Tag Archives: Grief

The Heaviness of Heart Work on the Days After

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This morning, I woke up crying.

It is Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and I am facilitating two discussions (one tonight and one on May 31) related to Asian Americans in educational and literacies spaces. Introducing more people to and centering the voices of Asian Americans in education is at the core of the work I do, based on the belief that when we know one another’s stories, experiences, and perspectives, it makes it harder for us to dehumanize one another. Usually, I use extensive social media networks to promote this work. But most of this month, I have been grieving, for the first part of the month, personal grief around mothering, and since then, particularly in the last 11 days, collective grief and renewed trauma based on my connections to multiple mass shootings.

I was just feeling a little more like myself yesterday, after spending over a week recovering from the shootings that occurred at the Tops Market in Buffalo, New York, and at Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church, just 20 miles from my home. So, I got on social media to tweet about today’s panel discussion.

And then I saw the news about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

A friend texted me that there was another school shooting, in Texas, and it looked bad.

It reminded me of the morning my brother texted me on the way to pick up my nephew from Sandy Hook school, nine and a half years ago and I was trying to piece information together. I knew we would not know the true total of those killed until the next day, maybe the next week. I knew that community would become just another place on a list of towns and cities known, first and foremost because a horribly deadly mass shooting had taken place there. And in Uvalde, like Sandy Hook, it would be particularly heartbreaking because it was children and educators killed.

My son was in 1st grade when the shootings happened at his cousin’s school. My daughter was not yet alive. In fact, because there are 9.25 years between them, she is in 1st grade now.

The Monday after the Sandy Hook shootings, I sent my son to an elementary school, one that, at the time, was open in the front and the back of the school. I was sad and I was afraid.

This morning, I woke up crying. I am sad and afraid. So little has changed.

This morning, I walked my daughter to an elementary school.

This morning, she ate Cheerios, with the heart shaped Cheerios interspersed with the regular round Os.

It is hat day, so she wore the raspberry beret I bought her in France and her Paris shirt, pink leggings, and a pink sweatshirt.

I asked if I could snap a picture of her before we left our house for our walk to school. I told her I wanted a picture of her all pink outfit for hat day.

But part of me wanted a picture of her, wanted to remember her breakfast, wanted to remember every detail, in case something happened.

Now, I am home.

In a few hours, I will drive across town to my son’s school where I will help celebrate the 8th & 12th graders.

A few hours after that, our family will see my daughter perform Arirang with her class and two other classes.

I have two papers to revise. Both of them are on centering humanity in the midst of dehumanizing contexts. One of them focuses on motherscholaring.

Tonight, we will have this beautiful panel of heart-centered Asian American educators. They are gifts as humans.

I do heart work.

All of it.

I live a heart-centered life.

And I’m broken. My heart is broken. I have pieced it together so many times. I have tried to fill the cracks with gold.

I have resisted in hard and soft ways, with authentic joy and sorrow, with words and actions.

But today, it is heavy, even in and with a community of grievers, today, the weight of it all is too much.

This morning, I woke up crying.

I cried after my daughter walked in the gates of her school.

I am sure I will cry many more times before the day is done, and on days to come, because that is part of my heart-centered life.

Today, the only resistance I can engage in is giving grace and holding space.

To myself and others. For myself and others.

Perhaps it’s the most important form of resistance there is.

Connecting through Grief

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Picture of two grave markers and four bunches of flower

I would never wish grief upon anyone.

Having been well acquainted with grief for the great majority of my life (introduction at 7 losing my maternal grandmother who raised me, with a a crash course in acute grief at 16 after losing my mother suddenly, and being close to death and loss many times since), grief has been a (mostly unwanted) companion for a long time. It has brought with it deep pain, longing, emptiness, and loneliness.

I say “mostly” unwanted, not because grief is anything one wants, but because I have recently gained a slightly different perspective on my grief as a part of my identity that strengthens me and allows me a greater connection with humanity, a greater sense of empathy and love, and a profound perspective on life that I don’t think I could have developed in any other way.

It is perhaps not grief alone that has done this. In fact, it is certainly not grief “alone” because when, for many years, I bottled up my grief, to build success in spite of it, I felt completely alone, disconnected from myself, my communities, and those who truly sought to know who I was.

It is, in fact, collective grief, or perhaps connective grief, that has brought healing in the midst of so much loss.

When my mother died, more than 25 years ago, I do not remember a lot about the period just after her death, but I remember a few things very distinctly: 1) Many people who came to her viewing were people I didn’t know who were part of the Taiwanese American community who loved her deeply, regretted not having more time with her, and shared stories with my aunt and brother, that I couldn’t understand for many reasons;  2)her funeral service had over 400 attendees: people who had flown in from all over the country whom she hadn’t seen in years, people from her job, churches she had briefly or consistently attended, people who were close to my brother, families from my high school, especially other cross-country parents; 3) At her funeral, there was a picture by the gravesite memorial of me half-laughing or perhaps just smiling. My brother had made a joke about my mom and it made me smile. We got in a lot of trouble for that photograph as I wasn’t allowed a moment of lightness in the heaviest time of my life.

I share these things because I am reminded that community bonds sometimes are deeper than the people we see each day. I share them because it was important to me to see my mother as someone who was so deeply loved and respected, even if she did not feel that she was these things much of the time (I was the only one living at home with her at the time of her death, and so became her confidant and saw her struggles with feeling alone and disrespected). I share them because it reminds me that in those moments, I instinctively knew that there was a complexity of grief that held many emotions, before I was socialized to grieve by two societies (Taiwanese & American) that reminded me not to be public with my emotions, good or hard, because it might bring shame to my family, because it might be judged as weakness, because sometimes hard things happen and of course, we’re supposed to take a few days, then move on.

Of course, I’ve learned, after 27 years, that grief doesn’t work that way, that grief is one of the most powerful experiences one can go through, and that grief in community, while not lessening the intensity of the pain, can allow for us to move through it holding another’s hand, knowing that we are not profoundly alone in our experience.

It’s been a week since a shooting at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, California which killed Dr. John Cheng and injured several other Taiwanese elders. This week has been, not unexpectedly, brought up a lot of grief, and it has resurfaced a lot of questions for me as to my own Taiwanese American identity. I have always felt on the fringe of the Taiwanese American community, as someone who did not regularly attend Taiwanese churches, community events, as someone who speaks only basic Mandarin and remembers just a few childhood family words and phrases in Taiwanese Hokkien.

Yet, strangely (or perhaps not), this week has made me understand that I am more Taiwanese American than I ever knew. As I’ve been soaking in so much information, about the context of the church, the complicated politics of Taiwanese history, many of which are frozen in time for my mother’s generation, but which continue to evolve in Taiwan itself, as I’ve been piecing together many parts of my own family’s landscape within a broader Taiwanese context, I have been able to embrace the ways in which I am and can be proud of being Taiwanese American, with all of the complexities of that identity.

It is certainly not grief alone, or even, I realize in the writing of this, is it collective grief, in and of itself, that has done this for me. It is the generosity of people who know more than me, who in their grief are processing aloud, are sharing their knowledge, who are seeking community on social media. What has finally, after many years, brought me peace about my identity as Taiwanese American is so similar to what has brought me peace around the loss of my mother, finding my place, finding her, through the stories of others, finding new connections that I thought weren’t possible.

Connection is there, in grief, when we are open to it, when we are ready for it.

We are not alone.

What is the Cost of Pushing Through?

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It’s my little girl’s 7th birthday.

She is amazing. She is light and laughter, love and joy. She is silly and kind, self-expressed and brilliant. She is a gift.

7 years ago, when she came into this world, I was crying. In those moments of birthing her, I felt perhaps most acutely the loss of my own mother. My mother was the one person I needed most in that moment. I wanted her to be by my side, to be one of the first people to welcome my girl into the world, like she had been one of the first people to welcome me into the world so many years before.

I wanted her to be the one to be by my side like she had been in so many of the hardest moments of my life, until one day, she wasn’t there at all.

My mother was omnipresent, then she was gone.

7 years ago, my mother was omnipresent, and she was gone.

Last night, I went to sleep crying.

On Mother’s Day.

Because sometimes when you make room for all the feelings, they show up, in expected and unexpected ways.

This morning I woke up crying.

On my little girl’s birthday.

Because sometimes when you make room for all the feelings, they show up, at expected and unexpected times.

I am a master at leaning into the feelings then pulling back when I must, pushing through when I must.

It’s her day, I thought yesterday, of my mother.

It’s her day, I thought this morning, of my daughter.

They are omnipresent, and sometimes I feel gone.

In waves of grief that consume me even though on the outside, I continue to show up.

For others.

Because I don’t know what it means or how to find a way to show up for myself, in these moments.

I am finding my way back to shore. I am swimming even though the rip tides always threaten to pull me under.

I am so tired of the struggle.

I am so tired of being so alone in this ocean.

People who see me today likely will not know.

I am likely only to share this with far away friends who follow through the lengths of the internet, instead of those who might touch me and watch the carefully crafted sand sculpture that I put up crumble, crumple, into a pile and disappear.

Omnipresent and gone.

Grief.

So another reminder to us all that we never know what those next to us are carrying, and that some of us are carrying so much, so much invisible weight that we have been carrying for so long, that we do not want to share, for fear it would crush the delicate bonds we have formed.

May we find a way to ourselves and to a community who can hold us when we cannot push through any longer.

It’s Complicated

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Photo of a card with the words "you are my shero" on the front

It’s Mother’s Day.

It’s my 27th Mother’s Day without my mother.

It’s my 17th Mother’s Day as a mother, my 16th as a biological mother.

7 years ago on this day, I was on the eve of having my youngest child.

Today, there is much joy.

And I am on the edge of tears.

It’s complicated.

Life is complicated.

Motherhood is complicated.

Mothering is complicated.

Relationships with our mothers and our children can be complicated.

There can much joy alongside many tears.

Today, I’m okay, but there may be moments where I’m not, and that’s okay too.

I’m working on making space for it all.

It’s Mother’s Day.

For almost 2/3rd of my life, it has been complicated.

I am grateful for the journey as it is.

And I wish so many things had been different.

I’m working on making space for it all.

(Happy) Mother’s Day.

When Grief Doesn’t Look Pretty

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I don’t feel like looking for an image.

Honestly, I don’t feel like writing about grief. I said as much today.

But grief doesn’t always listen.

I like to wrap grief in pretty packages of productivity.

Today, right at this moment, grief feels heavy.

It feels like the weight of all the things I’ve been trying to pile on myself to do to avoid thinking about grief, like a pile of things that are always there to do, that have collapsed on me.

It feels like the labored breathing of my lungs from walking around the block and not knowing if that labor comes from anxiety or COVID residual effects or grief.

It feels like the weight of the tears that are constantly held at bay. And even when I give myself the grace and permission to cry, they don’t come because they’ve been held back for so long.

This extra weight carried from task to task.

I wonder why I wake up tired and I stay tired and I go to bed tired, but I don’t really wonder.

My body feels the weight, accumulated over nearly 27 years, exacerbated by absorbing further loss that comes through deeply loving.

I keep loving so grief will be inevitable.

I know there is grace if I ask, but I am tired of asking, tired of talking, tired of telling.

Tired from grieving.

Wave

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photograph of a wave breaking with a backdrop of sunset

This wave of grief hit me hard.

It was expectedly unexpected or unexpectedly expected because grief and I are old acquaintances.

November is never easy.

November is the month of my mother’s birthday and my oldest daughters’ birthdays. It is a month focused often on gratitude, and rarely on grief, loss and complicated family dynamics that mean that sometimes, despite the deepest love in the world, relationships can change suddenly and irreparably through death, estrangement, and loss of self.

On Monday, which was also the 32nd birthday(s) of my twin daughters, I found out that a former middle school student was killed tragically in a car accident. He is the second student I’ve lost in the last 6 months, the second young man of color, the second beautiful human being whose family I remember fondly, whom I loved deeply.

Things happen so quickly, in the blink of an eye.

I could see the tidal wave of grief approaching. At first, I swam away from it as quickly as I could, opting to bury myself in the many things I do to distract myself from grief’s undertow, but I knew the wave would catch up to me, that it would take me under and that all there would be to do is to make space for it, to relax into it, and to hope for it to pass, leaving me with some breath to continue this life I’m living on land.

Today all day, I still felt caught in the undertow. At moments it was hard to breathe. I found myself tearing up at random and not so random times. I felt broken and like I would never come up for air. I felt all the grief at once and then some of the grief, and now less of the grief.

I know grief. It comes in waves. This was a big wave.

I am back on shore at the moment. As always, my community reaches out with love to pull me back to shore. They don’t worry about being sucked into the undertow with me. Some of them are already there. But there are enough of those who love me that are firmly rooted and holding out lifelines, holding space, reminding me that there will be a moment where I can wade in the water again, reminding me that I have gone on before and I can go on again, but also reminding me to take my time back to shore.

They will be waiting.

On My Father’s Passing

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My father passed away on Friday morning. It had been a chaotic morning for me. I was exhausted. I was late to catch a train from Paris to Bordeaux because I got lost on the way to the Metro. My Metro pass had run out, so I had to get a new ticket and there was someone at the ticket machine. I barely made a Metro which was just about to leave. I knew it would be close. My sister tried to call me on the Metro, but I was trying to see how much time I had to get from the Metro to the regional train station and I missed her call.

When she couldn’t reach me by phone, she texted my brother and me with the news.

My Metro train was approaching the station and I had four minutes to transfer from the Metro to the station before my train for Bordeaux left. There was a ticket validation check on the way from the Metro to the regional train station. I had checked on the Metro and if I missed my train for Bordeaux, the rest of the trains that day were sold out. I had a noon meeting. I ran through the station, dragging luggage, as fast as my non-sprinter endurance runner (who hadn’t run in awhile) legs would take me. My seat was in the last car of the train. I got into the car, relieved to have made the train and there was someone in my seat. In a moment of panic, I wondered if my seat had been sold because I wasn’t there in time, but that was just paranoia as the person in my seat had just gotten confused about their seat placement.

I placed my bags in the luggage and sunk into the seat just as the train began moving. Then I tried to FaceTime my siblings, but the signal wasn’t strong enough on the train. I saw notices for wifi on the train but couldn’t connect. Finally, I disconnected then was able to get on the internet.

Both my sister and I were in a state of shock. We knew that our father was old and that his time was coming sooner rather than later, but not this soon. Our dad had just sent me birthday greetings two days before. He had just video chatted with my sister the day before. He had done a video chat with my sister, my daughter and I as we were driving last week. We knew that our dad had been in the hospital recently, but he was vague as to why, telling us only that he was having trouble eating. He said that he would be fine if he could just have someone take care of him, so we tried our best, across the Pacific Ocean, to try to find him help, but then he changed his mind and said things were too costly.

My sister was the most upset of the three of us, which makes sense because: 1) she was the closest to our dad; 2) she had not yet experienced the death of someone close to her (her mom is still living whereas my brother and I have lost our mom, and in more recent years, a close aunt – my mom’s sister, and a month ago, our uncle, my aunt’s husband); 3) she’s the youngest of us; 4) she’s going through the most transition right now. In the past 10 months, she’s moved away from everyone she knows, had to start a new life in a new country, with a sister she hasn’t known for very long, and now lost her father. My sister said that our father finally felt that he could let go because he felt that she would be okay, which was a comfort, but she felt so sad that he was alone when he made the transition from this world.

Of my siblings, I am the one who lived with my father the least, and I really only know him through them. He had left my mother before I had a memory of them ever being together and I only saw him 4-5 times (once a year) until I was 6 and then not again until I was 16, after my mother’s death. We exchanged letters occasionally. I did my best to make him proud, in spite of it all. I longed for a father to do father-daughter things with, but I wondered if he would have done these things even had he stayed in our lives. From what my siblings say, I have doubts.

But now, he was gone. A permanent ending to a relationship that had never really begun. A finality to something that was always ephemeral.

I was a world away from everyone, both literally and figuratively, on a train, on a trip that represented a rediscovery of parts of myself that I hadn’t accessed in years, a trip by myself, for myself, during a seemingly never-ending pandemic, that had taken every ounce of resolve to give myself permission to take. I couldn’t be there for my sister. I couldn’t help my brother, and I was going to a place that represented the closest thing I had to a home.

My father’s death in this context felt also like a homegoing, because my father had always been an apparition in my life, appearing occasionally to remind me that I was not really an orphan, that I had histories and connections that were part of me that I could not ever fully escape or ignore, that I was, despite an enduring estrangement, still a part of him, and that he was also a part of me.

I spent moments for the rest of that day, in communication with my siblings as they tried to take care of themselves, each other, and the logistics of our American citizen father dying in Bangkok, none of us speaking Thai, his wife (my sister’s mother and his next of kin) also not speaking Thai and not initially having a visa to enter Thailand from Burma, and all of us unable to take care of anything even if we went to Thailand. But these were moments. For the most part, I did what I do in the face of grief when there are other things to do and people to be present with, I moved forward as best I could.

It is only now, as I am returning home, from a trip that has been so extremely profound for me, that I have time to reflect on my father’s death. And in this moment, I have an overwhelming wish for peace for all of us. For him, in his passing, that all of the guilt he may have carried about what he did and didn’t do in our lives, that all the love he meant to show, in his own way, to each of us, that all of the hope he had for each of us, that he made peace with all of it, whether things were the way he hoped for or not. For his wife, as she moves forward without him. For us, his children, as we reckon with our individual relationships with him in life.

My father is gone, but before he left us, he gave me the greatest gift in bringing me together with my sister, and in having also fathered my brother who is my greatest champion. My siblings and I have one another, and we are stronger for it. My siblings and I are imperfect, but we are all doing the best that we can, with the resources we have and the lives we’ve lived.

I don’t know how to end this reflection, so I will end this way. My father was a deeply flawed, incredibly stubborn, imperfect person, but he was my father. He was human. From a deep sense of his own inability to be who he wanted to be, he put his expectations on others. He simultaneously craved and feared love, from those he loved most. So perhaps in his death as with his life, there is a lesson for me, a lesson in who I have been, who I am and who I want to be. May he find rest in his transition.

A Space for Loss

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A black and white photograph of 2 young Taiwanese women with their mother and a young Taiwanese man

Back row: My mother, my uncle, my aunt Front row: My grandmother

Today, half a world away, my uncle, my aunt’s husband, died from a brain hemorrhage.

My uncle was in his early 90s and lived a long life. He spent much of his life traveling between China and the US. He got bored and restless easily. He loved my aunt, but he loved himself more. He also loved to gamble. He did what he wanted to without thinking much about the impact on others.

Given all these things, my uncle was far from perfect. But he was nothing if not authentic. He lived the life he wanted to lead.

And now his life is over.

My uncle was someone who took pleasure in life. He loved me, as much as he was capable of loving others. I was most close to him as a child and in the last few years since my aunt passed away. His antics made us shake our head and laugh, knowing that he was who he was, even if we often didn’t understand why he was who he was.

I am sad that my uncle’s life on this earth is complete, but not sad in the ways that I was when my aunt, my mother and my grandmother died. My matrilineal line is my heart. I am an extension of them, in the best and hardest ways. I carry their strength, their struggles, their resilience, their resistance, their legacy.

While it is not an equal sadness, I am sad because in losing my uncle, I feel another step removed from my mother. I have lost another person connected to her for most of her life. My uncle did not always get along with my mom (I don’t think my uncle always got along with anyone, actually), and they had a tense relationship at times, but he knew her from the time she was a teenager. And there are fewer and fewer people who knew my mom from that time who are still alive.

It is a natural part of life that elders die. But when you lose your mother in her middle age when you are an adolescent, and you don’t see through the grief until you are, yourself, middle-aged, and seeking to reconnect with her, every loss of someone close to her feels like another impenetrable wall separating my children from my mother, and separating her from me.

I am sad for my cousin, an only child, who has lost both her parents in the last 5 years. While this loss is not the same for either of us as losing her mother, I know that it is significant for her, and it is made harder by a pandemic which leaves grief open, in an urn that cannot be brought across the Pacific Ocean for many months.

Loss is hard.

Even the loss of those who were in and out of your life.

Even with complicated loss where you can feel nothing one moment and a flood of feelings the next.

Even when we are familiar with it.

But tonight, I honor my uncle. I smile when I think of him. I hope he has peace and rest and comfort.

And tonight, I honor myself. I hold space and grace for the feelings that are here and are yet to come. I take in the kind condolences of friends and strangers. I breathe in gratitude for my life and what remains of it.

In this space, we are together, even when we suffer loss.

Finding Family, Fragility and Strength

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Photo of three bunches of flowers in front of two gravestones Photo of blogger and her mother in front of flamingos when blogger was a child Photo of a girl smiling next to a unicorn jewelry box

I am ending this Mother’s Day weekend like my last post began, with reflection & amidst another wave of grief, one which is strong, but which I find easier to withstand.

Almost all the things I hoped for this Mother’s Day weekend happened as planned.

My sister made it safely out of Yangon, and is in the same city as her mother for Mother’s Day. She is in quarantine, but they will see one another soon, and she is safe. So they didn’t get to be together for Mother’s Day, but she is safely near her mother, and I am so grateful.

I visited the gravesite of my mother, grandmother and aunt.

I celebrated my daughter’s 6th birthday.

I rested, ate delicious food, woke up this morning sobbing, looked through boxes of photos, found so many pictures of my younger self and my mother and grandmother, laughed with my family, and gave myself space when I needed to.

I honored my full humanity.

I loved well and was present to so much love, from so many people, in a myriad of ways. My community has me even when it’s hard, and stands for and with me when I struggle to stand for better in my own life. I am so deeply grateful for the people in my life.

I am so deeply grateful to be so loved.

And I am still so deeply sad.

I suppose that I have learned over the last 26 years that, if I am honest, I will always end Mother’s Day with a heaviness in my heart.

I was loved so well and so completely by my mother and by my maternal grandmother that I still feel their absence every single year, even though I have lived the large majority of my years now without them.

And there is a hole in my heart that I speak of less often, being estranged from one of my own children and far from another.

And there is pain from having invited others to mother me and having had them turn away from me, in times of my greatest need.

And there are echoes of this abandonment, of my unworthiness and not being enough everywhere.

I have realized that humanity is not a zero sum game.

It is hard.

Even with so much love around me.

It is so hard.

But I am making space.

And holding space.

I am learning that honesty allows my chosen family to see what I often can’t and step in on my behalf when I can’t.

I am learning that in my fragility is also my strength.

In my hurt, in my heart, is also my hope.

It is hard.

I wish I could write away my sadness.

But I can only make space.

And hold space.

I can only mother myself, and trust those who choose me to support me in this journey.

It is so hard.

But I also know I am not alone in the struggle with this day, and in solidarity, there is also strength. In shared fragility, we become stronger. In our hurt, in our hearts, is also hope.

Tomorrow will not be Mother’s Day.

But I will still carry my humanity.

And I will still honor it, because it is the only way I can truly find a way beyond survival.

Lost and Found

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Whew. Grief. It comes for you out of nowhere sometimes, or maybe from everywhere.

On a morning when you have a three hour professional learning session to give.

At the end of a week you weren’t sure you’d make it through.

At the start of a weekend that simultaneously holds so much longing, hope and joy.

I am grieving this morning, as I do almost every May when Mother’s Day approaches, and particularly in the last 6 years because my daughter’s birthday is around Mother’s Day.

When I had my daughter, I most felt the depth of the loss of my mother. And my mother’s mother. And being near family.

There is profound loss alongside profound hope every Mother’s Day weekend for me, but especially since then.

My daughter is the continuation of a maternal line of strong women, of those who resisted, in ways seen and unseen, what society said that they could do.

But she also could be the continuation of a maternal line that suppressed so much rage and denied themselves the love they so freely gave to others.

I am the continuation of both those lines, embracing our legacy of resistance and trying to allow myself to feel the rage I carry that my mother, aunt and grandmother did not feel safe to express because of the consequences that might come to them or their families, trying to allow myself to acknowledge that I deserve better, that they deserved better, that my daughter deserves better.

This Mother’s Day has added complexity as I wait for news of my sister, a sister with a shared father but another mother and maternal line, who I have never met in person, but who I hold dearly, and who brings her own stories that I do not know yet.  I know, though, that she holds stories of resistance, and that she has courage similar to my own mother’s in seeking to begin life anew in a country that is not her own among people that are not hers, not yet, but who I hope will be. We will hold her close. First though, I hope her mother can hold her close.

But in addition to all of this, Mother’s Day begin in May which is also Asian Pacific American Heritage Month causes me, today, to pause. It is another layer of loss for me.

As a second generation Asian American, I mourn how quickly I’ve lost connection with my Taiwanese roots.

I struggle to reclaim some of those ties to my maternal line and their histories so that I can share them with my daughter.

My mother, having died when I was an adolescent, before I had the wisdom to embrace her wisdom, and her mother having transitioned before her, left me untethered to their histories. Now, I want to reconstruct these ephemeral moments that seem to be blown into the wind, transcribed in short notes, in script I still can’t read, with my cursory Chinese language skills.

I feel the loss so deeply within me.

There are layers of loss, layers of grief, layers of anger, layers of exhaustion.

There are also layers of resistance, layers of hope, layers of a future that is not begotten by the limitations of our past.

They are both there, these layers, waiting to be acknowledged, waiting to be embraced, waiting for me when I least expect them.

For when I am most lost, then they will find me, and enrobe me in all of the complicated layers that make up this life.