Goodbye again

notes on loss

Mar 28, 2025

this post is dedicated to my brilliant late grandmother, mary asunta. to honor my newest ancestor and the tremendous, time bending, transformative experience that is grief.

my grandmother exits at the dawn of spring, slow, deliberate. the eagles meanwhile raise their young. as their young emerge and lay in the sun, my grandmother returns to the hospital. silver haired darlings are fed in their designated nests. they collapse under the weight of their own bodies. my grandmother is walking slowly toward the other side. i am asked if it is hard to see her like this. of course not - she is a precious child. it is her turn to be taken care of.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

poem from march 5th

i had a premonition 
and it fills me 
with both 
dread and softness. 
it was a 
beautiful premonition 
about what loss is. 

                                                death, union, ocean. 

i wonder what causes

this premonition

at the palace of floods in a house by the ocean - my bisabuela sent me here. go to the ocean she told me in the fall. i go with my mother to new jersey to vist my mother’s mother - my beautiful grandma. we bring her to a local diner and share a decadent breakfast: challah french toast and hot chocolate with whipped cream. an older woman sits at the booth beside us, alone. she is wearing a hot pink turtleneck and lipstick to match. she must be a regular because the staff bring her order after she asks about their kids. how lovely my grandma says back at the house. i want to get dressed up and take myself out to eat, like the woman at the diner.

of course you should grandma, i tell her. her husband, my movie-star-looks grandfather, passed 3 years before.

like a beautiful wave of love, grief. sadness cannot hold the feeling - it floods. this time death moves in gentle violent love like waves. high

tide

low

tide

it is spring and my grandmother is dying as eagles emerge from their eggs. silky, silvery, feathery. i watch my mother run a comb through my grandmother’s hair. mary smiles. grief floods. i can feel it. sorrow, not sorrow. honoring. de-anchoring. a transference of roles. you are the matriach now.

how i look up to my mother.

⊹

later in march there is a storm in big bear valley. through the storm the woman stretches her wings to create a shield against the elements, protecting her young. one of the three chicks does not survive.

“we are reminded again that nature is wild and unscripted.”1

the armor is shifting

⊹

the family armor is passed down. the shield slips between dimensions. the weight is carried by my mother. my grandmother returns home for the last days of her life, surrounded by her family. we’re all going to be okay mom. my mother says at her beside, combing back her hair. we are all going to be okay.

she is worried about us, my mother says. a mother never stops worrying about her young. a mother can’t keep her wings to herself. a mother cannot stop protecting. i reach out to my own. the palace floods. i will never hug my grandmother again.

⊹

i thought the palace of floods was a physical space - a dye house in the middle of nowhere, where ancestors visit in the shape of fog and birds and rainbows. they take the shape of our own hands and guide what happens next

in this world

a world of flower baths and mess making, where the lotus grows, each petal releasing an idea to devoted artists that caretake the space. a cathedral, a palace, where we work at the mercy of the plants. where we pray for rain. what happens next

⊹

the palace floods, water washing everything so only the foundation reminds. an eagle dies and i return to the ocean to visit.

it is strange and painful and true. my beautiful grandmother is leaving this palace to enter the next. she slips in and out of consciousness. i wonder where she was between the worlds.

in early march we sat together in the hospital and watched the first hour of singing in the rain. the family comes in and we sit together looking at photos from the past. we still have to watch the best part she said when i left. i kissed her perfect cheek.

⊹

it is an honor to witness her life and death. to be with my mother, with her mother, to be with her mother again.