Dear Kindreds 2023--#3

A bit of a pastiche/a terrible update

I started this several weeks ago. A lot has changed in the interim. I will share what I started—a little nothing-piece about writing—and then transition to the harder stuff below.

1-27-23

Hello friends,

I’m sitting in a cafe across from my Carlos having writing time.

It’s so fun to be married to a man who is also a writer. Not sure if I’ve ever talked about Carlos in detail, but while he currently works in (and adores) his role driving bus for Pierce Transit, he also got his master’s degree from Columbia University’s prestigious journalism school, and has worked various jobs as a writer and editor, and only made the switch to this job in recent years. Being a bus driver was one of his childhood dreams (his grandfather was also a bus driver, and he has always loved cityscapes and maps and transit). As he and I got more and more serious it became clear to him that he was about to become a family man, and that freelance journalism might not be the best job with a husband and four step-kids. So he took the plunge, and his child self has gotten a real kick out of driving a huge bus around Tacoma and Seattle. And it’s been so fun to watch him live that dream.

But of course he still loves to write, and so do I. So here we sit across from one another, occasionally looking up to discuss certain vagaries of English grammar (today’s was hyphenated phrases as noun modifiers versus as nouns), happily typing away as we sip on our fave beverages (his a coffee nearly black, mine a chai), and enjoying the ambience of a very PNW coffee shop. (Today’s is Bluebeard Coffee Roasters, which has a really great vibe.)

Our discussions of grammar remind me of similar conversations my Grandma and Grandpa Mousley had when I visited them as a child in Morgan Hill, CA—where my mom grew up—and then later in Coos Bay, OR where they spent their final years. They both loved writing and grammar and the English language. My grandpa was an education professor at San Jose State and would write boring-ass papers for education mags and essays on topics he found interesting (like the stock market, mediumship and visits from the dead which he experienced often, and prophecy/revelation). My grandma—arguably the more skilled writer of the two—spent her free time plumbing the lives of family members and composing beautiful, full-scale memoirs about their lives, which they then published through a tiny boutique publishing house they created called Blue Mouse Press (their last name was Mousley). Occasionally online I see copies of these memoirs being sold in small bookstores around the country and it always makes me smile. In addition, she penned treatises pondering life, relationships, and the hazards of aging which she distributed among family. (Basically, she was an OG blogger before blogging was even a thing.) While they never splurged on the Oxford English Dictionary my grandpa coveted (according to one of my grandma’s essays about him), they did have a giant, heavily marked dictionary sitting prominently in their living room on a metal stand, and I remember them chatting–and occasionally even arguing, lol–about the grammatical particulars of one turn of phrase or another as they worked on their respective projects.

____________

2-24-23

That’s as far as this one got. And at the moment, it feels quaint and distant and a bit trivial. Carlos and I are sitting at the same cafe. And so much is different. This time we are seated on stools by the window.

I’m drinking a latte, hesitating to write the next sentence.

My little sister died.

It happened, the thing I was dreading and avoiding and in denial of in a letter I wrote you all at the beginning of January, when the diagnosis was unclear and there was still room for hope (denial?).

From this vantage point, it seems clear that the denial I allowed myself was because deep within me, I could sense the truth: time was very, very short. Shorter than I could fathom. Shorter than was right.

She died. On February 1st, 2023, her body stopped working and she died. It happened.

It’s still so hard for my brain to believe it.

I will never have my sister again in this life. I will never speak to her again. I will never laugh at her crude jokes. I will never speak to her again.

Images of her as a girl: smiling, assured, sassy, spunky, filled with life in that way we say when we mean spirited and independent and a fucking badass of a soul intent on striking out its own path in this world regardless of what anyone else thinks.

The events of her life shattered my sister’s body.

She died of a cancer that is very rare, and that almost never strikes anybody under age 40. Maquel turned 35 last August. Her cancer formed on a bile duct near her liver where it remained nearly undetectable until it had infiltrated her entire body, creating lesions in her liver and lungs and brain. Whenever doctors quizzed her about her situation, they would be amazed at her age. “Were you a heavy drinker?” they’d ask, as this was a liver-related cancer. “No,” she’d explain. “I grew up religious and I don’t like alcohol. I’ve only had a few drinks my entire life.” More amazement. More pity.

Near the end, one nurse finally hit the nail on the head. “Did you experience a lot of trauma as a child?”

Yes.

The answer to that question is: yes.

The answer to that question is: more trauma than I, a therapist who has helped victims of trauma for more than a decade, can even begin to fathom.

The answer to that question is:

Empty. Blank. It is ineffable. It surpasses any conceivable measurement of threshold.

I have no idea what to do with that reality.

Grief is a very strange thing. Like infatuation, it is one of the human conditions that could arguably be compared to brain damage in the ways it impairs normal functioning. That’s why I’m giving myself a wide berth in this letter, tenderly allowing things to be imperfect, allowing myself to cut and paste little splinters of thought into something, or future somethings, I will send out that are unfinished and unvarnished, but that hopefully contain pieces of truth, pieces of my thoughts as I undergo this strange human act of loss, of processing the impermanence of life and the unfinished business of the early demise of someone who was a victim of incomprehensible atrocities.

In her final years, Maquel wore a black hoodie I’d given her everywhere she went. Well, I didn’t give it to her as much as she swiped it from me ;-). I let her borrow it once when she was up for a visit, and she liked it so much she asked if she could keep it. She said it made her feel safe, like her big brother was nearby. And I was more than happy to let her have it.

(Oh, God, how I wish I could have actually protected her. Oh, God, how I wish I could have actually kept her safe.)

Getting that hoodie back last week was achingly difficult.

I never, ever, should have gotten this hoodie back. It’s wrong. It’s confusing. My brain finds it baffling. It’s hers now! It’s for her! So she can feel safe! So she can know she is loved! So she can feel protected!

And now I have it again.

It’s mine again? But it’s also hers? It’s the hoodie I happened to wear on the day I met Carlos in person for the first time. I can see the picture of us that day in my brain, on our hike at Washington Park in Portland before visiting the Pittock Mansion and then spending all afternoon basking in one another’s presence, feeling the delicious new vibes of our togetherness.

My brain is filled with pictures of me wearing it years ago, and then other pictures of her wearing it in recent years (her friends all said they associate it with her because she wore it so much)

and now it hangs in my closet.

Now, it is here, with me. I can touch it. I can smell it. I can feel it. But I can never hug her again. I can never speak to her again.

All I can do is wear this stupid fucking hoodie.

So I do.

I wear it so I can always remember her.

I wear it so I can feel safe.

I wear it so I can feel like my little sister is nearby.

I simply don’t know how to process this tragedy.

___________

That’s all for now, my kindreds. Thank you so much for letting me share these disjointed images/thoughts. There is something healing in the imperfect rendering of grief thoughts, and I so appreciate your indulgence.

And one final indulgence: an overly cautious, probably-unnecessary explanation that I am allowing myself to make. In coming days and weeks I will be publishing some letters to Maquel. I started one a few days after she passed. I reread it and it felt stilted and weird, but perhaps a better word is raw. Some of my letters to her will be public, but some will be behind the paywall even though I generally seem to try to keep most of what I share public. At the moment, I know that my remarks from her funeral (which, fittingly, came out of me weeks before she left in the form of a letter) are too personal to be accessible by just anyone on the Internet, so at least that one will be behind paywall. And I might do that with other letters I write her. As I do that, it feels important to explain that this is an issue of privacy and sensitivity, not a weird, exploitative marketing strategy. (Not that it’s wrong to publish paid content at all—that’s kind of one of the points of Substack, actually, is to provide the opportunity for readers to support authors they love in a way that is economically viable—but in this case, I feel sensitive about the optics and so I’m indulging my compulsion to explain myself perhaps overly clearly.) So yeah, please know how grateful I am to each one of you, and please know that I’m not trying to exploit my sister’s death in some cheap way by putting stuff about her behind paywall. (Funnily, it occurs to me as I think about it that Kelli would probably kind of love the idea of me using her cancer in that exact way, actually LOL. Makes me think of how one of the first things she said after diagnosis was something like “okay, everybody, it’s time to start taking days off of work and writing notes to teachers using my cancer as your excuse! I want you all to use “my sister/aunt/daughter has cancer” as much as you fucking can. Don’t let my cancer be in vain!” God I miss her and her hilarious sense of humor.) Anyway, I will try to publish some content that is free, too (like this letter). And thus ends this awkward over-explanation of a grieving brother about paywalls.

And thus ends this letter to you all, my kindred friends who have chosen, amongst all the many offerings of the World Wide Web, to read these driftless, ranging, imperfect letters I write.

Thank you so much for being there.

Love,

Josh