As immigrant artists for whom so much has been sacrificed, so many dreams have been deferred, we already doubt so much. Who do we think we are? We think we are people who risked not existing at all. People who might have had a mother and father killed, either by a government or nature, even before we were born. Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do.
I have always enjoyed cemeteries. Altars for the living as well as resting places for the dead, they are entryways, I think, to any town or city, the best places to become acquainted with the tastes of the inhabitants, both present and gone.
I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me.
My mother used to say that we’ll all have three death: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are out back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.
It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.
There’s no such thing as simple mourning for anyone, really, except that as writers our grief becomes woven into the fabric of our work as well as into our source material.
Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it? Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.
She made sadness beautiful.
We’re all carrying our coffins with us every day.” Or “We are all constantly cheating death.
I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children’s inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.
At times I like it when he is just a deep echo, one utterance after another filling every crevice of the room, a voice that sounds like it’s never been an infant’s whimper, a boy’s whisper, a young man’s mumble, a voice that speaks as if every word it has ever uttered has always been and will always be for me.
What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can’t.
People say that things like this happen in slow motion, as though you suddenly become an astronaut in the antigravity chamber of your own life. This wasn’t true for me. Things were speeding up instead, and I did my best to slow them down in my mind.
Isabelle didn’t need to call my name. Not because of the twin telepathy thing people always talk about, but because we were holding hands. We were holding hands the tightest we have ever held hands in our entire lives. We were holding hands just as we had on the day we were born.
Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world.
Maybe the way death folds into the most private of spaces encourages us to underestimate the shattering weight of such a devastating loss. Perhaps uninterrupted routines and the daily flow of life force us to forget that losing a loved one to death is confounding, excruciating, sometimes even unbearable. That is, until it is our turn to grieve, and no matter how many people surround us, we end up, at one point or another, feeling totally alone.
How do you even choose what to mend when so much has already been destroyed? How could she think, she asked herself, that she could revive or save anything?
This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.
There was probably so much blood being shed in different parts of the country that morning, the blood of militiamen at the hands of former victims, the blood of former victims at the hands of militiamen battling for their lives. Maybe the water could be a cleansing offering to the gods on behalf of all the dead, no matter what their political leaning had been.
They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.