Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 74

When I got cancer last year I wasn’t really that surprised. My mother got cancer when she was my age and I’ve spent most of my life holding my breath, waiting my turn.

After I got sick I did the calculations in my mind. She died at 43 years, eight months and nine days old. I was going to be turning 43 on September 19th, 2019, ten days after my lumpectomy. Eight months and nine days later would be May 28th, 2020.

That’s today.

I have now officially lived longer than her. Been on the planet longer than she ever was. I have not only outlived her, I’ve surpassed her in age.

It’s an impossible emotion to describe. As if it isn’t “inside” me at all but rather an energy circling me, fast and chaotic. Its beyond me, and also deeply within me. There’s a relief in it, alongside a sudden sadness, both familiar and alien.

There’s a line at the end of one of my favourite Rilke poems, The Archaic Torso of Apollo, translated here by Stephen Mitchell. It’s simple yet packs a punch, as it's completely unexpected.

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

You must change your life. I read these lines in my early 20’s while living in San Francisco, depressed and at a loss for how to move on from my mother’s death.

That last line brought me back to life. I knew that an essential part of me had been forever severed and that the only way to move on was to introduce radical change.

I started practicing fervently and never looked back.

Now I feel that sense of urgency again, that sense of having come to the end of one thing and the beginning of something new. Yet that newness has yet to be born. I am in an in-between place, having crossed this imaginary boundary where life was meant to end.

I can honestly say I never thought I’d live this long and even more honestly say there have been times when I wished I wouldn’t. But now that I have, and continue to live, and breathe, what will I do with this gift of more time?

What will I do with this mind and this voice? What direction is the arch of this energetic manifestation bending?

Here in London there’s a heatwave, the birds are singing and the sun is shining in a radiant blue sky. Meanwhile people are protesting in Minneapolis, L.A., Denver, Columbus, Memphis and Louisville. People are angry, and I believe rightfully so, at the deaths of more Black folks at the hands of the police. Ahmed Aubrey, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd.

In the last episode of Little Fires Everywhere, Mia (Kerry Washington’s character) says that sometimes the best thing to do is burn it all down. Sometimes somethings are so rotten to the core that there’s no fixing them.

After the fire, when the whole earth is scorched and it looks like the end of the world, only then might something completely new, and possibly better, emerge.

I remember the year Rodney King’s assailants were acquitted and L.A. erupted in anger. It was the same year my mother died. Twenty-eight years later and nothing’s changed.

Clearly white America is still not listening. People are trying to get a message through, in any desperate way they can, and the police and the politicians and the people who don’t wanna know or see or take responsibility for their part in upholding, participating in the enactment of white supremacy, still don’t wanna listen.

What will it take to start listening? Deeply, humbly, with no end game? Without fear of conflict or reprimand or accountability? Without fear of what might be lost? What are we willing to lose to bring about more justice in this burning world?

There is so much work to do.

This morning I need to be on Zoom again. This time with folks who run a retreat centre that I teach at a couple of times a year. They’ve just decided to cancel a retreat I was meant to be leading at the end of July.

I suggested that maybe we could explore running the retreat online. So now we’re discussing the possibilities.

It’s delightful how open they are to what might be possible online. There is a lot of creativity on the call and we end with a plan for moving forward with running an online retreat at some point this summer.

I have a salad for lunch and spend the rest of the day writing. At some point the doorbell rings and it’s our new face masks. They’ve finally arrived and they’re beautiful. We try them on in front of the mirror in the hallway and take a pic.

Then it’s time to speak with my Dad again.

We talk a bit more about the farm, and what happened after the military coup. Their family managed to get about a third of the land back. Over time, the rest of it was sold off to wealthy families from Santiago who built holiday homes there.

His parents’ marriage didn’t survive the political unrest. His father had uprooted the family, including his wife and their two youngest children, and moved them to Boston after Allende was elected.

My Dad says he thinks his father was unnecessarily paranoid. He had been the personal physician of the man who lost the election to Allende and he felt somewhat targeted by the new administration.

After the military coup my grandfather decided to move his family back to Chile. My grandmother was against the idea. They had not only lost the farm but also the family home in Santiago. She knew things would never be the same.

When they did eventually go back their marriage fell apart. There was resentment towards people who had left during the unrest and my grandfather struggled to pick up his career where it had left off.

Next my Dad’s telling me about how he and my mom ended up in Boston, following closely behind his parents.

He had finally graduated from medical school and after seven years training as a surgeon, was told by the government he would need to spend the next 10 years as the only doctor in a rural part of the country. Since he knew he would become completely deskilled if he agreed to that, he and my mom decided to leave the country.

They came to Boston illegally and through his father’s connections managed to get an internship at the Harvard surgical service which took him seven years to complete.

Meanwhile, my mom had three children in that time, my older sister, Maria, me, and my younger brother, Pablo. She also learned English and forged friendships with other Latin American families in the Boston area.

My Dad tells me about the time I came down with meningitis and almost died. I was two years old and my mom had taken me and my older sister to Chile for Christmas.

Apparently I got so sick I ended up having a seizure before they realized what was wrong with me. By then I was already in the emergency room. They did a lumber puncture and determined it was meningitis.

I was in the hospital for two weeks over Christmas and New Year’s. My dad was still working in Boston, moonlighting, and decided to fly to Chile at the last minute when I started to take a turn for the worse.

Somehow I pulled through in the end but no one really understands how or why.  

After having her fourth child, my brother Cristian, my mother fell into a deep depression. My father was at a loss as to how to support her and they struggled for a few years until the late 80s when she was put on a Prozac trial.

My Dad says that after two weeks my mother, who you normally wouldn’t see until well past noon, was up early one morning saying she’d been cured. The depression was gone.

Three years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer and a couple of years after that she was dead.

I ask my Dad to tell me more about how he managed to get legal status in the US and he tells me that’s a long story that we should leave for next time.

So we leave it there. After ending the call my partner comes into the front room wanting to watch Boris’s coronavirus update.

Miraculously, we’re well on our way to passing the five tests he laid out on Day 56. It’s not really clear to me, even after watching his fancy PowerPoint presentation, how exactly we’ve managed to do that.

Next is a video on the government’s new track and trace programme. You know, the one experts were telling the government they needed to implement three months ago. There are fancy graphics showing how easy it will be for people who get symptoms to report those they’ve been in close contact with for more than 15 minutes.

How exactly is that going to work? Am I going to have to get the names and contact details for everyone I ride the tube with?

But the best is yet to come. When the media are finally allowed to ask questions, Boris doesn’t let the top scientist and medical advisor answer any questions concerning Dominic Cummings breaking the lockdown rules.

He keeps referring to it as a political, rather than health-related, matter and that he wants to “protect” his advisors from getting “bogged down” with the issue. He then goes on not to answer the questions himself.

One journalist looks visibly shocked. The next one tries to pick up the thread only to be batted back by Boris.

I can’t watch anymore and insist we eat dinner and take our daily constitutional. We have leftovers and then head back to Hackney Downs.

The grass is looking particularly beautiful in the early evening light so I take a few snaps. I’m starting to recognise not just individuals but whole groups who, like us, have their favourite spots in the park.

When we get home I’m straight onto WhatsApp video for a call with a friend. Once again, I miss the clap for the NHS, although it roars on in the background for quite a long time. I’ve lost all motivation for it and instead would rather know for sure they’ve got all the PPE they need for as long as they need it.

Apparently the woman who started it wants it to stop and has called for this to be the last week we do it.

I’ve also seen calls for a boo for Boris. I’m totally down for that.