sixteen.
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.
The day mom died. Thirteen years ago, at six in the morning, I woke to my father, muttering, in complete disbelief, “she’s gone.” She lay beside the curtained window only beginning to alight with morning. Her mouth, open like a flower mid-bloom, as if at the end of a blown kiss. There but not. Me, a daughter but not.
I’ve found many ways to get through this day. To landmark it. Reflecting on her absence, what could and might have been. Remembering her publicly and privately, online and in person. Conjuring her through story, through detailed recollections of how she was, what it felt like to be in her company, to be ensconced in her love. Leaning on ceremony, the ritual red ballon set loose (a kind of return to sender in the language of the movie she loved). Finding some way to say her name, to feel its forgotten familiarity: Marita, Mom, Mamita, and hear it alive in another person.
I’ve felt grief’s weather in the days leading up, felt tired and tender. Had days so lonely, when she was forgotten by the people who loved her and loved me most, that I retreated and coiled myself in anger and disappointment. On easier days, hoped I’d gotten through it, that easy gratitude was the new paradigm.
Her death was meant to be the biggest and most terrible. But since death and I have continued to cross paths, her death, more and more, just is. The same as her living just was. The more I accept that in every life lives a death, in every opportunity to love, an ending, the more I find peace. An uneasy word because the kind of peace I reference is not serene, at all settled, or completely forgiving. Rather is giving up my own self-inflicted, hurtful provocations as method to remember her and not lose her again. I don’t need the punishing, hard earned education. I relinquish it. I give up.
In a dance class, the teacher asked “what can you lose without losing yourself.” I loved her and therefore remember her. I am a part of her and therefore cannot lose her.
I trust her as I trusted her then. I trust that to love is to remember she is my heart, that she looks after the ones I love, that she’s there in life’s most important moments and life’s most overlooked joys and disappointments. To love her requires no looking back.
I say this knowing I was lucky to have such a person in my life, and grieve for those that did not know or have someone like her. It was a love I took for granted — never again. It’s a love I’ll try emulate and put back into the world for the rest of my life.
On the first anniversary of her passing, my London landlord warned there was a insect infestation in the flat. When I walked in, searching for something sinister, I instead found a swarm lady bugs. Her bug. Her. Alive and continuing on, in her spirit and delight.
And now, me as well. Alive, with her spirit and delight.
Michiko Dead
BY JACK GILBERT
He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.
