When Prayers Don't Pay
The day I buried my sister, I also buried my faith. Not that I had much to begin with—even with our family's deeply Catholic roots back in the Philippines, but whatever remnants existed crumbled like the earth we shoveled over her tiny casket.
Abby was only eight when the doctors delivered the diagnosis. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. I still remember how the words hung in the sterile hospital air, each syllable a death knell. Our parents had passed years ago in a car accident shortly after we migrated, leaving me—a twenty-four-year-old accountant—as her only family.
I did everything by the book. Sold our parents' house, liquidated my savings, worked three jobs. The Filipino community at church offered prayers and novenas, but I needed more than that. The bills kept coming, like waves in a storm, each one threatening to drown us. Chemotherapy, radiation, experimental treatments—the numbers blurred together in an endless parade of zeros that mocked my desperation.
Every night, I'd sit beside her hospital bed, watching her frail body fight a battle too big for her small frame. Our aunt from Manila would video call, insisting we needed to strengthen our faith, that God was testing us. The hospital chaplain gave Abby a rosary, and she'd ask me to pray with her. I'd hold her thin fingers and mumble words to a deity I wasn't sure existed, remembering how our grandmother used to drag us to Sunday mass and healing prayers.
No one was listening—not the saints my relatives prayed to, not the Virgin Mary whose statue still stood in our living room, not the God they all insisted was merciful.
The final bill arrived three days after her funeral. I stared at it in my empty apartment, surrounded by her stuffed animals and the Santo Niño statue our mother had brought from home. The amount seemed to laugh at me—six figures of cruel irony. All that money spent, and she was still gone.
The community whispered about my absence from church, about how I'd "lost my way." They didn't understand that I hadn't lost anything—I'd finally found clarity. If there was a God, He wouldn't let little girls die while their big brothers watch helplessly, drowning in medical debt. He wouldn't let hospitals put price tags on children's lives.
Now, when I pass churches or smell burning incense, I don't feel anger anymore. Just a hollow emptiness, like the space Abby left behind. Because I learned the hardest truth of all—in this world, prayers don't pay bills, and miracles come with invoices attached.
I still keep her favorite teddy bear on my nightstand, next to the family picture taken at our last Christmas in Manila. Sometimes, in the quiet hours before dawn, I look at them and wonder if faith is a luxury only the financially secure can afford.
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