By Cliff Potts, CSO & Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

There is a moment after death that most societies do not like to talk about. It comes after the prayers, after the rituals, after the body has been washed, displayed, buried, or burned. It is the moment when the community decides—quietly, often unconsciously—whether grief will be shared or monetized.

I did not understand that moment until I lived through it.

While my wife was alive, this place felt like something close to paradise. Not because it was perfect, but because there was warmth. There were unspoken courtesies. There was patience. There was the sense that people showed up because they were human beings living among other human beings.

That warmth had an expiration date.

The Day Everything Changed

The shift did not happen weeks later. It did not creep in gradually. It happened the day the body came into the house.

In the United States, you would call it a wake or a viewing. Here, the body remained in the home, and with it came an endless stream of obligations, expectations, and costs—many legitimate, some cultural, some unavoidable. But woven into that process was something else entirely.

Every interaction began to acquire a price tag.

Who would handle what. Who would pay for what. Who was expected to contribute, and—more importantly—who was assumed to have hidden money. From that day forward, I was no longer a grieving husband. I was an account.

From Human Being to Resource

Once my wife was gone, I stopped being seen as a person and started being seen as a solution.

Requests arrived wrapped in politeness. Assumptions followed without being spoken. The subtext was always the same: You are the AFAM. You must have money. That is why you are here.

It did not matter that my income is fixed. It did not matter that I live month to month. It did not matter that I was barely functioning under grief. The narrative had already been written for me.

Paradise, I learned, lasts only as long as you are useful without resistance.

Transaction Replaces Care

What disappeared was not support—it was decency.

No one asked how I was sleeping. No one asked how the house felt after she was gone. No one asked how a widower was supposed to navigate daily life in a system he did not design and cannot escape.

Instead, conversations became ledgers. Needs became invoices. Silence became punishment. Engagement became conditional.

Even interactions with my teenage stepson—himself grieving, himself destabilized—became transactional. I was no longer an adult trying to hold a shattered household together. I was an embarrassment for refusing to quietly absorb disrespect.

Defending myself became the offense.

The Myth of Cultural Excuse

This will be dismissed by some as a “culture clash.” That explanation is convenient and lazy.

The Philippines is not a monolith. There are families, barangays, and subcultures that respond to grief with generosity, not extraction. What I experienced was not culture—it was behavior.

And behavior does not become acceptable simply because enough people participate in it.

What emerged after the funeral was not tradition. It was opportunism.

Grief as a Vulnerability

Grief strips away defenses. It makes people slower, softer, easier to pressure. Systems that exploit that vulnerability are not accidental—they are revealed.

I did not write this to solicit help. I am not writing this to escape. I am writing this to document what happens when a system loses all interest in human continuity and cares only about what can be taken next.

Once warmth is gone, all that remains is survival.

Surviving the Broken System

There is no fixing this. There is only enduring it.

I will fulfill my obligations. I will honor the promises I made. But I will not pretend that this is community, or family, or care. It is a structure that consumes until resistance appears—and then labels resistance as shame.

Paradise did not collapse overnight. It expired.

And expiration, once reached, is final.

For more social commentary, please visit Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

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