Dear Z.,
Tonight is the first night you’ll sleep without your mama since you were two weeks old, 4 pounds and ultraviolet in the NICU. She’s in that same hospital with gall stones and an angry pancreas, after a full day of being in lot of pain.
We waited too long to go to the ER; I chose Providence because it was closer, and that was a mistake. Your mama writhed in massive abdominal pain on the floor for nearly an hour.
At one point early on, I felt so scared and angry that there were so many people around but no one seemed to be paying attention to her that I yelled to no one and everyone that we need help RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Nurses burst out of the triage rooms; one insisted that my yelling was definitely “not okay”. They took her blood pressure and put her back out on the ER waiting room floor because there were other people who were suffering also and only so many humans in the hospital to help them.
I called Legacy Emanuel, where you were born. Their ER was empty. I drove through at least three red lights on our way. She was taken in with care. They discovered that she had gall stones which were plugging a duct and pressurizing her pancreas, which is an organ that, according to professionals, one does not fuck with. One reason to not drink excessive alcohol, I suppose.
Nevertheless, your mama is a redhead and many redheads have a mammoth’s resistance to opiates and other molecules, so her pain continued to torture her for 36 hours before the docs were willing to give her the dose she needed.
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Sometimes I teach men how to practice being with the big emotions of the feminine. I say to them, bend your knees slightly. Tuck your pelvis to open up the energy flow in your body. Tuck the chin just slightly and lift the back of your head to the sky, as if a puppeteer pulled up on your spine.
Breathe. Connect with her eyes, her experience. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Feel your own heart, I tell them.
Keep half of your awareness on her, and half on your own inner world, scanning for triggers and reactions. Open up the conduit and receive her words and tears and laughter and their everything with your whole body, presence, and heart, and let the energy move through you like water.
It is something very different—for me—to witness my beloved in great pain, suffering from within, helplessly. To see that pain grow moment by logicless moment, to see and hear her moans and cries, her writhing and convulsing, to feel the sweat of her body screaming something both incomprehensible and deadly clear. That is hard.
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When I say, may you be able to hold the suffering of others, I am not wishing for you to become a reservoir for others’ pain, but rather to develop a capacity and a willingness for leaning into the difficult circumstances life will present to you with humility and grace.
When we witness others in pain, we make a choice: we open, or close. There is no shame in either choice; sometimes exhaustion demands I turn my eyes askance at the red light to avoid the gaze of a bedraggled human wanting more. The important thing, for me, is to notice when I’m no longer making the choice—when closing my heart becomes automatic.
And so we pratice opening by allowing heartache and fear and grief to move they wish. The feelings know what to do, even if we don’t. Listen. Wisdom speaks in strange and quiet tongues. Give when you have something to give, and be kind. You cannot ever fully know someone else’s experience. It may feel as though a monster is twisting their insides and slowly killing them, and all you’d see is a wince on a face in the back of an elevator.
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You have shown extraordinary resilience since she went to the hospital. You have spent more time apart than ever before, and though it’s clear you miss her, you know she loves you and will be back. You’re sleeping through the night, and eating lots. Though the circumstances are hard, I am relishing our many moments together, when you sit on my lap to read books, or we go on adventures around the city.
You complete nineteen months today. You are more mobile and talkative than ever. You pick fresh golden raspberries and feed them to whoever is around. Your generosity and aliveness glisten in the late summer sunlight. It takes you just a few minutes to pick up the meanings of new words. You giggle when you dip your toes in the 36 degree water of our cold plunge. As I try to calm down in the near-freezing water, you just giggle and drop rocks into the water, just like at the beach.
Your mama may be in pain for a while as she recovers from these mad rites. I think this experience will change all of us before it’s done, but especially her. Let’s be gentle.
All my love, all my bones, as you’ve dubbed me:
Dey
Love you and miss you all
I hope everyone is holding up okay. I am sure this is rough, and I hope it passes quickly.