Tag Archives: Grief

Intention, Community & Moving Forward

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Photograph of golden sunrise over mountains

Sometimes, we just have to keep holding on, and moving forward, in community.

This has been an incredibly hard week for so many reasons.

There is still so much uncertainty.

But today, I am beginning to see light and beauty again.

And I am grateful for the community of friends, family and strangers that have walked alongside me while I struggled.

Earlier this week, I wrote about feeling like I failed my son. However, while the door closed on that assignment, it opened a door to give feedback on curriculum at my son’s school, and in creating a book list specific to his context (a public academic magnet schools with a 70% Asian American; 19% Latinx student population) and building from existing themes and texts, I was also able to share this list with others via Twitter.

The list was sourced through community.

It was shared through community.

It was added to by community.

I was able to really consider how to navigate a system designed to reproduce itself, to make a crack a bit wider, to support not only the students in my son’s school and community, but also my extended community online.

Thank you for lifting me up.

There are other things still going on, both personally and professionally, that are both hard and hopeful, but I am grateful that it is not all hard.

I am learning to embrace moments of hope and joy even amongst, or especially within, periods of deep grief and struggle.

I am learning that when you put things out in the universe, that which is yours will come and find you. And that for which it is not time or for which you are not meant can be accepted.

I am learning to be rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering and persevere in prayer.

I am really learning to be patient in it all, to continue to bring humanity to every situation, to make space where I can’t see it, at first, to step into spaces, and try, even when I feel like I may fail.

I could not do any of this without the strength of those in my community, who have been thinking of me, loving on me, praying for me. Holding me and holding space for me.

I am deeply grateful.

I am moving forward.

One step at a time.

One day at a time.

Moment by moment.

Slipping

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A photo of a rocky shoreline

I am at a loss on so many levels…

I have not remotely recovered from all the things that have happened in the past month, to my family, my community, to those I love and hold dear and so also to me. And then more happens around me and I don’t know how to carry it all. I just keep moving forward.

There is so much violence and loss for so many. None of it makes sense.

There is such a sense of helplessness.

I grasp for the moments of joy that have come in unexpected ways, big and small throughout this time. But that doesn’t really make sense either.

I am slipping.

I am struggling.

And when I think I get my footing again, when I manage to feel like I might make it, that we will make it to the other side, the ground beneath my feet begins to shift again.

There have been so many lifting me up. I am blessed by a community that deeply loves me.

But, it feels like we are standing together on this rocky terrain, and that at any moment, any one of us may fall.

I am so tired.

I am surviving.

I am trying to hold on to what is not there.

It is hard.

I am trying to believe that it is all going to be okay because that’s my nature, to hope.

But I am also making space to struggle, to slip, to allow myself to fall, to be okay with survival and not more, to accept what is not there.

It is hard because I have trained myself to open and close my heart on a dime; to cry and minutes later to hold myself together to lead and love; to be there for others and forget myself. It is hard to seek an integrated self when your whole life has been built on a compartmentalized existence that has helped you to survive.

I have trained myself to keep going.

But I am forcing myself to pause.

To feel.

To acknowledge what is so.

To acknowledge what is so far away, but what I want with my whole heart. To feel the distance between my heart and my reality.

I write these words because sometimes honesty is more necessary than hope. Even though it is often more painful.

But if we cannot reckon with ourselves, we can’t hope to stand on solid ground.

And if we cannot feel the fullness of our grief, we cannot move through it.

Living Tensions

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Taut grey rope with green water in the background

It has been such a week, after such a week, a series of such weeks over this past year, and a series among a lifetime of such weeks.

These weeks teach me about the living tensions and holding space for the abundance that makes up life even when it is so incredibly complicated.

This week, love and grief emerged for me in waves, in tidal waves, in gentle waves, like the ebb and flow of the sea. They came for me and I was not ready for their power. They came for me in their beauty and destructiveness and all I could do was to be swept away, and brought back. I could fall into them and hope to reach the shore.

This week, laughter and tears flowed. I surprised myself by laughing at long text threads and exclamations of a five year old (my favorite five year old), at everyday moments. I surprised myself by sobbing for a young girl that I once was so long ago who lost her mother and was told there was a time limit on her grief.

This week, the stress of anticipation was balanced by the strength of community. So many times this week, I wondered whether I should speak, what I should say, if I would hear from my sister, if I would know someone killed in a mass shooting, if it was safe to walk outside, if I could make it through a meeting or a workday without the familiar feelings of nausea and anxiety coming upon me to remind me that I was not free. And yet, in those moments when I was most afraid, I would receive a text or a message or a tweet from someone expressing love, or living in the present. I would hear the joyful laughter from down the hall. I would be shown grace.

This week, I drank 64 oz of water everyday (thank you, Joy, for my water bottle to support this). I breathed deeply when I felt the anxiety rise. I let myself cry and feel. I wrote in paper journals. I felt the depths of love in so many ways that I will always be grateful for, and I felt the depths of grief in equally powerful ways that remind me of my humanity.

We live so many tensions.

It is not easy.

But it is, in many ways, the beauty of humanity.

We can move towards liberation, but only in community, and only through navigating tensions, holding space for all that encompasses the complexities of our humanity, holding ourselves and each other accountable, while also showing grace to ourselves and each other.

I am living the tensions. I am working to embrace them. For in the tensions, I know I find my full humanity.

To Grieve is To Be Human

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To embrace my humanity, our humanity, humanity, in the face of a dehumanizing world is resistance.

I will be nothing if not authentic.

To be human as a woman of color in a world that is constantly pushing dehumanizing narratives, that is constantly trying to separate you from being deserving of love and grief and joy and the full range of human emotions that we are born into, is resistance.

To be human as a woman of color in a world that is constantly tearing you apart from those you love, either through physical violence at the hands of man-made weapons, warfare or “lone-wolves” in packs, through dehumanizing psychological violence that erases your contributions and silences your words, is resistance.

To be human as a woman of color in a world that tells you that you are alone and unsafe when in your heart, you know that safety is found in coalition and community, is resistance.

I am crying for myself.

I am crying for my family.

I am crying for my communities.

I am crying for all of us.

I am crying for our families.

I am crying for our communities.

I refuse to believe that I am only worth my contributions, if my contributions would cause me to deny my own humanity, my own grief, my own communities, the humanity of others, the grief of others, the communities I walk alongside.

Today I am so, so deeply sad. I grieve for the generations of women, present and past, who have been denied our humanity. I grieve for subsets of women who are told that they are not deserving enough to be grieved for, whose humanity is disregarded because of what they do or don’t do, because of what they look like or don’t look like, because of where they were born or how they were born or to whom they were born.

I am so sad.

I am so tired.

I am so human.

To grieve is to be human.

Hold on to humanity, even as you move through grief. It is our collectivity that connects us. We can only come through the fire more beautiful, if we pass through it together.

Hold on to those you love.

Hold on to yourself.

For though I may be drowning in grief, though we may be drowning in grief, we are alive.

Hold on to me.

I will hold on to you.

Together, we will keep moving to a far distant shore.

When There is Too Much in Your Heart

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I cannot remember crying after my mother died. Not immediately, although I’m sure I did, because I remember thinking that if I did not, people would wonder what was wrong with me.

But it was so surreal.

My mother, who had dropped me off the night before at my friend’s house, died the next morning crossing the street from our house to the bus stop.

She was alive.

And then she was dead.

For weeks, I could not fully understand it. Maybe for months. I did not miss a day of school. There is a photo of a small smile at her funeral (where I did not speak).

I do not remember much, but these fleeting moments.

I have spent the subsequent 26 years crying on and off about the death of my mother.

Grief is strange that way.

And her survival instinct, passed down to me, is also strong.

In the months and years after her death, when I would grieve, I was called “dramatic.” No one could understand why, at that moment, I was so overcome with emotion.

I didn’t really understand it either.

I am so worried about my sister and her mother. I am so frightened for the people of Burma, who had their hope so cruelly taken from them and now must live in fear and hope for survival. I am so angry that there is no attention, no outrage, nothing I can do for them right now. But wait.

I am so deeply, deeply saddened by the killing of 8 people in Atlanta on Tuesday. I am so devastated for their families. I am so deeply moved by the first stories we are hearing from their children (Randy Park, HyunJung Kim’s son and Jami Webb, Xiaojie Tan’s daughter). I am more devastated to know that both these women were single mothers, that these children were so close to their mothers, who were there and then gone, taken from them so suddenly. I hate that these women, like so many other migrant Asian women who worked so hard to support their children, died in an act of hate-filled violence. These women who spent their lives serving others.

I have been scrolling Twitter during most of my waking hours since I heard about the shootings. Something about the community and the wisdom there brings me some comfort. Many people have had words that I do not have, shared resources that I could not share, responded with knowledge and connections that see the teachable moment in this tragedy.

I started to feel badly that I could not do more. I also cannot feel the grief, although my body is breaking down which means that, despite myself, it is making me grieve.

I am literally sick to my stomach.

My head hurts.

My heart hurts.

Tonight, there were many community gatherings. The one I chose to attend was put on by Red Canary Song. It centered the voices of massage parlor workers, sex workers, Asian migrant women, community members. It was not a “call to action,” it was a vigil to hold space for those lost, to honor their lives and their work, and their humanity. It was beautiful, and if anything, I thought that being in community at this vigil would bring forth my tears.

But they would not come, even then.

So many tears around me, even from my friends who do not usually cry.

Why not me?

I know that for some people, even for me in my past, my solution to grief was action, to do something productive, to do something to help others, to do something that reminded me that life must go on, to use my privilege to do better.

I feel all of the weight of all of my privilege. I am, while vulnerable, far less vulnerable than so many.  I feel the guilt of survival and of “relative safety” at this moment. I have been taught to decenter myself. Always. It is selfish to do otherwise.

And I have so much, why wouldn’t I give, while I am still here?

This is harming me.

I am literally sick to my stomach.

My head hurts.

My heart hurts.

And yet, I feel nothing. Because I am in survival mode, a mode I have carried so long and so well.

There are people who have shown up for me, who have asked what they can do, how they can help. I do not know. Because I am not fully feeling the things, I do not know what I need.

I have spent most of my life not present to what I need, but to the needs of others.

I have spent my life in service.

I am literally sick to my stomach.

My head hurts.

My heart hurts.

Because my body tells me what my brain cannot fully process. That life is so fragile. My life. Your life. Their lives. Our lives.

I am so tired.

I just want to be able to cry.

There was a time when I cried all the time. It was cathartic and healing. It was freeing.

It is strange to wish for such unrestrained sorrow, but it reminds me I am alive.

I keep writing in the hopes that I will be able to cry.

I keep writing because it reminds me that I am alive.

I keep writing so that maybe I can write myself to understanding.

But I am out of words.

I am sick to my stomach.

My head hurts.

My heart hurts.

On Holding All the Heavy Truths

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CW: Human rights violations, trauma, racial violence

My sister, my father’s youngest daughter, and her mother, live in Yangon, the capital of Burma.

My father and I have an extremely complicated relationship, but the complications of our relationship have never prevented me from loving my sister. As my father’s daughter, my only hope for my sister and her mother is that my father would be better to them than he was to my family.

Burma is burning at the hands of a military coup. Innocent lives are being lost in a huge humanitarian crisis that is getting little attention here in the US where I live.

When the coup began on February 1, I hesitated to reach out, worried for my sister and her mother’s safety (my father is not with them, but is in Thailand where he went to remain safe in light of the COVID-19 global pandemic and because of his failing health). I remember the last time the military was in power and how it was not safe to send letters — they would arrive late to my father, censored, although there was nothing remotely political. I did not want to e-mail. I was not sure if it was safe to reach out via e-mail.

Finally, I couldn’t bear it any longer and reached out to my sister. Seeing her post on social media gave me a hint that this might be the safest way to reach her. I looked for her posts every day. I searched each day for what I could find out from the media.

This last weekend, when I saw the rise in state violence throughout the city on March 14, I reached out again to her to see if she was safe. The shooting was just one street away from her. She promised me she would do what she could to stay safe and message me immediately if they were in imminent danger. I told her that we loved her. We were praying for her safety. We hoped to meet her in person soon. To let me know if there was anything we could do.

Her words and hearts on my post let me know, even though we have never met, and our lives are so vastly different, that she feels my heart.

I am so worried for her and her mother.

Even if they survive this violence, the trauma of this time will never leave her the same.

Tonight, as I waited for morning in Burma, and a possible social media post that lets me know my sister and her mother are still alive, I received a different social media message.

A news story.

About 8 people, 6 Asian American women killed across three spas in the metro Atlanta area.

It reminded me (as if I could forget) that I also am not safe.

I have not felt safe in over a year.

I have not gone on a run alone in several months.

I know anti-Asian violence, particularly that against women, is nothing new. But I also know it is on the rise.

While I have not (yet) experienced physical attack, I am always aware of how easily acts of verbal aggression turn to physical violence.

There has been much psychological trauma, almost unbearable psychological trauma externally, in this last year, adding layers to grief and trauma that is personal and internal.

I am so tired.

I worry about my sister and her mother. I worry about myself and my daughter.

And yes, I still get a lot of things done.

It doesn’t seem like I’m carrying this weight.

I have survived many acute and prolonged traumas. I will likely survive this too.

I hope we all will.

I hope to meet my sister and her mother.

I hope they feel my love from afar.

I wish there was more I could do.

We don’t know what people are carrying, how tired they feel, and how much energy it takes to keep going.

If you care or if my words resonate with you, fight alongside me, against the erasure of Asian and Asian American women’s suffering.

My individual suffering is at the hands of unjust systems that perpetuate the world turning a blind eye until and unless it fits the right narrative to move forward a political agenda.

It perpetuates violence against Black women, Indigenous women, Pacific Islander women, Latinx women, trans women, all women.

Do not wash your hands clean of the blood shed and lives lost. Fight for better.

The Space Between

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word gratitude in script with golden sunset in background

This week was extremely hard for me.

I kept going and going and going despite all the signs that I was doing too much.

But I was wise today.

I made space for the people that would tell me that I needed to stop.

And, at the end of the day, with the call where there was no set purpose, I listened.

When my mother died, I frantically tried to reestablish normalcy as quickly as possible. I went back to school the Monday after she passed. I did not miss a single day of school because of her death. I worked as hard as I could, laser focused on my goal of becoming valedictorian so I could honor her in my speech.

And I have always done this. Doing more because the grief seems both more and less bearable when I am overachieving. More bearable because I can avoid it. Less bearable because it is never resolved. There is never space to just be.

This year, although I know better, I still continued to push myself beyond my limits.

I know I was trying to prove myself this week because, although I know better, I became deeply attached to the actions of others.

And that, as it inevitably does, made me doubt myself.

But, in conversation with my friend Tyrone today, I was reminded that the lives, choices, and actions of others are both out of my locus of control and not in response to me.

And that shift opened the space I so desperately needed.

It was a reminder to focus on what I could control and let go of those things that are not my load to bear.

I am grateful for the chiseled cracks in my armor etched by my community today. Questions about joy, concerns about my health and well-being, reminders that I am important not for any thing that I do, but because of who I am. Reminders that I have to prioritize myself and my health because all the things will get done or they won’t, but I am not replaceable to those who love me.

I know all these things.

But the space reminds me to feel them.

This week was extremely hard for me, but it is over, and I am still here.

This weekend, I will rest and regroup.

And try again on Monday.

Gratitude in Grief – 100 days and 26 years

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three bunches of flowers in front of two grave markers

I just want to pause to tell my community thank you.

It was an incredibly long day.

There was much emotion.

It was my daughter’s 100th day of kindergarten. The 100th day celebration was new to me when my son had it 9 years ago (and actually had it in both kindergarten and 1st grade, in Chinese and then in English, but I digress), but this time, we were prepared. In spite of 100 days of distance learning, her outstanding teacher put together a beautiful at-home celebration package including a Korean-English 100 days crown & a silicone 100 days bracelet. We added 100 go stones for our girl to count. She had a great day.

It was the 26th anniversary of my mom’s death today. Time was suspended 26 years ago, as my mom passed on a Friday when there was no school, giving me a full weekend of weird liminality before I went back to my normal life (I really don’t know what happened that weekend, where I slept, what I did). The day, I remember, but I remember its emptiness, rather than any fullness. I remember myself trying to record the memories of those moments in my mind because I knew I wouldn’t be the same after.

Today, however, was a day like many others — full of meetings: some I attended, some I led, some I engaged in, as if I was my whole self, today, which I am never really fully on this day of the year. Sometimes I pretend, like I did today, because my schedule is full and I could not avoid the normalcy. In better years (perhaps not in global pandemics), I give myself more grace and space. Today, my schedule was full, but in more moments than not, my heart was empty. I will likely not record any memories of today except that it is the 100 days celebration of my last baby and it fell on the anniversary of my mother’s death.

What I am grateful for, however, is the space to speak my truth, and the openness to receive love of those who walk alongside me in love and in grief.

This morning, already exhausted, I posted on Twitter about the emotions of today. I immediately received many messages of love and solidarity. Throughout the day, friends texted and messaged me to check on me, offering to talk if I needed anything. My husband ordered me food although I did not feel like eating. My children made me laugh. In one of my many meetings, I reconnected with a former credential student who it was a joy to hear from again. I got to participate in a community chat that reminded me to reclaim my leadership even in moments of vulnerability.

There are sparks of joy in the sorrow.

February 3 is never easy for me.

It is always heavy, and usually hard.

But it reminds me of the deep roots that cannot be breached by death, roots of love and of ancestry, of strength of character and survival, of freedom and faith, of community and support.

So I end today sad, as is to be expected, but grounded in gratitude, and buoyed by love. My mother’s love, my family’s love, my community’s love.

Grief & Love

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My mother and me as a toddler wearing a birthday hat

Grief is so hard.

It comes out of nowhere and seems to be everywhere all at once.

I had a beautiful, wonderful day.

And then, it crept in.

Slowly at first, through inklings of self-doubt.

Then a bit more steadily, like a fog determined to roll in.

And now, it is here.

With me.

Everywhere.

Sitting in my heart as I watch my sweet little girl coloring a rainbow.

Sitting in my throat, a stifled flood.

It’s been so long.

26 years on Wednesday.

But my love is deep.

And my grief is fed by the depth of that love.

It is here.

With me.

Sitting in my heart as I watch my sweet little girl coloring a rainbow.

Sitting in my heart as I watch my husband help my son take apart a pen and put it back together.

I wonder if they can take apart my heart and put it back together as easily.

Sitting in my throat, a stifled flood.

Spilling over, running down my face.

It’s been so long.

My love is deep.

It will sustain me.

But grief is so hard.

How do you hold it all?

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hands holding a glass vase pouring water

How do you hold death and grief,

trauma and everyday drama,

joy and accomplishment,

productivity and pain,

all in one heart?

all in one head?

all in one body?

There is only space for it all in community.

Community heals.

It does not erase the pain, but I have been through erasure and it’s not healing.

It lightens the load.

It reminds me that there is light in the fog of the everyday

and in the dark of darkest night.

It reminds me that I grieve because I love deeply,

and I have joy because I love deeply.

It reminds me that some things can be let go,

and others will never let me go.

It reminds me that I am not holding it all in my heart, my head, my body.

It is not only mine.

We were not meant to walk in the world alone.

How do I hold it all?

In community.