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.