Egun

 

We have lost so many loved ones, and so many dreams that sometimes it is hard to celebrate life and to sustain faith. We have adopted ways to cope through it all. There has been a lot of avoidance. Even me, with all of my empathy and deep emotions, I’ve been avoiding some mourning. Blocking some things out. It’s hard to mourn a life that you don’t understand the magnitude of. When you’re young and life seems limitless and endlessly forgiving, you don’t believe that death of loss can truly happen to you. I don’t know. So, even when it happens, it’s like it’s not entirely real. It isn’t fossilized in your being yet. Or it’s too real, and coursing through your veins with fire, so you play Jedi mind tricks with yourself, and drink and fuck, and run from the feelings.

When I started this project with my mother, I was so excited to be the narrator of our family story.  I felt like we were on the verge of something so big and there were so many discoveries and it was fun and deeply spiritual to learn my mother as a woman. A full woman outside of her identity as Mommy. And I was just writing and somehow keeping myself separate from all of the tragedy. And she needed to take a lot of breaks. I could have been a lot more sensitive with her but I was so hungry for the story and the sense of accomplishment. Ego was driving me forward, and I was gassed up by the possibility of taking all of this pain and turning it into poetic genius. And then we came to the part about my father, and my own profound sense of loss overwhelmed me and froze me in the project. Severe writer’s block. Panic. Pressure. Depression. Anxiety. Stress. Whispers of Ego; Fuck, I’m gonna be a failure. I can’t do this shit. More wine. Avoidance. Meltdowns. Anything but dive into the love story of the people that created me and the heartache from the father who wouldn’t keep me. Who didn’t protect me. I danced around it. Jumped to the decade before my father, five years after. Anything, anything but him.

Yesterday, as I was flying across the Lombok Strait on my way to the island of Gili Trawangan, the mourning hit me. I stared into glittering Indian Ocean and the tears flooded my eyes. I found myself mourning for all of the loved ones that I told myself I didn’t miss, and I was just fine without. I thought about all of the loss that my mother has lived through ; her father at 12, her Irish twin and best friend, my Uncle Carey at 50. Her innocence as a young girl, best friends, lovers, surrogate fathers, and a lifetime of dreams….and I just felt it. I understood the dam that she’s been keeping and protecting and why it’s been imperative that she let it out in small doses.

I am grieving. I am on a beautiful island off the coast of Bali and I am taking walks and singing to Yemoja across the ocean waves. I am scrubbing my skin with wet sand, coarse with broken coral. I am breaking open with my mother’s pain and raising her verse to the clouds. I am laughing at memories, and crying  and breathing and shouting down the wind…Look! Look! You guys! We made it! And I’m praying that the breeze will send my love to the souls of everyone that we loved. I am here. I am learning. And I will honor your stories.