nine.
This newsletter is here to connect you to your five senses and your grief at times when life and death make no sense. Consider it an imperfect “grounding exercise” for the month.
Loose ends. Mom’s illness laid all the unfinished threads, all the frayed parts of my life bare. At nineteen, I was still in school, I hadn’t decided upon a career, I hadn’t had a “breakthrough”, I wasn’t in love or anywhere close to finding a through-thick-or-thin partner. I was still more idea than realization.
While I had no action for eradicating cancer. I thought maybe I could fulfill my mom’s life as a mother.
I dug my heels into my career and into a love (lobbing too hefty hopes onto a kindly, soft spoken boy at a coffee shop on west fourth street). I hoped that my concrete decisions meant my mom knew me as a woman she was proud of. The woman she made. A finished person. And, if I’m honest, I wished that pursuing life meant that life would return to her and return her to me.
I lost my nerve without her. I couldn’t act. Love gave roots but didn’t risk wings. I unraveled without her.
But life weaves and is unwoven. It learns patterns. Stitching crudely, then steadier, with confidence. When it runs out of string, a new pattern begins. Refrains of past patterns return, giving confidence to the new. And loose threads are either tied off or left loose by design.
I see her pattern. I smell homemade broth on the stove. I taste the familiar and the arrival of things I don’t know. I hear trees sway, perturbed by wind. I feel capable. I grieve with fondness.
FEEL - Cafe Muller by Pina Bausch
Pina Bausch died a few years back, but her work as a German choreographer is immortalized in dance and in Wim Wender’s film “Pina”. Her work is poetic and unflinching, deeply beautiful and exposing, and combines human affectation with heightened, more dancerly movement. Her stories burst humanity’s seams.
When I’m at a loss for words or have lost my emotions, her work is a divining rod for feeling.
SEE - The Boy and the Heron
Miyazaki based what’s said to be his last film on a book titled How Do You Live? Equal parts grief and something bigger and magical, this film casts the view into mortal limbo with grace, raw edges, and tenderness.
SMELL - The Smell of Dawn by Nina MacLaughlin
What does dawn smell like? Peach pit, licorice, bread, nests, sparks, blood. What does dawn smell like? Anticipation.
HEAR - Promises
This album is an emotion river. Listen to it while driving, cloaked in night’s privacy. Listen to it with headphones, as you take a walk. Listen to it, and soften.
TASTE - My Greatest Inheritance? A Peanut Butter Taco.
Sandra Cisneros’s grandfather didn’t hug, kiss, or even talk much—instead, he spoke through his handmade flour tortillas. This essay learns to remember through replicated habit.
GRIEF - Learning to Drown
After her partner died, Jess Kimura (a snowboarder) confronted her usual unapologetic stereotype-breaking determination with grief’s despair. Fight and fear come to a head in this short doc.