Then I remembered: Mama wasn’t gone
but safe, in her bed, turning in sleep. It was Iwho went away—from Chopin in the bones,
palms heavy with dates like darkpurple fingers reaching toward sand, toward fruit
sickly sweet outside Mama’sbedroom window turned mine, her girlhood
unloosed in mine, on the ground, rotting yellow.
—Jenn Givhan, “Nocturne”
During the past couple of years of your life, weddings and funerals seem to coincide in an uncomfortable closeness around the Jewish High Holy Days. And yet this closeness of celebration and mourning, beginnings and endings, has become familiar to you, its emotive halo seeking ritual and perhaps a new liturgy, if not a place in the season of autumn, when harvests are reaped and the trees burst into a colorful descent toward quietus, and how content you are, when the earth goes dead, because there is always the promise of tomorrow.
Last year, in less than a week’s time, your mother’s eldest brother passed away in the Rio Grande Valley, and your brother’s sister married in Toronto.
Last year, in less than a week, you lit candles for the family patriarch, choked on each word of the Mourner’s Kaddish, slept in fitful bursts, awoke with rusted hope it was a dream, it was a dream damn it, you woke up hoarse-screaming, still filled with the stale daily worry of the terminal cancer that slowly, cruelly, robbed him of movement and speech, but no, your uncle never forgot you, he asked for you, asked for your husband, his new nephew, you lit those candles together—just as you toasted the newly-wed couple, those you now call brother and sister. At the wedding, loss bared down on your bare shoulders heaving, only slightly because you were exhausted, because you wanted to hide your new grief from the newly-weds, you tried to bury it deep within your brightly colored dress as your mother-in-law straightened the orange corsage around your wrist, and she held your hand as if it were shattered glass, the pieces of your hand she carried that week, this woman you now call mother, this woman who months later gave you a home in Hong Kong when you could not stand to look at the ocean anymore, when Padre Island, the island of your childhood, severed itself, when the past itself turned its back on you, and for a month, you would toast your dearly departed uncle on the rooftop of their home in Hong Kong, your father-in-law telling you no one is ever really gone, and you knew he didn’t really believe this, you knew he is not a man to say things he doesn’t mean, and he knew you cannot let go of the dead, when he himself has and many times over.
* * *
This past weekend, shortly after the High Holy days, you returned to Padre Island, where two years ago you married your husband in a Jewish wedding ceremony attended only by your Mexican Catholic side, your father and you being the sole practicing Jews in all the families gathered, no, none of his family attended. You went back to celebrate your two-year anniversary and to honor your dearly departed uncle because life and death cling to you in such extremes that your shattered glass hands remain fragmented, some shards lost and never to be recovered, but they are not broken because you have learned to grip, to hold and carry and protect, with what they have become. To deny them their splintering and un-oneness would be an act of contrition—when they are not a cross for you to bear, but a giving, a seed for planting elsewhere, which is now here. You recognize the Valley and Padre less these days, and this has nothing to do with land development, shifting demographics, border violence. The strangeness is within your own family, how your generation has scattered across the country—and even those who remained here feel the void of your uncle’s death as guiding compass, as polaris of memory. How large the world within the world of the Rio Grande Valley has become, and your home, your childhood, is slipping away, it’s always a little more gone, and this is why perhaps only your shattered hands can pull you through it, can grab at its shirt tails and rosaries, forever just out of reach, you always almost have it now, and for eternity.
* * *
You try not to think about how your parents, your aunts and uncles, have all had cancer, or that your mother’s parents were taken from this earth by cancer. No one talks about why there is so much cancer in the Rio Grande Valley, no one wants to talk about the maquiladoras across the border, the industrial run-off, the contaminated soil, the tap water, which to visitors tastes of sulfur, or spoiled, or bitter, or simply “off,” but for you will always taste of home.
At a gathering at an uncle’s house in Los Fresnos, another uncle speaks of a hospital losing his medical records, and yet another says drinking a small glass of whiskey before bed will kill the bad bacteria that grows at night while you sleep. Terrible things happen at night while you sleep, aunts and uncles all agree, but also, each has seen your dearly departed uncle in their dreams. This is only mentioned, not discussed—or that your uncle is not the only one missing, there are so many people missing because there are rifts among your aunts and uncles, slammed down phones, sleepless nights, there are so many secrets your mother will never tell you because they are fiercely loyal to each other, even the rifts become a form of loyalty by way of their very secrecy.
* * *
Your mother is the most resilient and most unforgiving person you’ve ever met in your travels across the world. You did not gather here on the island to celebrate your anniversary nor did you come here to mourn; there is a pull much stronger on you, a gravity that your husband and his family has witnessed and accepted, that radiates from your mother who was a child when she raised her brothers and sisters, who was a child when she went to work, who says she never had a childhood and you have witnessed this as her child, any tenderness brought out by your father, but mostly it is a secret between them, a secret he will guard.
Your mother asks what you are writing for this coming week, and when you try to talk to her about seasons, about beginnings and endings so close together, she shakes her head reminds you, right there on the island, amid a frame of palm trees and ocean, warring gulls and tiny crabs disappearing into wet sand, that here, there are no seasons and rarely does she see leaves turn. Rarely has she known anything, but the heat and burn of an unrelenting sun, the New Year like any other day, and that’s why you must never come back here, she likes having a daughter who lives so far up North, and you must never speak of coming back, there’s nothing here for you, and she stops speaking abruptly, like a box snapping shut, because she’s wiping at her dry eyes, no tears will fall, she wouldn’t let them, this day being like any other she’s known.
Evening falls. Your mother is standing on the island, and the waves are most unforgiving, tossing around no one, everyone wading near the surf, safely at a distance. Your mother is smiling and wiping at her eyes. She will not give in, to what you won’t ever know in its entirety. Your husband’s arms are tight around your waist, but your mother is holding your hand and you can feel her pulling you toward the water, and you let her, until you are waist deep and the three of you are being knocked down again and again, but she’s still pulling you forward as your husband struggles to hold you back. Because perhaps there are no seasons here, but sometimes here the world drowns. And you either go with it, or go against; indecision does not have a place. And this is the season you’ve become in a place you no longer belong: his arms around you and her wanting you to at least dare, wanting you to take the smallest step, to defy what’s most unforgiving of this world.