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.