The World, Without You

Coming to terms with life after losing the person who put the ground under my feet.

I have gone back and forth in my mind about how to ‘turn up’ at a time like this.

The world feels suddenly so foreign. I must find new ground, new scaffolding for the new world.

I must find new language too. So much no longer suffices.

Words are no longer tools for making meaning. They are the bricks by which I build the new world. An altar to remember you. They are an urge or a lump in the throat that I must follow. Necessity is the new impulse of my friendship with language.

I no longer need words for me to make sense of things for there is no making sense to the world without you.

I abandon sense and instead hunt for words that can give utility to this moment. Illuminate a void and give it a name.

Last night I lay in bed reading Christian Wiman’s book Zero At The Bone.

“There is a moment in the life of a writer when one ceases to care about the truth as if there were any sort of abstract objective word or occurrence that could warrant that name.

I don’t mean one loses fidelity to the fact. I believe one should hew to the facts as one remembers them, even as it seems scientifically incontrovertible that memory is mostly an act of imagination.

No, what I mean has to do with meanings, or the lack thereof. It’s not that I don’t believe in them anymore, it’s that I believe they are ultimately unknowable, even the most intimate aspects of our existence, including the mutilations that made us what we are.”

I remember when my Dad first received the cancer diagnosis. He said he had found a strange kind of solace in realizing the cancer wasn’t some foreign entity eating at him from the outside. It was a part of him. Part of his very self, his own body, his own cellular makeup. Yet, it was a part that had turned against the whole, a mutation or a mutilation even, but it was not something alien to be feared. It was intimate. Even in his dying, he had made friends with the aspect of his existence that was now causing his erasure.

Wiman continues on the subject of words and what we hope to seek from them in times of immense change and disillusionment…

“One wants only the cadences to continue as if there were something in the words themselves that sought meaning — sought concretion, even — out there in the world, or something out there in the world that corresponded so intimately and utterly to the sound of the words that the intensity and gravity of one particular existence — or even one moment in that existence — might catalyze the tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in the stones and every evil thing.”

Words as catalysts.

Words as cadences.

I feel as though I am spinning with a broken compass in my hand searching for the coordinates that get me ‘home’.

But my father was home.

Where is home now?

On July 7th at 9pm, my best friend, my hero and my beloved father took his final breath and left his body.

He was gone like a flash of light and now I feel him everywhere.

{ 7:01 am }

Dad, when I say I feel you everywhere, I don’t speak of sensations or senses. I don’t speak of meaning either.

I speak to an instinct and a stir of something unknowable. I search less for measurable truth and more for the truth that refuses common sense. There is no sense more common and more completely absurd and bereft of explanation than death and dying. Did my writing on the soil prepare me for this moment? Did some part of me know what was coming?

Words hold a different quality now. They are more of a provocation in the mouth, bearing witness to my soul, less of an explanation and more like an expiration of everything I previously held to be true, replaced by something at once ephemeral and frighteningly firm.

Frightening because… could it have been here this whole time? This portal? This thin veil between my world and yours? Closer than breath?

I’m drawn to try and name the swirling currents in the water. For myself and no one else. The whirlpools pointing downwards, the ones I must go down and through, the torrents of grief and joy. I search for the sailing boat on the surface of my water who gave orientation to all things. I search for you and you are not there.

That is true, in one sense, and not, in another.

You are not there, and yet… you are there.

I’m searching for you now, in everything. Because I sense, with no use for my usual senses, that you are hiding in plain sight.

I don’t think it is wishful thinking. It is not thinking at all — it’s the activation of previously untrained faculties that are now imperative and completely appropriate and sufficient for the new world I am building.

{ 8:07 am }

I continue to toy with the option of reclusive grief or sharing it in the open. I open the Substack app and find myself quietly (or not so quietly) nudged by the words of other writers that pop up on my computer screen like modern confessionals…

“I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.”

-Lily King (Writers & Lovers)

Dammit, she’s right.

I sometimes worry that if I start writing, the floodgates might open and I will feel ten times worse than if I carried this all in silence. But it always turns out to be the opposite.

I always feel better.

“Write so that you can remind yourself how you see the world”

-Aza McFadden

This one made me pause.
Does writing help me see the world as it is?
Or does it help me see the one I want to see?

Is it both? Does it matter?

The point is to see. See outside of one’s own echo chamber. Maybe you can’t see something clearly until you’re relating to it, instead of merging with it. All things find their true essence in relationship.

Suffering thrives in the lie of separation.

Father/Daughter.

Daughter/Father.

This equation, this conversation, this relationship, so integral to my sense of self. My safety. My perspective.

With the loss of your physical presence, Dad, I seem to have lost something of myself.

I not only grieve the loss of your hand, I grieve the loss of how mine felt in yours. How it felt to trust that fully.

I know it will never feel that way with anyone else again.

To Defend Your Dwelling Place…

{ 2:11 pm }

I receive daily emails from The Center of Action and Contemplation and inside today’s post were the words of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who wrote diaries during the Holocaust.

She died in Auschwitz in 1943 at 29, after refusing safe hiding to stay with her community until the end.

Something in this excerpt hit me like a sacred commission. She writes:

“One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves.

And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well….

You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.”

It felt like the same words my soul has been saying ever since you transitioned, Dad.

I must defend your dwelling place inside me.

Lately, your voice has been coming to me from the same place I tend to feel God. I don’t know how to explain that place exactly, but you know it when you know it.

Frederick Buechner called it “the living center of who we are…”

It’s as though you are now occupying that same space.

When you speak it sounds like God, it sounds like a mother and a father, it sounds like my ancestors, it sounds strangely like myself.

Some ancient self I’ve recognized before. But now it has more scaffolding and feels more real, like your life is being slowly rebuilt inside my heart. A resounding, a recognition, a oneness with everything.

It poses a challenge to every name for God I might have settled for previously. My well-loved words are like froth on the surface of a wild ocean.

You cannot help me any longer, I must let you go, Papa. But I shall make a home for you to live in. You live on now through me.

I could not protect the outer circumstances; my faith could not make it better in the material realm. The songs I played by your bedside couldn’t miraculously cast a spell to change what fate had written into the room.

How do I feel you now without my senses?

I will defend your dwelling place within me.

My heart is broken and yet it is breaking open to a world and a reality I am determined to make friends with. As you would have and did so time and time again, despite so many challenges you faced in your own life.

Papa, I miss you. I will write through it, as I always have. To you and for you.

I will protect the love you gave me and build a beautiful house for it to thrive.

{ 2:43 pm }

I know there’s another reason why it’s been hard to turn up here.

I used to send you my Substack posts to proof read. I know I could correct the grammar myself but what fun is that? I loved having an excuse to share things with you. You’d email back with tweaks in red and additions in brackets and always an encouraging comment, giving me just the boost I often needed to press “publish”.

“Great work Kim, brilliant writing as always! Thoughtful, articulate and challenging… Yet another gem.”

What now?

I cannot email my drafts to you. You cannot email back. You no longer animate the hands that could do that.

But, hands feel so limited compared to the ways you can reach me now…

When the soul leaves the body it becomes so abundantly clear how finitely contained we are in these vessels. These temples… and sometimes, these prisons.

I’ll never forget the way you left your body in that hospital room. The way the air changed when you completed that final exchange with your portion of it.

You beamed almost instantly at me, from the other side.

Such a clear transition.

Such magic.

To Write or Not To Write?

{ 3:15 pm }

I have two internal voices that rush to answer this question.

One says:

“Darling, you have no obligation toward anything. Grieve as you must. You owe the world nothing. Post a poem. Wait, if it feels too soon. You don’t ever have to share if you don’t want to…”

And I appreciate this voice, I do…

But writing has never been about whether I should or not.

To be a writer in the world is not to feel as though you should write.

It’s to feel as though you must.

It’s to know that it matters less if anyone ever likes it, sees it or even connects with it. It matters that it gets out. That it gets shared, in some way.

Weeks before you left, I watched Sara Bareilles say this in a recent interview with Rolling Stone…

“Grief must be witnessed”

I write more from compulsion than anything else.

I am pulled in by an obsession more physiological than logical. If I do not give language to this moment, I cannot write you into the new story. I cannot pay tribute to the man you were and how I would not be the woman I am without you.

If I do not have a witness for this moment, then I struggle to keep seeing you myself. It’s like I need the eyes of others to gaze upon the memory of you, made manifest in me, to help keep you alive. If I can share your life, your light and the total impact of your personhood with one or three thousand witnesses, something of you gets reborn.

I now live broken hearted and my heart knows no other way but to lean into relationship as the cure.

{ 4:01 pm }

What skills must I acquire for the Brave New World?

This world where everything looks the same but is totally different?

Who am I without your anchor? Your ground? Your gravity? Your sanity? Your friendship? Your love?

I write to answer these types of questions — knowing full well that writing does not promise an answer to them.

If all my questions got answered like that, I guess there would be no need to write.

Alas, I renounce the need for an outcome. I write, without expectations, I write to find you again. I write to find myself again. I write to reclaim my peace. My joy. Your dwelling place within me. I write to awaken the faculties I shall now use to find you, hidden in plain sight.

To be a writer at the time of one’s greatest rupture is to keep turning up in a state of devotion. Turning up does not always mean outputting. It means being present to whatever is alive in the moment. Even the paralyzing sadness has some kind of vital life force latent within it. In every death, there is life. In every joy, there is sadness. Even in grief, there is praise.

“Let me tell you, any writer who claims writing is a calling and not an obsession is either blessed or afflicted with youth or dementia. I have been addicted to opiates in my life and I must say that there is a kinship between that flood of sane and aimable elation that opiates engender and the release of meaning when the right sounds are linked together.”

-Christian Wiman

I do not have perfect shapes and sounds for the new world yet. But Wiman is right that there is a strange release of meaning when certain sounds are linked together.

I search not for meaning and sense for I see how reasonable ideas fail us so completely when we lose someone who gave meaning and sense to our lives.

I search now for sounds that can give structure to the nameless days without him.

I search for one moment in existence that might catalyze the tongues in trees… books in the running brooks… sermons in the stones…

As hard as it is to be vulnerable in my writing at a time like this, I am committed to discovering this new world in real time, with time, in relationship with the world and not in denial of it.

Wiman ends that same chapter with what makes most sense to me out of everything I’ve read in this book so far.

“Poetry is the only sanity”

Photograph by my father

{ 5:09pm }

Here is a poem I wrote for you one week before we said goodbye.

I read it to you at your bedside and while it wasn’t obvious to my senses, I trust you heard me when I read it.

I know you're proof reading this from the other side, Dad, and that you're proud of me for keeping on even as the ground is gone from beneath my feet.

You are here, just in new ways.

As I finish writing this, from a small bar now in Auckland, your favourite song by Bread “Make It With You” is coming on over the stereo.

What are the chances?

It’s the last song I played you in hospital.

The song we played again at your memorial.

Okay, I get it… You’re speaking in symbols now…

Winks and Koans.
Riddles and Grins.
Dad, the Infinite Jester — peeking out from behind the veil.

Beaming with bliss.

I won’t stop listening for you in the strange coincidences of my life.

I’m already catching glimpses of you everywhere.

I miss you.

I’ll keep my heart open.

Till next time,

Inheritance

I knew something was wrong
when I couldn’t stop crying and saying your name

You’re back in the hospital
and all I can do is think

of you

thoughts
fall short
when trying to demonstrate
what only hands can say
when we held each other’s
through the redwoods
and you named all the trees
in Te Reo

I wonder where our blood would lead us
if we followed it back
to Flanders Field
where the poppies grew

and even further to the first trace of self
that formed the curl of your smile
the ancient refuge I ache for
as I lay tossing stones at almost-dreams

we have always been

both restless and willfully asleep
to the truths we could not bear to see

thoughts
too poor
a medium
for sending you the canyon
of my feeling

the spirit must carry my heart to you
no other part of my being will do
only the timeless part of me
that does not grow anxious
at the thought of losing you

for we have always been

and my love for you has no end
no limit
no border
no opposite

it holds the whole world in it

the love we taught each other
cannot be separated from itself

I overflow
with inheritance