Sunday Mourning
Sunday — February 8, 2026
11:45 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
We were running late to Leilani’s memorial service at Reflection Church in Rockport, led by Pastor Kevin Saegert. Not late in the ordinary sense — not the kind of late that means missing the opening song or slipping quietly into a back pew. On the drive there my father mentioned the time, and I snapped. The words came out sharper than I intended:
We’re not late. She’s already gone. There’s nothing to be late to now. Leilani is gone.
The second I said it, I felt the weight of what I meant. Death has a way of stripping language down to its bones. There is no schedule once someone has crossed that line. I had to reframe my thoughts in real time, sitting there in a car full of grief and Hawaiian-style button-ups, trying to honor someone we loved.
Midway through the drive I asked my father if he had thought about bringing his ukulele. It was a big part of Leilani’s life. It was a big part of my mother’s life. My mom taught her to play. My mom taught my dad to play. That instrument carried a lineage of memory, and suddenly it felt wrong to arrive without it.
I remembered standing at another funeral in the past and wishing I had honored someone properly, wishing I had spoken or played or done something that carried meaning. I didn’t want that regret again. I asked my dad if he wanted to turn back.
We did.
It made us late, but it made us right. We chose intention over convenience, turning the car around to retrieve a ukulele so we could honor and mourn properly.
On the way back to the church we passed animals on the roadside — deer struck by cars, bodies still and quiet. Something in me broke open. Death felt everywhere. I told the pastor’s wife, Elisha Saegert, later that I was afraid of going numb, afraid of becoming accustomed to loss to the point where it stopped hurting.
She told me it wasn’t numbness I was building. It was a mechanism to survive.
She compared it to a rubber band. The first snaps are tight and sharp. Over time the band stretches, not because it stops feeling tension, but because it learns how to bear it. Adaptation is not indifference. It is endurance.
She talked about refocusing — about how faith redirects our attention away from the ugliness surrounding us and toward the promises beyond this life. Sometimes that refocusing is deliberate. Sometimes it feels like forcing your thoughts into alignment until they stick. Fake it till you make it, she said. Force the posture until it becomes natural.
It echoed something a pastor at my church once told me: you force yourself toward joy, you discipline your thoughts, and over time your brain follows. Call it faith, call it neuroplasticity — either way it’s practice shaping perception.
During my conversation with the pastor’s wife, I found myself standing near the entryway drinking water from the dispenser. It was ice cold and startlingly refreshing. I couldn’t get enough of it. It felt like something my body had been asking for without me realizing it.
This might sound off subject, but maybe it isn’t. For the past couple of weeks I’d been trying to buy sweet tea from different stores and kept running into what felt like a shortage. I even saw someone else mention the same thing on TikTok — and ended up having a brief conversation about it with a stocker. I don’t know what’s going on with the sweet tea supply, but every time I couldn’t find it I defaulted to soda or water — and more often than not I chose soda.
Standing there at the memorial service, drinking that cold water, felt like a small revelation. It reminded me how much I actually needed it. It was a quiet realization, but one that stayed with me and later folded back into the larger reflections of the day.
I realized I need to cut back. No more sweet tea. I think this isn’t only for the benefit of my spirit, but for my health as well. Maybe I’m being led in that direction. Maybe it will even help with my eyesight and the recent blurry vision I’ve been experiencing. Maybe this is simply God directing me. Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this.
As my mind settled back into the conversation I was having with the pastor’s wife, I told her I held no real authority on grief or healing. I’m just a traumatized human trying to navigate life without a manual. I wrote my grief kit because I needed it. The Book of Carlos, I explained, was simply my testimony — an account of my experience and my walk with God.
For a long time I carried the few pages of a grief pamphlet I’d found in a donated area of a library or thrift shop, keeping them with me because they helped me survive. Seeing how much I depended on those pages made the need obvious: I needed a grief kit of my own. So I wrote one. If it helps others, that’s a grace I’m grateful for.
She smiled and told me that the sermons her husband writes as a pastor are created in much the same way — written first for the one delivering them. What we create to heal ourselves sometimes becomes medicine for others, but its origin is always personal.
She told me to revisit my own work. The grief kit wasn’t a finished artifact — it was something meant to be returned to. In fact, that’s exactly how the book is meant to be used: kept with you and opened whenever you need it, as many times as necessary, in no particular order.
We also talked about anger. I admitted I’d been furious — sometimes with God, sometimes with the world, sometimes in ways that spilled over onto people I love. The pamphlet I carry reminds me that God has broad shoulders. Anger is part of relationship. Everyone grieves differently, she said, and that means we have to give grace not only to others but to ourselves.
I think about my father and the moments when I react too sharply. I don’t believe he means harm when he forgets things or says something off. What scares me is the possibility of losing pieces of him to time. I’m not upset with him. I’m upset with it. That fear leaks out sideways sometimes, and I apologize when it does. He understands. We’re both carrying grief.
I think about the day my mother passed and I called her friend Mary. When Mary reacted in disbelief, I snapped at her. I couldn’t understand why anyone would question news like that. Only later did I realize she was accepting the loss in her own way. The same way I had to accept other losses in my life. I regret my tone, but I also understand it now. We were speaking different languages of grief.
Grace is the translation.
Circa 1966: My mother with her bandmate and high school friend Mary during a school band trip. They both played clarinet. Still hanging on the wall.
Circa 2011: My mother with her bandmate and high school friend Mary, still going strong.
At the service my father played his ukulele for Leilani.
Pastor’s wife Elisha Saegert and their son Ezra reading my dad’s sheet music as he plays ukulele in honor of Leilani.
The sound filled the room with something softer than sorrow — it was memory in motion. Later, I played a recording of my mother singing and playing “Do You Miss Me?” by Eddy Arnold. As it filled the space, there was no question in my mind:
We miss you, Mom. Completely.
If I’m able to find more footage of Leilani performing, I’ll place it here as another echo in the chain — music passing from one life to another.
Alberta (in red) and Leilani (in blue) performing hula alongside the Rockport Ukulele Group, with an unknown dancer (haole) in front. Woody Acres RV Park, Rockport, TX — January 2018.
Sunday Mourning — Leilani and her sister Nekelli in Rockport, TX, after Hurricane Harvey. August 2017.
After Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Rockport, Leilani was featured in a news report alongside her sister as they were interviewed inside their destroyed home, trying to piece their lives back together. While they stayed in hotels, my mom and I did what we could to help. We were family. They weren’t alone, and neither were we. We had each other.
That’s gone now.
After the memorial service ended, my father and I went home and gathered ourselves. There’s a quiet that follows something like that — not silence exactly, but a kind of emotional settling where everything you’ve just carried starts to redistribute inside you. We didn’t stay long. We had plans to meet Joe, a friend we had met almost a year earlier.
When we pulled up, I could already hear the ukulele.
The sound floated out before we even stepped out of the car. Joe is originally from Guam and carries a deep love for island culture — Guam, Hawaiian, and the broader threads of Asian influence woven through it. Music is part of how he expresses that identity. Hearing him play before we reached the corridor felt like stepping into a continuation of the day rather than a separate event. He was already there, waiting for us with his ukulele.
We brought down our instruments immediately. My dad carried two: a guitar strung and tuned like a ukulele, and his tenor ukulele — the one that used to belong to my mom. Holding it still carries a certain gravity. It isn’t just wood and strings. It’s memory shaped into an instrument.
Joe welcomed us warmly. We sat down and began to play — a kanikapila jam session, the Hawaiian term for an informal gathering centered around music and shared rhythm. The first song we reached for was one my mom used to play often, a well-known Hawaiian piece called Pua ʻOlena. It’s one of many traditional Hawaiian songs and speaks about the beauty of the ʻolena flower. The lyrics are primarily in Hawaiian with a few English phrases woven in, and it’s typically performed with ukulele and vocals, either solo or in a group. The moment the melody started, I felt it in my chest. Being around the ukulele at all already had me walking a thin emotional line, but that song pulled memory into the room in a way that was both painful and comforting.
My dad sang songs like I Can’t Even Walk and Wayfaring Stranger, and later Joe had us moving into Elvis covers, shifting the mood into something lighter while the undercurrent of the day still lingered beneath the music.
I didn’t play. I don’t play ukulele, but I sang along. My dad was playing my mother’s ukulele. I told Joe that I still have an ukulele my mother gave me. She told me I might not want to play it now, but maybe I’d pick it up later. I mentioned that my mother taught my father, Leilani, and many others how to play.
Recorded audio of the kanikapila — Joe and Dad on ukulele, and me improvising vocals to songs I only half know.
My mother, Leilani, and Alberta performed together as a trio at rest homes and community events. My mom also volunteered teaching ukulele at the Ingleside public library. Together, the three of them entertained with hula, ukulele, and belly dance. When they performed as a trio they were known as the Ipo Hula Dancers, and their logo was a purple-shaped heart. My mother was also part of a belly dance troupe called the South Texas Gypsies.
Recreated flyer of the Ipo Hula Dancers — from left to right: Alberta, Leilani, and Kala (my mom, Janie), whose stage name means “forgive,” “pardon,” “release,” and “let go.” This flyer was created for the blog as a tribute; the group never had original flyers.
My mother, Kala Sunshine, performing hula at one of her many venues, circa 2011.
And then there was a detail that stopped me. My father, without realizing it, was using a purple guitar pick he had cut himself from a piece of used plastic. He didn’t put the connection together — I don’t think he even knew the name Ipo Hula Dancers or remembered the purple heart logo. It was just the pick he happened to make and bring that day.
But it was Leilani’s day. My mom and Leilani’s day.
Earlier at the memorial, I shared with the pastor’s wife stories of my mother, Leilani, and Alberta performing together everywhere and the deep joy it brought them and those around them, and how I was front row and the cameraman to my mom’s liveliness, as well as to Alberta and Leilani whenever they performed together.
Alberta, especially, was a deeply knowledgeable dancer and instructor in the dances of island culture. She would explain each movement — what it meant, what elements were being used, what the dance represented — and then she would perform. Afterward my mom and Leilani would join her. She was a living source of dance knowledge, someone who carried the tradition and shared it freely.
The pastor’s wife told me that Alberta is now in a facility with dementia. I had known this before my mother passed — she had mentioned it to me — but I hadn’t understood the scale of it. I knew Alberta was struggling. I just didn’t know to what degree.
Alberta had a light in her spirit that was unmistakable. The three of them did. It’s a huge loss.
The segue: Dad getting choked up while playing at the service, then gathering himself and playing again during an impromptu jam session.
Afterward, the three of us went to lunch. Over sandwiches, the conversation deepened. Joe was curious about my books. I showed him what I had brought and explained how they came to exist — not as a planned project, but as a byproduct of trying to process what I was living through. I told him about Operating Without a Manual, about I’m a Traumatized Human, and about The Book of Carlos and my walk with Christ. Before we ate, he asked me to lead prayer. I hadn’t done that in a while. It felt grounding, a simple act of connection and gratitude that I realized I should practice more often.
As we talked, I explained how writing had become a way to map my thoughts — to break down experience into something I could examine. I told him about the conversation earlier with the pastor’s wife and about my view that healing doesn’t mean being cured. It means reaching stability. It means building new neural paths, reshaping how the mind responds, using pain as raw material for understanding. That’s how the grief kit came into existence: I saw a need for something immediate and practical to hold onto during loss because I had been clinging to a small pamphlet myself.
Joe listened and then offered a perspective that reframed everything we’d been discussing. He said the ideas of forcing yourself toward joy, of stretching like a rubber band, of refocusing your thoughts — all of it pointed back to one principle: obedience to God. Not faking emotion, but choosing alignment. Over time, he said, God instills the character you’re striving to live out. Your suffering becomes something that can serve others because suffering is universal. What matters is what you do with it.
Joe expanded on that idea of refocusing and obedience by talking about turmoil — about how God doesn’t always remove hardship, but allows it to shape us. He described it as a kind of internal excavation. He pointed out that scripture speaks of living waters within us — Christ describes them in John 4:14 and John 7:37–39 as a source of renewal placed inside the believer. We don’t reach that depth until character is built through pressure. The development isn’t punishment. It’s preparation.
He said that once we’ve passed through that shaping, we’re able to draw from those living waters in a way that lets us sit with others in their grief without turning away. We recognize the terrain. Our hearts become more sensitive, more capable of empathy, because we’ve tapped into something deeper than surface emotion. We’re no longer reacting to pain as strangers to it. We’re meeting it with understanding.
As he spoke, I remembered the water from earlier — the dispenser by the church entryway that I couldn’t stop drinking from. I know the comparison isn’t literal, but it felt connected. I had been thirsty without fully realizing it. Maybe turmoil works the same way. Maybe storms carve channels inside us so that when we finally reach those living waters, we understand what thirst really means. And once we’ve tasted it, we can recognize it in others.
In that sense, hardship becomes part of a cycle. We’re shaped by it, we draw from it, and then we use what we’ve found to help someone else endure. Empathy circulates the way water does — moving from one life to another, sustaining what it touches.
The language Joe was using echoed scripture in ways I didn’t fully process until later. In John 7:37–39 Christ says, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me… out of his heart will flow rivers of living water,” and the passage makes clear that this living water is the Holy Spirit itself — a source of renewal placed within the believer. It connects to the moment with the Samaritan woman in John 4, where Jesus describes living water as a spring welling up to eternal life, something that satisfies a deeper thirst than anything external can reach.
The imagery runs through the Bible: in Revelation, the water of life flows clear from the throne of God, given freely; in Jeremiah, God calls Himself the fountain of living waters. The symbolism isn’t abstract. It points to continual spiritual renewal — to the idea that transformation happens from the inside outward. Even in the Old Testament, living or running water was used for purification, tied to the belief that life flows from what is in motion, not what is stagnant.
Hearing Joe talk about the waters inside us suddenly felt less like metaphor and more like recognition. The storms we endure don’t create the source — they uncover it. They drive us toward the place where renewal already exists, waiting to be drawn from.
He described two paths. One is to hold onto pain until it hardens into bitterness, spreading that poison outward. The other is to process it into something constructive — to transform it into empathy and action that helps someone else. It reminded me of Hebrews 12:15: “See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.” Bitterness doesn’t stay contained. It reaches beyond the person carrying it. Joe was talking about the same warning in practical terms — that suffering can either isolate us or deepen our capacity for grace. He mentioned Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” We talked about what that meant. In this context, flesh wasn’t weakness. It was sensitivity. A heart capable of feeling — of sensing the wind, of recognizing another person’s pain, of sitting beside someone and offering presence.
Joe shared his own experience of losing his mother years ago and how that loss eventually allowed him to sit with others in theirs. That, he said, is the essence of it: sharing experience so that no one has to navigate suffering alone. Pain doesn’t disappear, but it can be shaped into understanding. It can make us more attentive, more human, more willing to reach across the space between people.
When the service ended earlier that day, I had felt fractured. By the time we left lunch, I felt refocused. Not healed. Not finished grieving. But steadied — by conversation, by ritual, by music, and by the reminder that the things we create to survive are meant to be revisited.
I wrote my grief kit for myself. I return to it now the way you return to a compass — not because it eliminates storms, but because it reminds you where north is.
We are all fragile. We are all carrying some version of trauma. We are all learning, imperfectly, how to stretch without breaking. If there is anything I understand after this day, it’s this:
We don’t escape suffering. We choose how to carry it.
And in choosing to carry it with intention, obedience, and grace, we allow memory to become meaning — and meaning to become something that helps rather than harms.
Survival requires grace — for the living, for the grieving, and for the parts of ourselves still learning how to endure.
If there’s a thread running through everything I’ve written here, it’s this: grief is a passage that reshapes us. There isn’t a way around it — only a way through it — and the way through is to let it deepen our capacity for empathy, memory, and connection rather than harden into bitterness. Everything else in this day seemed to orbit that realization.
We began with the blunt confrontation of death — the moment of saying out loud that she was already gone and feeling how time itself fractures around loss. From there came ritual and intention: turning back for the ukulele, choosing meaning over convenience, letting music carry memory into the room. I felt the fear of numbness and asked whether grief would hollow me out or stretch me, and I was given the image of the rubber band — endurance instead of indifference.
Even the small moment with the cold water tied into that thread. Thirst, living waters, renewal — the sense that something deeper exists beneath the surface, waiting to be drawn from. Being with my father, with Joe, remembering my mother, Leilani, and Alberta widened the experience from something private to something shared. Grief wasn’t isolating; it was communal. Memory moved between us instead of staying locked inside any one person.
The conversations about living waters and bitterness brought it into focus. You don’t escape grief. You metabolize it. And what you do with it determines what flows out of you — whether it poisons or nourishes, whether it closes you off or opens you wider to the people around you.
That is the distilled core of this day and of this piece: we choose how to carry suffering. And in choosing to carry it with intention and grace, we allow it to shape us into people who can recognize thirst in others and sit beside them without turning away.
And to close and sum it all up, none of it was even planned. Yet the day somehow unfolded into Hawaiian music and ukuleles after the memorial service, as if guided by something unseen. It felt like it was for her — and for my mom — an act I can only imagine they somehow put together.
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