elmira

Sep 20, 201611 min read

We Give Way

*This journal entry was written over several days in which I was processing some very heavy experiences. There is content in here that could be potentially triggering for suicide survivors or those contemplating it.

Please take care.*

With That Moon Language

Admit something. Everyone you see, you say to them “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud: Otherwise, Someone would call the cops. Still, though, think about this,

This great pull in us To connect. Why not become the one Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying,

With that sweet moon Language, What every other eye in this world Is dying to Hear.

~ Hafiz

I sit down. Set the playlist.

Let the music stream.

Gather my plant allies.

I do the best I can to emotionally prepare myself to start this piece.

Unsure, and uneasy about what's gonna come out.

But sure that I need to write it so that the thoughts can get outside of my head.

Outside of my body.

It is mid September, and today the water falls, and falls, and falls from the sky.

Offering life and nourishment to so many, many creatures and beings.

I can hear the soil sigh with relief.

I can feel the roots of trees and plants take up the water.

I offer gratitude for the gift to the land.

At the same time, my skin feels lonely for the touch of my most intimate lover, the sun.

I like to think that the sun was lonely for me today, too.

But we give way, we give way, and we give way.

Summer continues to fold itself back from the skies and give way to autumn.

The leaves demonstrate what a beautiful dance falling can be when you let go.

After the full Harvest Moon of last evening, we are now in the waning phase of a moon cycle.

I dreamt that I stood over my body and beat myself bloody and dead with a bat.

I drew Death from my cards today.

Everywhere, thing give way.

Cease to be. Exhaust themselves.

This process is both beautiful and tragic.

All at the same time.

The reality that life is in a constant state of fluctuation, transition, and change can be a challenge for me to work with at times. Especially in the interpersonal and personal life realms. I am a cancerian mama who reflects the cancerian archetype so closely that it's a bit absurd. I am ruled by the moon. Saturated with water. I feel most secure in the world when I am rooted in home and hearth. My transitions, transformations, and adventures anchored by intimate and familiar relationships with people and place.

But home, for me has been ever elusive and always just beyond the fray. At times, places that feel like home have rose up out of the dust, only to dissolve back into it like it was never ever there in the first place.

And, I've been talking to all kinds of folks, having all kinds of conversations with friends who's feet have been walking and walking, diligently, but have yet to meet their home.

And there is so much sadness in these stories. Hurting hearts that just want a place and a people to pour their heart into. To belong to.

In a world so upside down, it can be so very confusing to know which path will lead you home, and which will just leave you hurting. And it seems like everybody is just hurting.

Hurting for a home they've never been to. For a lover or a friend they've never known.

And for some of us, living indefinately with these cravings for home, healing, and belonging can take too much emotional labor to sustain. And a human heart can exhaust itself trying.

This last week I've seen two members of my circles make the choice to check out of this world. One was an intimate familiar from a life past that I had not seen and had fallen out of direct contact with some years ago.

And it hurts to know these things.

There is hurt for these beings who chose to leave, and there is old hurt that floods me too. There is hurt, and anger, and longing, and resentment, and bitterness.

All shaken and stirred.

Mixing up my heart.

Mixing up my mind.

I spend a few days not knowing up from down, dark from light.

Not knowing how to believe that everything is gonna be all right.

Because, really, it might not be. So often its not.

When It's Not

I'm taken back to the year of 2002. I am in late pregnancy with my middle child.

It's midday. I'm at work. I get a phone call.

It's my mother.

How did she find me?

No time for that.

"Your dad killed himself. He jumped a bridge." Her words echo, and echo, and echo.

Someone picks me up from the floor and drives me home.

I don't remember what came next.

Some of the memories I've lost, or rather, are still in return to me.

June 12th, 2002. It was a beautiful day, with skies full of sunshine.

The call into #911 came in at 6:43am.

It must've been a beautiful last sunrise from his spot on that bridge, looking over the Columbia River. I can appreciate his chosen time and place to die.

He was six days away from turning 43.

He left without a fucking word. No note, no goodbye. Not a damn thing.

And I don't know how I will ever "get over" this.

I don't know that I will ever heal the trauma that is sourced in ruptured attachment.

There were weeks of nightmares before I took up nighttime tokes to fog them out.

Me running to the bridge. Him there, and slipping away just before I get there to reach out to him. I still can't drive over that damn bridge, and feel sick every time I even see it in the distance. There were dreams of seeing him driving down road in his old truck. Me running after, frantically trying to follow him. Him speeding away from me.

Trying to get away from me.

I order a copy and read the autopsy report. I order the tape and listen to the #911 calls.

I salvage his answering machine and listen to his greeting.

Wanting with all the want in me, just to talk to him.

I pick up and keep the cloths he died in.

Beige Dickies pants, and a flannel.

They washed them. Why the fuck did they wash them?

While I was dancing with my own misery, my little brother who was 15 at the time, didn't get the support he should've gotten to help him get through it. And this is a guilt so big, and so tall, and so heavy that I don't know how it stays in my body.

But I remember that it doesn't.

It comes out in all kinds of side ways.

I hold so many painful imaginings of things I could've and should've done better.

Things I can't change or redo. Just imagine.

There was ten years of walking into his room to find him cut and bloody on the floor.

Not knowing if he was gonna be alive or dead when I reached his body.

Ten years of middle of the night phone calls from hospitals.

Rushing in to find his fragile and bloody body being kept alive by machines.

He became a street kid. The kind that nobody like to see. Riding trains. Junking out.

I remember cold, cold winter nights wondering where he was and praying, praying, praying that he was somewhere warm. Somewhere alive.

And then, one day he wasn't anymore.

I was again in late term pregnancy with my third child.

It was a dark February night.

I was deep in work. Organizing for a campaign to end gender violence.

I got a phone call from an old friend.

This time my mother couldn't find me.

"Jess (this friend is one of the only people to still know me by my birth name), your brother's gone. Your mom is at the hospital."

Again some of the memories here are lost, and still in return to me.

No. No. No. No. No. Okay calm down. Let's be sure here. It will be okay. He'll be okay. Just like before and the time before. It will be okay. He will be okay.

Don't get spun out by third hand information.

My partner has the phone now. I'm curled on the bed. Everything spins anyways.

I had seen him just a few days earlier.

I took him for pizza at Sizzle Pie on Burnside.

We talked about the court proceedings i was in against my former partner and how we might just want to handle it ourselves.

Afterwards, we went to see a talk by Karen Coulter of the Blue Mountain Biodiversity Project.

Laughing Horse Books.

I thought that he might become inspired and connect with community.

That he might find a way to cope with all the childhood traumas and loss through activism.

Like I had been.

I brought him home. Made him some soup. Put him to bed on the couch.

He was gone when I woke up. Blankets folded neatly on the couch.

A night or two later he called me from a payphone at 4am and left me a voice mail that I still listen to every now and again.

My partner finds a number to call, connects with a medical examiner.

I muffle my ears to not hear the conversation.

Keeping it out for as long as I can.

He hangs up and sits on the bed where I wait to hear him say that my brother is in the hospital. Not dead, but in critical care.

That I should go tho the hospital, Just like all the times before.

That he's gonna be okay.

But he doesn't say any of those things.

He tells me instead that he is gone.

That some kids found him in a creek.

That I can get the autopsy report if I want it.

But he left a note with some last words.

And this time I don't need to go looking for answers.

And again, i have to appreciate his chosen place to die.

It is a beautiful, hidden creek.

A refuge in the belly of suburbia.

And there is so much pain. Unbearable pain. Searing pain.

I threw myself into my work. Distracted. Closed myself up.

Neglected that which should've been tended to.

But I could do little else to survive that experience but try to escape it.

I remember being afraid that if i let the grief rise, that I might not ever get out of it.

I remember being afraid that if I let the grief rise, that the baby in my belly would be touched by a grief so big that they would carry that trauma with them into the world.

I remember the struggle of having to tell my children that their uncle had passed.

Not wanting to tell them. Postponing and avoiding.

What the fuck was I supposed to tell them?

My partner telling me straight, "Elmira, you have to tell them."

But the three of us had already endured so much pain and loss that year and I didn't want to have to give them more.

We really did get more than our fair share that year.

A year which I'm not sure any of us will ever really recover from.

And if healing means that I no longer feel the pain,

then I am sure that I will never heal from this.

These are the things that come up for me every time that a friend in my circle choses to leave this life. And there are so many. Friends who never found a home to belong to, or hands in which they could spill out the contents of their hearts. Friends who decided that they had had enough of trying to reach a place that never has been and never will never be. Friends who decided that they just couldn't carry the grief any longer.

Friends who knew deep deep in their bones that things aren't gonna get better.

And come, sit with me for some real talk. If you can stomach it.

In this time and place in the story of us, our eyes will not see the conditions under which we have all been brutally forced to live under, improve much.

Not to the degree that we need them to for our hearts and lives to thrive.

And I know that some might disagree, refusing to let themselves become so disenchanted. Perhaps for fear of having nothing left between them and the uncomfortable reality that the late stages of empire are upon us and the fight that empire will put up to preserve itself will be wretched, and violent.

And even after the fall of empire, there will be many generations of spiritual and psychological healing that will need to be worked before humans are in right relationship with ourselves, with each other, with the land, with God *.

(*My humble and summarized understanding of God: the ungendered life force or energy that flows through all beings, human and beyond. Words I use interchangeably with God: Spirit, The Great Mystery, The Sacred)

Our lives will come and go and there will be no place that truly feels like home for those of us who long to live in a world where forests are left to grow, and waters are left to flow.

Were slavery isn't stitched into the fabric of our cloths.

Where black and brown bodies are not criminalized, and murdered by the state.

Where the culture is not one of rape, disposability, or exploitation.

Where we care for each other through the conflicts.

Where we can cry and weep, and sob, and be held.

Collectively, we are a long way away from there. It's gonna be a long and arduous journey home. Trauma is not easy to mitigate, and we are all carrying thousands of years of unprocessed trauma and grief in our bodies. Buried deep in the cells of our muscles, flowing in our blood, and transmitting through our genes. And it gets compounded every day. Wounds on top of wounds.

All this and no village. No home.

I hold immense understanding and empathy for those whose suffering is just too big for their hearts. I took great resonance with the story that came out of holland this year, in which a woman in her twenties was granted euthanasia because she was unable to continue living with the pain of her childhood traumas. I get it. I do. Not everyone did or does. There was much criticism over the decision by the Dutch government to allow this woman access to euthanasia for what was termed "incurable Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."

While I would prefer to live in a world where rape culture doesn't exist and girls aren't sexually abused in their childhood, we don't. And we won't for a long while. If ever.

And we are trapped in our bodies, forced to carry the trauma that never should've been perpetrated on us in the first place. And in this world, with no village, and no home, carrying that trauma all on our own is just too much to expect sometimes.

As it is with so many other traumas.

My only ask for friends considering leaving this world, is that you take the time to care for the hearts you will leave behind. Because its hard here for us too. Please believe that.

And sometimes, we feel so intensely that there is nothing we want more than to be where you are. I know it's a big ask to ask someone who can't manage their own feeling to take on the feelings of others, but I am asking it anyways.

Let us say goodbye to you. Let us tell you of our love for you so that we might not be shadowed the rest of our days by the things left unsaid. Let us know that you left knowing that you were loved.

Friends, I will not tell you that time or love will heal all wounds, because they can't.

I won't tell you that things will get better because I'm not sure that I believe that they will.

I know the pain of these things. I often feel trapped here in my body with wounds that will never heal, stuck in a world with so much accumulated sorrow. But here I am and here I will stay until I am called on to travel somewhere else. i stay for my children. They are the only anchors I have in this world and I choose to never leave my children to do my work for me.

Your choice might be different, and I want to support you in whatever way that I can as you make that choice. And even in the choice to leave, there can still be connection and praise.

It doesn't have to be traumatic and leave wounds that never heal.

It doesn't have to be that way. We can learn to give way.

Please, please, please. Don't go that way.

My Eyes So Soft

Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients can

Something missing in my heart tonight

has made my eyes so soft my voice so tender my need of God absolutely clear.

~Hafiz

For my brother. May these meanings stream through the great mystery, to you..