We have to cross / the river and my strength fails me.
In another job, in another time, when I had to be thinking through a policy around bereavement leave, I was reminded of - indeed, once again confronted by - how culturally limited many Americans are in their definitions of close family.
Grandparents, siblings, parents, spouses, sure. But uncles, aunts, cousins? Baffled looks. Worse yet trying to convey why a policy should extend to people to whom you’re not related - the friends of your parents who were always around when you were growing up; the parents and families of your friends around whom you grew up. And those friends, themselves, who shaped you.
Overlapping discomforts - around grief as a shared experience with associated rituals; around family structures they did not themselves share and cannot understand. Discomforts that become the status quo, that become the policy. Until one of us can change it, baffled looks and waspy jokes be damned.
December always makes me think about death, because it is when Phil died. I do not think you have to have lost people to understand grief; I do think that having experienced grief changes you. I am no stranger to loss, by now.
There will always be something about children dying that is incomprehensible. That renders all forms of expression insufficient, inadequate.
Rest in peace, Samaya. May all who love you find a way through.
Attribution:
Give me your hand. We have to cross
the river and my strength fails me.
Hold me as if I were an abandoned package
in a wicker basket, a lump that moves
and cries in the twilight. Cross the river
with me. Even if this time the waters
don't part before us. Even if this time God
doesn't come to our aid and a flurry of arrows
riddles our backs. Even if there is no river.
— Moses by Luis Alberto de Cuenca; translated by Gustavo Pérez Firmat