Week 1: Christina Lukban

Week 1

One of my more recent experiences that has led me to believe in spirits was when my grandpa passed away last Summer. I’ve always been the type of person to believe in spirits but I never really thought to understand them more until he passed away. Being Filipino, our culture has a lot of supernatural beliefs. One example of these beliefs are how spirits are present in the forms of as animals, insects, etc. The day he passed away we held a prayer in his house for our family to come. We set up a sort of “offrenda” for him where we surrounded a table of pictures, candles, flowers, and his favorite foods. As we were waiting for more of our family to come, a dragonfly flew onto the table of my grandfather’s picture. The dragonfly stayed there throughout the prayer and didn’t try flying away despite us trying to scare it away by blowing at it or waving our hand around it. The dragonfly then flew away after the prayer. We all joked around saying it was my grandfather, but really, what were the odds that a dragonfly would somehow come into our house, stay in front of my grandfather’s picture, and leave right when the prayer ended? There were a lot of other instances when grieving for my grandfather that dragonfly’s would appear. 9 days after his passing, in our religion, Catholicism, we have another big prayer for him. My cousin was learning how to ride a bike for the first time and while she was doing that, a dragonfly landed on her shoulder and would not leave.

A couple of weeks after his passing, we took my grandfather’s body to the Philippines to be buried there. As a Filipino tradition, the whole town would show their support at the church and all walk together in bringing his casket to the cemetery. During this long walk, my grandmother, next to my grandfather’s casket, had a dragonfly fly onto her sunhat as we were walking to the cemetery and would not move away. Out of a crowd of over 80 people walking, the dragonfly landed on my grandmother, my grandfather’s wife. After my family was back in America, we constantly saw dragonflies in moments when we needed it most. When my sister’s tire popped in the freeway, a dragonfly flew onto her windshield as my family was on their way. Now that I’m back in Davis, during Fall Quarter, I had a lot of breakdowns and moments where I would be extremely stressed and grieving about my grandfather. In some of these moments, dragonflies would show up in front of my car in the Hutchinson parking lot, in front of me as I was waiting for class, and I could just feel like this was a sign from him that he was still here and that I was going to be okay. I don’t know if this was just me looking for signs or me being crazy, but every time a dragonfly popped up, it just seemed too good to be true that it would come during certain moments. My grandma gets mad saying “Your grandpa is not a dragonfly!” but for some reason I do believe in these spirits embodying other forms and it’s actually been comforting for me.

(This is me and my Grandfather who we call "Lolo Jesus")