The truth is …

The truth is I’ve been a companion of death for a year now. January, my father, slipping away alone on the second Wednesday of the month, just after my mom and brother left his room to get dinner. It was so like him to shoulder it all alone as he had since he was a boy, raised in poverty in Mexico.

The impact of the pandemic meant we couldn’t hold his funeral until Labor Day, immediately after which my mother went into the hospital, finally dying on the second Wednesday of November.

The truth is I am grieving. The truth is that grief and sorrow are not the same. Some days I missed them with a depth I can’t explain—a giant hole that drops from my heart into some unfathomably cold, clear cenote. Tangled roots and vines from above threatening to hold me down, deeper caves beneath luring me further in. These are the days I have thought, “I’ll call Mom,” or “wouldn’t Dad have had a laugh about that?”

But the truth is that mostly I’m grateful. To them and my teachers and the profound healing work that has allowed me to close—yes excavate and fully heal—many of the wounds all children have from growing up. So the truth is that my parents have in some ways passed from my life with a pure surgical cleanliness. Not a lot of blood or oozing. Yes there is pain. And maybe a tiny scar, just a pure silver, diamond thread to mark all they have given me.