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

Like This

When I was a little girl, I would fall asleep in the couch and my father would scoop me up, carry me to my room, put me in my bed. Most of the time, I would have woken up from being moved, but I would continue to close my eyes, pretending to still be asleep. I'm sure he knew I was pretending, but he would carry me nonetheless, and tuck me in. He would sweep my hair up from my nape, and I would feel cool against my pillow. He never rushed. And when he left, he would leave the light on, and the door open.

I have a memory of his shirt chafing my cheek, of the creak of my bedroom door, of the sudden warmth of the light in my room.

Years later, he would still carry me, every time our street got flooded and I would refuse to miss my 7:30 class. By this time, I was already a teacher, but in his eyes, I was still his little girl in need of being carried to a dry patch of street, seven houses away, so my schoolteacher's shoes wouldn't get soaked. He would wait for a dyip with me, and I would wave goodbye, both of us quietly laughing at the hilarity of it all.

I have a memory of the sloshing of the water, and of his back as he would slowly wade his way back home. I have a memory of the sound of his feet, and of the rhythm of his breathing.

On the day that he died, we had been laughing about a piece of pastry that had gone missing in the ref. Conveniently, of course, we had pinned the crime on the Chubby Brother, but my father's laughter was his admission of guilt. He was diabetic, and I remember the pastry conspiracy that sprung unspoken between us at that moment. It was my turn to carry him then, towards a reprieve from a hard and tedious life--towards his own dry patch of street seven houses away.

Some days, I look back and I see that we have never arrived on his dry patch. The floodwaters have caught up, and I had failed him.

But some days, I look back and I would know that this could not be true. He never allowed us to feel that we were causing him any trouble, much less allow us to think that we've failed him in any way. I could wash myself clean afterwards, he'd say every time. We'd get to a dry place in a jiffy, he'd say, assuring his girls that it was a small bother. The neighbors who saw us would fondly cheer him on, calling out to us, Palangga kaayo ni Papa o! 

Today, I brave the floodwaters on my own. But when the wading gets hard, it is still him who carries me towards a reprieve, towards my dry patch of street.

And these are what I keep, when I doubt what I deserve. When I forget that I, too, matter as much as the people I love. The memory of this service. 

"See, here," the memory says. "You had been loved like this."

Irrecoverable

January 17, 2015

Sometimes, when I put my hair up a certain way, and I catch a wayward reflection of myself on some shiny surface, I see my mother looking back. For a microsecond she is there.

But I have ceased taking a second look when this happens. She is forever lost to me. And irrecoverable, she stands on the other side of the shiny surface, perhaps looking back, perhaps not.

March 19, 2015

On his way back to the village, Jarvis meets Kumalo, the father of his son’s murderer. Despite himself, Jarvis asks the other father if he remembers his son, and Kumalo says, yes. Even if he doesn’t.

How does it happen that there are some things in this world we wish we did not understand?

Like this begging for a shared memory? Or the blinding clarity of how natural it is to need it so much. Or the embarrassment of having to stutter when you try to explain where you are going, because you  were going someplace where you could wait for the longing to abate. Or the immense gratitude for the kind of empathy that does not require a syllable of explaining.

This comprehension, this insight into what the human soul is capable of enduring—where does one give it back?

July 6, 2015

Always. I have to pause in the middle of a lecture, from my tasks, in my tracks. I stop because I have to acknowledge your non-presence. All of a sudden, This does not make sense. 

Towards what end do I slave away, or struggle, or endure? For what am I kind, or thoughtful or honest? Your death eats away at all my reasons.

And I want to stay there, in that pause, where you are.

We will forever be a heartbeat apart, forever a soul away--my breath is our distance; our memory, my curse.

Grays and Goldens

I now love the sea at dusk for a different reason.

I used to like it for the sunset, like everybody else, but one afternoon, lacking a reason to hurry home, I sat a little bit longer, and I discovered that the colors of the sea after sunset are more beautiful--when the sky is quieting down from its explosion of reds and yellows.

The sea gives up its blues and greens then, and becomes so many kinds of gray. Up in the sky, there are usually muted streaks of goldens—nothing extravagant. The grandeur of the sunset has subsided, and the sky and the sea give in to a denouement. This denouement is like a sigh, as if both the sea and sky are spent from all the work required in creating such a spectacle of colors that must accompany the setting of the sun.

From the left, what I come here to watch begins without haste. The goldens burn a little a duller, and the grays from the sea meet those from the sky, wiping away the horizon.

I come to the beach now to watch this disappearance.

Without the horizon, there is no longer a divide. It seems to me that the earth and the heavens continue into each other, as if we could reach the heavens if we walked far enough; as if all the people we have lost, who are there on the other side, could cross and come back to us.

Are they looking, too? Are they sitting down, perhaps, on their side of the shore, waiting out the horizon as well, so that they may also feel us near?

And always, as if my soul remembers an ancient instruction, I look up towards my left—towards the memory of a left hand that could not move, towards the memory of another left hand that endeavored to make up for what the other could not do. I have lost both of them now. I have lost, too, the memory of the last time I had stolen into either of those hands for their comfort.

When did I decide that the weight of my hand into theirs was a burden I could spare them? Why was it never revealed to me that by withholding my need for their hand, I was denying them a pleasure? 

Yes, the disappearing always starts in the left. And right up ahead always lies the last piece of horizon to disappear. Soon, the sky and the sea will be seamless. The new singular vastness will be two shades paler than night, and when the wind is right, it will be tranquil, save for the foam that would rise up and roll towards the shore.

The depth that this vastness would possess will be breathtaking. From where I sit on the shore, it will be as if I'd be looking right into infinity, and it will feel as if the reckoning of this unimaginable space/time could only be done right there and right then.

It is very, very far, where they are, isn’t it? And forever is a very, very long time.


Perhaps, sitting there on the shore at dusk, across the immense gray vastness, is the closest I will ever get to them.

This infinity separates us.

But then the horizon disappears, and for that little while, it is all the distance that I need.

Grief, In Pieces

Because we can never truly handle the enormity of the grief of loss, we deal only with its pieces. We deal with the sadnesses—in the plural.

We break grief down into tiny, deal-able chunks. Into little, handle-able fragments.

What I know for sure is that I am grateful for small, individual portions of grief, even when they arrive together. This is why I think mourning takes a lifetime. One does not really suffer through the colossal grief all at once and then get over it. He mourns because of the small sadnesses, each time dealing with a different piece of grief from the other time.

Some days, I grieve for pastries they loved and which I begin to wrap out of habit; for text messages I am terrified I might delete by accident, for TV ads I am very sure they would have laughed about. Some days, I grieve for God misunderstanding that we do not need them anymore; for friends who are impatient that we get over the loss; for verb forms in the past tense I use when I write about them;   

Some days, I grieve for my name when they used to say it, and for the fear that I would forget. I grieve for the mundane, for the everyday, for the lying down to bed, and then, for the getting up again.

I grieve for the many, many sadnesses that are omnipresent, that render me exhausted from all the toughening up that needs to be made, because there is Everyday that needs to be done.

I grieve that even despite my best efforts, some days, I rip apart at the seams of this Tough I put on, and the sadnesses creep in—not all at once, but in pieces.

I grieve, most especially, for the pieces that arrive on tiptoes, those sadnesses that burrow in a corner of the soul, where they linger and refuse to leave, and where they lay quiet and heavy and inconsolable.

Tatak IDS Ako

Almost five years ago, my friend Ron and I put together a video ID for the Integrated Developmental School, where we both were members of the faculty. We decided to use the battlecry (for lack of a better term), "Tatak IDS ako".  

So many things have happened since then--some of them sad, some of them scary, some of them insane, but all of them necessary, and therefore, wonderful. 

Friends, students, teachers, people we work with--I have never ceased to be amazed by all the lives we form memories about, or form a memory in. 

I am inclined to believe that we are all each other's most beautiful coincidences. 

And then again, perhaps we are more.

Mid-day Epiphanies

I do not know whether every other death is similar, or whether each death is different.

What I know is that since the death of my parents, I have become aware of a ruthless panic that is unlike any I’ve ever felt before. It feels very much like the panic of a fall: it is as if the ground is suddenly snatched away and my heart catches in my throat, except that this time, the panic is not momentary—it is continuous and unrelenting.

What I know is that it is worse in the evenings, when my mind checks for familiar sounds, as if it is unknown to it that the sounds will not come anymore. In the evenings, I am suddenly aware that I knew those sounds so well.

And I knew the silences, too.

But the world is different in the mornings. In the mornings, there are strengths that are doled out to wanting hearts, even though these strengths are retrieved at sundown. Oh, no, the strengths are not given for keeping; they are only lent. And while it is true that there is beggary in anything that is borrowed,  we beggars hold open our palms eagerly, because there is also salvation.

Mid-day epiphanies arrive arrogantly, knocking down walls and threatening the doled-out strength you picked up on the way to work. They are the kind that would drive you out of the office at lunchtime and make you walk in the rain so you could entertain the thoughts, fearfully, in the privacy of an unshared umbrella.

Mid-day epiphanies about loss are the worst. They arrive while you book a flight, and the form asks for emergency contact persons. They raise an eyebrow when you get comfortable in a conversation, and they scoff, “What if your friends indulge you only because they think you’re their responsibility and they’d really rather get on with their lives?” They march with you as you get awarded for Outstanding Teacher, and they whisper, in cadence to your steps, “There is no one to make proud anymore.”  The epiphanies help you arrange your brother's academic gown on his graduation day, and they chide, in many different versions, all throughout the day, "They had to be robbed of this experience, as well."


Epiphanies that come in the middle of the day are powerful epiphanies. 

They are those that make you stop at the turn of a familiar aisle in the grocery when you suddenly realize that you will not need to get anything from that aisle anymore. Right there, at the aisle crossing, in the middle of little kids playing tag around pushcarts, and above the din of half-meant threats thrown by parents at their unruly children, you suddenly realize you have actually ceased being a daughter.  

How is it that one actually stops being anybody’s child? 

How is it that one is brought into the world and then abandoned? How is the weighing being done at the moment when it is decided how much is too much for one heart? Where does one appeal about it? How does one keep his heart from looking for those who will never come back?

What I know is that while you deal with the loss of people you love, you begin to truly comprehend what never means. The comprehension does not come suddenly, of course. You will have been contending with it since Day 1, but one day, perhaps on a rainy Wednesday, without warning and without your consent, the thought suddenly crosses your mind. Never. Never is a very, very long time. The thought drives you out into the rain, because there, in the middle of the day, you are gripped by the panic. You are suddenly falling, not belonging to anybody. 

How does one un-comprehend that?

  

*My parents died two weeks of each other in October. We buried them two weeks apart, in the same place, after a similar ceremony, around the same people who knew them or who know us. We dug the earth again, while it was still soft— when it hasn’t even begun to heal at all.

In Medias Res

People lie when they talk about death.

Nobody ever dies “done”. Nobody ever “finishes the race”. Nobody ever “fights the good fight”. There is no ‘[raging] against the dying light’. No bargaining; no volition. There is no “leaving” even, as if some consent is given. Everybody leaves is taken in medias res.

People lie about the dying knowing their time is near. The truth is that there is no intimation. No foreshadowing. People only flatter themselves with meanings they forcibly assign to otherwise random events prior to the death. People romanticize coincidences too eagerly, too desperately. The events in our lives do not give way to death. Death happens, quite insensitively, in the midst of things--in medias res.

Nobody else participates in its performance either. Not even the dying. Friends are poor performers; the bereaved are worse. We take refuge in clichés, because three languages-worth of vocabulary will not have the words to encapsulate what we want to say.

Is that it? Or is that a lie, too?

And what about “[resting] in peace”? Who knows for sure that it is a resting? When people lie about everything else, why should we trust them on this, too?

Suffice it to say that some part of the rational mind recognizes the whole hullabaloo during a death, as a performance: everyone is a performer, and everything is performed in medias res.

How necessary this conspiracy is. In lieu of a rational explanation, we take to metaphors, to ceremonies. The grander, the vaguer, the better. We take to lies, to make us forget how strange it is to bury someone in the ground, and to leave him there, under all of us, never to return to his things, to his half-finished coffee, to us.

So there is no philosophizing this. There is no other perspective to be convinced about. There is no seeking for metaphors that would provide comfort. There is only death.

There is only an end. And with everything else, a loathsome, loathsome continuation.

For the Sake of One Individual

“You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle or integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger security for happiness.” 

            –Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Jane Austen says DON’T.

For the sake of one individual, she says, we should not waver in what we believe in: that what we hold true for one person, we should hold true for everyone.

I’ve been trying to figure out why the absoluteness of her saying no doesn't sit well with me.

Why is she absolute about advising against making an exception? 

Why do I feel that it is a rational expectation that we should have the ability to make an exception, if necessary, for people we love?

It is true that principles, essentially, should be unshakable. They should be applied to everybody, in all circumstances. What good, of course, are whimsical “moral rules”? I even agree that a few of those we are especially passionate about need not be explained or apologized for.

These said, I still believe that rigid principles are anti-human. It scares me to think about an inability to compromise, even for the sake of one individual. As people, we assign more value on unbending principles and less value on those that allow room for negotiation, for compromise, for exception. This is great, for all the right reasons. But when we equate compromise with weakness and with unreliability, I disagree. I think the ability to compromise reveals a strength rather than a weakness in one's character.

This said, I can imagine the vast uncertain gray area. When do we bend our own moral rules? For whom should we allow ourselves to do it? And for what reasons?

Who knows, really?

What I know is that I believe in the simple logic of making an exception for people who matter in our lives. Whether this means staying up later than our usual bedtime, or letting pass errant punctuation marks, or allowing this person to see us in our most vulnerable states--if our person so requires, our making an exception for him communicates a valuing that words will fail to encapsulate.
   

Sure, it is laudable that someone should die for a principle, but I find it more impressive when, in this same state of passion for what he believes in, he could make an exception.

I think our ability to do this is precious. I would always choose to be someone who will make an exception, than be someone who would not.

For the sake of one individual, why not? yes. 

The Broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah is not a praising song, although it might as well be. 

It is a sigh, really—one that grays the space between surrender and defeat. 

It is the cry which one utters when he is exhausted from a fight he has been very passionate about, but then he discovers a truth he has not seen, and this changes how he feels about the fight, except now, he is spent, and he could not be anything more. The fight in him has left, and so has everything else.  

I saw your flag on the marble arch

But love is not a victory march

It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah

The songwriter Leonard Cohen clearly alludes to the Bible, but he flits from one allusion to another, until the “you” he addresses in the song becomes unclear. At one point it refers to David, at another to Samson, and then to God, and finally, to some absent lover. A vagueness like this may start out to be appealing, but after a while, the lack of clarity becomes frustrating.

In the end, though, what I fail to understand does not matter as much as those that I do understand. A hallelujah is usually an exclamation of faith, a declaration of love--a single word for all of the words we cannot say. Praise You, God, for every thing.

I first heard the song's refrain in an episode of The West Wing. The refrain seemed to jump out of the scene, haunting and stubborn, demanding to be experienced on its own. And as I did, I was gripped by a surreal recognition: this is not the hallelujah that people know. 

This is my hallelujah.

It seems to me that this is how exhaustion would sound, if it had to be personified. And I know that there are those of us who wish that we didn't recognize it. In a song. Like an anthem of our soul.

The song alludes to how David's faith had been challenged by the bathing Bathsheba under the moonlight. David was a dutiful king during a very difficult time, but although his faith was strong, [God] needed proof. It baffled David, this test of his faith despite all the good that he did and all the struggle for it. It is understandable how, when he failed--in the song at least--he utters a cold and a broken hallelujah.

Perhaps I, too, like the "baffled king", think this "test" is cruel.

Too many of us are already doing the best that we can about what we are thrown in life, and when we have to struggle further because we are being "tested", in order to prove our worth for love, or in order to prove our faith...why, hallelujah.

None of it would make sense, to David, and to me, and I could imagine that no argument could ever come close to explaining the abandonment and betrayal that are afforded even to especially to the best of us.

Perhaps, like Cohen’s David, I, too, understand too well the privacy of this hallelujah. It is the resentment of a good man, undeserving of the Test of Faith he was bound to fail in. A resentment that is quieted now. I recognize the rebellion in the refrain, and the loathsome yearning to be rescued, and the resignation. And ultimately, the exhaustion for what never arrived. 

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But You don't really care for music, do you?

In the end, who's to say that a cold and a broken hallelujah is valued less than its holier counterpart? Who's to say that confusion, or anger, or brokenness, cannot be a place for an exclamation of faith? Or who's to say that we risk heavenly favor if we question, quietly, what the suffering is for?

And about those of us who have been spent in the fight, who’s to say that we are not fighting still, here, with our very surrender?

Daunt/Less

I am putting to rest one persistent thought tonight.

Paton wonders in his book, Cry, the Beloved Country, “What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?”

And what about when he decides to take his own life? Does something break in him, as well?

Is the breaking unhurried, and unrelenting, and agonizing? Or is it a shattering--sudden and ravaging?

Or perhaps it is a birthing, rather than a breaking? A creation rather than a destruction? A filling up of the void which had been the very reason for the giving up; except that in the final moments, what fills the void is a dauntlessness that is unusable but for a singular purpose--ending one's life.   

Dauntlessness. It is neither courage nor a lack of it. It is only the absence of fear. In fact, it is only an absence--an absence of reasons to continue, rather than having reasons to stop.

And I believe if one pauses long enough, he will find in himself a fearsome capacity to empathize— the tabooed recognition of the human tendency to give up and stop.

Instead of hope.

Limpid Dewdrops

Mono no aware. The pathos of things. The poignancy of the awareness of the impermanence of every thing in the world.

The mono no aware is the Japanese aesthetic perspective that the sadness of transience is beautiful.

Scholars exemplify this with iconic examples: the last sliver of the waning moon; the last burst of summer; a flower in its fullest bloom. Zen examples make more sense: a dewdrop on a leaf, a rose and a horse by the roadside, a snowflake on an open palm, the stillness of an old pond. These images evoke a sensitivity towards a criterion of beauty—what makes something beautiful is not what already is; what makes something beautiful is the awareness that it doesn’t last.

Thus, in this perspective, the snowflake, the dewdrop and the still pond are beautiful because of their fleeting existence. A rose in full bloom is beautiful only because it wilts after that period of beauty. A dewdrop is a marvelous thing to behold only because it could roll to the ground without warning and disappear in an instant. The beauty of the stillness of the pond lies in the apprehension of it being disturbed, perhaps, by Basho’s wayward frog.

Transience. Sadness. Beauty.

I see it in the excited chatter of students, sudden and wonder-ful, when an idea—irrelevant until then—suddenly becomes the most important discovery of the day.

It is there, and everywhere else—

In the awareness of a pride that cannot be contained by the world for a class one mentors;

In the smile that steals into the eyes of a parent who has been tired for too long;

In the ridiculous affairs of a younger brother, or in the fierce passion of a younger sister’s dreaming;

In the lighting up of a child’s eyes at the arrival of an adult friend, making the latter wonder if it isn’t undeserved;

In the carefree laughter shared only among true friends, the rolling kind that renders one breathless;

It is there, especially in the silence that sits between two memories—the previous memory for which the laughter was, and the next one, still being sifted through for, in the minds of old friends who sit together, just for reminiscing. It is there in the quiet that lingers when they say goodbye, before they send each other off with silly jokes that speak what they do not say.

It never gets old. Each time I am confronted by the aware, I am struck by the same sense of discovery that washed over me nine years ago, as I sat in my AsianLit class, and a haiku suddenly made sense, opening to me a worldview that was as powerful as it is honest and beautiful.

Oh white, limpid dew

With what poor judgment you choose

The place where you lie.

Limpid dewdrops, we might all be. And are we not all placed in the midst of great uncertainty, at times rolling to the ground before we are ready, and at times, lingering long enough to catch a ray of light, and lending a tiny burst of colors to the world around us?

Mono no aware. It is the uncertainty—the gray—that makes that tiny burst of colors, and everything else, precious.

Sing Us a Song, Piano Man

I look forward to workdays that close with a walk to a coffee place near the school. During the walk, the day dwindles into a soft conclusion, and even my thoughts quieten a little bit in recognition of this ceremony. This afternoon, I had Billy Joel’s Piano Man on repeat on my music player, and by the time I reached the coffee place, I had listened to the song four and a half times, and my heart was weighed down twice over.

I think, in this world, I would never hear a lonelier song refrain. This one belies the jazzy piano solo—and then the famous harmonica instrumental—at the beginning of the song. The rhythm almost readies us for a love song, but it goes on, first, like a beautiful irony for the story it tells, and then later, like the melody that was meant to echo the words in the first place. Each time, I allow myself to experience this shift, and I imagine an impish playmate, who could convince me that the idea he put in my head had always been mine, never his.

The song doesn’t rush. It takes its time in introducing the regular Saturday crowd in one bar, who “shuffles in” to “forget about life for a while”. We are brought to the place by the Piano Man, and through his eyes we see tired people nursing their drinks only as much they are nursing their broken spirits. Through his music, we, too, “share [in the] drink they call loneliness”.

On the bar, we see an old man “making love to his tonic and gin” who calls out to the Piano Man, “Son, can you play us a memory/ I’m not very sure how it goes/ But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete/ When I wore a younger man’s clothes.” It is not difficult to imagine this old man’s sadness, as that which Shakespeare describes is for the memory of things past. 

I wonder what stories this old man has. What things must he have seen? How much of himself has he poured out into the world? How much remains?

On the other side of the bar, is the Piano Man’s friend, John, the jovial bartender, who confesses that he would have made it big somewhere else, if only he “could get out of this place”. I keep thinking about the “smile that ran away from his face”, and about how lonely a thing that must be to witness. Elsewhere in the room, there is Paul, a novelist who “never had time for a wife”; Davy, who will, for the rest of his life, be a navy man; a waitress “practicing politics”, and businessmen who are slowly getting stoned.

Sing us a song, you’re the Piano Man! Sing us a song tonight!

To this, the Piano Man sings his sad refrain, Oh la la-la, la-di-da, la-la, la-di-da, da-da...

Wordless, the refrain is a resignation, an answer that is really a non-answer, like every resignation is. Like an answer, it offers comfort and an assurance; but unlike an answer, it calms the soul only until it wonders again.

I used to equate resignation with cowardice, but I have long since learned how horribly wrong I was. I now know that the courage necessary to decide to let go/give up pales in comparison to the courage necessary to renew that decision, every time the heart second-guesses itself.

I have a special empathy for people who have had to reshape their dreams and who hold on to whatever shape remains, in order to be where the people they love need them to be. Isn’t this reshaping a resignation? And isn’t this resignation admirable? Do we not do this because we had to step up too soon, or perhaps because we had to make right that we did not do so soon enough?

Later in the song, the crowd, who comes to the little bar mostly for the Piano Man, asks him, “Man, what are you doing here?”, to which he replies his sad refrain, Oh, la, la-la, la-di-da, la-la, la-di-da, da-da…

Too often, like the Piano Man, we become painfully aware of how much more we could be, if we were less constrained. And when we think of this, we find ourselves embarrassed by such selfish thoughts. For later, when we think about the people who need us where we are, we are reminded that our pain is also our privilege, and that if only so they may hold on to their dreams whole, we would quietly lay ours down.

Oh, la, la-la, la-di-da, la-la, la-di-da, da-da…

Right Opinions

Written on February 9, 2011, when everybody had an opinion about Angelo Reyes’s suicide

It disgusts me— the way we always have something to say to explain other people’s actions or inactions; the way we encapsulate a lifetime into a sentence; the way we reduce a person into a Right Opinion.

Today, I do not care about Right Opinions.

I am saddened by Angelo Reyes’s suicide. I do not care if he was guilty or not. I do not care about the politics that backdrops his death. All I care about is that he belonged to someone. All I care to imagine is the pain that his death is causing the people to whom he belonged. Damn everything else.

I remember a similar feeling I had almost six months ago with Rolando Mendoza, the hostage-taker in the infamous bus hostage crisis. I still remember how the media cornered his poor father and how they feasted on his reactions. Damn those insensitive bastards.

I cried for Mendoza’s father that night. His reaction to his son’s terrible death was unforgivingly captured by the media that brought the news. That moment was in the midst of so many things to be said, of so many facts that would happily back up opinions, of so many justifiable opportunities to reduce, to trivialize, to mock.

However, that moment should not have been like all the rest. It should have been a moment for pause, for feeling. And because it was so delicate a moment, it needed to be seized—to be felt—right then. At that fleeting moment, all we should have cared about was the poor old man in his flimsy shirt, wailing like a heart-broken child, for the son who belonged to him. Damn everything else.

In the next morning, that moment will have drowned in a sea of Right Opinions. In the next morning, it will not have been a Right Opinion to feel sad for Mendoza or for his father.

Sometimes I fear that we couldn't stop long enough to second-guess ourselves. We are all so proud—and so right—all the time. Couldn't we just sit down and feel? For a while? Couldn't we allow ourselves to just be sad, for a moment, because something is sad?

I do not care so much about Right Opinions today. I only care that my heart is in the Right Place. Damn everything else.