26

Oct

Be brave with your life.

Once upon a time, when I was still living in Los Angeles and my mother was still alive, she came to visit me. Mom visited often; she loved California. She was an avid gardener, and we used to go for long walks so she could admire the trees and flowers she didn’t get to see back home in the Pacific Northwest. I tolerated those walks, but barely. I was always trying to speed through them, impatient to get to the other, more interesting things I thought we should be doing. Now, I marvel at how such a seemingly simple exercise – a walk – could bring my mother so much joy.  A single colorful bloom, the trunk of a mighty tree, the morning breeze perfumed with eucalyptus: they were wondrous, all.

Of all the walks we took together, there is one that sticks in my memory. But memories are funny things, because I can’t tell you what year it was, or which neighborhood we walked through, or anything else we did that day. I only remember a sidewalk, and me, charging ahead as usual, while my mom hung back and enjoyed the view. I had been doing too much, not sleeping enough, exhausting myself with the sort of impassioned attempts at world domination that are part of the program when you’re in your twenties and chasing your dreams in a place like Los Angeles. Dizzy with fatigue, hungover perhaps, a bit bored, I turned back to Mom and made a silly face, put on a funny accent, cracked a questionable joke. If I could remember what I did I would tell you, but I can’t. Those details are lost to history. But what is not lost, what I will never forget, is how my mother reacted. She stopped walking and looked at me, hard, with a deadly serious expression. “I wish you’d let that side of yourself out more often, Sar,” she said, and looked me in the eyes long enough to make sure I knew she meant it.

My mother died eleven years ago last month. I used to think that with enough time, healing, and therapy, I’d reach a point where her death no longer hurt. Eleven years later, I no longer think I’ll reach that point. But I also think that by trying to wish away the pain of my mother’s death, I was missing the point. The pain is a gift. It is a constant reminder of the tremendous love between us. And it is also a motivator. Pain is the thing that tugs at my insides, the thing that taps me on the shoulder and tells me to try again. It is the quiet, steady drumbeat that reverberates through even the darkest of days. “It’s not too late,” it whispers, insistently. “As long as you’re alive, anything is possible.” 

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my why. Why am I here? What are the values that drive me? What am I supposed to be doing – in the words of the inimitable Mary Oliver – with my one wild and precious life?

I started writing about my life because I wanted to make sense of it. Because nothing made sense and I wasn’t OK with that. I guess I figured if I could find meaning in the darkest, most difficult things I’d experienced, maybe I could find hope there, too. And as I wrote my way through fear and sorrow, I realized that the clarity I was seeking was something I wanted for other people, too. Because I think most of us are carrying something painful that we don’t know what to do with. Most of have struggled with feeling lost or inadequate or unsure. Most of us see a chasm between the life we are living and the one that we wish for. And most of us – as much as we might want to – are terrified to leap across that divide.

My mother was my best friend. For the first thirty-one years of my life, she was my first phone call. My most important person.

And yet. For all of those thirty-one years, I watched my mother build a life on deferred dreams. I watched as she made one excuse after another for not pursuing the things she wanted. I watched as the passage of time eroded her confidence, as “someday” became never. And as the distance between the life she dreamed of and the one she was living continued to grow, I watched her drink to bridge the difference. For a time, I think that alcohol made my mother’s life bearable. Happy, even. The booze blurred the edges of reality and made everything seem softer. Prettier. And when it stopped working, she just drank more. And more and more, until eventually, the alcohol obliterated everything. Including her.

I don’t know if my mother knew she was going to die when we took that walk together. I only know that there was an urgency in what she was trying to communicate. She was telling me to take more chances. She was telling me to be brave with my life.

I used to think that being brave meant getting on an airplane to cross a vast ocean, traveling alone to foreign shores and wandering cobblestone streets in cities centuries older than the one I was born in. I used to think it meant giving up a comfortable life in Los Angeles to move to New York City and follow nebulous dreams of working in the theater. I used to think it meant turning down a stable job for an uncertain future.

I think those things were brave when I did them, but I also know that they were forms of running away. There are so many times in my life when I ran to avoid looking inward, to avoid being honest with myself about what I really wanted and the work it would take to get there.

Now, when I ask myself what it means to be brave with my life, it has nothing to do with running and everything to do with staying. It means having the courage to stand in the truth of who I am and to live that truth unapologetically. It means refusing to be ashamed of the ways I’ve struggled, refusing to let the fears of what other people think of me keep me silent. It means believing that my flaws and mistakes don’t disqualify me from happiness. That my humanness alone is enough to make me worthy of love and belonging. 

Which brings me back to my why. My why – what I want for myself and what I want for others – comes down to one word: honesty. I want every single one of us to find the courage to step into the truest, most fully-realized versions of ourselves. I want us to be honest about who we are and what we want, and then to go after those things, without fear or shame or apology.

What I want to say to you, friends, is this:

Be brave with your life. 

Not rich. Not famous. Not perfect. Just brave. Because for thirty-one years I watched the person I loved the most never think that she was be good enough to be brave with hers. I watched how that tore her apart. 

In the end, what my mother wanted more than anything was for me to have all the things she never had. 

I want that for me too. I want it for all of us.

And I’m here to say it’s not too late.

As long as we’re here, anything is possible.

We can choose, every day, to be who we want to be.

We can choose, every day, to be brave with our lives.

7 months ago Short URL 10 Comments

Change/Grief/Healing/Health/Writing

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14

Feb

Mom and Dad.

As of today, both of my parents have been gone for ten years.

Ten years.

It’s a number that’s impossible to fathom.

Impossible because it has been so long.

Because it has passed so quickly.

Because my life has been through so many evolutions in their absence.

There are so many parts of me they’ll never get to see.

*******

The thing no one tells you about grief is that you don’t just lose someone once.

You lose them a thousand times.

On holidays.

On birthdays.

When you return to a place they loved.

Or travel to a country they’d always wanted to visit.

When you’re in trouble and they can’t help you. 

When you have good news and can’t tell them.

When they visit you in your dreams and it feels so real, until you wake up and grasp at the memory, trying to hold onto moments before they vanish.

After ten years I don’t suppose I’ll ever stop missing my parents, or wishing they were here.

But here’s the thing about time: it has a way of softening edges that once were jagged.

It is forgiving.

It can even, occasionally (if you’re willing to let it), wrap you in grace.

And so, after ten years, here is what I know:

I am lucky.

Lucky that they were here.

Lucky to have been loved.

Lucky that while they were alive

They gave me everything that I needed

To survive

To grow

To endure

To persist 

To blossom

To make it through the rest of this life

Without them.

1 year ago Short URL 3 Comments

Family/Grief/Love

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02

Apr

Canceled.

It was Thursday, March 12th. The last day of winter quarter at Savannah College of Art and Design. I was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep but full of adrenaline, racing to finish one last assignment and get it uploaded to an online discussion board before my eleven AM class. A stack of essays marked with my scribbled comments sat beside my backpack, waiting to be shoveled inside.

And then the email came. I saw the white notification pop up on my iPhone screen, and before I read it, I knew. The heaviness that had been hanging in the air for the last several days settled onto my shoulders like a weight.

The message was short and to the point. It said simply:

Courses at all SCAD locations to be offered online only for spring quarter. More information to follow later today.

I just sat there, staring at my phone. Even though I’d been following the news reports about the coronavirus, up until that point it had still felt like something far away. Something I wasn’t quite sure how seriously I should be taking. After all, life in Savannah hadn’t changed that much. Tourists still flocked to the bars on River Street and filled in the old town squares. Celebrations for the week-long booze fest of St. Patrick’s Day had already begun, promising more drunken mayhem the closer we moved toward the holiday. The previous night, my boyfriend and I had met his aunt and uncle for dinner at The Olde Pink House, an upscale, multi-level restaurant in an elegant southern mansion. The mood was festive. Every table was full.

I was sitting in my morning class when the next email came. All in-person classes and public events during SCAD’s spring quarter, including graduation, were going to be canceled. Academic buildings, libraries, gyms, dining facilities, and most residence halls would be closed. Campus was effectively shutting down, effective immediately.

The rest of March 12th passed in a haze. I should have been happy: it was the end of the quarter, and I had made it through. I had made it through the first, grueling, ten weeks of graduate school. Instead, confusion ruled the day. Confusion and mild hysteria. The corridors of Arnold Hall were crammed with students huddled in corners and pushed up against windows, talking on their cell phones in hushed voices. Some students were visibly upset, some were crying. All of them wondering, “What now?”

My first class let out early, so I walked to a nearby cafe, sat at the bar, and ordered two tacos for lunch. Outside, the sky was bright blue, the weather warm. It didn’t feel like a global pandemic was on the horizon. I scrolled through the news on my phone and saw that the U.S. president had issued a travel ban to and from Europe, sending airports into chaos. More travel restrictions were imminent. I texted my friend Vim, in California. I had been planning to fly to Oakland the next day to visit him and his wife Sharon for my spring break. “Everything just got crazy here,” I wrote. “I’m not sure I should travel. I’ll call you later?”

By the time I got home, canceling spring break felt like the only logical thing to do. As I watched via cable news, events in the outside world began to change, and quickly. The San Francisco Bay Area issued a shelter in place order. Los Angeles and New York closed down their bars and restaurants. Meanwhile, in Savannah, my yoga studio stayed open, and tourists continued to take advantage of the city’s open container law, ordering cocktails to go and strolling down Broughton Street with plastic cups in hand. But time pressed on. The news turned darker. And little by little, Savannah started to catch up.

First, on March 19th, the mayor issued a state of emergency, closing public beaches, fitness centers, movie theaters, and all bars that didn’t serve food. Next came the official shelter in place order on March 24th, forcing all restaurants that hadn’t already closed to switch to takeout only, and effectively shutting down all non-essential businesses. Both of those orders were well behind those of the cities hardest hit by the pandemic, but still felt progressive compared to much of the rest of the south.

Savannah House

It has been three weeks since I received that initial email from SCAD. My extended, largely quarantined spring break is over, and my new, virtual, spring quarter has begun. Life looks a lot different than it did three weeks ago, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. My emotions swing wildly from day to day, and from moment to moment. There are worries about my west coast family and the friends I left behind in New York. There is gratitude for my spacious condo, and relief that I’m no longer living in a cramped Manhattan apartment at a time when everyone is shuttered inside. There is the alienation of living somewhere new, far away from most of the people I love, in a part of the country where the prevailing worldview is sharply different from my own. There is the aching for home and for the familiar. There is the claustrophobia of not knowing how long this quarantine will last.

And then there is anger. So much anger that frankly, it catches me by surprise. Some of my anger has been fueled by cable news, by watching elected officials play politics when they should be helping people and saving lives. But the large volume of corona-related content swirling around the internet is what has triggered me the most. Every day, my news feed is a barrage of essays and social media posts telling me about all the things I should be grateful for, all the ways I should be using my time productively, all the “virtual” experiences I should be having. Everywhere you look, there are too many people, with too much time on their hands, trying to spin this pandemic into a positive experience. It’s exhausting. It’s irritating as hell.

That might sound extreme. Negative. Mean-spirited, even. At first, I didn’t want to admit how genuinely ticked off I was by all the people insisting I take a glass is half full approach to this quarantine. But then I realized something: the anger I’m feeling is really grief.

It’s not the kind of grief I’m used to. Not the kind I’ve experienced before. I’m lucky enough to be able to say I don’t know anyone who has died from the coronavirus (and I hope that I never do). But all of this insistence on positive thinking reminds me of the worst, most unhelpful things people said to me after my parents died. Things like “there will be a silver lining to all of this,” and “everything happens for a reason.” For the record, the next time someone tells you “everything happens for a reason,” when something really shitty happens to you, you have my permission to punch them in the face.

There is no “right” way to feel right now. It’s weird and unfamiliar and scary as hell. And the scariest thing about it is the sheer number of questions we don’t have answers to. No one knows how long we’ll have to stay at home, or how many of us will get sick, or how many businesses and individuals will be financially decimated in the process. What will life look like when all of this is finally over? We simply don’t know.

Here’s what I do know: if you’re like most people, you’re probably grieving something right now. It might be something small, like a vacation you had to cancel. It might be something larger, like the loss of your job or your income. Or, you might be one of the millions of people struggling with depression, adrift and alone in this sea of self-isolation.

Whatever it is that you’re feeling, the important thing is not to judge yourself for feeling it. Yes, you can always find someone else who is struggling more, someone who has it worse than you during this time of crisis. But playing the comparison game is not helpful. We’ve all lost something in this pandemic. We’re all grieving something. And admitting the difficulty in that doesn’t make you a bad or a selfish person. It just makes you human.

So, do the things that bring you comfort. If you want to use this time to write the next great American novel, or learn another language, or get into the best shape of your life, go right ahead. But you don’t have to. You could also call a friend. Or go for a walk. Or simply get through the day.

I’ll be right here, getting through the day alongside you.

Until next time, friends.

Savannah Sunset

4 years ago Short URL 12 Comments

Change/Grief/Mental Health/Savannah/Well-Being

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22

Sep

Seven years.

“Maybe it’s okay

if it takes time,

to be okay.

Maybe

healing is a road that is

lined with endless grace.”

– Morgan Harper Nichols

Dear Mom,

How do I begin? Usually, I’m the one other people come to when they need help figuring out what to say. But in trying to figure out what to say to you – my best friend, my first phone call, the person I miss most of all – I am utterly lost. My fingers are clumsy on my keyboard. A heavy brick sits squarely in the center of my chest.

But still, I will try. I will try because you deserve it. You deserve to know all of the things I have been thinking but haven’t been able to say.

Seven years. Seven years since I got the worst phone call of my life. Seven years since all the color bled from the world and the sky turned black and nothing would ever look the same again. Seven years since you left.

Seven is an impossible number. It is impossible for me to believe it has been seven years since I’ve seen your face, or hugged you in an airport, or heard the familiar, “Oh hi, Sar,” on the other end of the telephone.

But seven is an impossible number for another reason. It is impossible to believe how quickly the years have elapsed since you died. It seems so cruel that time has marched on, indifferent, and that I have lived and loved and struggled and succeeded and hoped and failed throughout most of my thirties without you. How unfair that the worst thing I could possibly imagine happened to me, and all I could do was survive it? How awful to learn that I not only could go on without you, but that I would go on. I would go on to become a better, braver, more compassionate person in your absence, and that better, braver, more compassionate person is someone you will never get to meet.

Damn it, it’s so unfair. And yet, it is. The unfairness of life is one of the most profound lessons I have learned from your death, Mom. As children, we are taught to believe that kindness will be rewarded and the good guys will win and that everything will work out in the end. And sometimes, those things do happen. But other times, they don’t. Other times, life shocks you with its randomness. Sometimes, terrible things happen that don’t make any sense and there’s nothing to do but accept them.

For a while, I was angry with you, Mom. I was angry with you for dying. I was angry with you for leaving me at the worst possible time. Dad was dying, and Grandma was losing her mind, and Grandpa was wheelchair-bound and depressed, and you just checked out. You left the building and left me to deal with the mess you left behind.

When you died, I was in the prime of my life. I was thirty-one, living a sun-soaked existence in Los Angeles, doing exactly as I pleased. Before you left, my biggest concerns centered around whether my agent liked my new headshots or how many auditions I was getting. And then suddenly, everything changed. Suddenly, there were a million hard decisions to make. There was probate court. There were health care directives and funerals to plan and boxes and boxes and boxes of belongings to sift through. There was a home to sell. My family home, or at least it used to be, before I watched you unravel within its walls. And then, there was Grandpa. Your sweet, heartbroken father, who could not reconcile the fact – no matter how many times I tried to explain it to him – that someone who was only sixty years old and in seemingly good health could suddenly just die.

It was relentlessly unfair, Mom. And I was not ready for any of it. In fact, for a while, I was convinced it would kill me. I was convinced that I would die. Yet, for whatever reason, I didn’t. Even though everything was horrible and gut-wrenching and wrong, I survived. And a funny thing happens when life deals you the worst cards you can imagine and you continue to breathe in and out. You learn something about yourself. The world is suddenly, irrevocably, different, and you are different in it. You can’t go back to the way you were, and you find you don’t want to.

I am going to say some things now that will probably sound awful, but I have to admit to them because they’re true. If both of my parents had to die, I’m glad you went first, Mom. Because my relationship with my father needed repairing and those last few months with him were a gift. I’m grateful for the dinners we had and the football games we watched and that there was nothing left unsaid between us. I’m grateful he got to plan his own funeral, and that I was able to carry his ashes down the aisle of the church, and sit in the front row with Deirdre and Dave and Matt and pretend to be the good Catholic girl he wanted me to be. If you hadn’t died, Mom, I wouldn’t have done any of that. I would have been too busy holding you up.

And even though I blamed her cruelty for causing you to turn to the bottle in the first place, I’m grateful for the daily phone calls with Grandma before Alzheimer’s erased her memory. I’m grateful for the realization that even though she was a terrible, abusive mother, she was still in pain over losing you. I’m grateful for the knowledge I learned earlier than most: that love is complicated and people are too, and most of us aren’t working with a full tool kit when it comes to matters of the heart.

I think you already know this, Mom, because I choose to believe that you see and know everything I do, but I will confess it to you anyway: I have lied about your death. I’m not sure how many times, but there is one time in particular that stands out. It was after we found out Grandpa was dying, and I was on a plane headed back to Seattle to be with him. The woman seated next to me was one of those busy body, Matriarch types, and before I knew it, I was telling her my entire life story. And when she asked me how you died, I lied and said “Cancer.”

It embarrasses me now that I did that, Mom. Why should I care what a complete stranger thinks? But at the time, I was trying to protect you. Or rather, I was trying to protect us both. I was afraid that if I told the truth, the busy body Matriarch seated next to me would think you were a terrible mother. Or I was a terrible daughter. Or there was something wrong with our family. Or – worst of all – you didn’t love me enough to stay alive.

I know that none of this is true, Mom. What is true is that for most of my life, you harbored a deep, dark sadness. A sadness I didn’t understand and didn’t know how to fix. And you drank to feel better, and the alcohol worked until it didn’t. Until it killed you. But I don’t think you wanted to die, Mom. I don’t think you wanted to leave us. As one of your friends once told me, “Your mother was so tired. She just wanted to sleep.”

Shortly after you died, the man I used to be married to told me he was jealous of our relationship. He said he was jealous of how close we were, because he didn’t have that with his own mother. His words caused me to fly into a blinding rage. I was so furious at the unfairness of losing you, so devastated by the gaping hole your absence had only recently carved into my life, that I simply couldn’t hear it. But looking back, I’m glad he said it, because he only illuminated what was true. In thirty-one years, I never doubted how much you loved me, Mom. Not once. You gave me everything you could, and I am the luckiest person on earth to be able to call you my mother. Nothing will ever change that. Not even death.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in losing you, and in losing Dad, and Grandma and Grandpa, is that healing is a road that runs straight through forgiveness. In order to move on, you have to let go.

It has taken me seven years to be able to say this, but here it is: I forgive you, Mom. I forgive you for dying. I forgive you for leaving me at the worst possible time. I forgive you for needing to sleep.

And I forgive myself, too. I will have to say that again and again in order to believe it, so I guess I better start practicing now. I forgive myself. I forgive myself for not being able to save you. I forgive myself for every horrible, awful, selfish thing I did in the years since you died. I forgive myself for the mistakes I made, for the time and the money I wasted, and for all the ways I hurt myself. I forgive myself because I can see now that I was doing my best. I can see now that I was only trying to survive.

You stayed alive for me as long as you could, Mom. And now, it is my turn to stay alive for you. But I won’t just do that. I will do you one better. I will write the story of your life, and my life, and the story of all the ways in which our two lives are irrevocably intertwined. And as I do that, I will put this sad, seven-year season behind me and move forward into the future with a still-fragile yet hopeful heart. Because, do you want to hear something crazy? Even after everything that’s happened, I’m still an optimist. Even after all the evidence to the contrary, I still believe in happy endings. I still believe that people are good, and love is real, and we will be OK. And most of all, Mom, I believe that being your daughter is the greatest gift I could ever have asked for.

Thank you for being my mother.

I love you.

Sarah

5 years ago Short URL 12 Comments

Addiction/Family/Grief/Healing/Things My Mother Never Did

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20

Aug

Motherland.

“my mother

was my first country.

the first place I ever lived.”

– Nayyirah Waheed

I’ve been back in the Pacific Northwest for nearly three weeks. The weather has been glorious, reminding me of all the childhood summers I spent on this same beach in front of my grandparents’ house: digging for clams with my mother, collecting driftwood to build bonfires, combing the shores of Case Inlet for colorful sea glass we’d use for our art projects.

Most of the people I spent those childhood summers with are gone or come to this beach no longer. New neighbors and new, fancier homes have cropped up all along the inlet. And these days, sea glass is hard to come by.

But every now and then, you still find it. Like the evening a week ago, when I emerged from a saltwater swim and spotted a weathered, rectangular piece of transparent lavender peeking out from among the rocks. Its color reminded me of the four walls of my high school bedroom. A bedroom with no windows, where I affixed blue, glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling. A bedroom in a house that someone else calls home now.

Every month, the full moon bears a different name. In January, it’s called the Wolf Moon. In June, it’s Strawberry. And a handful of nights ago, as I sat under the August moon – Sturgeon, named for a fish – I turned that piece of sea glass over and over in my hand and did something I haven’t done for a while. I talked to my mother. I asked her for help.

There are some conversations too personal to share. In the nearly seven years since my mother died, my conversations with the inlet are like that. Because if my mother is anywhere, she’s there, in the water that raised her. The water she loved her whole life. The water where we scattered her ashes, sending her back to the place where she began.

So, last week, I sat on the deck of the beach house and rested my feet on its railing and asked the inlet some questions. I watched that big, bright, full Sturgeon moon cast a golden stream of light across the inky, mirror-like expanse of water and I confessed my secrets to the sea and the sky. And that night, I dreamt that I was swimming underwater, exhaling huge air bubbles into its depths. And when I broke the surface, I saw that the beach was covered with sea glass. Polished, weathered, sparkling glass, glinting in the moonlight. As far as the eye could see.

I’m going back to New York soon. I don’t know what I’m going to do, only that I’ll be there until December, and beyond that, the future is uncertain. But after three weeks on this beach, uncertainty doesn’t scare me as much as it used to. Because over the last three weeks, I was reminded that I can still sit under the night sky and confess my secrets to the inlet. That saltwater swims still have the power to heal me. And that rare and beautiful things can still be found among the rocks on this beach.

This is where my mother is, as much as she is anywhere. And because of that, no matter what else I do, I will always return here. Because of that, no matter where else I go, this is the place I will always call home.

Until next time, friends.

5 years ago Short URL 10 Comments

Change/Grief/Healing/Pacific Northwest/The Beach

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21

Jun

Recovery.

When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.

– Elizabeth Gilbert

I could tell by the look on his face that I was going to be OK. An hour earlier – give or take, time was slippery – I awoke to a blur of fluorescent lights. “Don’t touch your face!” a nurse barked, as she wheeled me down the hallway of Mt. Sinai hospital. She parked my gurney in a curtained recovery area and looked at me. “How’s your pain?” she asked.

“Umm. . .”

“On a scale of one to ten.”

I tried to lift my head and a sharp, searing pain shot through my shoulder blades. Waves of hot, heavy cramps traveled across my abdomen. I slowly lowered my head back onto my pillow.

“Five?” I offered.

Tired, confused, and still feeling the effects of anesthesia, I struggled to put facts together. I remembered the long morning in the hospital, the paperwork, the blood draw, the pleasant, reassuring face of my doctor as she cheerfully told my boyfriend Jake, “We’ll take good care of her,” just before wheeling me off to surgery.

I remember thinking the operating room looked nothing like the ones depicted on TV. It was too crowded, too brightly lit. As I lay on the table, doctors buzzing around me, discussing their plans for me as though I weren’t there, panic rose within me. I can’t do this, I thought. The anesthesiologist leaned in close and adjusted something on my IV. “How do you feel?” he asked. “A little nervous,” I confessed, my voice small. “That’s perfectly normal,” he said, his tone as warm as the heated blanket my doctor had just placed on top of me. And then, I fell asleep.

“What time is it?” I asked Jake, when he appeared at my bedside.

“Five o’clock,” he said.

I had been in the hospital for eight hours. I was out of surgery. And I was awake and talking. It felt like a miracle. I could tell by Jake’s face that he thought so, too.

I barely slept that night. Even with the aid of Percocet, the pain was intense. The only thing that alleviated it was standing and walking, so, off and on throughout the early morning hours, I hobbled around my apartment, trying to disperse the Co2 gas that had been pumped into my body during the laparoscopic procedure. When I did sleep, I dreamt of my mother, my mind circling around something my uncle said when I told him about my upcoming surgery: “You are your mother’s daughter.”

Like me, my mother also had a large ovarian cyst that had to be surgically removed. When I was a child, her stories about the cyst haunted my imagination. Not just because it was big – the size of a grapefruit – but, because – creepily – it had hair and teeth. “It means I was supposed to be a twin,” my mom used to tell me. Whether or not that was actually true, I have no idea. But she said it, and I believed it.

After my cyst was diagnosed, I avoided the internet. I didn’t want to know anything about it, didn’t want to have an understanding of how large it was. It was enough that my doctor winced when reviewing my ultrasounds. “You’re really not in pain?” she asked.

The day after the surgery, with the mass safely out of my body, curiosity got the better of me. A quick google search led me to a chart comparing tumors to pieces of fruit. Ten centimeters was the equivalent of a grapefruit. My cyst, when they pulled it out of me, was fourteen.

How long had this thing been growing inside of me? It was impossible to know. I had been avoiding doctors for years, terrified of them after a string of deaths in my family. But suddenly, it all started to make sense: the frequent stomach cramps I’d chalked up to stress. The strange sensation of something tugging on my insides. I’d told the truth when I told my doctor that I wasn’t in pain. But for as long as I could remember, there had been something else. Something more elusive. A persistent feeling that something was wrong.

These last few years, I have worked hard to heal, to stay positive, to change my life. But no matter what I’ve done or how hard I’ve tried, something always, inevitably, pulled me low again. Over time, I’ve become used to my sadness. I’ve harbored a secret fear that I was permanently broken.

Until last week. Until the endometrioma – a benign mass filled with blood – was cut from my body. And then I began to wonder: what if this thing, this growth, was the physical manifestation of watching my mother slip into madness? What if it had stored up all the memories of my father’s physical decline, my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s Disease, the weeks I sat with my grandfather while he died? What if all the terrible things that happened over the last seven years needed somewhere to go, and this was where they went?

I don’t know if, in the words of Elizabeth Gilbert, the past has passed from me at last. Maybe it never will. And maybe that’s OK. But over the course of this last week – as my pain has subsided and my strength has returned – I have been awed by the power of my own body. I am embarrassed that I have neglected it, and grateful beyond measure to discover that it is healthier and more resilient than I could have imagined.

I still have some hurdles to clear. Some medical tests to pass. And some big decisions to make. But I feel like I’ve been given a second chance. I feel like I’ve turned a corner, one I’m only beginning to understand. And for the first time in a long time, I feel like everything is going to be all right.

Until next time, friends.

5 years ago Short URL 12 Comments

Grief/Healing/Health/Well-Being

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14

Apr

Westeros.

The day before the season seven finale of Game of Thrones, I left Los Angeles. All that remained of the eighteen years I’d spent there was contained in three suitcases, a duffle bag, and four cardboard boxes. The luggage was coming with me, on a one-way flight to Seattle; the boxes would be shipped to my new address in New York City, once I knew where that was.

Daenerys, Tyrion and the dragons (from IMDB.com)

I had no job and no place to live, a fact that should have concerned me more than it did. But as I bid farewell to my roommate Jen, bound for the vacant house in western Washington that once belonged to my grandfather – the house where I planned to “figure things out” – my priorities were elsewhere. “I can’t believe I’m not watching the finale with you!” I wailed. Jen and I were friends who, for years, had dissected every GOT plot point and character arc like it was our job. “What am I going to do?”

More than a year and a half later, I’m looking forward to the epic series’ final season with both eager anticipation and a palpable sense of loss. For eight years, Game of Thrones has been my companion throughout the most difficult experiences of my life. When it premiered in 2011, I’d never lost anyone close to me; before season three was over, my parents, my grandmother, my dog, and a close friend from college were all dead. As I grappled with disorienting grief, the brutal, you-win-or-you-die rules of the world GOT unfolded before me provided welcome catharsis. A show where the writers didn’t hesitate to kill off beloved characters was – oddly – comforting. No one was safe. Anyone could die. Just like in real life.

Watching Game of Thrones in L.A.

At my father’s funeral in the winter of 2013, I sat at a table with his younger brother, Jimmy. The last time we’d seen each other, I was four years old and the flower girl in my half-sister’s wedding. With no relationship as adults, we had little to talk about. Jimmy was also gravely ill, requiring an oxygen tank to help him breathe. But he’d been a professor of film at a university in Nevada, and somehow, Game of Thrones came up. Our stilted, awkward conversation quickly gave way to a spirited discussion about Jimmy’s favorite character, Daenerys Targaryen. Jimmy died a few months later, and, in the years that followed, whenever Daenerys conquered a city or triumphed over one of her enemies, I felt a nagging sadness that he didn’t live to see it. “Jimmy would have loved that,” was my common, wistful refrain.

There are no knights in my story, no dragons or sorcerers or white walkers. But so often over the last eight years, the struggles of GOT’s characters have felt like heightened, fantastical versions of my own. I have loved them, learned from them, cried and cheered for them. But nowhere in the Game of Thrones universe did the stories of two characters resonate more personally with me than those of Arya and Sansa Stark. While their brothers were off getting killed (and occasionally, coming back to life!) or turning into a three-eyed raven, those two sisters were learning to survive in a world that constantly underestimated them. My life circumstances were – obviously – far less dramatic, but like Arya and Sansa, I too knew what it was like to suddenly lose my parents, to have my family ripped apart, and to be thrust into a new reality where everything felt cold and cruel and unfair. Every time one of them was hurt, I was outraged. Every time one of them triumphed, I saw it as a personal victory. Which is why the season seven finale, when they worked together to finally bring justice to the man who had been the architect of so much of their family’s suffering, was so, damned, satisfying.

Arya Stark (from IMDB.com)

There are plenty of people who will say GOT is just a TV show, and plenty more who will brag about the fact that they’ve never watched an episode. But for me, it’s more than just a compelling drama. The community that formed around watching Game of Thrones made me feel less alone during the loneliest period of my life. As Vulture.com pointed out in a recent article, in the age of binge watching, GOT might be the last show we watch together, each episode an event that must be experienced in real-time, with all of its awe and horror unfolding before our eyes. Which is why, even now, with so many of my friends and loved ones three thousand miles away on the opposite coast, I’ll still feel like, tonight, when I tune in for the season premiere, I will be watching right alongside them.

The final episodes of Game of Thrones are done. All that’s left to do now is wait, and watch. I am equal parts excited to see how my favorite characters’ stories will end, and terrified to learn their fates. And while I know no one is safe in the land of Westeros (or in the lands beyond), I do have one final request. Hey David, D.B. and George R.R.? Please don’t kill Arya and Sansa. I have survived many things in my life, and I’m sure I can survive that, too. I’m just not sure I want to.

Until next time, friends.

Jon Snow and Sansa Stark reunite (from IMDB.com)

5 years ago Short URL 9 Comments

Change/Entertainment/Grief/Memoir

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28

Sep

Autumn.

“It is the nature of grace to fill the places that have been empty.”

– Goethe

I knew summer was over before I dipped my toes in the saltwater. The normally cloudy Case Inlet was unusually clear, a sign of a fresh current of (cold) water coursing through the bay. Goosebumps formed on my arms. “Don’t chicken out,” I chided myself. “This is your last chance until next summer.”

The thought of all the people for whom “next summer” never came flashed through my mind, and with an urgency suddenly more powerful than my fear, I flung myself into the sea. The shock of icy water traveled quickly up my body and stabbed at my insides, but it didn’t matter, I was in. “Hi Mom,” I murmured, looking up at the familiar snow-capped peak of Mt. Rainier. “I miss you.”

Later, cover up and shorts layered over my swimsuit, I sat on the deck of my aunt and uncle’s house, stared out at the inlet, and thought about everything and nothing. It was my last day at the beach and my uncle had plenty of questions, most of them involving the future.

“How long are you planning to stay in New York?” he asked me over dinner that night. My reply was noncommittal, as I still had plenty of questions about the future myself. “As long as it makes sense,” I told him. “There are a lot of things I want to do there.”

It’s hard for me to believe it has already been a year since last September, when I left that same stretch of rocky beach in the Pacific Northwest to move east and reinvent my life. These last twelve months have passed quickly, even though at times – mostly during the cold, dark winter – they seemed to move at a torturous pace. When I made the initial decision to relocate, everything fell into place so quickly that I foolishly believed everything that followed would be easy, too.

I was wrong. I came to New York with a long list of things I wanted to do, see and be, and one year later, I feel as though I’ve accomplished very few of them. I applied for numerous fellowships, residencies and jobs, and have been rejected – so far – by all of them. I’ve hit roadblocks, struggled with seasonal depression, and felt like a failure more times than I care to admit. I’ve been sick, sad, and have experienced a resurgence of grief I thought I’d healed from. Countless times, I fought the urge to give up, give in, and go home.

But there’s a sticking point: I’m not sure where “home” is any more. The place I lived longer than anywhere – Los Angeles – is filled with people I love and years of life-altering experiences. I left because I was bored, creatively stagnant, and desperate for a change. That rocky Pacific Northwest beach? It will always be a safe harbor and an anchor, but it’s also a repository for more painful family memories than I can count. In other words: not the best place to begin the next chapter of my life.

And then there’s something else. Something bigger. Something I promised myself somewhere over the course of the last six rollercoaster years that began with my mother’s sudden death: I would no longer do the safe and easy thing. I would make choices based in hope rather than in fear. I wouldn’t go back and try to recreate the past, I would move forward and forge a present that was entirely new.

I’ve tried my best to do that. It’s no accident I left my family’s beach cabin and moved to New York one week before the fifth anniversary of my mother’s death. I didn’t want to spend that anniversary in the same place where my mom and uncle grew up, the same place where I’d spent every childhood summer, the same place where we boarded my grandfather’s tiny tin boat, went out to sea, and scattered my mother’s ashes. I didn’t want to mark the passage of another year feeling like a prisoner to the past. I wanted to spend it starting over – whatever that looked like – on the opposite coast.

A few weeks ago, in early September, I spent the day with one of my mother’s closest friends. As we caught up over lunch, we talked about my mom, our memories, and what had happened in the year since I’d moved. The conversation turned to the memoir I’m working on. “Is it about your Mom?” she asked. I nodded. The next part was – and is – hard for me to admit. “It’s about what you do when the person you love the most is the same person you’re terrified of becoming.”

To my surprise, she didn’t seem horrified. She seemed to understand.

I’ve been in New York for a year. It still feels less like home than it does some exotic, foreign land I’m learning to navigate. But you know what? I like it. I like the fact that it’s full of strivers who get knocked down and continue to get up again. I like the fact that I’ve been challenged here in ways I never was in L.A., and that my failures have forced me to think outside of the box, get creative, and try things I otherwise wouldn’t. I like the fact that it’s a tough town, but one where it still feels like possibility waits on every street corner.

There’s no way to know where I’ll be this time next year. Any attempt to lasso the future is a pointless exercise. For now, it’s enough to be here, living moment to moment, doing all I can for as long as I can, making choices based in hope rather than in fear.

Until next time, friends.

6 years ago Short URL 4 Comments

Change/Grief/Memoir/New York

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30

Aug

Labor Day.

“Something good will come of all things yet.”
– Jack Kerouac

It was a hot, humid morning when I left New York, every bit as hot as it had been eight weeks prior, the last time I fled the city to seek the sanctuary of a rocky beach in the Pacific Northwest.

And yet, even as I settled my tired body – already sweaty at seven thirty in the morning – into the back seat of a taxi cab and we drove east through Harlem, I could feel the summer waning, feel the drumbeat of autumn, feel the looming threat of barren trees and crisp days and  – before long – fresh snowfall. I had felt it the day before too, trudging along Amsterdam Avenue on my way to the Morningside Heights post office, as the influx of new Columbia students poured out onto the city streets. Something about their wide eyes and dewy faces screamed “Fall is coming!” And I realized as much as I’d grown weary of my swampy apartment, the mosquito bites dotting my legs and my impossible-to-tame hair, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to summer yet. It had gone too fast.

I have a keen awareness of time passing that I didn’t have before I moved to New York. Years ago, I remember being told by east coast friends that the lack of seasons in Los Angeles skews your sense of time, something akin to spending too long in a Vegas casino. Think glittering lights, pumped-in oxygen, absent clocks. I pretended to understand what they meant, but the truth is, I didn’t. I was eighteen years old when I moved to L.A., and before that, I’d lived in Washington State and Alaska. Places with weather for sure, but not the sharp swing of extremes I had already experienced during my first year on the east coast. The lightning storms, the Nor’easters, the way the sky would suddenly open up and pour out buckets of rain, all of this was new to me. All of it seeming to signify the impermanence of the present moment, that this, too – be it good or bad – shall pass.

As I write this blog, it’s Labor Day weekend, and I’m exactly where I was this time last year, staring out at the silver mirror of Case Inlet from the living room of the beach house where my grandparents lived for most of my life. This house – once a buzz of activity – sits largely empty now. Each time I return, I do my best to fill up the lonely spaces. I brew strong coffee and drink too much of it. I unfurl my red sticky mat and practice amateur yoga in the living room. I watch as much Mariners baseball as I can, occasionally (often) yelling at the TV. I wrap myself in my grandmother’s old yellow afghan and watch the sunset from the same weathered porch swing I used to climb on as a child. And sometimes, in the morning, I’ll put on my grandfather’s enormous emerald green bathrobe – still hanging from the hook on the back of the door of his old room – and find comfort in the weight of its heavy cotton against my skin.

This place, this beach, is my anchor. It’s my back up plan if everything else goes wrong. Three of the four times I’ve traveled west since I moved to New York, I’ve returned here. To see my family. To remind myself where I come from. During an often confusing and challenging year, it has been my safe harbor. My true north. For a while, as I struggled through seasonal depression and various physical ailments, I was convinced I had made a mistake by leaving L.A. It’s only now, returning to the very spot where I planned my move a year ago, that I can see that everything I did was right. That the adventure I began back then is not ending but beginning.

The day before I flew to Seattle, I finally had a conversation I’d been dreading. The year lease on my Morningside Heights sublet was almost up, and I wasn’t sure if my landlord would allow me to stay beyond the twelve-month period we’d agreed to. Technically, I had been living in someone else’s apartment – my landlord’s daughter – who could choose to return at any time.

“I’m not sure what your plans are,” I wrote, “But I’d love to stay until Christmas, and then we could reassess from there?”

“No problem,” she replied, adding that her daughter had no immediate plans to return to New York, and that, when she did, she wanted to live in Brooklyn “for a while.”

“Let’s see what develops,” she added.

I suppose “seeing what develops” is exactly what I’ve been doing this past year. And now that it finally feels like it’s working out, I see no reason to stop. After all, if everything goes wrong, the beach will still be here.

Until next time, friends.

6 years ago Short URL 8 Comments

Change/Grief/New York/Pacific Northwest/The Beach

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22

Jun

June.

“Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.”

– Khalil Gibran

I started writing the end of my story first. I began with the day I hugged Jen in the driveway of her apartment building after she’d helped me put three heavy suitcases in the back of my car, and then drove my silver Toyota Prius up an eerily deserted 405 freeway to the top of the Sepulveda Pass for the last time. I wrote about the Lyft ride to the airport, where I told the driver I was moving to New York and how strange those words sounded coming out of my mouth, and the celebratory glass(es) of prosecco I drank at the Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Terminal 6, where I thought about my mother the whole time, because it was almost eighteen years to the day that I’d taken the reverse flight, from Seattle to L.A., as a kid going off to college, and how scared I’d been, and how she’d held my hand and told me that everything was going to be all right. And now, here I was again, eighteen years later, no longer a kid, but feeling just as exhilarated and terrified by the change I was about to make, and this time without my mother to tell me everything would be all right. So I took a deep breath, got on the plane, and told myself.

It felt easier to start at the end than the beginning, not just because the ending was fresh in my mind. Because the ending was so full of hope. As I scrolled through old Instagrams and blog posts from last summer, that was the thing I was struck by again and again: hope. The fact that I didn’t know how this grand adventure was going to turn out, but I was barreling forward anyway, with a sense of faith and confidence that surprised even me. Because I wanted something different than what I’d already had, and that meant doing something different than what I’d already done. Because when nothing is certain anything is possible, and I believed most of all the words of a friend who told me that anything is possible in New York.

So I made the decision to go, and once I’d made that decision, all the other decisions sprang from it, gathering momentum, like a giant snowball rolling down a hill. And I didn’t stop to think that anything could go wrong, didn’t consider any outcome other than a good one, didn’t even really listen to friends who cautioned that change is difficult, and I might have a hard time transitioning to life on the east coast.

Of course, hard turned out to be an understatement. And as winter descended like a fog, and none of my plans worked out and the grief I thought I’d healed from came roaring back, I lost sight of the hope I’d had in those early days. I stopped believing in myself. I stopped believing that good things were possible.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned during these last few difficult years, it’s that sometimes our darkest moments can be our greatest teachers. And during the winter that never seemed to end, I came to a realization: maybe the fact that nothing was working out was exactly what I needed. Maybe my move to New York wasn’t meant to be about what I would accomplish. Maybe it was meant to be about what I would learn.

It’s officially summer in the city. My first. It’s already uncomfortably humid for a girl used to the desert climate of Southern California, and it’s nowhere near as hot and a sticky as it’s going to get. I’m trying not to think about it. I’m trying to take each day as it comes, enjoying the fact that I can still sit in my living room with all the windows open and feel the faint breeze rustling through the trees and listen to the rattle of the 1 train as it shoots out of the tunnel at 125th and Broadway.

The beginning of summer means my memoir class is coming to an end. And while I’ve made a commitment to spend these next hot, humid months writing my book, I’ve also just begun another class: an intensive playwriting workshop geared toward finishing the first draft of my next script. I’m a bit worried I’ve taken on too much, that one big project might derail the other. But as I’ve started diving into this new play, a bittersweet love story about two people whose destinies are intertwined and yet, who ultimately can’t be together, I’ve realized that whether it’s fiction or non, there’s one theme that keeps running through all of my work, a theme that goes something like this: You can’t save people, you can only love them.

I can’t say how long I’ll stay in New York. I can only say that after nine months and three seasons, I’m finally starting to appreciate this city for what it is: an open door I needed to walk through to change my life. I’m grateful for every road block, every challenge, every time I looked in the mirror and asked myself, “What in the hell am I doing?” This experience has made me stronger, less afraid, and more willing to fail. And while I’ve never been a person who’s been comfortable living in uncertainty, I can recognize that uncertainty is exactly what I needed to make me realize I still have the power to shape my own narrative. I don’t know how this story is going to end, only that I’m writing it moment to moment, in a place where, once again, anything feels possible.

Until next time, friends.

6 years ago Short URL 22 Comments

Change/Creativity/Grief/Love/Memoir/New York/Writing

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