what will see us through

The days bleed into each other. Time is a circle. The sunup to sundown fog here in the city only adds to the dislocation.

I take long walks with the dog, I leave my phone at home. I have walked every single trail in all the parks closest to me in every possible configuration so many times that I could trace you their maps with my eyes closed. I know where the honeybees have a hive hidden in a eucalyptus tree in Glen Canyon, where and what time to walk if you want to see coyotes on the backside of McLaren Park, and the best place to perch on top of Bernal Hill if you want a Red Tail Hawk to breeze slow and so close to your head you can hear the whoosh of its wings.

I run in the mornings; I walk at night. On the days my gym runs outdoor workouts I bring the heaviest weights I have, I run hard, I push. I want to feel strong. I want to not think. I don’t know what else to do. How to pass the time. How to exhaust myself. I am with myself constantly. I never leave.

Yesterday we went to the ballfields where 7th Avenue dumps into Golden Gate Park and took some deep breaths in the Aids Memorial Garden before walking around Stow Lake and up to the top of Strawberry Hill. Eighteen years in this city and I have never been to the top of Strawberry Hill. It’s beautiful and also fake the way Disneyland is— the water is an eerie shade of man-made lake green (algae? Ecto Cooler?) and the water in the “waterfall” smells like the chemically treated water on Splash Mountain, but it’s also gorgeous, and weird, and the park is full of weirdos, still, my people, thank god. I walked until it got dark, watched the ducks cozy themselves up against the shore, tuck beaks under wings, settling in for the night, before we crossed over the stone bridge and I let the dog off his leash to sprint up to the top of the world’s cutest named hill. I crave horizons the way I crave faces. Climbing tall hills helps, unless the fog looms far enough that I can’t see what’s beyond. That there is a beyond.

Things feel different now. The whole thing. The long haul of it. It is heavy, and viscous, and murky. Or maybe my adrenaline is finally crashing and reality is hitting. I can’t concentrate at work. Words on the page come out choppy, blunt. I crave people, I want to avoid them completely. Sun on my skin feels like hope; the fog is an anesthetic.

Four years ago on the On Being podcast, Krista Tippett interviewed Dr. Pauline Boss, an educator and researcher who developed a theory called “ambiguous loss.” On Being re-released this episode in light of current circumstances. It’s a helpful conversation, a way of looking honestly at:

…the reality that every loss does not hold a promise of anything like resolution. Amid this pandemic, there are so many losses — from deaths that could not be mourned, to the very structure of our days, to a sudden crash of what felt like solid careers and plans and dreams. This conversation is full of practical intelligence for shedding assumptions about how we should be feeling and acting as these only serve to deepen stress. 

Stay with me now…

Immigration is a form of ambiguous loss. Until I listened to this episode, I didn’t have language for one of my most persistent inquiries: How to wrap my head around the long term effects of leaving a homeland, not knowing that you would never return. The people I love most in this world have lived lives marked by ambiguous loss. My great aunt says that if she’d known when she left Cuba that she would never see her mother again, she would have never set foot on the plane that brought her to New York, and her new husband waiting for her in Brooklyn, in the first place. I think about what it would have been like to say goodbye to my mother in my early twenties, and then never see her again, but live with the grief of knowing she was alive, just forever inaccessible to me. And this is just one story! There are hundreds, now mostly buried. Our immigration story is not unique—lives upended, making one’s way inside a reality that could have never been expected.

Re-listening to this podcast now, there is an additional lens, or filter, I suppose, through which I try to ground the unfathomable into some kind of shape that makes sense. For many people, living with ambiguous loss is not new. What has been a baseline experience for my family and others like mine is not unlike what we are all dealing with now. I feel this permeating us—the deepening, harrowing realization that there will not be an end to this grief, not for a very long time.

(My mom blowing out birthday candles. That’s my grandfather staring straight into camera, his hand on my grandmother’s shoulder. My great aunt is to their right, with the awesome cat-eye glasses.)

I look to my history to map a future where despair and hope can live in some kind of peace.

• What new ideas exist inside the space that is created when old ways die?

• How do we learn to live inside ambiguity in a way that honors our grief without allowing ourselves to be waylaid by it?

• How do we keep going?

Adding to the intensity of the times is the fact that this is an election year, you know, that other thing we are learning to live with: The awful possibility that we will be four more years under this administration. That we might truly devolve into fascism (if we haven’t already?). This might be our reality. Yes, it will be terrible. And, yes, we will keep going. We will find a way to live, we will do our best to keep others alive.

How to keep living? Stories help. Dr. Boss (um, I am hella jelly of that moniker) talks of working with Japanese communities directly effected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster and tsunami, and how in order to integrate loss we must create meaning from it. We make music, we paint or draw. We feed each other, we keep bellies full. We, uh, Zoom. We write letters, we talk on the phone, we send care packages, we say the things we’ve been afraid to say, we tell the truth. We forgive, we grieve, we expand our capacity for love. And, we protect each other, fiercely, by any means necessary.

My family honored what was left behind by keeping memory alive. My absolute fondest memories growing up—and to this day—were gatherings that ended up with all of us sitting around a table, listening to tales of family folklore I’d heard countless times but nevertheless couldn’t help but listen to with rapt attention. No matter what pain befell us—loss, illness, mistakes, trouble—joy walked alongside. We were never not laughing. These are my roots: holding pain and joy in equal measure.

I left home at eighteen to find my way in the fog. On visits home my first stop was more often than not to my grandmother’s house, to her kitchen, her cheek against mine, her smell as familiar as my own mother’s.

Inevitably, I’d brought some trouble with home me. Necesito una bendición, I’d say, and she’d drop whatever she was doing, pick a fresh flower from the manicured garden of her retirement community, and we’d close ourselves in her bedroom, bottle of Royal Violets in tow. Drenching the flower in perfume, she’d shake it over me head-to-toe, all the while chanting the holiest words in her sweet and tiny voice. I might catch a word here, a phrase or two there, but mostly I’d close my eyes, let the love wash over me, an impromptu baptism.

When I think of her now, it’s that old magic I miss most (that, and the perfect flan awaiting me that you had to beg me to share even a bite). Wisdom from a different time, a different world, a call back to something more essential, simpler, slower.

I long for that now. I’m not sure where to find it, how to recreate it (if that’s even possible), so I make my own rituals: I weave certain parts of her into my book and keep her memory alive in my own quiet ways and honor today her kindness, her sense of humor, how we would sing and dance together, memories of watching telenovela with her on hot summer afternoons, little walks around her apartment complex , that time she came up to the city and we stayed in a fancy hotel downtown. I miss her, and it’s also true that the ache of grief is the most beautiful thing I know.

Physical distance in a time when we need each other more than ever is its own unique grief. The pain and terror of these times is real. There are moments that feel impossible to hold.

But: There will be a beyond. In the meantime, keep walking. Keep walking, and running, and writing, or whatever it is that you do, keep staring out windows and dreaming of horizons, keep tracking hummingbirds, and honeybees, and bowing down at the feet of coyotes, and calling your people of the blue, keep being relentlessly in community, if from six feet away. We are what will see us through.

Oh! And VOTE. Keep voting.

I love you. As ever, take care of each other. We belong to each other.

What is seeing you through? I’m aching for inspiration. Let me know in the comments below👇🏽

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Slow Motion Sober is a newsletter and community for creative types who are sober or curious about sobriety, and all the life-y intersections along the way. It's written by me, Dani Cirignano, a writer and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

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