Keeping Loss Close — Far Away Is Here

When I first read this tweet around Thanksgiving, it struck me. Bettina's so right, I thought. People around me are all bent out of shape about the travel restrictions due to Covid, and they just don't get that plenty of other people have been dealing with this kind of stuff all along. And I'm not one of those "people" who "don't realize." I realize. I have memories of being in Lebanon visiting family walking with my mother to a phone station to make long distance phone calls back home. I’ve been evacuated, rushed through the passport line, stuck at the border. I’ve also been a passenger on endless-feeling airplane flights since before I can remember. I’m a pro at not really being able to explain to people what it was like in the other places I knew...Bettina is so right—us diaspora kids, third culture kids, were the original Zoom-ers; we had pods before that was a thing; we wondered if it made sense to travel based on what we couldn’t wholly comprehend, and then we did or didn't but we carried on. Unlike everyone who doesn't get it...

And after I saw the tweet reposted a few more times, I kept nodding along as I scrolled but also I started to wonder...why this sense of us and them? Just like we all come from the same place, isn’t it true that we are all diasporic, all immigrants, all parted from our origins violently? Yes, and also not necessarily...If this year has taught me anything it's that truth isn't just about what's here, but about knowing it, about saying it, if only to yourself at first, but, also, as you get braver, as your trust grows, to others too.

I think of a certain point of conversation that I've gotten to occasionally with my therapist of many years. This is the point where I'm feeling guilty, saying I shouldn’t be complaining about whatever I’m complaining about because there are people elsewhere who have it so much worse. Now, when I say this, I’m thinking about Lebanon where I haven’t been for nearly seven years now and I won’t be able to go anytime soon...and now, I'm thinking about COVID, and how it's happening to so many people everywhere, around me, even, but just like when I was young in Lebanon, I am safe, privileged, lucky, unscarred. I think of my therapist saying, "Complaining? Your pain is real, your grief is real"--even though she would never say it that way, so obvious and straightforward, too easily dismissed by me, who, as my therapist and I have both come to see, uses self-dismissal to difficult ends, and often.

I've been trying to write this post for many weeks, wondering what I can say that feels like it matters. Christmas has passed, and Lee and I are away from home--a trip that involved much worrying over for one
so close by, so "easy" in other times we wouldn't have even thought to come here. I am writing these words as I stare out the window of a small apartment over someone's garage at a pasture where a pair of donkeys graze in the winter sun. It is a vacation of sorts, a retreat at this darkest point of this formidable year, a time to be both deliberate and free, to empty the mind, the heart, and also to feel, to think. And I think, for me,
diaspora and travel life has meant dealing with a lot of connection and disconnection and often being unable to really be present with who is in my present, while worrying about who's absent--who I've lost or who I've left behind, what the future will bring, who else I can be, who else I can meet... The fact that "home" has always been so fraught has given it a sense of meaning and elusiveness that will always be with me, though I know I'll keep feeling it differently, as long as I persist in feeling...

There isn't much to do but drive on the swerving roads around here. The landscape is at turns sloping and flat, alternating farmland and woods, the low sun is beautiful. Lee is my captain and our tiny car feels like a boat, until it is a conduit when we park, get out and walk on pretty paths along the rivers and streams, through the sleeping trees until my hands get numb. My body tricks itself into feeling empty, worried, hungry, and I try to think of what it is that's wrong, what I am missing, what I have lost that I, in my way, retain. The gratitude I feel is grief sometimes too, my gratitude is simple and complex.

And yet..."Your pain is real, your grief is real." This year I have lost friends and heroes to disease, to self-sacrifice, to age; I have lost people close and distant I will never know, I have lost versions of myself, lost friends, lost enemies, lost chances, lost time, lost places I might have called home... I suspect this year has brought many of us closer to our own diasporas...closer to the pain of what we might think of as loss but might be more like longing. And it is by sounding these losses, keeping them close that we sail on.