Etherreal: In the Depths of Debts in Deaths

by

Christine Dianne Guiyangco

I heard of a dying wish recently. The protocol of the wish was death. But unknown to the receiver she was not only there to accompany the dying in her final moments—she was also the one being called. The recipient of the wish. The one who, without preparation, was tasked with enacting the final command. The protocol is to give death to the dying at the threshold of death. To be present at the threshold is to be drawn into the dying’s final will, to be asked not simply to witness but to act. In that moment, proximity becomes implication. The bedside was no longer a space of comfort or closure but one of transmission—where death, already underway, authorized the living to carry out what the dying could not complete alone.

Staying beside the dying is often regarded as an act of compassion—a quiet attending, a final holding, a steady presence meant to soften the passage. Perhaps, too, it is something more: a necessary anchoring without which the dying cannot fully pass on. But this compassionate gesture in such a context becomes something else. It is no longer solely about offering solace or providing comfort. It becomes entanglement. It becomes participation. It becomes conscription into death’s unfinished business. What does death authorize us to do? What is the dying permitted to ask for, and what is the living made to enact under the weight of that request? The dying speaks from a position no longer fully in the world yet still capable of command. And the one called upon becomes executor, translator, accomplice. To fulfill the wish is to affirm the authority of death; to refuse is to fracture it. But refusal does not dissolve the bind—it only shifts its form. The wish remains, but the dying is no longer present to witness what it sets in motion. That absence is not incidental—it is the very condition of the wish itself, the source of its peculiar power.

This is the final logic of the protocol—the compassion knot through witnessing: it begins with the dying but takes effect only in their absence. It authorizes without accountability. It binds through proximity. It initiates action without remaining to see what that action develops. Like a knot, it gathers tension quietly—its grip pulls and constricts but is formed through the intimacy of being near. There is something in compassion itself that begins to twist here in this process of attending, not as violence, but as a force that holds and cannot easily be undone. To remain at the bedside is no longer just accompaniment for it marks the moment when care exceeds the life it was meant to serve. Death no longer finishes itself. It entrusts its final gesture to the one close enough to receive it, whose presence makes the act of dying possible, and without whom the passage remains unfinished. The one who is there is left not with closure but with the burden of having been named—tasked with carrying out what cannot be negotiated, and what, once asked, can no longer be fully refused. It leaves only a demand shaped by absence, where its presence clings like a carcass still warm, stripped of voice yet dense with claim. It draws the living into a complex ethical terrain, where agency is both heightened and constrained by the authority of the dying wish, raising urgent questions about autonomy, obligation, and the duties that begin in the wake of death.

The protocol gives rise to a new kind of ethical subject, not through conviction or intention, but through the simple fact of being present at the threshold. What is passed on by death is not wisdom. It is a task bound to the moment of departure, leaving behind not authority but a form of service—one in which the dying person's wish becomes an immeasurable bequest, placing the witness in a position of debt that can never be fully discharged. After all, how does one repay what was given at the verge of absence? Out of this uneven handover, a figure begins to form. Not one shaped by tradition, which once gave the dying a way to leave something behind—words that could enter memory, memory that could offer relation—but by the terms of the immediate encounter. Such a figure is pressed into being by proximity itself, by the raw demand of presence compelling the moment of encounter before meaning could arrive. By the weight of having acted without assurance. From the carcass of a dying wish, a storyteller emerges. Not a custodian of inherited narratives, as tradition would have them—charged with preserving coherence, revelation, and continuity—but one who carries the mark of their absence. This storyteller speaks from within the unresolved space between duty and disappearance in which witnessing becomes a form of endurance—one that must abide by what has been asked even when it cannot be fully understood. The wisdom that follows, therefore, is not timeless or moral; it is situational, fragmentary, and shaped by the labor of enduring under the authority of death. Perhaps it is in this final request, spoken or implied as the dying wish, that the most intimate form of compassion is sought: not merely to be accompanied to the edge but to be ushered across. To be watched over in that final passage, to need another to complete what cannot be done alone—this draws compassion to its limit where nothing else could break because nothing should break more than the dying. And if nothing else breaks, it is because something else is pulled tighter—drawn into the very gesture that confesses incompleteness, binding the living to what they alone must now carry forward as completion. In this moment, death creates its final debt—one that transforms the witness into a storyteller precisely because they must make meaning of having facilitated another cross while remaining behind themselves. Through this binding, the witness becomes more than just a companion. They become a storyteller upon acting on another's final will, indebted to craft wisdom from the paradox of having both ended and preserved a life through the same act.

In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin illuminates a world where death was still visible and communal. “Dying,” he writes, “was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one” (93). At the deathbed, life became transmissible experience rather than mere biography. “Not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom,” he notes, “but above all his real life—first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death.” This moment grants a singular authority to both the dying and those who witness—an authority that "even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him" (94). The storyteller stands precisely at this juncture of mortality and meaning. For Benjamin, this figure represents what modern society was rapidly losing: the capacity to weave individual experience into collective memory through the oral retelling of stories. These stories gained density and wisdom through countless retellings, each narrator adding their own layer, creating what Benjamin calls "the slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers" that constitutes the "most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed" (93). When the communicability of experience declines—as Benjamin witnessed in the shell-shocked silence of soldiers returning from World War I— something far greater than entertainment disappears. What withers is our capacity to integrate death into life, that is, to transform private suffering into shared wisdom and to place individual experience within continuity of human memory. The storyteller's fading meant, for Benjamin, nothing less than the loss of practical wisdom itself—"counsel woven into the fabric of real life"—leaving modern humans increasingly unable to hear or speak to one another across the boundaries of their separate experiences (86). 

His is a twilight lament, still pending its transformation into epitaph. Benjamin writes from the threshold of a world where tradition no longer guarantees meaning, and where lived truth begins to fracture under the pressures of abstraction, isolation, and speed. The decay of the aura—the singular presence of a moment, event, or object that still bears the weight of its time and place— marks not just an aesthetic loss, but a collapse in the conditions that once made wisdom possible. Aura is what holds when something remains embedded in the world that produced it, when meaning is still tethered to context, ritual, and presence. Its disappearance signals the fraying of continuity itself. In Benjamin’s view, wisdom is not information or knowledge. It is a form of meaning shaped through experience, weathered by time, and transmitted through counsel. It enables orientation in the world: the ability to draw insight from lived events and offer it to others not as instruction but as guidance formed through proximity to life and death. Wisdom is relational. It is what allows one generation to speak to the next across the fragility of time. To lose it is not simply to forget. It is to become disoriented, unable to interpret experience beyond the self, unable to locate one’s suffering within a longer continuity. Without wisdom, the shared ground for truth thins. And yet, even in his diagnosis, Benjamin writes from a moment in which the full scale of this transformation has not yet settled into atmosphere. What he describes as decline is still felt as rupture, not yet absorbed into the texture of the everyday. He could not have foreseen how the century would unfold—the mushroom clouds that would bloom over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the invisible radiating aftermath, the acceleration of technologies alongside the algorithmic velocity of the digital age, fracturing experience into ever finer units of data, debris, and distraction. The storyteller he mourned—already imperiled by the rise of the novel, the isolation of the reader, and the bureaucratization of knowledge—would not simply vanish but undergo a profound mutation by being reconstituted in a world where tradition no longer secures meaning, and where narrative transmission occurs not through ritual continuity but through breach, the reverberation of memory, and the unpredictable force of survival.

The story now does not gather over time; it erupts in delayed aftershocks. The contemporary storyteller does not emerge from the slow sedimentation of communal memory, but from the ripples of the aftershocks—dislocated traces, partial and unresolved, dispersed across time and perception. She speaks not from outside the losses Benjamin named, but from within them, shaped by a world that no longer grieves those losses as ruptures, but absorbs them as the very condition of the present. Where death was once the exemplary site through which a life could be narrated and understood, it has been stripped of that function—no longer grounding meaning or offering finality, but diffused into perception, ambient and unlocatable. For Benjamin, this unraveling had already begun: death made anonymous, remote, unshared—its narrative force undone by war’s scale and silence. But now, that loss is no longer estrangement; it is atmosphere. Death no longer punctuates time but saturates it—recursive, unending, impossible to narrate in full. In this terrain, what Benjamin once called the decline of counsel is no longer merely decline; it is the architecture of the everyday. Time flickers. Ethics drift. Fragments circulate without ground, entangled across moments and registers. These fragments do not seek reassembly but persist as manageable ruptures, or as incremental detachments, integrated into the rhythm of survival. And within this field of drift, today’s storyteller endures. Not through the persistence of form, but through the persistence of need. The need to speak, to pass on what was never fully received, to remain faithful to a call that continues to resonate, even when its source is obscured. In turn, she does not carry wisdom shaped by repetition but the residue of what was interrupted—of what entered her not through inheritance but through exposure. If Benjamin’s storyteller was authorized by tradition and the finality of death, this one is summoned by breach: by contact with what could not be assimilated. She speaks not from the authority of accumulated meaning, but from having been marked by what eludes understanding, what was never completed. Still, she is not entirely severed from Benjamin’s figure. She is its mutation—formed in the debris of transmission, bearing not continuity, but remainder. The remainder is not what tradition failed to carry but what resists being carried at all, a persistence that continues without ever becoming whole. If the former crafted meaning from the shared finality of death, this one speaks from the currents of its dispersal, where nothing concludes and everything persists. And what follows is one such telling: death not narrated as closure, but as trauma passed on.  

I heard of the dying wish recently—from a storyteller. Or rather, I received it. Not as counsel, not as memory, but as snapshots. It came in fragments, in a room where suddenly every light had to be turned on, where the television blared—not to be watched, but to drown out something pressing in, too heavy for silence. Harking back to a deathbed, and yet nothing appeared whole— only flickers, as if the scene kept shifting in and out of focus. Not an image in full, but something unstable, not because it was vague, but because it was too precise. Zoomed in, then abruptly distant, as though the scale couldn’t decide where to land. It glitched. Hung there. The sense of something already over, yet trailing after her in pulses—tucked into each breath, embedded in the repetition of her pacing, flaring up again in the splintered cadence of her voice. And so, the story came to me this way: jagged as it glitches in its precision.

The storyteller—let’s begin there—was pacing, then finally sat down. Ok…something is wrong. What do I need to do? One fist rubbed up and down the center of her chest in a futile rhythm, as if trying to settle something that kept rising…What now? At first, there were no words. Just movement. Breath. Disbelief. “Oh my God. What did I see? Why is it me that have to see that?” The story hovered at the edge of language, too raw, too close to the scene it was trying to tell. It wasn’t meant to explain. It came as a kind of ejection—a gesture of relief and incredulity, or maybe refusal with some disgust. Should I write this down? The story did not unfold. It recoiled. Buckled. Stalled. It moved backward, then forward, then circled again. I’m feeling sick to my stomach. “What was that? I even cleaned her up beforehand. Changed her clothes and washed her up…everything.” What just happened? “Then it was suddenly just all like that!” It spiraled, then cracked open, as if time itself had warped. What reached me first were shards from the end—not a sequence, but flashes. The horror of the death scene came disordered, partial, barely held together by the stunned speech of someone still caught inside its procedure. The body convulsing. A mouth flung open. A torrent of vomit erupting without warning—some of it, the storyteller said, nearly splattering her face. “HUUUUAAAACK.” Green. Muddy. She waved her hands in front of her, gesturing as if to trace the shape of a body on a bed, pointing to all the places the vomit had landed. “Like monster, you know?” She flinched in the telling. Huh? What?! “Like those in movies—green muddy stuff coming out…hwuuuuup.” Her fear still vivid—not only for the dying woman, but for herself. “Really, like a monster!” More dry heaving. “…bbbblaAAAGHH.” She reenacted the vomiting scene using her arms to trace how it erupted from the woman’s mouth, projecting across the bed. What if she had gotten some in her mouth? In her eye? Her proximity to the death had become physical, intimate, inescapable. “I even ran to the bathroom to get a bucket in case she vomits more. But her skin had already turned purplish.” Then, reenacting again, she mimed how the body froze, how the eyes flared up and the mouth dropped open. She opened her mouth and stared up at the ceiling. “Three minutes,” she said. “It was just about three minutes! It took like three minutes.” She was shocked. Using half the length of her left arm, she demonstrated how she had been right beside the dying woman when everything happened so swiftly, so compressed. “All that vomit. Maybe just three minutes!” What the fuck?! Hold on, hold on, hold on…“Then I just wiped her mouth and covered the vomits with a big towel.” And then the account buckled again. Does she know?! It jerked backward into the moments before the vomiting, when the dying woman was shouting: “I want to die already! I want to die already! I want to die already!” And then suddenly, the tone shifted. The storyteller’s voice tilted into commentary, the disbelief now audible. “Can you believe that? His mother was dying. She kept saying she wanted to die already. And he—he was asking her where the tenant documents were. Even like that, in her state, she still needed to help him. And that was all he cared about. She remembered still.” She paused, as if registering the depth of the moment, and added, “Can you believe that? Even when she was dizzy already, she told him where they were. She was still giving him directions. Can you believe—even then—she was still sharp and organized? Still helped him?” And then, “Just like that,” the storyteller said, “he left. He got the papers and left. Didn’t even stay for his mom.” …did she not realize what actually happened? The refrain returned: “I want to die already. I want to die already.” This time not merely quoted, but inhabited. The words rose as if they hadn’t left her since the first time she heard them. “So I was surprised—I thought they were supposed to be pills. You know, like something like high-dosage morphine like with my mom.” She shaped the air between her hands to describe a bottle. Then she explained the doctor gave her gloves. Wait—so there were others in the room. Then the frame began to clarify—slightly, like breath on glass. There had been four people in the room: the dying woman, her son, the doctor, and the storyteller. The woman on her deathbed was dying. The son walked out. The woman still dying. The doctor arrived and stayed. The storyteller remained. She continued, “She just wanted to die already and she said she waited for me so she can do it. The doctor even asked her ‘Are you sure, aunty?’” The doctor was also her niece? So, in the room: the dying, the storyteller, and the doctor-niece. “You know, she was just very determined. She just says, ‘Yes, yes, I want to go! What do I need to do?’” The storyteller mimed the doctor pointing to a drink being prepared: “But you need to drink all of this to work, ok aunty? You need to finish.” “Yes, yes,” she echoed, recounting the dying woman’s reply. The doctor mixed the drink. The doctor and the storyteller, now both wearing gloves, assisted the woman in sitting up. The doctor handed the cup to the storyteller. While holding her upright, the storyteller helped her drink. “She drank it straight without hesitation. And I also had to give her apple juice right after.” Then again, quietly, “She just wanted to die already and she said she waited for me so she can do it.” She added, “The son didn’t want to stay, so he just left us. She said she just waited for me.” The dying dead. The storyteller on one side. The doctor-niece, on the other. I thought I was just giving her stronger painkillers and she would just sleep on.” How could she not know? “Even the doctor was surprised to see that she would vomit just like that… I didn’t know…that that was actually poison and that’s how it looked and that’s how it works. So I was shocked. She just started vomiting and I was right next to her.” Her expression returned to the earlier fear. “So her niece was apologizing a lot to me because she didn’t know it would be like that too. No wonder she made me wear gloves. Afterwards, she even asked if I wanted to take anything. But what would I want to take? I just wanted to go home.” The detail landed not as clarification, but as another rift. “What if the vomit had gotten in me?”

I heard of this dying wish after listening to Waldeth: "She kept waiting for me—she said, 'Lorraine, I want to die when you're here.'" At the time, she didn't yet know what she had been part of. I gave her the name for it—assisted suicide. Her own mother had just died in a hospital— high-dose morphine, several hours, then silence. Waldeth didn’t go home. She left the hospital and went straight to work. The patient—a 94-year-old woman with terminal cancer—was waiting. The shift had already been scheduled. She stayed in the house for the next eleven days. For over three months, she had been moving between deathbeds—her mother’s, and the one she was paid to attend, another’s mother. Two deathbeds. Two mothers. Two deaths. Simultaneous. The patient had been saying it since the second month: "Lorraine, I want to die when you're here." At first, it sounded like uncanny affection. Then it became routine. Then it became something else. Meanwhile, her mother had still been asking, “Waldeth, when are you coming back again?” After her mother’s death, Waldeth remained by the patient’s side until the day the patient decided she didn’t want to reach her birthday in six more days. She demanded to die already. During those eleven days, Waldeth never came home. She was paid in advance for the eleventh. Each evening, she joined her family over video call to pray the nine-day novena for the dead—her mother’s novena—while sitting beside another mother’s deathbed. 8:00 PM PST, 11:00 AM Manila time. One death behind her. Another in progress. And on the eleventh day, two days after the novena ended, Waldeth prayed for the patient. The prayer split. She thought it would be like before: sedation, quietness, sleep. She didn’t know it would be a drink that would take just three minutes. That the patient, the niece—also the doctor—and the son had already arranged everything. That she alone hadn’t known. Three days later, she attended her mother’s funeral viewing in a one-day rented casket in Mission Hills, California. Two weeks later, the permit came through and the ashes could travel. Two months after, she joined the burial by group video call. Facebook Messenger. Her mother buried in the Philippines. Two weeks earlier, she had already begun attending to another elderly cancer patient. 

Observation, in its ordinary sense, is often thought of as passive—a way of seeing or registering something that already exists somehow untouched by the act of looking. In this view, the observer stands apart while the observed unfolds on its own. But quantum theory challenges this assumption. Observation is not detached; it is relational. This means that things do not exist with fixed properties on their own—they only take shape through their relation to something else. A quantum system, before it is observed, remains in superposition—a suspended condition in which multiple, even contradictory, outcomes are all equally possible. Nothing is settled. Everything that could happen is present at once. Only when the system enters into relation with something else—when it is observed—does one possibility materialize and the others vanish. This is what is known as collapse: the resolution of uncertainty into a single outcome. In this sense, to observe is not to passively witness what already exists. It is to create the conditions for something to take form. The observer is not outside the event; they are entangled in its unfolding. Attention touches reality. And when that attention turns toward the dying, it does not simply accompany death—it makes death possible.  

This is where the language of quantum theory begins to illuminate the conditions of the deathbed—not as a scene of closure already unfolding but as a suspended state awaiting relation. The collapse that physics describes—the shift from multiple, coexisting possibilities into one enacted reality—finds resonance in the moment when a dying wish hovers in uncertainty, waiting for a specific presence to give it form. In this context, compassion becomes collapse. It is not merely the posture of care offered at the edge of death—it is the relational force that draws the suspended moment into finality. Just as observation in quantum theory resolves indeterminacy through contact, so too does the attentive presence of another bring the dying wish into event. In a world where wisdom no longer accumulates through tradition but erupts through breach, compassion does not carry the assurance of moral goodness; it carries the charge of implication. When a dying wish lingers between possibility and realization, it is compassion— not violence, not decision—that enables its resolution. Lorraine did not choose the outcome. She did not act with intention. She remained. And in remaining, she became the relation the dying had been waiting for. The collapse came not through intervention, but through proximity. Her attention allowed the wish to pass into reality. The transformation is not metaphorical: what had been suspended became irreversible. This shift—from compassion as gentle accompaniment to compassion as the structure through which death occurs—redefines the meaning of witnessing. It is no longer about preserving the dignity of the end; it is about making the end possible. Compassion becomes the medium through which the indeterminate becomes real. It turns presence into consequence.

To be present, then, is not to remain untouched. It is to be entered. Entangled. Exposed to what one cannot prepare for and from which one cannot retreat. Lorraine’s attention—what might be mistaken for passivity—was in fact the final variable in a system held in superposition. Her presence collapsed the waiting into outcome, not through will, but through relation. The dying waited—not for assistance but for the one through whom the act could be completed. This waiting refigures compassion not as solace but as submission: a form of receptivity so total that it becomes indistinguishable from exposure. Lorraine did not act decisively, yet she became the structure through which death finalized itself. The collapse passed through her—not as agency, but as condition. What had been suspended became irreversible because someone remained. The scene does not produce understanding—it leaves a mark. And what this collapse reveals is not a new kind of care but a new burden: to become the medium of another’s dying, and to remain as the afterimage of what one’s imposed proximity made real. Collapse, here, is not accident or failure. It is structure. It is the condition under which ethical life must now take shape. 

This form of being-there is what Simone Weil calls attention: the voluntary suspension of one's will in order to receive what exceeds comprehension and cannot be reciprocated. Attention, for Weil, is the most demanding form of love—not because it heals but because it insists on turning toward what withholds response. It is not an act of understanding or control but of exposure without demand. To attend in this way is to love without consolation, to remain turned toward what does not return your gaze. For Weil, this is what it means to love God—not a divine figure who answers prayers or grants meaning but that which withdraws entirely, leaving only silence. And yet, love continues. To love God, in this sense, is to remain oriented toward the absence of meaning, to endure relation when nothing comes back. This asymmetrical, unrewarded love is what makes attention so exacting. It is love stripped of reward, emptied of possession, and dispossessed of self. Weil writes that such attention must be offered most fully in the face of affliction—not merely suffering but a total collapse of the human framework for making sense of experience. Affliction is when the body is broken, language fails, time disintegrates, and the soul becomes unrecognizable even to itself. It is a condition in which the world no longer answers, and the person is reduced to necessity—without witness, without orientation, without ground. In the context of the dying wish, affliction is not only what the dying woman experiences. It is what spreads: a field of disorder that pulls others into its orbit. Lorraine's presence enters precisely this terrain. Her attention—offered not through spiritual devotion, but through structural placement—enacts this severe form of love. She does not interpret the scene. She does not recover meaning. She simply does not leave. Her presence does not resolve affliction; it becomes the relation through which it reaches its end. The dying woman's wish does not collapse into death on its own. It requires contact. Lorraine's unknowing proximity completes it. Not as decision, but as condition. And what remains in her is not clarity or peace, but the imprint of something she could not refuse. This is what Weil's thought helps us to recognize: that love, in such moments, does not uplift or transform. It endures what cannot be made meaningful. Sometimes love appears only as attention in the absence of coherence. Sometimes it is the demand—or the compulsion—to remain turned toward what breaks the world open. In that act of remaining, attention becomes indistinguishable from collapse. It is not that love makes affliction bearable. It is that love, when emptied of reciprocity and reward, is the only thing that allows affliction to remain visible—to be seen, without being resolved. 

And this is the ethical ground from which the storyteller now emerges: not from clarity, not from tradition, but from having endured proximity to what could not be assimilated. The ethical subject, in this late nuclear age, is not the one who acts with certainty, but the one who survives collapse. Lorraine does not speak from wisdom in the traditional sense—she speaks from the afterlife of having stayed. She did not choose to carry meaning; she was exposed to what refused it. The storyteller today is not a custodian of inherited truths but a witness marked by what passed through her. She carries not revelation, but vestige. A vestige is what resists resolution. It is not simply what has been left behind, but what cannot be integrated into narrative, tradition, or understanding. It lingers after collapse—neither healed nor concluded—refusing to disappear, yet unable to speak for itself. The storyteller does not turn this excess into coherence. She holds it because she was the one closest when it took form. And that vestige is not personal. It is structural. It is the trace left when attention, as Weil names it—the suspension of will in the presence of affliction—meets the logistical demands of empire. It forms where love, stripped of reciprocity, is enacted within systems that refuse to recognize it as love at all. In this context, attention becomes not just an ethical act, but a geopolitical placement—one that binds the subject to histories she did not choose but is made to endure. The vestige is that binding: what endures after the death, after the care, after the scene concludes. It is the carcass of what could not be refused—cooling, weighty, unclaimed—left in the hands of the one who stayed. 

Because Lorraine is also Waldeth. The split between them is not metaphorical—it is material. Lorraine is the one who stayed for someone else’s mother. Waldeth is the one who stayed for her own. Her mother died in the U.S., surrounded by family overseas. But her burial took place in the Philippines—delayed by permits, made possible by remittances, rerouted by the rituals of a transnational life. This split reflects the contradiction at the heart of the Filipino diaspora: to care for one’s own, one must care for others first. To be present for family, one must leave them. This is not a tragic irony. It is a logic. It is the function of a global labor market shaped by histories of colonization, postwar dependency, and neoliberal restructuring. In the case of the Philippines, this structure was forged through over three centuries of Spanish colonial rule which instilled Catholic values of sacrifice and obedience; restructured under U.S. imperial control following the annexation of the archipelago from Spain; and violently disrupted by Japanese occupation during World War II—a consequence of its status as a U.S. territory. 

As an American holding, the Philippines was reengineered to serve imperial logistics: as both a military outpost and a reserve of labor. Its bureaucracies were remade, its economy redirected, and its public schools mobilized to deliver instruction in English. The language was not merely pedagogical—it functioned as infrastructure, aligning education with extraction, fluency with mobility, and aspiration with departure. Lorraine’s presence at the deathbed was not born of devotion. It was a consequence of state-sponsored labor export. The Philippines has long been positioned as a supplier of care work to the Global North—especially the U.S.—where Filipino women become the invisible infrastructure for aging, dying, and domestic continuity in households not their own. What Weil described as attention—a radical turning of the self toward the suffering other—has, under global capitalism, been hollowed out. It has been routinized, hourly waged, and coded into protocols of efficiency. Staying with the dying, once an ethical act of presence, becomes a shift on the schedule, part of an international algorithm of managed affect. Presence no longer instantiates relation; it becomes proof of task completion. Lorraine’s proximity should register as vulnerability, as exposure to the dying moment’s ethical intensity. But within this system, it is reprocessed as productivity. That is the distortion: collapse becomes closure, attention becomes performance, love becomes logistics. And still, not everything complies. Some part clings as residues that produce stories that fail the grammar of value: stuttering, excessive, fragmented. They scatter because they elude the attention capital knows how to measure. They are precisely inattentive.  

Inattention, then, is not a simple absence—it is an engineered condition. It names the infrastructural logic that allocates care without recognition, that orchestrates proximity without mutuality, and that generates trauma through systems designed to suppress its inscription. Lorraine’s presence at the deathbed is not her own—it is state-authored. Her body is a node in a circuit: labor schedules, transnational care chains, logistical substitution, remittance economies, visa policies. The dying wish she fulfills is structured, not granted. And what unfolds from that encounter does not belong to her. It transfers. It circulates—affectively, administratively—into Waldeth, who is now tasked with rendering meaningful what was never allowed to appear as meaning. But what she receives is not memory. It is trauma: a residue produced through colonial afterlives, fractured kinship, and the bureaucratic deferral of mourning. The residue does not become wisdom; it is coded as excess, dysfunction, or noise. And that rejection is no accident. It upholds the hierarchy of value by excluding what resists conversion. What Lorraine carries as remainder—Waldeth must continue as form. Her grief is displaced into obligation. Her mourning refracted through screens, time zones, currencies, and policy frameworks. She prays beside one deathbed while coordinating the logistics of another. And it is within this doubling that a structure crystallizes: the compassion knot through witnessing—a system that binds collapse into continuity not to repair, but to maintain. This continuity is not resolution; it is reproduction. Lorraine sees the break; Waldeth must operationalize its breakage. And what survives in her is not insight as intelligibility, but knowledge shaped as surplus—unvalued, unclaimed, and yet enduring. Inattention is not an absence of meaning; it is a sorting force, a calculus that determines what must remain unseen to preserve the system’s appearance of function. In this refusal of legibility, diasporic knowledge emerges as counter-logic: a circulation of incompleteness that cannot be reduced to productivity or coherence, yet persists as structure, unsettling the very grammar of value that depends on its concealment.

This is where Benjamin’s concept of “profane illumination” finds new resonance. In his essay “Surrealism,” Benjamin recognized that modern life had already become a waking dream—saturated with structures that disguised themselves as rational but were, in truth animated by myth, repetition, and concealed violence. Surrealism, in his view, was not a retreat into fantasy but a political method: a way of interrupting the facades of bourgeois reality to expose its unconscious mechanics. Against the fascist hunger for order, surrealism refused synthesis. It preserved contradiction. It made disorientation a form of resistance. Its aim was not to deliver coherence but to estrange the present enough to make revolution thinkable. Benjamin’s “dialectical optic”—to see “the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday”—was not only a critique of capitalist rationality, but an attention oriented toward a perceptual ethic: to dwell in fragments without converting them into narrative redemption (190). But in the globalized postcolonial present, what the surreal illuminates is that it is no longer profanely strange enough. What once functioned as estrangement from modernity has been consumed by it. Estrangement is no longer a disruption of the everyday as it returns home to the everyday. The irrational no longer shocks; it organizes. It is no longer rupture but the very order that scripts collapse into routine, where compassion is measured in quotas, grief in policies, and mourning in schedules. It is what organizes care quotas, labor export policies, cross-border funerals, virtual burials, and timed compassion, converting the impossible into protocol. In Lorraine’s case, it is the simultaneity of her own mother dying and longing for her care while she is scheduled to assist the suicide of another mother, a task displaced onto her because that woman’s son could afford to pay for his absence, while Waldeth could not afford to be present for her own. What should be unbearable contradiction is absorbed as ordinary function. Still, it generates in Waldeth swells of affective residues that cling to the dream for return—not return as restoration but return as compensation for the impossibility of returning home. This dream is metabolized into loyalty, and that loyalty into nationalism. But the nation to which that love returns no longer offers home—only function. This is the final twist of the knot: where collapse is translated into moral clarity, and moral clarity into obligation. The world asks Waldeth to speak from that place—not to testify to fracture but to make it legible. To make it useful. To make it whole.

I observed a death wish recently. The dead got buried next to her firstborn, whom she had outlived. She was dying on her deathbed for nearly eight months. When her first born, her eldest son, died, his ashes took too long to arrive. He died during the COVID-19 lockdown. His deathbed was visited through a nurse’s iPad for minutes at a time over several weeks. He died on screen. Weeks passed. Then his ashes arrived. She kept them beside her, waiting until one of her daughters could travel again. Months passed. His ashes were packaged, smuggled, and shipped inside a “balikbayan” box or a repatriate box as an overseas routine care package. Months passed. He was buried in the Philippines where his daughter and grandchildren live. Years passed. His mother died. She had been in the U.S. dying to return. Months passed. She returned, buried next to him. I attended the burial through a screen watching myself through a frame in a frame framed by other participants watching themselves framed watching the frame framing the dead getting buried next to the child she outlived where all the children who outlived her could attend both framed and unframed including those outside the frame as well as behind it.

We have arrived at the scene of global death—the etherreal age. The term etherreal is both pun and portmanteau: it combines “ether”—as in signal, atmosphere, the non-place of transmission— and “real”—as in consequence, weight, finality. It fuses “ethereal” with “real” to name a condition in which experience becomes both spectral and undeniable. It also echoes the ethernet— the infrastructural weave that renders transmission immediate, presence “iterable,” and attention programmable. Yet “ether” also doubles as anesthetic, the chemical once used to numb sensation and suspend awareness so the body could be opened. In this sense, etherreal is both atmosphere and narcotic, both the network that connects and the medium that dulls. It anesthetizes grief even as it transmits it. What passes through is not presence but its sedation, not immediacy but delay. Here translation is not the carrying across of difference but its suspension, the fabrication of a universal medium that promises smooth transfer by erasing the breaks that make relation difficult. Ether is thus always double: transmission and anesthesia, signal and sedation, translation and its numbing. It is what makes circulation possible by numbing the very break it should reveal. This is the age in which death passes through broadband. The burial is livestreamed, the last rites delayed, then compressed, then stored. Mourning becomes an interface. Grief loops through updates. Compassion, once forged through presence, now collapses through the very technologies meant to extend it. But that collapse surpasses absence— it drenches saturation with more depth flooding it with more networks than real connection can sustain. The proximity that once structured care has not disappeared; it is even more enigmatic. You can now be continents away and still collapse a dying wish into finality. This is not the disappearance of compassion, but its reconfiguration: a logic of compression where care is enacted through algorithmic immediacy, not intimate time. Affliction arrives not in person, but in pixel. And yet, it is no less real. In this system, to witness is not to be near—it is to be entangled in the very infrastructure that delivers the blow.  

This is the etherreal condition: not the loss of relation, but its dispersion across architectures built to simulate connection while eroding responsibility. Responsibility here does not vanish; it mutates. It thins in presence yet thickens in demand. To leave home for work overseas was once framed as the ultimate act of responsibility—sacrificing nearness to provide sustenance. But under the etherreal, that responsibility corrodes into logistics, transferred through remittances, policies, and screens. The more dispersed the contact, the greater the expectation to hold it together. What appears as detachment is in fact hyper-responsibilization: being tasked to coordinate, to appear, to care at a distance, to answer the call of multiple deathbeds at once. In this field of hyper-contact, the storyteller does not vanish—she fractures. Presence is not lost but multiplied, scattered, mirrored, cached. Where Walter Benjamin once mourned the disappearance of counsel—the wisdom exchanged in the presence of death—we now confront its overexposure: contact without coherence, saturation without synthesis. Everyone is proximate. No one can stay. The sacred singularity of the deathbed, once the generative site of witness and wisdom, is absorbed into protocols and lag. The cloud is no longer metaphor—it is the medium of our mourning. We live in the fallout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where death first entered the cloud. That mushroom did not just mark the dawn of nuclear modernity, it forecast a world where death, memory, and decision are refracted through abstraction. It was both instant annihilation and lingering poison, both the spectacular blow and the slow attrition of radiation that continued to erode bodies for decades. That double temporality is what persists today: the massive strike of collapse paired with its dispersal into latency, into systems that numb, buffer, and extend. Between that detonation and today’s death feeds, something has collapsed—not death itself, but our ability to carry it. The story no longer unfolds—it pings, it buffers, it drops. Wisdom, once sedimented through embodied telling, is now through encrypted compression. The storyteller’s voice transmits glitches in recursive loops. She does not restore. She does not console. She speaks from beneath the cloud that took both. 

It is in this atmosphere that Vilém Flusser’s What If? becomes newly urgent—not merely as a speculative gesture but as a method for perceiving the improbable architectures that now shape our most intimate experiences. Written as imaginary philosophical landscapes where concrete realities are reconfigured through provocation and rupture, What If? abandons systematic logic in favor of narrative dissonance. In “Son,” a fetus speaks with eerie lucidity, reflecting on abortion, probability, and freedom from within the womb. His voice directly mocks the logic of biological determinism—the belief that identity and purpose are dictated by biological fact. “What have you gained,” he asks, “from the traumatic experience of having been born? You were thrown from a physiological into a sociocultural uterus, and not into any kind of freedom” (22). Birth, in this framing, does not liberate but re-ensnares the subject in inherited constraints. Simultaneously, the fetus dismantles moral absolutism by refusing to treat all forms of death as ethically identical: “I can’t reconcile it… to toss abortion, coitus with a condom, the drowning of newborns, the execution of hardened criminals, the gassing of millions of innocents, and the crucifixion of Jesus into the same bag labeled ‘Murder’” (21). This collapsing of moral binaries exposes how ethical frameworks often obscure the specificities of power, context, and suffering. “Your birth diploma,” he continues, “was nothing more than a preparatory exam for the larger diploma, that is, the doctorate of death” (22). Here, natality and mortality fold into a single circuit of inevitability, not as tragic irony, but as a diagnostic of systems that produce life and death on the same register. Like the etherreal condition, “Son” inhabits the glitch—not from the outside, but from within the illogic that structures reality. Flusser does not write to resolve; he writes to fracture. Like Benjamin’s dialectical optic, his texts make the everyday impenetrable and the impenetrable everyday. Like Weil’s notion of attention, they dwell within contradiction without demanding coherence. His absurdities are not speculative escapes, but acts of attunement—listening to what the present is already doing to us beneath the surface of functionality. They attend to systems that no longer produce wisdom as counsel, but as fracture. Attention here is not the posture of mastery but the willingness to remain with dissonance, and attunement is its relational register, the shifting of oneself toward uneven rhythms as they unfold. One steadies while the other bends. Alone, each falters: attention stiffens into fixation, attunement disperses into drift. Together, they form a practice of listening that remains relative, where what becomes audible depends on one’s position and alters as the field of relation itself moves. 

The critical function of storytelling in the etherreal age is not to restore coherence, but to interrupt the expectation that meaning will arrive intact. Storytelling here does not explain; it distends. It lingers in the temporal gaps where systems falter and recognition fails to stabilize, where attention wavers and attunement cannot fully align. If recognition beyond moralism is possible, it is not the recognition that resolves contradiction into judgment, but one that acknowledges incompleteness as structure. It is recognition as listening without closure, a responsiveness that neither condemns nor redeems but attends to the unevenness of relation as relation. In a world where collapse is prepackaged as insight, where compression masquerades as compassion and latency is mistaken for care—storytelling resists legibility. In etherreality, it does not resolve. It transmits the interference of a scrambled trace of relation, distorted by distance and disguised as connection. In this way, storytelling becomes less about content and more about exposure: a transmission that fails cleanly, deliberately, and in doing so, reveals the noise beneath the code.   

I was beside death recently. So pressed against it, it drapes around my head and shoulders, contouring my back. We have exceeded the capacity by seven folds. I am snugged between shoulders. Endlessly scrolled from years past of group chats, there come the words. Projected from the glow, they recycle the script from the slides way back in 2020. “Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb…” I keep my head down to not arouse more tension. She is glaring at me and mumbling curses. My aunty at the corner across me, she hates me. I just yelled at her. She was video chatting the last breaths. Eyes squinted, stuttering lines, zooming in, then rereading for correction, swapping “Alessandro” with “Remedios,” then scrolling down to find “Hail Mary x 3” and again at “x 10”and another “x 10” again and again through the next set and the next. We waited for my mother’s mother to pass with the high- dosage morphine already injected. Every so often, the “Ate” nurse and “Tita” nurse would come and check-in with us. The Tita-nurse allowed all of us into the bed space, past the two visitor limits. She address Nanay, “Nanay” too. The first time I met her, she said, “Sige, kausapin mo Nanay mo, gisinging mo.” But Nanay never woke up again. On her last second, her mouth dropped open. Hours were passing. The doctor on duty was too busy to pronounce her death. My uncle wrapped a scarf around her head to shut her mouth closed so it wouldn't harden open. Fourteen of us squeezed around it. So pressed against it, the white curtains stretched around us. 

Let me tell you a story.   

In the emergency room where my grandmother lay dying, hospital protocol allowed only two visitors at a time. Her small bed space contained exactly two chairs to enforce the rule. Visiting hours were strictly set from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM. In the difficult days leading up to her passing, we asked her daytime nurse if someone could stay overnight to watch over her since we knew she often became frightened in the hospital without a familiar face nearby. The nurse needed to consult with the head nurse overseeing the night shift. When the head nurse finally arrived, she made an exception, allowing one family member to keep vigil through the night. The next day, as more relatives gathered, we began not only rotating in pairs to comply with the two-visitor rule, but gradually, our presence grew—first three of us at a time, then five. At night, two family members now stayed instead of one. Soon, the nursing staff brought in two additional folding chairs to accommodate us. As the days passed, my grandmother’s space consistently exceeded the official visitor limit, even in the shared ICU, where eight beds were partitioned only by thin white curtains. On the final day, when my grandmother took her last breath, fourteen of us had squeezed in that small space, surrounding her bed.  

And all of her nurses were Filipinos.  

I thanked the nurses. Their presence, like ours, exceeded the protocols. All Filipino. In that moment, a shared visibility seemed to organize the unfolding scene of death, not in opposition to hospital systems, but within their elasticity—an elasticity afforded not by protest, but by nationalist recognition. Fourteen bodies surrounded my grandmother in a room built for two, yet no one was turned away. The bending of rules was permitted, even welcomed, because it reproduced a particular narrative: the Filipino as caring, sacrificial, enduring. Compassion, here, was not a disruption of the system. It was its intimate extension. This is the compassion knot through witnessing: a structure where attention becomes obligation and love becomes exportable. And yet, this is not simply spontaneous solidarity. It is an affective infrastructure—a mechanism of the labor-export state that frames presence as pride and diaspora as fidelity. Simone Weil, writing of uprooting, offers a language to interrogate this. For her, uprooting is not just displacement; it is the stripping of life from the environments and relations that sustain meaning. It is the disintegration of the world’s coherence from within. The collapse from within does not abolish coherence; it manufactures its counterfeit. Nationalism arises as that counterfeit coherence, translating uprootedness into belonging and binding fracture into duty. And nationalism, I argue, does not repair uprooting—it aestheticizes it. It converts rupture into sacrifice, detachment into virtue, and absence into loyalty. In the room “Intensive Care Unit,” the scene of my grandmother’s death, attention—Weil’s term for the radical suspension of will in the face of affliction—was operationalized. Not abandoned, but rerouted. Not a spiritual act of surrender, but a logistical flexibility reinforced through shared ethnic visibility. The nurses did not break the rules for us; the rules flexed because our presence aligned with a mythologized form of Filipino love: soft compliant, devoted, always available. What appears as care is already shaped by what care is allowed to look like under global capitalism. The Filipino presence at the deathbed is not just personal—it is geopolitical. What remains is not a spontaneous act of love but a structure of feeling that makes sacrifice appear voluntary and displacement look like pride. To retell the paradox once more: the attention that once marked a sacred encounter with affliction now circulates as a sanctioned performance of compassion—so normalized that it no longer looks like structure at all. 

As Christine, I write these stories in English, though they did not come to me only in English. They arrived as partial tellings, broken images, fragments carried in both Tagalog and English, slipping between tongues in the uneven way grief demands. Tagalog is my mother tongue, yet I retell them here in English because English has become the dominating medium through which memory is expected to circulate on record. It is not a neutral choice. Lorraine and Waldeth stand as figures of the Filipino diaspora, whose lives make visible how global capitalism restructures intimacy itself: extracting women from their homelands, scattering families across oceans, and placing care for one household in exchange for absence from another. English was central to this reorganization: the colonial language that remade Philippine education into a training ground for exportable labor, aligning fluency with employability, and still today the medium through which grief is transformed into protocol and diaspora into obligation. To write in English is to enter the very structure that displaced them, yet it is also the only way to insist that this displacement be heard.

But I am not only Christine. I am also Dianne. I was present at our grandmother’s deathbed, attending her final breaths, and I was also the one who listened to Waldeth recount another death that had passed through her care, a dying wish not her mother’s but another’s, tended by Lorraine. These tellings emerged within a larger orbit of mourning already unsettled: my grandmother’s son had died during the pandemic, his ashes delayed and repatriated inside a balikbayan box, while she longed to return to the Philippines to be buried beside him. His deferred burial, her deferred return through death, and the assisted death Waldeth witnessed converged into a circulation of grief that moved through oceans, remittance economies, and transnational rituals. What reached me in these tellings was not continuity but dissonance, moments that resisted settling into coherence. As Dianne, I was the proximate medium through whom the story passed. As Christine, I now translate it into English. Yet here I confront what Vicente Rafael has called the end of translation. English, he writes, is “the dream of capitalism”—a vision of a world in which all value, labor, and relation can be flattened into a single medium of equivalence (194). In this dream, translation becomes obsolete because everything is presumed already intelligible within the logic of exchange. English does not deepen understanding; it displaces the need for it. I take Rafael’s “end of translation” as a point of departure, reworking it into what I call the “death of translation.” If the end marks obsolescence, the death marks collapse: like quantum observation, where suspended possibility resolves into actuality, the death of translation names the moment where language gives form to death by resolving what had been suspended. English numbs like ether, anesthetic and atmosphere, transmitting grief while muting its rupture. To narrate in English is therefore to witness translation die — to see its wound laid bare in the very act of giving death its form.

To remain in the etherreal is to remain in the depths of debts that death produces. Compassion is never free; it circulates as obligation. The granddaughter tends her grandmother, the daughter cares for another’s mother, the migrant bears witness while her own kin wait across an ocean. Each act of compassion becomes a debt that cannot be refused and cannot be paid. Nationalism seizes on this circulation, recoding debt into sacrifice and loyalty, aestheticizing uprootedness as belonging. Yet not all is absorbed. What persists are errant currents—uneven rhythms, lingering excess, traces that escape assimilation and unsettle the counterfeit coherence demanded by nationalism and capital alike. It is here that the quantum relation clarifies the structure of collapse/compassion. In quantum theory, collapse does not simply signify an ending but the emergence of a particular outcome from an entire field of suspended possibilities. Likewise, compassion is not only the inevitability of being bound to another’s dying but also the force through which a new reality takes form. Collapse/compassion is thus double: it annihilates by closing down all other possibilities, and at the same time it produces a singular reality that could not exist otherwise. To remain proximate is to become the medium through which death finalizes itself, but also to glimpse the structures that organize who is made proximate and who is allowed to withdraw. What appears as love—the tenderness of staying with affliction, as Simone Weil would write—becomes conscripted into obligation, bound into debts that cannot be repaid. Yet that same love also exposes the mechanics that force compassion into collapse, illuminating how empire manufactures this inevitability as the very condition of survival. Collapse/compassion is therefore not resolution but a negative-sacrament, where obligation and exposure circulate as sacred remainder, pressing on both the impossibility of refusal and the possibility of another construction.
 
At this threshold, even philosophy itself begins to falter. Counsel, once woven at the site of death into communal continuity, now collapses into saturation and latency, its authority scattered across protocols and screens. Storytelling does not recover this lost coherence but transmits its remainder—interference, static, fragments that resist resolution. To continue speaking under such conditions requires a new form of critique, one that refuses to repair what empire has organized as collapse. It is here that Vilém Flusser becomes urgent. His What If? demonstrates how philosophy can be rewritten at its breaking point, when systematic logic can no longer contain the world it seeks to explain. Flusser turns to speculative fragments, impossible voices, and philosophical fictions not as escape but as method. He shows that critique itself must be reinvented, not as mastery but as interruption, as dissonance sharpened into counsel. This refusal of coherence is not resignation but a generative practice, one that points to how storytelling in the etherreal age might take shape: not as continuity but as the pressing of pressure into form, the crafting of attentiveness to what remains incomplete.

As Dianne, I bore witness. As Christine, I retell. In both, I am bound to translation and to its death. To write in English is to carry these stories into communal memory, but also to write against its dream of equivalence by insisting on what remains untranslatable. The untranslatable is not silence but incompleteness as structure. It is the residue that cannot be absorbed into capital’s grammar of value, the breaches that scatter into memory as unpayable circulation. To remain with the untranslatable is to enter the depths of debts, to unearth the subterranean networks of devaluation where empire has buried fracture under the appearance of function, and to find in that depth the possibility of new ground. Collapse/compassion is the structure of this telling: a burden that cannot be discharged, yet also a sacred dimension through which another form of counsel might begin. To narrate in this way is to integrate death into life in the etherreal age—not as coherence, but as counsel sharpened in incompleteness, a negative-sacrament where compassion and collapse circulate as sacred remainder, unmasking how empire binds care to debt and pressing open the ground for other forms of life might take root.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken, 1968. 

---. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Schocken, 1986. 

Flusser, Vilém. What If?. Translated by Anke Finger and Kenneth Kronenberg, U of Minnesota P, 2022. 

Rafael, Vicente L. Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation. Duke UP, 2016. 

Rovelli, Carlo. Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution. Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, Riverhead, 2021. 

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd, Harper & Row, 1973.