all life is fragile hope

For years, I have started a new journal in January. For eight years, to be exact.

In my possession are 8 journals of various form, size, purpose, color and brand. I indexed everything in them a few years back, trying to make sense of what timeline I’m on when so much has happened in such a short time. I remember being deep in my feelings and sensing that some monumental shifts were hitting me, and that I was neither at the beginning nor the end, but in a layered, squishy middle that was quite alive and quite present. Becoming a mother on the day America elected a monster. Surviving a pandemic as a parent. An endless, horrendous political reality that we can’t escape because it is on our phones.

The last time I started a new journal was January 2024. Several things were happening at that time.

The first is this: I realized that something was very wrong with my mother. She was unwell, possibly very sick. I did not have the question, let alone the answers or the courage, to face the voice inside of me that kept telling me that she didn’t have much time left to live. The voice prompting me to look at the clock when the time was 11:11 or 12:34 and 2:22. That’s when I first learned about the concept of angel numbers, though I was so desperate to eliminate any possibility of significance that I started avoiding looking at clocks at certain times, especially at night, when the house was quiet and the weight of my fears covered me like an ancient veil. That voice directing me to notice, with visceral clarity, that she was changing. Maybe this is what it’s like to watch a parent age - disorienting and tender. Maybe these changes are too rapid and too severe to be normal. I didn’t know either way, as I had never watched parent age or slowly die before.

Another thing that was happening at that time was the beginning of the live-streamed genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Here’s the first thing I wrote the last time I started a new journal: Palestine, I weep with you as we enter this year. A shadow hangs and every moment with you feel precious. For I cannot imagine a world without you. I pray that everything I do in your name will be a spark or a ripple or a nudge or a catapult for change. What is more holy than honoring the divine in every one of you? I pray that our children meet one day, somewhere far from this moment, and that they fall in love with the God they see.

A few weeks later, Mom died.

I can't explain why but watching the genocide (and the ecocide and the femicide and infanticide) happen feels like my mother is still dying. Beloveds, we have been watching human beings in Gaza be starved, bombed, displaced, humiliated, tortured, and mutilated by weapons that are paid for with our tax dollars. For three unbearable years. We have absolutely abandoned the children of Congo and Sudan and Myanmar. And now Iran, and Lebanon. Babies in detention centers in Texas, mothers and fathers kidnapped from their babies at school pickup and flown to unknown places. I wish it was not real, but it is, and so very inconceivable. Just like my life without her.

My mother’s body was my first home. As I spent time with her at the end of her life, the most desperate and impossible wish was on my mind: I want to start over, from the beginning, in her womb with my twin brother, and I want to do the whole thing one more time with her. I would have stopped the world to have her again. I wish I could stop the world now and save our children and save our humanity and save our one precious earth.

When I was first indexing my journals, I was also outlining a book of essays and planning to publish them. In some other timeline, I’ve already published most of them and my Mom read the collection and loved it. In a lot of ways, I was writing it for her, but she’s not here anymore. Cataloguing those first 8 years was easy and tidy: a journal for every year… how quaint. That’s the kind of writer I was before Mom died. These days, no journal could possibly contain everything I need to write. The last two years contain such outrageous multitudes, and grief is uncontainable. There are voice notes, post it notes, scraps of paper that live in the lining of my purse, random docs on my desktop, and at least 5 draft blog posts. Occasionally my journal, if it is in arms reach. Literally, whenever the urge finds me, that’s when I write.

Shortly before she died, she asked to read something I had written, so I pulled up an essay called Movement. She sat in a chair and read it on my phone, scrolling through with soft eyes in concentrated attention. When she finished, she looked up at me and smiled. “I’m thinking of writing a book”, I confessed. In the way that only she could say it, the most resolute tone and precise drawl, she responded: “Girl… this is the book.”

And so I know that no matter when, where, or how I write my stories and share them, they are enough. Maybe not enough to sell a book, or stop the world or stop genocide, or keep the love of my life from dying.

But somehow still enough.