Theresa Shea Seguban spent years finding ways to tell the story of her twin boys, Jio and Joshua, and the grief that followed their loss.
Now, she is sharing part of that journey as the only Filipina contributor to 20 Shades of Grief, an anthology curated by Cathy Derksen featuring 20 personal stories about grief from writers around the world.
For Seguban, contributing to the book was not the beginning of telling her story.
She had been writing about her sons and her experience since she was in hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I knew that my story needs to be told,” Seguban said. “You have a small voice or quiet voice in your head, ‘Just tell your story.’”
She began journaling while hospital restrictions limited who could be with her.
She recorded details about the people who cared for her, what she experienced and what she remembered about Jio and Joshua.
Over time, Seguban returned to those memories and rewrote her story in different ways.
Holding on to those details became an important way of honouring her sons.
“I’ve rewritten the story many times and just to contextualize the very details of what happened was very important for me,” she said.
“I don’t want to forget because they did exist.”
Seguban’s chapter recounts the pregnancy loss of Jio and Joshua and reflects on how the experience changed her understanding of grief, motherhood and herself.
The opportunity to contribute to 20 Shades of Grief came through a friend who told her Derksen was looking for writers willing to share their experiences with grief.
By then, Seguban had met other women through her own journey who had also experienced loss and struggled with feeling alone.
When the opportunity to contribute arose, she decided she was ready to share.
Grief is not linear
Writing the chapter also allowed Seguban to reflect on how grief can extend beyond the initial loss.
For her, losing Jio and Joshua also meant grieving parts of the future she had imagined.
“The primary loss was the twins, but there came many other losses,” Seguban said.
“Loss of identity, loss of hopes and dreams of the motherhood that I envisioned.”
Those feelings did not follow a predictable path.
Seguban described moving through anger, denial, sadness, guilt and moments of happiness.
At times, she felt she had accepted what happened, only to find herself struggling again.
Her experience taught her that grief is not linear and that people can carry several emotions at the same time.
It also led her to think about why conversations around grief can be difficult.
Seguban said the discomfort is not limited to Filipino families.
Through support groups, she met women from different backgrounds who had also found it difficult to speak openly about loss.
Sharing her story has since created opportunities for others to tell her about their own experiences.
Some spoke about losing loved ones, while others described relationship breakups, losing jobs or the changes that come with migration.
Those conversations broadened Seguban’s understanding of the different forms grief can take.
Writing became one of several ways she learned to understand her own experience.
“If anything at all, the sharing of this personal grief, whether through storytelling, journaling, music, creative art and through writing a chapter of the book, it was all part of the process of how I understood grief,” she said.
At the heart of Seguban’s chapter is an idea she hopes readers experiencing their own loss can carry with them: grief can also be an expression of the love that remains.
“Grief is love,” she said. “When you grieve, that means you’ve shown that you have love.”
For Seguban, sharing Jio and Joshua’s story is one way of continuing to carry that love while giving others permission to make space for their own grief.
Luis Miguel De Castro is a Changing Narratives Fund-Local Journalism Initiative reporter at Mabuhay Canada and a journalism graduate at Humber Polytechnic in Toronto. Originally from the Philippines, he is passionate about community storytelling, multimedia journalism, and amplifying Filipino voices through meaningful local coverage.
