An answer year

 

We started off as a question year: Surely there had to be an end to this much pain? Surely there was something more to be done? And then we switched to a different sort of questions: Did he know, when he said no ventilators and we laughed, even the oncologist, because surely there was no question of a ventilator when all he had was a pain in his shoulders? What was it he wanted to say when he asked my brother to sit by his side? Did he hold on a few hours longer just so our anniversary would remain untouched by death? Yes life ends, but why so much pain for a person so gentle? The questions rolled in one after the next, questions about what now and what next and how to re-imagine our lives and roots in the wake of the wave that carried us this far. 

Earlier this year, I wrote that grief was love untethered. Not an original idea, probably, as I've seen many quotes since then that voice that idea. The question that remained, though, is where does the grief/ love go, and why does it flood the spaces in everything, and where does this end?

Last week or so, I came across a quote about an enduring idea of death, this from The Good Place: 

And then, of course, there was a poem, this one by W.S. Merwin: 

When love is untethered, it turns out, it goes everywhere. It is impossible to look at the world and not see the memory of the wave in the water all around. It sparkles sometimes bright enough to make you tear up, and sometimes the memory of the wave wells up so strong you could drown. This is where the love goes. 

Clash

 

It has been a month and ten days since our divide began. A little context: I was 18 when I first felt cracks in the walls leave echoes in my gut, my memory, my worldview of human transience on this planet we call home. I still ache from the loss of a single life. Buildings razed, thousands dead, these are things unfathomable to me. As they are to you, I know. The cartoon pink and red hearts we exchange each day a reminder of how aligned we've been, mind and heart, in so many disagreements. 

But now we're split. To you the existence of one country is...existential, as you put it. It must survive even if a thousand die, even if a city is reduced to rubble. I don't say the word peace to you anymore, as I rarely did to anyone anyway. Because -- 

My vision of peace is a terrifying one. To lay down your arms, violence, life itself, but to strive always for less harm, greater harmony. A continual melting of conflict in every way. This summer I lay by a smoke-covered lake and recognized that my anger at the flawed vacation was only a reflection of a deeper anger, one rising from the earth under my feet at the violence reflected in that smoke. My tears turned to lake water and those few hours lost to annoyance melted into recognition of a greater wound, one that consumed annoyance and turned it into grief, which is love. Growing harmony. We sailed hours later than planned, caught equally between smoke and water. 

To execute this peace, over and over, with no guarantee that the other side will do the same, a continual melting away of self and strife into a whole that is still bigger, still flawed, but still here, requires more strength than war. To know that you can find your feet/identity/self even when you lose yourself in something beyond fear and religion and political boundaries.

I don't know if there is a cause or faith or country I feel so strongly about that I could condone a single death in its name. Perhaps it's out there, or so deep in my heart, that it will take something even more terrible than this for it to emerge. For me to say end this now, whatever it takes, in order to preserve whatever it is I hold so dear. 

I wonder where this will end, both in the world and for us. I wonder where you will shift, how our echo chamber might shrink. And I feel for its edges and let life lap back at its edges, hearts fewer but flowing, trusting that this clash will wash away in life itself. 

No comment

 

Fold up the poems, draw back the light. There is no purchase for other grieving fingers here. I can be rock, seamless. I can be quiet. Ask if you must, but I choose to say no. My heart is whole within, holding grief and joy equally. Ask if you must, but my essay is not ready for your eyes. 

Because your questions ask, did I feel grief in my physical body? And to answer that I must tell you how my veins throb, and how many days/ months/ years I have lived suspended between dreams more vivid than the waking world. Ask me about the tsunamis. Ask me, if you knew to do so, about how I know that just because something's in your head doesn't mean it's not real. 

Because your questions say, how did you smile at your daughter's birthday, only a month after your father died? I would never have guessed, you say, and this is why I choose not to answer. Because you did not know enough to guess, and if you did your guesses would be wrong.

Because your questions say, did I support you enough? And to answer that I must tell you no, you did not, and I'd have to tell you support comes from leaning into each other, and you and I haven't found that balance yet, despite years of going on walks together.  

Yes, these are question years. But no, you cannot have my questions. Your grief is a black hole, one where only contrast is possible, where your sorrow can only be explained, justified, made real, by explaining my life as nothing but privilege and joy. I refuse to be swallowed whole. And so my essay, my attempts at balance and forward motion, remain shielded. 

Signed, Durga

 

Jo, you wonder how these pieces fit together. 

Phone calls that bleed one into the next, questioning 

the meaning of each blip on a monitor, each spasm, each fluttering breath that catches. 

There it is, the next one, and the sighs that merge. A father sleeps, a daughter wakes, love slips across continents.

Slice cucumbers for the lunchbox. Don’t forget the cotton candy grapes, Mama.

Can I have my moon and stars dress, the one with the pockets for my treasures?

Sorry it’s in the wash, the laundry I haven’t done in a week 

Piled high in your bin covered in pink elephants

A stack so insurmountable, relentless, 

The paint-stained shirt, mud-splattered pants, flour-covered apron. Each on its own, all together the being of a child

So crushing you’ve named it Mt. Laundry. The impossibility of lining those edges up neatly.

I know how that feels, that weight of expectation. 

The need to keep these pieces together, daughter, mother, wife, sister. 

Each takes separate shards of strength. You are just one person. 

Remember, I too am mosaic. Pieced together when the gods found it all too much.

They glued bits together and called me goddess. 

Broken things, held together, can slay.

(Written Feb. 8, 2023, for a workshop on epistolary poems. The prompt for this assignment was to write a letter to yourself from a mythological figure.)

Writing grief

 

A friend tells me to journal my thoughts, and I don't say there is no ink the color of grief. What paper could hold absence, what words hold its shape? The answer is all of them. 

Grief trickles through  this draft where I cannot use the phrasing "X lost their child". Because losing my father sounds like the sort of stupid thing a child might do at a mall, letting go of their parent's hand. A silly mistake, easily fixed. Death is anything but transient. Grief breaks through when a friend talks about how sentience is defined by pain, and her voice is drowned out by the ICU doctor's, clear as this moment. Grief leaps out in the sunshine, sits by my pillow in the dark, hugs me in my dreams. Maybe one day there will be words to wrap around this. For now, there is only the living of it.   

Moving

 

She was physically forgotten/ Then she slipped into my pocket/ With my car keys (from Diamonds on the soles of her shoes, Paul Simon)

Can't help thinking how true this is of grief, the way my father slips into the car with me almost every time I drive. And yes, I think everyone would know exactly what I'm talking about. There's something about movement in any form that shakes emotion loose.

Falling

When you feel like you're falling, 

Like hitting the ground would kill you. Try this -- 

Spread yourself thin. Catch every wisp of air. 

Each hand that reaches out: what can I do to help?

Every well-meaning text that pings

Grab them all.

Take the signature your neighbor the notary offers at 9 pm, no charge.

Say yes to the friend who makes shadow puppets for your child

hand feeds her aloo-gobi and rotis during the strangest time of her five years of life.

Text the college roommate at 3 am. Let her show up and sit with your mother in law

As you wait in the cold sunshine of February in San Francisco for the man who will give you permission to travel to your dying father. 

He stumbles in late. He could've not answered the phone, but he did. And you can go.

Hold your friend's sunglasses in your palm, the ones warm from her head when you fumble to find yours.

Here, take mine, she says. Inhale each act of grace

May his memory be a blessing, they tell you.

Tell yourself this: this is how they show up in your life. 

Awkward, unexpected, afloat on an ocean of grief.

This is how blessings wash ashore, like buoys. Hold them close. 

This is how you breathe. This is how you float. 

(began this on Feb. 11, 2023) 

Grief, part 2.

 

The thing about crying in public -- and I don't mean writing-workshop-this-is-a-safe-space sort of crying--but unexpected emotion in a place it doesn't belong, is that it is easier the second time around. 

The first time: I was in a Milpitas movie theater with a friend, watching a Bollywood film about a girl whose fiancé dumps her and she chooses to go on her honeymoon alone. What was the line her mother said that made me bawl over the possibility that I'd never have a child? I don't remember anymore. Last week, in the theater, I cried in the dark as my daughter bopped along to the song a pig sang to an elephant: "we'll still be friends, even after it ends." 

Grief, I am learning, doesn't get easier, but more familiar. The ways it can sneak up on you and refuse to go unacknowledged. The little ways you learn to release it into the world. First it was huge, too big for any words to encompass, and each time I tried it spilled past the confines of sentences into rambles, a river I could not tame. Now my words are measured. I smile and say thank you when someone acknowledges this loss. I know it will take my voice, my breath sometimes, and yes it is uncomfortable, and sometimes I stop in strange places to sit with it, like in the parking lot while my daughter plays in the park, or in the last row at the children's theater. 

Love, untethered

 

I send the text message knowing my father will never see it. I know my mother checks his cellphone now. And still I wait for those two blue checkmarks telling me it was seen from his phone. Incomplete closure. She knows I send them for him. I know it is her on the other end. But we never talk about this on our daily calls, my mother and I. The many ways we hold peace, sorrow. 

I've been thinking a lot about people as repositories for the emotions we place in them. Grief, in a way, is love untethered. Emotion as refugee, uprooted and wandering. The times I want to call, the conversations in my head. Knowing that the next story that publishes is one he will never read. The little things you don't know matter until they cease to exist. Whether it is this profound awareness of the small sorrows or just an overwhelm of feelings in need of anchor, I'm deeply moved by small acts of generosity. 

The friend who picked my child up the night we packed, fed and entertained her in a space removed from sorrow, at least temporarily. The one who showed up at the airport and handed me the sunglasses off her head because I forgot mine, along with medicines and a car seat, the other things I forgot. The one who sends an email helping me source a story, because work must happen even when it feels impossible. The space people hold for me, a small measure of the space left by his absence. 

 

Stick your head in

 

On the drive to the pool, I remind my daughter of her love for the water; of how the ocean holds Moana up and it will hold her too; of her strength; of her brain that remembers how her muscles should move. Still, week after week, I watch the same exchange with her instructor: 

"Focus, you've got this!" 

She spins in place, her face above the surface, squeal-shouting. 

"Believe in yourself."

She spins in place, her face above the surface, squeal-shouting.

"Pick a stroke and come get me!"

She spins in place, flails her arms the wrong way, going nowhere.

Week after week, I watch and wonder at her struggle. Why is it so hard, this simple thing? 

I've spent the last four days flailing in words on an assignment that was given to me because it's something I've written about before, and I'm one of only a handful who have. And yet. I didn't know the material. I should've done more reporting. What was even there to say about this that people didn't know already? I asked for an extension. I flailed some more. Took some naps. Complained to a friend. Pored over my notes. This afternoon, something shifted. The words were in me. I didn't need more reporting or other examples. My story was right here, where I'd been spinning in place for four days. All I had to do was take a deep breath and dive in. 

Why is it so hard, this simple thing? 

It's been a rough few days -- nothing terrible, but I've been struggling to find balance and beauty, which seem to go hand in hand for me. The latter is easy to find when I'm calm, and it's a lot easier to be grace-full in the presence of beauty. For today, this snippet on my walk, a translation of a line from a song: 

"when the sunray landed, it wrote on the dewdrop these stories of the clouds."