This year, I am experiencing my father’s birthday twice, simultaneously. My body is telling me that it is 1am in the morning, but I have also just sloughed into the Lisbon airport, where all the flight information displays fast-forward me to a disorienting 9am. I am supposed to present my research at a fancy academic conference in a few days, but I can’t escape that today is today: more so than in past years, I feel like a cassette tape skipping tracks, thin film demagnetized, chasing after semblances of continuity. Time is a spiral and I am unspooling, confluent with the worn edges of memory.
There is a version of this story where grief didn’t pry suddenly into my diaphragm two nights ago, my checkered breaths casting bruises into dreamscapes. There is a version of this story where I didn’t wake up crying the next morning, gasping after a familiar shadow, (often) gone by daylight.
This is today’s re/telling: I am contending with my grief in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by unfamiliar people, steeped in an unfamiliar language. My watch battery is dead, and both nose pads of my glasses broke off while I was on the plane, and I had to buy a second travel adapter because the first one didn’t have the right plug shape for my laptop charger. These are all inconveniences that my father would’ve mitigated if he were here. I wonder if this is his version of a prank. Not very funny if so (but then again, these are petty spiritual maneuverings, perhaps, as in silly), but of course I am at/tending.
The sunlight outside is gray-tinged, slanting through the rain. The bleary day smudges into the airport, which comprises a dusty array of inconsistent staircases, escalators, and elevators, interspersed among the harried rush of the food establishments open at this hour. I wend my way to the fifth floor, where there is a quiet cafeteria without every other seat taken up by an exhausted and/or grumpy traveler and/or their luggage. The barista talks to me through the red-fading-to-pink streak that curls through his bangs.
“With milk, please,” I tell him, after he gives me a few options for my coffee (in English, after I fumble through some hasty web-translated Portuguese).
“Sugar?” he asks.
“Yes, please.”
“Tray?” he asks.
“Yes, please.”
The television mounted on the wall is playing tinny reruns of MTV music videos from the 2000s. It has been unseasonably warm on campus over the last few days; September is ending soon, yet I’ve still been wearing tank tops and no socks at home. Between sips of steaming galão, I watch Usher dance in 4:3 aspect ratio. Autumn quarter has just started, and lately I’ve found myself swerving to avoid the freshmen who are still figuring out how to bike sensibly on campus.
Time layers, sedimentary, flush with the ever-shifting composites of its constituents.
Despite all this fluctuance, time does seem to be congealing into something that feels more legible to me. Perhaps it is simply that I am finally allowing my body to sag into its own exhaustion. I remind myself to breathe; it is autumn, indeed, in some sense of that word, spokes of a rusted wheel winding down before turning in earnest again in a few months’ time. My body doesn’t always have to cycle through So Much, or at least not so rapidly, in-tempo and on-time, all the time. Maybe my body needed this decontextualization of self today: to be thrown out of lockstep, and back into tandem with the grief that I have left untended for weeks, months, years.
I remind myself to breathe.
This was a note to myself I had written last year while I was still in Hong Kong, stewing in the thick of summer:
things to remember (conversely, things i keep forgetting lately… time is ever a spiral and i am re-re-re-circling): drink water. hold beloveds close and listen to the thunder of their heartbeats. dance with sticky/cyclic grief and know that i can rest when my feet get tired. nourish seeds planted in seasons past and trust in their re/generation. burst with gratitude for torrential rains and typhoon tides and cicadas screeching in the bushes. find joy in survival AND miracle AND abundance. laugh and be silly!!
When I was a child, I understood grief to be a severance, foreclosing its own articulation even as it tore my throat open from the inside. Grief masked itself as anger, bottled like a wish and explosive when it emerged. Grief cloaked itself in shame, a secret ocean countenanced only and always with solitude.
My past relationship with grief has therefore often left me feeling like an extremely-out-of-town guest in spaces where beloveds smolder with the warmth that blossoms when grief is shared-welded-wielded. But of course the most honest of relationships are the ones that leave room for revelation, and I am learning that my own stagnation may have been because being stuck can sometimes feel like its own kind of safety. I have learned so well how to hold my own grief and contain it within myself, suspended and stale and still. To thaw is to crack is to melt is to allow water to flow, and I worry that I may drown. And yet: if grief is an ocean, then to hold it all by myself, all the time, is herculean and futile, as if the inertia of my fear can overcome the gravity of connective love that draws me back into community again, again, again.
We sit facing each other in your car with the sunroof pulled wide, parked on a ledge overlooking where we know the city to be. Headlight-drenched sprawl smears in and out of view from underneath a rolling veil of fog. The sky hazes periwinkle blue under a tulle mist and we talk quiet, ginseng-rose-goji tea poured from my thermos into two clear glasses that clink along your center console. You tell me that you still go to Mass sometimes, not because you are religious but because your mother used to go every Sunday. There’s something comforting about that ritual and the ease of its familiarity. I tell you that I grew up in a Christian church, and that my father was the one who first took us as a family to join that congregation, and that I have not attended a church service in years. (I wonder often about the difference between religion and faith. If prayers are proxies toward relationality, does it make that much of a difference if we pray to our parents or to a god we don’t believe in?) You have a Polaroid of your mother clipped to the sun visor, one of those photos where the background doesn’t really matter. What does matter is her smile in that moment, suspended in the camera flash. We drive home as the fog clears, and the Big Dipper blinks into sudden view above the winding road. It’s your first time tracing its contours. I show you how to find the four polygonal corners of its bowl, then count outward three more until you reach the end of its handle.
We gauze our tongues with the tang of liquor. The conversations around us spill from this two-room bar into a near-empty parking lot in the middle of a sleepy rich-person town. (It is a Friday night – I find that the lifestyle of people bearing generational wealth is honestly so boring, morality and exploitation aside, but that is for another time). I say something inane about how alcohol consumption probably doesn’t bode well for your latest tattoo, which is meant to be a memorial for your father. I ask if you were close to him. “No,” you say, shadowy across the table.
We make eye contact for the first time as you speak on behalf of your family and request a final image of your mother’s brain, already sponged over in its own swelling. You took a red-eye across the country the night after your college graduation to watch the ventilator push breath through her lungs. Her chest deflates on the artificial exhales in a way that her swollen eyes and hands cannot. Later, I will follow the gurney as we roll your mother to the CT scanner, deep in the belly of the hospital, heavy lead doors yielding entry into the imaging suite. Later, the oxygen saturation in her body will become tenuous, 90s dipping to 80s, and as we move her onto the imaging table I will begin to bag-mask ventilate her, the strain in my arm reminding me that at this point she is, in some inviolable way, still alive.
It all feels important, somehow, this catalogue of grief, three conversations in three days, snapshots pinned together into a throughline of loss. There is a particular sort of soul-ache that has to do with the tenor of these conversations: once-stranger, once-lover, again-stranger, again-beloved, finding pinpoints of resonance as we swim through the waters of our grief.
My mother says 我爱你 over the phone now, almost every time we call. My mother says 把东西放下来, 只要你开心才是最重要的, you keep too much on your mind, I regret not being there for you. That feels like its own kind of poetry.
Her grief: she planted more rose bushes in her garden this year, and she lays their petals in meticulous rows on the dining room table to dry. Upstairs, in my childhood bedroom, she dehydrates lemon slices on plastic trays that have a lime pattern printed on them. We laugh about the complementarity after I point it out to her. She packs me a sandwich bag of fig leaves, also from her garden, that she says the neighborhood aunties have been enjoying as tea.
My mother and I had one of our worst fights two weeks ago, and a few months ago, and (insert time frame – there are many, many versions of this story). My mother texts me over WeChat to say 对不起, 不应该, 我爱你. That, too, feels like its own kind of poetry.
Her grief: she scrapes the bottom of the 砂锅 because she knows that I love the crispiest 锅巴, she braises pork for hours in the afternoon so that I can have 红烧肉 for dinner, she folds ninety-nine 汤圆 with rose filling that she brought back from 成都 because 99 Ranch only sells sesame and red bean paste.
Lately, when I miss my father, I thumb through pixellated photos-of-photos of him during his college years, most of them timestamped from last year when I was visiting family in 南京. The most recent snapshots were culled from a series of dusty leather-bound albums that my grandfather had pulled from beneath the cloth-encrusted cabinets in the bedroom that he still shares with my grandmother. My father wears that goofy grin that youth bestows, when you don’t know yet that your body can wear away at itself, deep grooves carved around your eyes and the apices of your cheekbones.
“You smile like your dad,” a beloved once told me. I wonder which version of him I emulate: hollowed, or hallowed?
My father often carried around an elliptoid silver camcorder and a boxy Canon camera, using the two interchangeably as the family documentarian. He drove me to ballet classes in the rickety wooden building with the big banana spider out front, and he filmed my recitals with an earnestness that made me laugh with helpless tears when I watched the grainy footage years later: children toddling in pink and purple tutus, hardly a rhythm to be found. I now drive the same car in which he played for me the first album I have a memory of listening to: the soundtrack for The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston crooning through the speakers.
I found out years later from my mother that he was an avid member of the photography club while they were in college. When I told my aunt, his younger sister, about this unearthed memory, she told me about how he used to bully her into helping him mix chemicals in the university’s darkroom. The first film camera I ever used was a Nikon N65 that my mother gifted me, which turned out to be my father’s first-ever audio-visual purchase in America. When I opened it, the product box still cradled its original shipping invoice, with two phone numbers inked near the top of the page in my father’s fastidious handwriting.
Archive is something that I think my father bore in part as a natural instinct, and in part because he knew that memory is fallible. I wonder how much of that impulse is my inheritance, and how much of my own archival tendency is borne from my desire to reach toward some reckoning with all the ruptures that grief spins out of absence. I pick up the strewn pieces of whatever I remember, whenever and however I can. I think it is never too late, and I also think it is never soon enough.
What I have gathered (in flux, always, ebb and flow) about my father is a jumble of slivers that I have collected from the people who loved and love him, tangled with the sieved fragments of who I knew and know him to be. It is nothing if not an unstable archive, and I am only just beginning to understand the depths of grief as it weaves through the passage of time. For a long time, I had been trying to knot together the threads of past-present-future until they formed one long tendril, a sort of map-making toward some place that I thought would make the grief leave me alone.
It turns out that, after all these years, I do not wish for the grief to go away.
Opalized fossils are exactly what they sound like: ancestral remains, pressed into stunning auroral montages under the abiding assurance of silica and water. Mirrors of ancient oceans and skies buried deep beneath the ground, echoing old worlds, cascading into color and candescence. These instantiations of lineage made luminous remind me that it is possible for us to act as conduits, for us to transduce our grief into the buoyance underlying all the attendant possibilities of generative connection. Whatever remains is some molten core that we continue to hold, together, until that (ever/over) flow of grief anneals into something smooth and solid and stable.
The question, then, if grief-as-sinew potentiates our healing by how it shapes the practice of our love with/for each other: What conditions allow us to anchor into our relationships with grief? I am learning to understand grief and the love that binds it to us, and us to each other, as collective, communal, liberatory, imaginatory. Whole. Holy.
Grief is connection, in the way that love is sinew, bridge, thaw.
Grief is love – this is the lesson, I think, over and over and over again.