In You

In an interview, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked, 'What keeps you up at night, Neil?' I expected his answer to be his usual soundbite of 'the questions we do not yet know to ask'. But his answer was this: if the universe is expanding at a constant speed, what we see when we look up at the night sky is only a piece ripped from a larger universe which has now expanded so vast that its entirety has escaped our field of vision; what we perceive as a whole at the present, could actually just be a portion of a whole. He's worried that there might be a piece forever lost to us, and he imagines a time in the future, when future people would look up and see only their own piece of universe, not knowing their heavens belonged with ours.

 

This struck me as the musings of a man who knows so much that he knew he knows only very little. And now the implications of the theories he knows are challenging his truths. And yet, because he is a scientist, he respects what he doesn't know, and he is comfortable with how little his significance is, or how fleeting. I find it especially poignant that someone of his caliber would situate himself as almost worthless from a cosmic perspective, and quite literally, too. Against the universe, he is less than a speck, like all of us.

 

In college, we read Pigeon Feathers by John Updike. I remember it to be a (very long) short story about a boy, David, who is asked to get rid of the pigeons which were considered pests in their farm. While relieving himself in the outhouse, he comes to thinking about his mortality. Already, his discovery of a book has shaken some core ideas he had assigned to be true about his existence. His young mind panicked at the thought of falling into the dark chasm under where he squatted in the outhouse. If he fell (into his poop below), nobody would hear him scream, and perhaps nobody would even think of looking for him, and he will be swallowed into the darkness. David's thoughts follow him through his tasks, and while he was burying the six dead birds he was able to shoot with his rifle, he noticed how the feathers of each bird were intricately positioned. They were in 'a pattern that flowed without error'. The feathers stiffened in the right places when the birds braced for flight, and they were soft and fine where the birds needed them to be soft and fine. Here was his epiphany: if the universe granted these pests so much attention that even their feathers had divine detail, then he should be fine, for he was a boy and not a bird, and surely the universe would take care of him, too.

 

David's crisis is a familiar crisis, and it recurs as the subject of so many great literature: in the course of our lives, our smallness will terrify us.  We only have to look up at the night sky, and our insignificance will be made clear.

 

Many have romanticized our littleness against this unimaginable vastness. In our ‘quest for meaning’, we have appealed to the notion of consciousness, and to our capacity for love, or for language. We wove into our souls beliefs in a purpose, destiny and divinity. Because philosophy is tedious, we seek refuge in the arts. We paint and dance, and write verses that celebrate-- and mourn-- our existence.

But for me, one of the best to address this crisis is an astrophysicist.

 

In one of his lectures, Neil deGrasse Tyson counted on his right hand the elements that make up the universe, and on his other hand, the elements that make up the human body. 'You are stardust,’ he concluded. ‘The stuff that makes up the universe is the same as the stuff that makes up You. You are the universe', he said.

 

 'And the universe is in you.'

 

 

 

Written July 5, 2020

Into Song

Back to the grind, I say out loud today.

I think I have exhausted myself enough feeling so much about all the deaths in the world, and about the kindnesses that people have been showing others during this pandemic.

I think about faceless frontliners, about kids they don't get to see anymore, about parents they might infect. I worry about those who are far away, about friends I love, and about my own brother and sister. I've cried watching Italy break into song, and equally in frustration about how This is being handled in our own country, and about how ill-equipped we are to handle it any other way.

There is so much to feel.

But mostly, it's the kindnesses that break my heart, and I am reminded that our hearts could break that way, too: for the bravery that is summoned everyday by nurses I don't even know, and the choices I imagine are being made by doctors who decide to be present, and whom we know nothing about. And then there are those who step up in the grocery lines to pay for items other people couldn't afford anymore, and young people going out of their way and into the store for the elderly who are too scared to step out of their car.

My god. We can be this kind, too. We can take care of each other like this.

So now, I force myself to get back to the grind: back to my notes, back to work. To put back some normalcy in my day, until it's time to look at the news again, to see more grieving, more fear---but hopefully, to also see more courage, and more people breaking into song.

Between Never and Infinity

Over these five years, so many have reached out to me to express how grateful they are for the words I lend, however inadvertently. They too, have lost people; they too, are coming to terms with 'devastating loss'--words that never meant much until the day they did.

I know exactly what they mean about words like these. I, myself, had traced 'blue'. I traced blue with my finger on my father's lips after the doctors called Time of Death. I had weighed in my palms the heaviness of a 'lifeless hand'. I had held 'cold' in my arms. I had whispered 'brave' in my mother's ear when I told her she could go.

And I know the 'quiet pace' of a daughter who had ceased to be one--suddenly, irrevocably. I had walked this pace, in my mismatched slippers, all alone from the hospital and back home, certain only of the news I was carrying to my younger brother and sister.

I know also about the impatience of 'friends' that we get over the loss, as if there was a time frame for grieving. I had coffee with someone once, who told me to stop 'whining' about dead parents. I was five weeks into grieving and she wanted me back into the business of decoding her affair with a married man. Even the earth we dug up again to bury one more parent hasn't begun to heal at all.

And I know about memory, too. I know acutely that I hunger for shared memories, like how a man is hungry for food. A few days ago, I came across a post by my mom's best friend. She was just remembering October, and the friends she lost in my parents. I couldn't express into words my gratitude for this remembering.

So I'd write about loss, sometimes. I write because only in my remembrance of them am I able to honor how they had lived.

I write about loss because we never stop loving those who are gone. Because all the love we have for them fly out of us not knowing where to go. Perhaps it goes into what we write; perhaps it goes into the remembering. But where I can, I hold steady this love so I may feel them near.

I write about loss because between Never and Infinity, I am cursed with Every Day: I grapple with the absence of a parent I can make proud, and with the sudden untruth of 'coming home'. Home has become a lie, a space I suddenly had to redefine so that I would not have to accept that I will never come home again. They are very very far away. My breath is our distance; their memory, my curse.

And ultimately, I write about loss so I may find grace where there is none.

Here's to the struggling, to the grieving, to the frightened. Here's to those of us who feel unceremoniously abandoned, having lost perhaps the only people who will ever love us without question, without measure, without pause.

May you also find healing, where you can, and may you never ever forget how you had been loved.

The Tragedy of Broken Things

“The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again.” 

Thus begins this novel of powerful themes. The novel explores how one’s country creates pain and gives comfort at the same time.

Written by South African author Alan Paton in 1948, Cry, the Beloved Country is set in Ndotsheni, South Africa, a beautiful place tainted by the fear of a broken people. It is set during the difficult time of a racial segregation, where the rich and powerful white South African is frightened by the violence of the deprived black South African.  

In its core, the novel talks about the struggle of an old Negro priest, Kumalo, who learns that his only son has committed the most horrible crime of all: taking another man’s life. The young man who was killed was the son of the rich white South African, James Jarvis, who is a quiet and agreeable man in the village of Ixopo. His son was an active and a well-respected reformist in the city of Johannesburg and he was accidentally killed by Kumalo’s son, who along with two other young men, intended only to steal from the white man’s house.

Kumalo travels to the city of Johannesburg where his son is being kept. The old priest is frightened by the busy city, and is extremely distressed about his son; and although the novel is about the boy, the story is not his.

This is largely the story of the father who raised him, who had held his little hand in the darkness when he was afraid, who had looked at him and envisioned so many wonderful things for them both, who had prayed for him all the goodness of the world.

Now, sitting across his son in the jail house of Johannesburg, Kumalo asks the boy, “Why?”, but the boy could only hang his head and weep. He was going to be hanged for his crime. Kumalo wonders what breaks in a man, at the moment that he strikes another man, with the same hand that had groped for his father’s hand in the darkness, afraid, when he was a little boy. This breaks Kumalo’s heart, and he finds no solace, even, momentarily, in his faith.

He is only comforted by the memory of the beautiful land of Ndotsheni:

“Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal. Aye, even the name of a river that runs no more.”


Even the title of the novel is an address to the land, this unfortunate land, which embraces a people who are fearful and broken. It is a land where the young are made to think that progress is only achieved through violence in the city and where the old are left in the mountains to remember their children, because they do not go back. It is a land where the color of the skin dictates one’s fate. The title of the novel is an address to the land, telling it to cry for the unborn generation who will inherit the fear and the hopelessness.


The conclusion of this story is one of surrender, as Kumalo walks up the mountain on the eve of the hanging of his son. He had gone there before, in two occasions of crisis, when he needed to commune with God in solitude. On the way up, he meets Jarvis, and in words that are neither condemning nor kind, the two fathers both remember the son who died by the hands of the other son. Jarvis, “after such deep hurt, had shown such deep compassion” and Kumalo has seen it. The old priest is assured that there is hope—for him and for the land that he loves.


As the sun rose on the day of the hanging, the father rose too, with a panic in his heart that he quelled with a prayer. Somewhere else was a son who was looking straight at the same sun, with the rope around his neck, the same panic in his heart and perhaps, the same prayer; and up there on the mountain, the father saw his beloved country and wondered when the land, like him, would start to heal.

A Silence and A Half

To this day, four years after I read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, I have been able to articulate only to two people my wonderment with how Rilke closed this opus.

I'd mention scenes from the book in class, or at the dinner table with friends. My students would always punctuate my narration with wondering silence, their eyes searching inwardly, as people do when a secret is revealed to them. A silence and a half later, almost always, one or two would start with  a wow, and after that, the class will erupt with thoughts.

They'd ask about Rilke calling Paris the city where one goes to die--'isn't Paris where people go to declare their love?' They'd  ask about other things, and they'd give examples for their own declarations.

But it's the silence before the Wow that I look forward to. It's those few seconds that comprise the pause that I tell the story for.

More often than not, it is in that silence that each of us becomes connected with each other. We become a singular energy. And while there are many many thoughts, we are united in thinking about one thing only.     

Within that silence, I can see in my class's minds the images that Rilke so masterfully paints: a man holding in his hands a worn-out face, thinning and torn in some parts, as he sits forlornly on the Parisian sidewalks, forgetting for two seconds that he is sitting there exposed, faceless. Without a face.

The first person narrator, Malte, sees this from across the street, and shaken to his core by the sudden jolt of the faceless man now realizing his carelessness, Malte walks away hurriedly, realizing, poor men shouldn't be disturbed when they are thinking.

Within a silence and a half, our minds build the physical form of fear--this abstract concept suddenly comprehensible in tangible terms, through Rilke's words. Our hearts drive us out of ourselves, Rilke says, our hearts pursue us, and we are almost outside of ourselves and we can't get back in. Like a beetle that someone has stepped on, he says, we gush out of ourselves. 

We gush out of ourselves, Rilke says. And like magic, it all makes sense.

Once, at a lunch with my mentor and her friend, we got around to talking about the laws of nature. A retired Physics professor, my mentor's friend brought home a point with an example: a heavily pregnant woman is often criticized as arrogant. Apparently, the arch of her back and the tilt of her head make her look like she is looking down on people. She explains, it's not arrogance but the woman's center of gravity that has shifted, requiring her to adopt what people perceive as a proud posture.

It was my turn to fall silent then. I remember the first few pages of Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge saying our deaths are born with us, and living is all just a prelude to a death that we should strive to be proud about. Regarding it this way, Rilke rearranges the hierarchy between life and death: it is death that matters more, and one's life becomes the condition with which one's death may be judged as good or bad.

The pregnant woman is proud, Rilke says, because she is carrying a life aside from her own, and with these, not one but two deaths.

But I did not say this out loud. I found myself keeping it for myself, like I keep from sharing the conclusion of Rilke's book. I can talk endlessly about this Rilke, but I have never once mentioned how it ends in class, or at the dinner table when I invite friends over. I fear that we reveal so much by how passionately we retell something we find beautiful. In this sense, it is us who decide whether we allow ourselves to be seen, and by whom.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge holds so much Seeing. Delicate sensibilities articulated in precise language. It talks about those who have taken to themselves the entire task of love; those whose strengths consist in being found.

It talks about beginnings. And it talks about endings--those conclusions one knows will eventually come. In Rilke's words, we are always painfully aware about 'partings one has long seen coming'. Cursed with this Seeing, we can only surrender, giving back to the universe what only the universe can endure.

Correct Isn't

I remember you on your birthday, Ma. And every day.

I still couldn’t tell stories about you. It is still difficult to have to remember how easily you laughed, and how beautifully you loved.

Loving, you expected nothing, accepted things even when they hurt you, stayed silent to keep the peace, and forgave even when you’re exhausted. Your love was perfect.

But I try not to love like you, Ma. I try to expect a little, to hardline against what hurts me, to speak up when it’s not my fault, to stop when I’m tired. I try.

I try to honor how you loved us, and how we had been suffered for, by loving ‘correctly’, but it is difficult to love less than the only way we know how, isn’t it? You knew that, too, Ma. Correct isn’t perfect.

There is a place in my mind I never go to. Everyday, I keep myself from thinking about how much you had to endure. How you had to learn to cut an onion with your one hand…and other things. 

What time did you have to start to make me the dinner you had ready that night, Ma? That night, when I arrived from work, and you called out from the kitchen that it was almost done. It was 8 PM. That night, eight days after we buried Papa, when after you placed my food on the table, you sat down, called me to you, and I came just in time to see all the light disappear from your eyes.

You left, too. With as little inconvenience for us as you could manage.

And all your love for me in my dinner plate.

April 22, 2018

Do Not Resuscitate

I ordered a Do Not Resuscitate for Mama.

I signed a DNR Form, authorizing her doctors to let her go when her heart stopped; no more drugs, no more CPR. It was me who ordered to withdraw life support.

Visitors are only allowed in the ICU at certain hours, so I camped outside her doctor's office at the first level of the hospital, near the lobby. I had told my brother and my sister to go home. There was nothing else that could be done.

I find it peculiar that I have no memory of how the DNR Form looked like. I think I might have signed it in the ICU; I couldn't remember that either. I had been made to understand that if Mama survived the night, she would be taken off her respirator, the machine that breathed for her.

Camped in the hospital lobby, I learned it was policy that a family member turns off the machine.

And because we just buried my dad ten days earlier, there was no one else who could do it. I was 28. I should have been planning family trips with my parents, buying them new furniture, trying out new restaurants with them.

Instead, I was signing DNR Forms, picking out coffins and buying memorial lots. Instead, I was haggling with hospital cashiers for the ICU cash deposit. "Sir, I'm a government employee. Sir, I work at IIT. Sir, you can have all my IDs. Sir, I swear to God I will pay the rest tomorrow."

He will not say yes.

I was a child; I did not even know how to plead properly. I did not even know how to insist to the night nurse that I be allowed to stay with my mom in the ICU in her last few hours.

When I talked to my mom for the last time, I whispered that it was okay for her to let go. I told her that she had been tired for too long, that it was time to rest. I promised her that my brother and my sister will both be fine.

I held her hand, just as she did during my grandmother's last moments. Her left hand was almost closed in a half-fist, the way it had always been after the stroke that left half her body paralyzed. For the twelve years following the stroke, she had been living with a disability that had caused her to do for three hours what she used to be able to do in ten minutes. Her other hand looked older than the paralyzed left hand. It had large, protruding veins, and longer nails; the years it spent compensating for the other lifeless one, were creased onto her fingers.

I held this hand, like she did with her own mother's right hand, and I told her what she told Lola. "Don't be afraid. I am here."

Today is my Mama's birthday.

It was also the 22nd when she passed away. She passed away before sunrise, before I had to be the one to unplug her, before I had to have one more memory I would need to forget.

They say our hearing is the last to go before we die. If that is true, then she would have known how I had been like her. She would have known that she did not have to be afraid.

She would have known that the love she loved us with, is the only kind of love we are capable of giving. Never less. Never, even when it meant letting her go.

Despite ourselves.

Written, April 22, 2017