. I didn't have to be sure yet. You met me exactly where I was and believed in me before I knew how to believe in myself. The way my father has always done, and the way, I would learn, you do for everyone you love.

You did the same for my sister that day. She'd been teaching herself guitar for a few years by then, and from the same bag, you pulled out a method book, handed over with the same quiet certainty, like you'd been paying attention all along.

Another one of those summers, we decided to play tourists in our own city. The city we'd grown up in, that had been slowly turning unfamiliar with every year we spent in Maryland instead. We got tickets for the hop-on-hop-off bus and spent a sunny, windy day chasing down all the places still alive in our childhood memory: the Embarcadero, Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, the bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts, more than I can name now.

We hopped off in Telegraph Hill with an ambitious plan to climb up to Coit Tower, forgetting how much walking we'd already done that day. The hills alone were steep enough to leave us winded, calves burning, all three of us gasping and laughing at how out of shape we'd become. I couldn't tell anymore if the cramp in my stomach was from the climb or from laughing so hard climbing it.

We rewarded ourselves with lunch at a little boulangerie — Hayes Valley, or maybe Noe Valley, I can never remember which. I sat across from you at a table by the window, eating a cheesy, savory sandwich, splitting pastries after. You have a sweet tooth, like my sister and me. All three of us, helpless for good bread.

We always got the same order at the dim sum place near our old apartment: pork and shrimp siomai, floppy puto, buchi for my sister, and the fluffiest char siu bao for me. I never knew what your favorite was. I wish I did.

A few doors down was Valerio's, a Filipino bakery that lives more vividly in my father's memory than mine. But it was that summer I first tasted their pineapple bread — soft as a brioche roll, with a pineapple filling, and I loved it instantly. The way you only love a thing you don't yet know you'll lose. You always said we'd have to come back a few days before flying home, "so you can bring some back for your mom and dad". Because you were that kind of tita, the pasalubong kind, always arriving somewhere with a suitcase half full of snacks for whoever you were about to see.

One summer, we showed up so happy for the ritual and found a handwritten sign taped to the door: closed for vacation. We laughed about it. We didn't know it would happen again, and again, summer after summer, some explanation or none at all — until one year you told us before we'd even arrived: the dim sum place had closed. We were shocked, annoyed, a little sad, laughing anyway, though the joke had changed shape. What used to be funny had become something quieter. Valerio's, last I checked, wasn't there either. Maybe it moved. Maybe it's just gone. I miss it too, in the specific way you miss a thing you never got to say goodbye to properly.

You stayed with us the summer of our high school graduation, back in the townhouse in Frederick, and sat in the gymnasium stands beside our parents while my sister and I were called up to walk across the stage.

Years later, you stayed with us again — a few days in our apartment in Bethesda before flying to a conference in New York. One morning you stood at our stove, stirring rice, milk, and chocolate together, walking us through how to make champorado while it thickened. Rich, dark, creamy, comforting — I hadn't had it in years. It wasn't just breakfast. It was a small thread pulled back to childhood. Back to a culture I sometimes worry I'm losing my grip on, still there, waiting, in a pot on our stove.

The morning you flew out, I gave you a bracelet — amethyst beads I'd been saving, back when I was deep into making jewelry, waiting for something worth using them on. Purple, your favorite color. February, your birthday month. It was always going to be yours. I clasped it around your wrist myself, and asked if I could take a photo — one of just the bracelet, and then, because it mattered more, one of you. I usually photograph the things I make. That day, it was you I needed to keep.

When my sister was planning her wedding, she thought of asking you to be part of the veil and cord ceremony. An honor, a role usually given to someone who feels like proof that love can hold. I watched you that day between taking photographs. You were standing at the front with the microphone in your hand, your voice steady and calm and gentle, exactly the way I've always known it to be. I don't remember every word. I remember the sound of it — sturdy, unshaken, wrapping around the room the same way your hugs wrap around me.

Three years before that, my sister and I dropped you off at the airport after your visit to Bethesda. We pulled up to Departures, unloaded your bags, took a photo of the three of us smiling before we said goodbye. And then, like always, the tears came. We've known you long enough to expect them — any goodbye, no matter how soon we'd see each other again, moved you to tears. It's one of the things I love most about you. My sister and I just held on, told you we loved you, said see you soon, in between the bear hugs and the sniff kisses, until it was time to let you go through security.

You have carried more than any one person should have to. I don't know all of it, and I'm not sure I need to. What I know is this: you have every reason to be hardened, and you are not. You never stopped believing in goodness, even when you have every right to. Somewhere between everything you've carried and everything you've lost, you kept opening your arms anyway. Kept believing that God, or life, or love, was still worth trusting.

I don't know how you did it. I only know that when I'm near you, I can feel the proof of it — whatever you went through, you turned it into something that only ever gives. You have never once let it make you smaller.

When my phone buzzes and I see your name, I already know what I'll hear. "Happy Birthday Briannaaa," warm, joyful, the last A stretched out like it doesn't want to end. You're one of the only ones who calls me by my full name — everyone else shortens it to Bri, or B, but never you. You ask what my plans are for the day. We catch each other up on whatever's new. I always pass the phone to Mom and Dad, because I know they'll want to hear your voice too. You've always been good at remembering birthdays — like Grandma, another woman who never let a year go by unmarked.

This year, I won't get that call.

I had just landed at SFO, the seatbelt sign clicking off, the whole cabin rustling to life around me. I switched off airplane mode and watched the texts arrive. Bri, the kids will pick you up, make sure to give them your itinerary. What are the plans for this weekend? And then yours: Welcome home! Glad you're here.

My heart jumped. I smiled, sitting there in the place I still call home, already picturing my titas and cousins. And then, just as quickly, my face fell, thinking of you. Wondering how you were doing, when I'd get to see you, whether you'd feel up to the drive to the house or whether it would be too much to ask. These are the things I find myself calculating now. It's strange, how much a disease can demand to be accommodated, when all it ever gives back is harm. You've been fighting it for a long time — six years, maybe seven.

A month before that flight, we were all together in Maryland for my sister's wedding. My mother, sister and I hadn't seen many of our relatives in seven years, and the days were joyful in a way we all needed. You seemed to be managing well, though I couldn't say for certain. The morning after the wedding, our whole group walked back from brunch, and you and I fell into step arm in arm. Partly to support you, partly, selfishly, because I wanted you to myself, even just for a block or two. I mentioned, in passing, how uncertain I felt about love. You've always known how to hold space for the parts of me that aren't easy to say out loud.

I don't remember everything you told me that morning. I remember this: in that same gentle voice you've always had, you said, "I hope I will be able to see you get married one day." I looked up and found you smiling at me. I think about that sentence often now — how you were more certain of my love finding me than you were of your own place to witness it.

And still, every time we say goodbye — in person, on the phone, whether I'll see you again soon or have no idea when — you say the same words: "I'm praying for you. God bless you." I used to think phrases like that could wear thin, worn down by how often people say them without much meaning underneath. But when they come from you, I know they're true. I'm still finding my own way toward faith, still figuring out what my relationship with God even is. I don't have your certainty. But when you say those words, I feel held anyway. Held by you, and maybe, through you, by something larger than either of us.

So when I see you next — whenever that is — I already know what I'll do. I'll walk toward you the way I always have. And when your eyes find mine, and they crinkle from smiling your knowing smile, I'll say it first this time.

Oh, there you are.