I have expertise in abuse, personal and professional. I lived it for seven, worked it for ten, and when I put it like that, it sounds less fun than being set adrift in a ship full of starving rats. I didn’t mean for abuse to play such a prominent role in my life. I blinked, and nearly two decades have passed, and now it’s two hours past my bedtime, and I am counting the blinking cursor rather than counting sheep. I don’t want to write about abuse, and also, all I want to write about is abuse. What does it look like? How does it feel? How can we see it coming? How can we heal?

In a list of ten, eight are about abuse.

Yet… I am a joyful girl. I say it to myself sometimes, under my breath: less an affirmation, more a battle cry. I imagine myself on horseback, charging aft and fore in front of an army, but the army is just thousands of versions of myself, each of whom I have inhabited once or twice, and I am screaming at all of my selves. My horse is proud and powerful, the flag I am holding whips in the wind, and my voice carries impossibly far.

“We are joyful people!”

In reality, I am no Joan of Arc, and stacking joy is the war I am fighting.

Joy and war, two three-letter words that carry all the weight of my heart. Inside me is a little Egyptian scale, and I never know which way it will tip at the beginning of each day. The world is savage, even nature is cruel, and upon examination, abuse is heavier. It weighs more, and joy is at a disadvantage. That is why it takes mounting an imaginary army of one thousand versions of myself to face the day, to tip the scale, to beat back the demons.

However, what I know is this… we are wired to look for beautiful things, to listen to beautiful tunes, and to use our fingers to feel around this world for beautiful trappings. What I have learned is that in a sea of sadness, the beauty always shines through, like silver fish swimming upstream in black water.

If eight of my ten essays are about abuse, then so be it. If two of my ten essays are about beauty, then so be it. Abuse weighs more, yes, but being heavy isn’t always advantageous. The lightness of joy is what makes it powerful. It floats our hearts up to the rafters like little helium balloons, brightly colored and celebratory.

I will continue to write about abuse in these essays. People deserve to understand how it happens, and we should be discussing the toll it takes. I will also, however, for our own dang good, pepper in the joy, because after all, I am a joyful girl and we are joyful people.

Artwork by Juli Adams Art

At the 116 Cafe
Sitting by the window
Gripped by fear.

Shoulders folded forward
Jaw clenched solid
Unable to enjoy the smells, the sounds, the sun.

So afraid you’ll walk by
So afraid she’ll be on your arm
So afraid you’ll be laughing and floating
And as in love with her
As you once were with me.

I think I would feel less fear
If I were in the plains of Africa
Confronted by an angry lion
Than I feel in this moment.

In this cafe
Sitting by this window
Gripped by this fear.

Those fear-filled memories have been replaced by thousands of much more beautiful ones. The pain is no longer sharp, undoubtedly. But the words I wrote a decade ago still live in me. I dream of them sometimes and awake in a sweat. They say time heals all wounds, and I like to believe that, but sometimes something happens to us, and it reorders the cells in our bodies. Abuse and infidelity were what for me. I went through my husband’s phone, and after that, even my sweat smelled different. Time moves forward, and I have built back beyond imagination. Yet sometimes, I will sit in a coffee shop, and the bell above the door will ring as fear sneaks its way in. I will board a plane, and the fear will take the seat across the aisle and send me sideways glances. I will hear a song in the elevator and frantically push the close-door button before fear has a chance to slink in beside me. A poem, aged ten years, can still be a poem for today.

“Is this you, trying to reset your password?”, or some such notification.

No, it was not me. At that time, my cell phone and I were both in sleep mode.

A few minutes later, I sat at my kitchen table and opened my email. There was a message there, too.

“Click here to reset your password.”

I clicked and was taken to Instagram, where I saw that someone had already taken over my account. They had posted an obscure photo of a glossy wooden tabletop; the reflection of the cell phone snapping the photo was visible.

My stomach sank. Dang, I got hacked!

Instagram still allowed me to log in via the link in my email, so I was able to change the passwords on my personal account and my nonprofit account. I deleted the weird photo and ensured that I was still able to log into a few of my Instagram accounts. Everything looked fine, but how had they bypassed the 2 Factor Authentication?

I put it out of my mind and got dressed for the morning Chamber of Commerce Gathering, where I was presenting on my upcoming Human Trafficking Disruptors Summit. I drove to the meeting, and during a few extra minutes in my car before heading in, I opened my Facebook app. That was when I realized. It wasn’t just Instagram; the hackers had infiltrated my personal Facebook page. They had gotten in so deep that they changed the recovery email and phone number. When I clicked “reset password,” the final characters of the email on file were not mine. Nor were the last four digits of the phone number attached to the account.

I made a few attempts before rushing inside to try again from my laptop… It didn’t matter. I had lost access to my personal Facebook account.

But from there, it got worse. Because business pages are attached to personal accounts, I also lost access to my nonprofit Facebook page, Disruptors Org. In addition, I manage social media for a few other anti-trafficking organizations, and without access to my page, I could no longer access their pages.

The panic began to rise. Someone had now acquired Admin control of my page and various client pages. The panic began to overwhelm. I felt a mix of helplessness and injustice. After a quick panic cry in the bathroom, I texted my clients, instructing them to log into their accounts and remove me as admin. I could take no more time addressing the problem; I had to stand in front of the Chamber and give a presentation.

I delivered my remarks, and two hours later, I could finally sit down to assess what happened. I was hacked for real.

It did not appear to be a targeted attack. The hackers have not done anything with the accounts besides posting some wedding photos of another woman named Lauren Trantham (weird!). They haven’t tried to extort or blackmail. It has been less than a month, and the accounts are just sitting there. In the end, I have not been able to recover these accounts. I lost access to roughly 11,000 followers and donors.

The loss of these accounts has been catastrophic and also… a relief

Everyone knows, you cannot run a business without Facebook. That is the prevailing theory. I myself used to teach business owners that if their website is like a storefront, then their social media is the person working behind the counter. Social media is how you humanize your business. It is how people come to know, like, and trust a business or organization.

Personally, social media has been the biggest tool in growing our donor base for Disruptors Org. Over the last ten years, I have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for survivors of trafficking with the power of social media.

However, somewhere along the way, Meta had other plans. I used to be able to make a birthday fundraiser for my org and raise $5,000 for survivors. Lately, I have been lucky to raise $250. When thousands of people used to see my post, lately, it has been in the low tens.

Last year, Meta revoked my ad account. I had boosted a post that apparently went against community standards.

Here is the post:

I tried no less than half a dozen times to dispute the revocation. I even hired a Facebook expert on Fiverr to try. Meta didn’t budge. I was no longer allowed to use paid ads or boost events. I had violated community standards. How did I do this? Beats me.

When I created Facebook event pages for the Anti-Trafficking Summit and other gatherings, the tab to “invite followers” to attend was missing. Gone. Scrubbed. Not available. I could make an event, but I just couldn’t invite anyone to it.

A few weeks before I was hacked, Meta deleted my Disruptors Summit Event page. Or at least I am assuming that is what happened. One day the event was there, the next it was simply gone, as if it was never there to begin with.

Over the past several years, Meta took an engaged community that cared about human trafficking and killed it by a thousand cuts. By the time I lost access, those Facebook pages were, unfortunately, all but useless.

After the initial shock wore off, I was surprised to feel something else, something new… and it felt a lot like relief.

For too long, I have been spending time on Facebook, wishing I didn’t have to. I had bought into the belief that without it, we would crumble.

For too long, Meta has been systematically reducing the effects of our efforts to end trafficking while simultaneously allowing predators and traffickers to run rampant. This is not a theory; it is something I see every day in my work. Courtrooms are starting to see it too.

“Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been accused of enabling predators to target minors through algorithmic recommendations of explicit content, unmoderated groups, and direct messaging. A former Meta researcher estimated around 500,000 daily instances of child exploitation in English markets alone, based on internal emails revealed in court. New Mexico’s investigation used decoy child accounts and found platforms directing minors to sexualized material and facilitating predator contacts.” -Fox Business

500,000 daily instances of child exploitation. Excuse me, but what the actual F?

Meanwhile, Disruptors Org is banned for boosting an innocuous post inviting community members to end child trafficking in Southern Oregon. Make it make sense. Oh wait. We can’t.

The irony of supporting a platform guilty of promoting child exploitation while desperately trying to fight child exploitation is crazy-making.

So, when people ask me if I am going to keep trying to reclaim our Facebook pages. I say no.

Others want to know if I will try to rebuild. To that, I also say no.

I have been spending time doing a thing that I hated, on a platform that is profiting from the very thing I am fighting. Yet, even knowing that, I still had not had the courage to step away.

Luckily for me, the hackers did that for me.

At first, I felt violated. Now, I feel lighter.

When you work in anti-human trafficking as I do, difficult conversations are inevitable. It is not abnormal for me to hear gut-wrenching accounts of physical and sexual abuse on what for the rest of the world might be a regular Tuesday morning.

Recently, however, I was included in a discussion that has proved more difficult for me to digest than even the most graphic stories of trafficking… a conversation that has remained at the forefront of my mind for months.

During a conversation about abuse and violence against women, a man I was chatting with questioned the prevalence of abuse. He reasoned that reports of abuse must be exaggerated because he personally “did not know any men who were abusive.”

I listened as he made his case. At 65 years of age, he couldn’t remember being friends with any abusive men. This logic, therefore, led him to the conviction that abuse is not as prevalent as broadcast. Abuse against women is exaggerated.

His words resounded in my ears, and I felt that old familiar knot in my throat forming. The same knot that I have swallowed down my entire life. The knot that grows like a stone when I feel small. The knot that sits on my neck like a brick in moments like this, when I want to shout out a truth, but I don’t… or can’t… or won’t.

As women, most of us collectively hold this knot in our throats, one that is filled with the pain of things we know but cannot always say. While not all women have been abused, all women do have a best friend, a niece, a mother, a cousin, a daughter, or a co-worker who has been abused. We also know that abuse is prolific and can happen to any of us at any moment, in any place.

What I wanted to do during that conversation was to shout out in rebuttal. I wanted to present the long list of women in my life who have disclosed abuse to me. I wanted to explain in detail the types of abuse I knew about and experienced… but I didn’t.

What I did say was sanitized. Pushing past the knot in my throat, I said, “Why is it so common for men to say they don’t personally know any abusers, but we all know women who have been abused?”

What came next really gutted me. He said, “I also don’t know of that many women who have been abused.”

I was astonished. I knew he was wrong, that he did know many women who had experienced abuse; we all do.

After a beat, I replied, “It is more likely that women in your life have not felt safe enough to disclose their abuse to you.”

Fast forward, months later, and I still cannot stop obsessing about this conversation.

In the work I have done alongside Epik Project, we operate with the ethos that “if good men hold abusive men accountable, we could fix a lot of problems in this world”. But the conversation with the gentleman that day made me analyze the logic of that assumption.

For starters, how are good men supposed to hold bad ones accountable if they aren’t identifying the abusers right in front of them? Or worse, what if good men aren’t paying attention to abuse because they aren’t posturing themselves in ways that would make the women in their lives feel safe enough to disclose abuse or to go a step further to name their abusers?

I couldn’t get the problem out of my mind, so I decided to put pen to paper and dedicate this article to the good men out there who, after taking stock of their life, might realize that this statement resonates: “I don’t know any abusers and/or I also don’t know many women who have been abused.”

If this is you, here is your invitation to read on.

First, when looking at abuse, we have to understand that it lies on a spectrum. There is emotional abuse, sexual abuse, financial abuse, physical abuse, coercive abuse, spiritual abuse, verbal abuse… the list goes on.

Abuse against women shows up in many different ways in many different relationships. Abuse happens in romantic and intimate partnerships, in the workplace, and even among friend groups. While abuse can happen to anyone, I am focusing on the violence and abuse perpetrated against women by men for this article, because it is the most common type of abuse.

The Power & Control wheel is used to get a quick understanding of tactics used by abusers:

Let’s talk about the reported prevalence of violence against women. According to statistics, 1 in 3 women will experience sexual or physical violence (e.g., beating, burning, strangling) from an intimate partner in her lifetime. Over half of women will experience sexual violence involving physical contact during their lifetimes. 1 in 4 women have experienced completed or attempted rape. More than 4 in 5 female rape survivors reported that they were first raped before age 25, and almost half were first raped as a minor (i.e., before age 18).

These statistics are astounding to absorb, no doubt. While I have read and re-read these reports and figures for years due to my work in human trafficking, I have always carried the nagging feeling these figures are low… under-reported… inaccurate.

That feeling comes from a lifetime of being a woman, surrounded by women, each of us sharing our stories of abuse while also telling the painful reasons why we never reported that abuse to the authorities.

The conversation I had with the gentlemen coupled with this nagging feeling that abuse is underreported, prompted me to dive a little deeper. I decided to take stock of my knowledge and experience by putting my own “knowing” on the line. So, I did what made sense to me… I created a spreadsheet.

I started by listing the names of the women closest to me. Included in the spreadsheet are 16 women, some are old friends, some are new, some are related to me, and others are not, but one thing they have in common is that I am very close with each one of them. After I compiled their names, I randomly assigned them a number for privacy. Next, I listed out what I know about them regarding their experiences with abuse and violence.

Keep in mind that this is not some fancy peer-reviewed university study. This is one woman (me), sitting down at her computer and making a list of 16 of the closest women in her life and remembering back to a lifetime of hearing heartbreaking stories. Some of these were spoken while cradling cups of tea at kitchen tables, and others were shared while sitting, draped in blankets, on couches. Some stories emerged during heart-to-heart conversations over long car rides, and the rest came during any one of the thousands of moments of truth and pain that often surface between women when we talk to one another.

The 16 lines on this spreadsheet are represented by real women who have loved, supported, and stood by my side, and to whom I have endeavored to do the same. While they are special to me, there is nothing inherently unique about their situations. These women are a microcosm of people from all walks of life. They are located across the US, come from varied backgrounds, and their ages span from 20 to 70 years old. These women have founded businesses, worked as employees, stayed at home to raise children, decided not to have children, graduated from college, not graduated from college, traveled the world, stayed close to home, and everything in between.

I took their stories and turned them into a spreadsheet to demonstrate the following painful point. We all know women who have been abused, and because these abuses have not been reported, not all of them fall into national statistics.

Of the 16 closest women in my life

• 2 have never disclosed any abuse to me, so they are in the “unknown” category

• 2 have not experienced abuse

• 6 were abused as children

• 8 were abused as adults

• 2 were abused as children and adults

• 1 of these instances was reported to the authorities

• Emotional and Physical were the most common types of abuse

The woman in line 2 was sexually, physically, and emotionally abused as a child by her father’s “friend,” and those abuses were never reported to authorities or agencies.

The woman in line 5 was date raped in high school and never told a single soul until her late 50’s, it was unreported.

The woman in line 11 was violently assaulted by her boyfriend on multiple occasions, and it was not reported to the police.

The woman in line 13 was also beaten by her boyfriend, and she also did not report.

The woman in line 16 was beaten by her husband; she tried to report it, but the police did not file a report in hopes the issue would “resolve itself”.

You get the idea…

Due to the nature of my work, many of my closest friends are survivors of human trafficking. For clarification, I did not include any survivors of trafficking in this list, as this would greatly skew the numbers.

Making this list was not easy. It was painful to take an in-depth look at the lives of the women in my life and remember the moments they recounted the awful and violent things they had experienced at the hands of the men in their lives.

And while I assuaged my nagging feeling that most abuse goes unreported, I do not feel better seeing how this plays out in my own life. The truth is, we all know women who have taken the brunt of violence from men, whether or not they have disclosed that abuse to you is another thing.

This ramps us right into the question posed earlier: why do we all know women who have been abused, yet we don’t know any abusers?

Another thing to note is that none of these women were assaulted, raped, or abused by a stranger. Each woman knew her abuser, was often intimate with him, and had to exist with him for either the rest of her life or at least over the course of many years. This is a common reason why most of these abuses were not reported to authorities.

The women on this list did not feel safe enough to report to authorities the abuse from their dads, family friends, husbands, boyfriends, and boys from school. Can you imagine having to intimately recount the worst and most violent moments of their lives to authorities, where they might not be believed, possibly have to testify, and live publicly with the stigma of what happened to them? Not to mention overcoming the shame, humiliation, and pain associated with disclosing.

This prompted me to look at the male counterparts in my spreadsheet. Who are the men who perpetrated the abuse of the most beloved women in my life? I looked some of them up on Facebook; some of them I knew from high school, and some of them still exist in these women’s lives. It was eerie to see their smiling faces in family photos, wedding and engagement photoshoots, new home purchases, vacations with their kids, etc., knowing the harm they have caused to some of the people I love most.

Of the 12 abusers

• 3 are unknown to me

• 1 owns a restaurant, well-regarded in the community, and is a father

• 1 is a teacher, well-regarded in the community

• 1 is a professional realtor, well-regarded in the community

• 2 are small business owners, fathers, well-regarded in the community

• 1 is a well-known musician

• 1 is a decorated veteran and a father

• 1 is married now with children

• 1 is newly engaged

Some of these men physically beat my friends to a bloody pulp, breaking bones, cutting through skin, and strangling them. Others viciously and verbally tore down my friends to the point of causing eating disorders, depression, suicide attempts, and ideation. Others lied and stole family funds to support sexually illicit habits. Others were just straight-up pedophiles. None were arrested, prosecuted, or held accountable for the abuse. None of them are publicly known as an abuser. The majority are, in fact, successful, celebrated people.

So, to the men reading this, if you can admit that the women in your lives are not disclosing abuse to you, is it also fathomable to admit that the men perpetuating those abuses are not disclosing their abuses to you either?

Is it also safe to say that both of these truths don’t erase the abuse?

Abuse happens. It happens every second of every day to people across our communities. Until we can acknowledge the truth and prevalence of abuse, we will never get a handle on violence against women. Women know these abuses in our bones, and we grieve every time we embrace our friends, sisters, mothers, aunts, cousins, and daughters who have experienced it.

Proclaiming that abuse doesn’t happen because “I don’t know any men who abuse” is another way of pouring salt on the wounds left by the fists and words of the abusers who walk among us every day.

It is not enough that women have to endure abuse at the hands of men in their lives, but women should not have to beg for non-abusers to be allies in believing that the abuse even exists.

So, I leave you with more questions than answers…

Men, how have you regarded degrees of abuse up until now?

How have you spoken about abuse in front of the women in your lives?

If you have daughters who have overheard you diminishing the prevalence or seriousness of abuse, do you think they will feel safe to disclose abuse to you if it happens to them?

How have you spoken to your sons about abuse, consent, violence, and anger?

Have you taken stock of the men in your life?

Have you stood up against “locker room” talk or misogynistic jokes?

Have you really peered into your own life and looked at the places where you yourself might have caused harm?

What steps can you take to become the type of man who is a safe place for the women in your life to disclose abuse if they choose to do so?

And lastly, how can you make a difference in holding the abusers in your networks accountable?

This post was previously published as a blog for Epik Project.

I will never forget when I realized I was plagued by object personification.

It was early October, and I was traveling down a main street in my car when I got caught at a red light. The SUV next to me had a ladder affixed to the side that climbed to the roof, and hanging from a rung in the middle was a plastic skeleton. It was white, of course, about two feet long, tied by the wrists and hanging down in honor of Halloween.

The light was slow, and as I gazed out the window at the skeleton, I started to feel pain in my shoulder joints. It was a weird pain, and the lack of distraction allowed me to focus on it. I fought the urge to roll my arms up and around, to loosen them. The longer I looked at the skeleton, the more my body hurt.

This is object personification, a term I would not learn for many years after sitting at that stoplight. I felt bad for the plastic skeleton; there was such a deep empathy that it was tied up, its body weight pulling at its joints, that it manifested in my own body.

Other people who endure this infirmity talk of feeling agony for the bottom plate in a stack of dishware. Pobrecito, the plate that must bear the weight of all the other plates! Others talk about the pain of seeing a piece of paper being ripped in half, or an aluminum can being smashed.

As children, I think most of us understand the personification of inanimate objects, ensuring our teddy bears were warm at night and were left face up in the day so they could “breathe”. Most people grow out of this… alas, not all of us have.

The world is severe enough without having to worry about the bottom plate and the plastic Halloween decor, but this is where I am. This is who I am, and it makes things tricky. Beyond empathy for plastic and paper, I become overcome with grief when I see roadkill. A dead something or other on the side of the road triggers flu-like symptoms, as if my lymph nodes are swelling in real time and antibodies respond by standing at attention.

All this to say, if I am not careful, “having a good day” becomes a challenge.

I practice gratitude, I look at the positive side of things, I say my prayers, and then I see a fly caught in a spider web, and the adrenaline pumps with the beat of my heart, and I hear ringing in my ears. The rest of the morning is a bit more gloomy as I fight my body back to normal. If the visual is really bad, a fawn splattered on the highway, for example, it can take hours or even days to correct. When countries bomb each other and injustice happens, well, that can take me down for weeks, months, years, or infinity.

Lately, however, I have been practicing a workaround. I can’t seem to stop the anthropomorphism in its tracks, but what I can do is rebound a little faster with one simple phrase.

“I am open to the possibility of the rest of the day going better.”

I can’t take credit; I heard it on a podcast, and I can’t even remember which one, but it helps.

It lets me acknowledge the tough sensations and gives me a chance to move forward and away from the pain.

“I am open to the possibility that this next meeting goes really well.”

“I am open to the possibility that I might have a lot of fun at this event.”

“I am open to the possibility of feeling better soon.”

It also releases the pressure valve associated with negativity. I am not forcing myself into any particular mood or attitude; I am simply saying that things could get better. A positive, stable day is within reach. It might not happen, but it could. That is what “possibility” means, right?

And what a glorious thing to have… possibilities. In a brain that is partisan to pain, a possibility can be a wonderful thing.

Try out the phrase, let me know how it goes, and in the meantime, go check on the mug in your cabinet with a chip in the brim; it could probably use a little triage so it knows you care.

That summer was a little lonely, or at least that is how I remember it. My parents worked, my brother was usually out with friends, and I ate a lot of peanut butter cap’n crunch and watched a lot of Blossom. That summer, though, was also the first time I started getting curious about my dad’s record collection. I had my own Walkman, of course, and in it were safely nestled my cassettes. Sometimes Boyz II Men, sometimes George Straight. Music was my favorite; I knew all the radio stations by heart and would challenge anyone to guess the song and artist within the first five seconds before me, and I was undefeated.

My dad had an eclectic taste in music, even in those days, his albums ranging from Mozart to Big Audio Dynamite, from popular to obscure; he never judged, he just vibed. We listened to Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt, the soundtrack to the movie The Big Chill, which, even today, I have never seen. There was Vivaldi, Jonny Cash, Benny Goodman, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jethro Tull, the Eagles, and thousands of others.

This particular summer, though, when home alone, I reached for something I had never heard before. It featured an action shot of a man, his head swung back, a microphone positioned in front of his body, and in small letters along the top, the words in Spanish.

Silvio Rodriguez, it said. Causas y Azares, it was called.

Having no expectations of how it might sound, I gently pulled the record, round and black, out of the sleeve, and holding my breath, I carefully placed it on the turntable and lowered the needle. Scratching one of dad’s albums would result in exile, or at least that’s how it felt.

I switched on the amp, and the sound that came out of the speakers was unforgettable. There were horns. So many horns. There was a maraca-type sound, and maybe I dunno, some kind of cymbal thingy, and drums. Drums! Drums being hit in places I didn’t know drum beats belonged, then there was a piano. What was this concoction of notes, and where did it come from? I stood totally still.

But then, something moved deep inside me, my eyes grew wide, and when the singing started, I didn’t care that I didn’t understand the words; I was rapt. Silvio’s voice was like a ribbon, flowing like silk, surfing the melody. The tone carried an echo, as if the album was recorded live or in some big open space, and I could picture myself there.

The feeling inside could scarcely be contained. So, without ceremony, I began to jive around the living room, my knocked knees a’knocking, my fingers flittering flawlessly on an imaginary piano. I danced. I don’t know how, or in what ways, but it felt good. The crescendo of the song was accentuated by a cowbell and Silvio’s voice rising like it was climbing stairs, each beat, an octave higher. “Ey, ey, ey… ey ey ey eyeee.”

I was taken hostage by the musicality, the joy, the complexity of so many sounds clanging together into something so… flawless.

The next day, a neighborhood friend came over.

“You have to hear this,” I exclaimed, repeating the ritual of gently removing the record from the sleeve, turning on the amp, and dropping the needle.

Again, those sounds in which my body had been baptized by the day before, bellowed from the speakers, and I looked to little neighbor Lindsey and waited to see the joy I felt crawl across her face. Her eyes grew wide as mine did, but then she scrunched her nose and pulled her chin down and back toward her chest and made a face like the song smelled bad.

“That’s…. not… good…” she hollered out over the crashing cymbals and the four-four timing.

What? I could never have anticipated her reaction… her blonde hair and cherub face confronting me like that.

I turned it off, and we watched Aladdin or something instead, but I was undeterred. I lay in bed that night, and I just knew that Silvio’s music was good, and I felt sorry that Lindsey couldn’t hear it or feel it in the way that I did. She was missing out.

Fast forward nine years, and I found myself at seventeen on a chicken bus in rural Guatemala, and it wasn’t Silvio blaring out from the boom box that was bungee corded to the roof above the driver’s seat, but Joe Arroyo, and the song was called “No Le Pegue a La Negra”. I heard it, and that old familiar feeling started creeping in; the piano hypnotic, offset by the clanging of metal and the cry of those horns. My insides started to oscillate. Only that time, I did understand the lyrics. After five months of language school, my Spanish was more than proficient. The song beseeches slave owners not to beat the female slave. I felt a little sick. I was growing up.

Fast forward three more years, and I was in college. I came home from class and sat on top of my desk in my dorm room, and I shuffled through my iPod. Since that summer at the Eagle Wood house, I had compiled a grand collection of salsa, merengue, ballads, and Spanish and Portuguese-language pop music. I had lived in Guatemala, Spain, Brazil, and Venezuela, and traveled to Honduras, Portugal, and would go on to backpack from Mexico to Panama and beyond.

The music was a foundational contributor to the lifeblood of my adolescence. Willie Colón, Shakira, Carlos Vives, Héctor LaVoe, Grupo Revelação, Juanes, Alejandro Sanz, Celia Cruz, Oscar D’León, Buena Vista Social Club, Eddie Santiago, Gypsy Kings, Jarabe De Palo, Rosana, Adolescentes, on and on and on.

I have danced across continents, dedicating hours upon hours to the disconnection of my hips from my spine, so that they might move independently and in opposite directions. I have mastered the spins, the arm pretzels, the dips, the counter-beat rhythmic gyrations of the salsa, the merengue, the forro, the bachata, the samba, the cumbia, and whatever else the club might throw my way.

But again, I am growing up. I am not nine anymore, I am not seventeen anymore, I am not twenty anymore. Over time, my relationship with the music transitioned from adoration to understanding. I learn and reflect on the global slave trade, imperialism, and all the ways corporations have gutted and exploited Central and South America. I read about the horrors, I see the poverty with my own eyes, and I listen to stories of oppression and corruption.

Salsa is a sophisticated mix of Afro-Caribbean sounds born under violent slavery and colonialism, and many of the lyrics are explicitly about Black resistance, class struggles, and anti-imperialism. Salsa’s building blocks (son, rumba, mambo, etc.) emerged from Black and mixed‑race workers in plantation zones, ports, and poor urban barrios shaped by sugar economies and racial hierarchies. “Salsa” as we know it today was crystallized among Puerto Rican and other Latino migrants in New York (“Nuyoricans”) who were concentrated in segregated, impoverished neighborhoods. Afro‑Cuban and African American musicians also built solidarity through music (for example, the collaborations that birthed Latin jazz), sometimes using lyrics to protest Jim Crow and U.S. racial violence.

Silvio Rodríguez, in fact, is a Cuban revolutionary folk singer, with many songs explicitly condemning colonization, authoritarianism, and U.S. domination in Latin America. His songs are a protest against tyranny from the late 1960s and 70s.

My nine-year-old self did not, and would not have grasped these concepts; my adult self now knows that, since the beginning of time, oppressed people have used music as rebellion to the oppression and exploitation of their bodies, their lands, their children, their religions, and their spirits. The music is used as a cry for relief, humanity, and even salvation.

The task to reconcile the abject suffering of millions of people with a sound that just makes my body move now becomes my lifeblood. I dedicate my life to social justice issues, I weep as I stand over the mass graves of genocide, and on the weekends, I dance until I feel my feet will fall off. This is the humanity of Latin music. It encapsulates both the joys and the horrors of being human in pulsing rhythms. It is older than time.

So, when Bad Bunny forwent his usual style of singing about the club and all the ladies in favor of his Taíno roots and released a Salsa album with revolutionary themes, I was here for it. When he took the world’s stage and opened his act in the sugar cane fields, where Indigenous labor and enslaved Africans were forced to work for hundreds of years, and he did so joyously, I got it. When Ricky Martin sang how he hopes Puerto Rico does not turn into the next Hawaii, where gentrification overtook the Island, and Native people were priced out by the wealthy corporations, and he did so with pride, I got it. When Benito sang about the lack of safe infrastructure in a country that belongs to but is not fully part of the U.S., where Congress can override local decisions, and island residents are U.S. citizens but cannot vote for president and have only a non‑voting representative in Congress, and he did so with grand spirit, I got it.

However, lots of the country did not get it. And I get that too.

But, like Lindsey, the little neighbor girl who scrunched her nose at the unfamiliar sounds of Silvio Rodríguez, I hold my conviction that America is missing out.

I was half paying attention, half multitasking, when I heard words that halted my movements in an instant, as if I was in the middle of a game of freeze tag and just got touched.

My brother’s calm voice said the words, “Tumor… Heart… More testing…”

I silently made my way down the hall to listen better.

Coral Wren, due mid-Feburary will be the first grandchild for my parents and will make me a first-time Auntie, something that, for the most part, we didn’t think was ever going to happen. When Laura and Jody called to tell us she was pregnant, I don’t think it sank in for many months. When they called again later to tell us she was a girl, we slowly started to imagine a life with her in it. Later still, when they called to say that her middle name would be Wren, after my childhood nickname, I cried.

Now, they were calling to tell us about the tumor. It showed up as a big white blob on the ultrasound, hovering in the photo like a ghost in the dark. Large and obvious, and unmistakably unwelcome. The doctors gave a name for the growth, and it was one of those words my brother had to spell out because no one this side of a medical degree could pronounce it.

“The good news is, they think it is probably benign,” I heard him say. “Of course, they are sending us to a fetal cardiologist next week for further examination.”

We ended the call with a promise to pray, and Jody signed off with resolution.

“We are not worried at all,” his voice was as steady as always.

My brother, like my mom, is an effortlessly positive person. When he says he is not worried at all, I believe him. I know him well enough to know he means it. He and I are built differently. He was born with faith. I was not, and sometimes it just makes me so mad.

My brother is forty-six years old and has waited his entire life to be a biological father. He has been patient and faithful, and has dreamed and prayed and hoped for this little person to exist. Now, after all these years, Coral Wren is finally on her way, only for us to find out she has a peanut-sized tumor in her walnut-sized heart. And yet, my brother remains calm. Steady.

Meanwhile, I didn’t sleep a wink last night because maybe I forgot to email that person back about that thing. Did I, though? Because maybe I did… but if I did, then why does it feel like I didn’t, and if I didn’t, they probably think I am disregarding their feelings, and if I didn’t email them back, then they were right, I did disregard their feelings, and now I probably won’t get into heaven because God knows I am a terrible person and wait, maybe I did email them though. Oh, and by the way, in case anyone is wondering, it’s 2:45 AM.

Faith.

I didn’t get it.

I picture God as Oprah, doling faith out willy-nilly to all the people in my family, ala, “You get a car”.

“You get unwavering faith. You get unwavering faith. You get unwavering faith.”

Then, when it’s my turn, a pause and a shrug, “You get… let’s go with… anxiety and an unrelenting desire to question EVERYTHING until your gums split and your hair falls out” (real things that happen to me in the name of stress).

Knowing myself and for the sake of my gums, I try real hard to put the tumor out of my mind. Normally, as a prolific texter, I would send this troubling news to the many members of my girl gang. Instead, I only texted one girlfriend the news. It was as if putting it out there made it real, in a time when reality was horribly unappealing.

Then another phone call came…

Jody and Laura, on the speaker phone again. They have just returned from the specialist. The doctor put Laura through endless imaging machines; they looked at Coral’s heart from all the angles at all the depths and with all the technology that is available to man on earth.

The tumor is gone.

What once was there, now is not there.

The family is shocked into silence. My parents share a knowing look. I feel left out. Then joy erupts.

“We knew it!”

“We prayed for this!”

“Phenomenal!”

I am incredulous. Unbelieving.

“But what did the doctors say exactly?” I demand to know. “What does that mean? It was there, and now it’s not? Well, where the F did it go?”

I do not relent, “Does that mean they made a mistake last week? What is their explanation for telling you there is a tumor and now, suddenly, a few days later, there is just no tumor? How is that?”

I go on and on, and even as I do, I am present enough to know I am wholly missing the point.

“So are they calling it a spontaneous remission or are they just bad at their jobs?” I can feel my voice rising.

My brother indulges me and answers what he can. Eventually, I realize I need to shut my mouth, I am quite literally shitting all over a very profound moment.

A few hours pass, and I call my brother to apologize. He is patient with me, reassuring me that I have nothing to apologize for. As I know him, he knows me. I sometimes have a problem when things don’t have a clear answer, you know, because of the lack of faith thing. And then he says what I have been resisting.

“Lauren, it’s a miracle,” he pauses. “That’s all it is.”

We hang up, and it takes me another few hours before I am hit with the realization.

I see God now, in a purple blazer (still ala Oprah), “Girl, you’ve asked for faith. I sent you a miracle. Instead of saying thank you, you called the doctor a moron.” God is now the incredulous one.

My bad.

I am taking it as a sign.

Maybe instead of waiting for faith to come to me, I can try to meet it in the middle. Maybe I can do a little sashay down the lane to meet faith as it maintains its ever-steady pace in my direction. Maybe, just maybe, I have been a little too demanding of faith, wanting it without really wanting it, you know. Feeling entitled to it without believing in it.

Maybe faith is Coral Wren floating in amniotic bliss, her soul, not yet fully landed, watching me from above, laughing about all the lessons she will teach me when she arrives. She is telling me I’d better get on board now because having a niece and loving a niece is a miracle in its own right and will likely require faith. For Coral Wren, I will endeavor to have more of it.

Loving you was like going 12 rounds in quicksand,
You were always cheating and changing the rules.
So, like Romans in an amphitheater,
I gave you the fucking thumbs down.
Since then, I’ve built a skyscraper and put my heart way up in it.
Now, like a penthouse, you gotta be rich and know people to get to it.

One hundred stories up, I stretch myself way out in the bed.
Feeling the sheets pressed against my legs,
Saying prayers with my eyes closed.
My chin turned to the night sky outside the glass, the moon keeps me company,
Waxing, Waning, Crescent, Gibbous.
All that I see and feel belongs to me.

Time passes, and the sentiment remains.
Call it closed off, I call it elite.
I am a track star - running, running, running,
Word around town is you’re still stumbling at the start line.
I don’t spend much time comparing,
For all its worth, you made me faster.

Loving you was like going 12 rounds in quicksand.
You were always cheating and changing the rules.
Now, the people call me Sugar Ray Lauren.
I wear a robe of emerald satin, step over the sand,
And serve uppercuts for breakfast,
without even breaking a sweat.

Trembling and nauseated, I held onto my boyfriend’s arm, and I remember thinking, if they come back, I hope they kill me first. I didn’t want to be in the world without him. I was preparing myself to die, and if need be, to die for him.

Now we don’t even speak. The carjacking was the beginning of the end of that relationship. It took a while for things to dissolve afterward, but that trauma shifted something in us.

And here I am, nearly twenty years later, trying to understand how we can go from being willing to die for someone to never speaking again?

Why does that happen, and why can’t I achieve some comprehension around it even after all this time?

Since him, there have been others. Others I would have sacrificed myself for. Now, they too are gone, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. I understand why people break up, I do, I really do. The truth is, I am grateful for each ending. I wouldn’t choose any of those men for myself today. But that doesn’t answer the question that sits in my heart about the nature of love.

My little brain can’t reconcile the bonding and the breaking. I am often deeply struck by the what, the why, and the how of it all.

And for those who say, well, we just aren’t meant to be monogamous… I ask, then why does your heart irrevocably implode like a dying star being sucked out to a nebulous solar system by a space tsunami when the person who says they love you later decides they don’t? What is the evolutionary purpose of crying yourself into a migraine or missing a week of work because you can’t breathe? If we are meant to love a lot of people, then why does each finale feel like a literal finale, the end of all things?

Moreso, why would we want to die for a person who, in a few years, might leave us for someone they met at an Applebee’s delivery pickup line on a Tuesday in June?

If this sounds deliriously depressing, I just want to point out, I agree. And that is my point. It is discouraging to dedicate something to another that might not be appreciated or reciprocated. It is personality-shifting to love and not be loved in return. It is gut-wrenching to shuffle along a grocery store aisle, looking at someone’s favorite snack and walking right past it instead of adding it to the basket because that someone doesn’t love you anymore.

It’s mind-bending to wonder if you’re the only one who feels this way, when all around you people are getting divorced and then remarried and falling in love and breaking up and generally getting flung from the relationship ferris wheel only to stand up and get back in the line to ride again. And they do it seemingly without much hesitation. No regard for the pit they are tight-rope walking above. Where does that come from, and how can I get some?

Then again, maybe I don’t want some. Maybe all this love I carry inside can be put to better use. Maybe instead of inhabiting a willingness to die for some handsome motocross racer, I turn that energy into a willingness to die (and live) for myself for once?

Is that where this is going? Is this what they mean when they encourage you to “love yourself”? I sure don’t know the answer, and there are a lot of days, I am glad I don’t.

I mean, if I never loved so dang deeply, then I wouldn’t have a Substack, would I? I wouldn’t have a million epic stories to tell about all the love I’ve lost, would I? Who would I be if I hadn’t loved to the point of my own detriment again and again, and would I like her any better than I like myself now? Probably not.

When I was held at gunpoint in Caracas, I was in love. And for every year after that, too. Now, I am not… and that is finally starting to feel like a really good thing.

For me, at least.

For now, at least.

As a foreigner, I can see that the edifices are old. I wander the streets, arching my neck to search the facades like faces, looking for clues. Are they happy buildings or are they sad buildings?

No structures this ancient exist where I live. My country, as it is today, is relatively new. However, as old as this Dublin architecture is, and as much history as the stones hold… they are not as old as the old-growth forests from where I come.

The Redwoods outdate the buildings in Dublin by a few thousand years. They, too, are made anew, sprouting and shedding and losing branches to the wind. What started as a seed in the year 300 is now 300 feet tall. What once was a twig is now a tree. Twenty-five feet in diameter and growing taller all along. The trees themselves have been busy, their burls and rings expand, and even the dead ones feed the soil. The bark is witnesses - watching as tribes move along under the canopy, first in moccasins, now in rubber soles.

These God-made trees and man-made homes hold our history. Bricks and buildings and branches and bark. They watch, they wait, and they clasp our civilizations in their shadows. Minuscule and individually insignificant, we are ants toiling beneath. We live our fears, triumphs, pain, and pleasures as they tower above. They sway in the weather and creak with human stories of sin and salvation. In the buildings, the walls hear us moan, in the forest, the trees moan back.

Both are a wilderness: the city and the woods. Both hold our hearts. Both have a way of allowing the light filter in, activating something sacred behind our eyelids. They are beholden to the poetry of their time.

On my travels, I walk among the buildings. When I am home, I walk among the trees. I know my life is a blink to them. They regard me from above, maybe even dozing as I pass by, opening one eye to observe my gait and count me as common. In both places, I am rounding corners, bracing against the wind, and praying to God that the bricks and the branches don’t forget me too soon.

“Annnnnnnnniiiii, kitty kitty.” A shake of the cup, a pause to listen. Nothing.

From across the yard behind the house, I could hear my mom doing the same.

“Annapurna! Where are you?!” She called out.

We had been looking for nearly two hours. In the dark. In the cold. I was frantic.

It is a mystery how Annapurna and her three brothers arrived on the farm just six months earlier. My mom had gone out one warm evening in late June to close up the chickens when she heard an awful bellow resound from behind her. She turned to see an itty-bitty grey kitten clinging to the side of the chicken fence, about two feet up from the ground, and screaming her head off. My mom rushed over and gently pulled her from the fence, cradling her in one hand; she was that small.

My mom rushed her into the house, declaring, “I found a kitten!”

She pushed this little thing into my hand and went back outside. I held this tiny crying thing and gave it a good look. Its left eye was crusted shut, and it was skin and bones and clearly very hungry. I tried to soothe the scrappy little creature, not knowing the first thing about a kitten that small.

Soon after, my mom surprised me when she returned with another kitten. We grabbed a cardboard box from the garage and laid the two kittens down on a towel. My mom went back out and quickly found two more kittens. As she kept looking around, she just kept finding them. There were four in all, two grey, two brown with stripes, and their little howls filled the house and confused the dog as we wondered what to do with them.

After a call to the neighbor, who is a vet, and a quick trip to Petco for kitten formula, they settled down for the night. The next morning, my BFF and animal whisperer, Dawn, came and picked them up. They went to the vet, where it was established that the little grey one with one eye did indeed have two eyes, one was just infected, and she was the only girl among the lot. She was the smallest and the sickest, yet she had somehow been the one to crawl the furthest and cry the loudest. Because of her, she saved her brothers. Right away, I announced she would be called Annapurna, after the Himalayan mountain range.

For the next several months, Dawn fostered the kittens. They were estimated to be about two weeks old when we found them, and with no sign of a mama cat anywhere, Dawn became their mother. At first, too small to even suckle properly, Dawn had to tube feed them. As they grew, so did our hope that they would survive. Dawn had warned me that kittens this small without a mama could mean a lot of things, and we should be prepared that they might not all live.

I stopped in at Dawn’s house every day to help feed mouths and wipe buts. Then came the fleas. Too young to tolerate chemicals to kill the tiny bugs, Dawn and I had to bathe the kittens and hand-pick the fleas out over several days until we were confident the little blood-suckers had been annihilated. Dawn sacrificed sleep and travel, and she made it her mission to heal and care for those kittens.

In the end, we both got too attached, and she kept two, and we kept two. We brought Anni and her brother Earle Grey home a few months later, and Harold and Gerald stayed with Dawn.

Now it was December, and because of their age and their vaccine schedules, they were not yet allowed to be outdoor kitties. We worked diligently to keep them in the house the past few months, with a to-date perfect track record of keeping them safely contained inside.

Until tonight.

Anni was with me for the evening, lying on my chest, draping across my neck like a little grey scarf. We snuggled like that all the time, Anni being the most affectionate animal I have known in my life. A little runty at just under 6lbs compared to her brothers, who are all pushing double that, Anni has stitched herself into my heart with her snuggles and her ferocity. She is part neck warmer, part Xena Warrior Princess, and I love her.

A few minutes later, I got up to make dinner, and she did her thing. A few minutes after that, I went to feed the kitties dinner, and for the first time in her life, she did not come running. Usually, any touch of the feed bowl brings Anni and Earle sprinting and sliding around the wood floors, tripping me as I walk, a joy and a desperation to eat! Tonight, it was just Earle.

I searched the house, the sunroom, the garage, and the house again.

“I can’t find Anni,” I announced as we retraced everyone’s movements. Who went outside and what doors did they use… could she have snuck out somehow, where could she be?

After searching each closet, each cabinet, and under every piece of furniture, we bundled up, grabbed flashlights, and went to circle the farm.

The more time passed, the sicker I became. My thoughts were running down all the scenarios. She had never been outside; would she get lost immediately? Did she jump up into the wheel well of the pickup? Did she already get runover? Was she in a tree? Did a hawk swoop in and fly her away? Was she scared? Was she freezing?

I alternated between searching the farm and running back inside, my fears taking me to the darkest places. Maybe she jumped into the dishwasher, and she is drowning with the load of dirty dishes. My heartbeat choked my throat as I yanked open the dishwasher, expecting and fearing to see her sopping wet, lifeless body. No sign. That gave me an idea, so I raced to check the washer, then the dryer, then the freezers, each place conjuring horrific mental images, all the while calling out her name. Nothing.

Back outside, I climbed the ladder to the roof, and I could feel tears welling up inside me. All I could think was, she is so little. I swept the flashlight all around the yard. Nothing.

I made my way back down to the grass, and I could feel my knees buckle. The panic had finally overwhelmed me, and I was overcome with grief. My mouth opened, and the sobs started pouring out of me. Why couldn’t I find her? Why couldn’t I help her? This kitten that had come to me as a gift from the universe, the purring grey supernatural sprite, and now she was gone.

I cried, and I cried. Big tears rolling down my cheeks, gaining speed and weight like the snowballs that start avalanches. I cried for little Anni, and I felt the pain in my body. The sorrow was as big as a heavyweight boxer that walloped me right in the stomach, doubling me over and leaving me breathless. My throat was in a vice, and someone was turning the lever. My head felt as if I was being hung upside down by my ankles, the pressure building beyond tolerance.

I was having a very visceral reaction to the sadness and fear that had been building over several hours.

Then… a voice called from in the house. “I FOUND HER!”

My dad, checking again, found her under the bed. A place I had looked no less than six times before that. I ran into the house and caught a glimpse of her as she flashed from one room to the next.

A flood of relief should have washed over me, and in some ways it did. But my body couldn’t let go. I was fully in the grips of a panic attack; the danger had passed, but my system didn’t compute. It was late. Anni was safe, and so I put myself to bed but barely slept. The physicality of the event had left me unbalanced and unhinged.

The next morning, I felt hungover. My body ached, my eyes were puffy and swollen, and I felt as if I had been struck down by a clap of thunder. I didn’t go to the gym; I was in a funk. I was despondent.

That same morning, we put the pieces together. The day before, we had brought in the Christmas tree. It had been hauled in through the back door and plopped down in the living room, awaiting decoration, and for whatever reason, that was enough to send Anni into hiding. It would take her two full days to appear from the back half of the house, and only after we moved the tree into the sunroom.

It also took me two days to dissect my own reaction. Yes, it makes sense for me to be upset about Anni getting out of the house. It was scary not knowing where she was or if she was safe. However, I felt deep down that my reaction was not proportionate to the situation, and I wanted to know why.

Then it hit me. While the PTSD level emotions I experienced were triggered by Anni, they were, in fact, based on something much deeper and darker than that…

You see, I spend my days working with survivors of human trafficking. My friends are trafficking survivors. I speak to survivors, I read their books, I photograph them, I listen in on congressional hearings, I write papers in grad school about the issue, and I think about exploitation all day, every day.

For nearly ten years, that has been my reality. In the beginning, it was difficult. There was PTSD, vicarious trauma, therapy, and insomnia. I would meet a survivor, hear their story, and then go throw up in the bathroom, or cry for four straight hours. Hearing the abuses they endured as children haunted me. They, like Anni, were so little.

Nowadays, I have better coping systems. I have built up a resiliency to the work, and I have learned to construct a little wall of protection around my heart. I go about my day, training community members, speaking on stages, hosting conferences, and raising funds.

I am ok.

Until I lose my cat for a few hours.

Then all that emotion flows out of me like a tsunami, a disproportionate deluge of despair. A deep grief for the world, for the littles, for the pain, for the injustice. All of it. A despair that left me on my knees, a silent scream distorting my face as I knelt in the grass in the lateness of a cold, dark, and cloudy night.

The truth is, I love Anni. A lot. She is affection incarnate, and when she Velcroes herself to me, I feel better about the world. I need that. I need to feel better about the world, because a lot of it is so very ugly.

Losing Anni for a few hours has shown me that maybe I am not doing as well as I thought. Perhaps I am not that successful at buttoning up the horrors I hear every day. Maybe I need to be more cognizant of the pain I stuff down daily.

Maybe, just maybe, I am not ok.

Yet, in the same breath, I have gratitude for that. Maybe “being ok” about the work I do is the real thing to fear. If losing my cat triggers a DEFCON 5 reaction, then maybe that is what my body needs. Maybe I need to remember it’s ok to not be ok, especially when dealing with the horrors of the world.

A few days later, Anni and I are both back to normal. She has returned to sprinting through the living room and banking off the furniture. I have returned to sleeping through the night and lifting weights. As Anni grows, she will have to learn to face her fears of weird trees and the changes she can’t control. As I grow, I will have to learn to face my fears of losing those who mean so much to me and to continue to navigate a world that might never feel safe for everyone. For now, we are going to enjoy the rest of this wintry Saturday afternoon with a cup of tea, a cardboard box that is perfect for shredding, and a newfound remembrance that being ok is circumstantial and maybe even a little overrated.

I couldn’t possibly know what would be an appropriate response, so I managed a subtle nod of my head and whispered, “Yeah, I know.”

After a long pause and another exhale, she followed up with, “That’s fucked up.”

Smoke coiled up around her, and for brief moments, the details of her face disappeared. I think she preferred it this way. She was smoking a medwakh, a long, skinny black pipe with a white bone tip of Arabian origin. Even though we had only met three days before, I had yet to see her without it in her hand. She carried it in a tiny leather pouch along with loose tobacco that she would scoop and smash into the bowl before lighting it on fire.

Her name was Farrah, she was from Syria, and she was beautiful, like movie star beautiful, with all the mystery and intrigue of one too. Her eyes were ice blue glaciers floating in the distance, obscured by the fog of her pipe smoke. Younger than me at thirty-three, her skin was light, and her expression was nearly blank.

“Yeah… it is fucked up.” I succeeded in replying, suddenly wishing I’d had my own smoke to hide behind.

The red velvet couch we were sitting on had deep cushions, so I perched on the edge, half on, half off, as my eyes trailed out to the South African mountains surrounding us. We were at an outdoor wedding in the southernmost region of the African continent. Our friends were getting married, and there were over sixty nationalities represented among the medium-sized pool of guests. South African, American, Bahrainian, Syrian, Canadian, Egyptian, Moroccan, UK… on and on.

We were a small cohort of global citizens, gathered to celebrate love while the world was at war. Or at least parts of it were.

Love is like this… a unifier for the human experience. But in that moment, sitting there with Farrah, love didn’t feel like enough. That is a feeling I have had more times than I can count as an American abroad. We are always fucking something up somewhere, and while I know there are good deeds in the mix, cognitive bias has us focus on the bad because the bad is real and the bad can hurt us.

I asked if her family was safe, and she answered, “For now.”

After that, we didn’t really talk about it much. We spent the next ten days together, touring South Africa with a group of others, and each day I would search her face for emotions, looking for any indication of worry, but none appeared. Not that she was not worried, I would not make that assumption, but maybe she didn’t wear all her fears on her face, as I do. I wanted to learn that from her, to be stoic.

I don’t smoke, but I used her smoke to train my breathing. When she inhaled, I inhaled; when she exhaled slowly, I did too. As if matching her cadence would enlighten me. Stoicism as a necessity is something I was familiar with, though I had not yet mastered it. Who knows if I ever will. I can’t hide heartbreak, I can’t steel myself when I am angry. I can’t this… I can’t that…

But what I can do is write. It is what I know to do, and even all these years later, Farrah’s presence sits in my memory, and today they move out through my fingertips. Syria is in the news again, with the US president declaring revenge for the attack on three soldiers that happened a few days ago in Syria. Even last month, as the Syrian interim President was the first president of his nation to visit Washington since 1946, things have not healed. Things never heal, not really. They just scab over and dry out until the next blow. Or at least that’s how it feels sometimes.

I would have liked to imagine that Farrah and I were just two young women, sitting on a red velvet couch at an outdoor wedding in South Africa; a simple plotline. But we were hardly that. We were instead full of complexities and fears, anger and joy. We were navigating coming of age in a post 9/11 world where, as she informed me that evening, my country bombed her country last night.

Yet, in light of that, we were somehow supposed to toast with champagne and celebrate love… and we did do those things, don’t get me wrong… we sang and clapped and ate till we were stuffed, and we wished the newlyweds well, and we had hope.

This world is so full of juxtapositions that it can drive us mad. We can try to be stoic, and if we fail, we can try to peer into those stoics who have succeeded and try again. When I think of South Africa, I think of Farrah, the smoke curling around her hair and the intensity in her gaze. Her inhale, her exhale. I want to live in a world where my country doesn’t bomb anyone else’s country. Instead, I am left to choke on my unsaid apologies and throw my weight into cultivating an unshakable hope for more love.

When you land in Guatemala City, you just make your way to the bus depot, where you can catch a three-hour ride to the lake, no problem. You arrive in a town called Panajachel, which is filled with rows and rows of vendor booths selling brilliantly colored wares, calling tourists in like moths to a lamp. The air is electric, the wind off the lake is fresh, and the feeling in your stomach is one of marvel.

Eventually, you can make your way down to the water and walk along the docks, which is what I have just done. I am twenty-four, and this is my third time visiting this lake. The first time, I was seventeen and falling in love; the second time, I was eighteen and falling out. This time, I am a little of both.

I stand on the shore and look for signs for a boat to San Marcos La Laguna, an itty-bitty town across the lake where I am to meet my Tio. People are yelling in Spanish and Spanglish, negotiating fares and routes over the sound of water slopping against the wooden boat hulls that are bobbing and bumping around. From Panajachel to San Marcos is 40 minutes and the equivalent of three U.S. dollars. Before I know it, I am loaded on a motorcraft, sitting on a bench seat with my forest green North Face backpack nestled between my feet. Inside are the essentials: an extra pair of jeans, four t-shirts, a handful of undies and socks, a journal, a passport, a Nikon film camera, and a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. When I leave this lake, I will get on a bus, and then another, and another, and another until I reach the Panama Canal. San Marcos is my first stop in a month-long backpacking journey through Central America.

Guatemala means many things to me. I first came at seventeen with my Tio. He navigated us to Xela, a city deep in the Highlands, and he stayed with me one month. I stayed an additional four. I became fluent in Spanish and proficient in adulthood. Guatemala was where I first learned of corporate exploitation, civil war, death squads, and genocide. It is also where I learned that all children play patty cake, fresh mountain air will save me, and that this world is bigger and smaller and scarier and more beautiful than I could ever imagine.

Guatemala also means Sterling. These Highlands of Central America are synonymous with my Uncle Richard Sterling Trantham. Barrel-chested and with a face so very reminiscent of my Grandfather, my Tio is the definition of a photojournalist. With his Hasselblad at his hip and a smile in his eyes, he has spent his career immersing himself in the hybrid religions of the indigenous cultures of Guatemala. His black and white film photographs tell stories of pain and darkness and hope and light. I love Guatemala because my Tio loves Guatemala. His love for this place is woven into me like the yarn of my favorite sweater.

The boat ride is bumpy, and jet lag sits on my shoulders and pulls at my eyelids, but when I arrive at San Marcos and disembark, I am renewed by the sloping, tiered green grass and the quaintness. The town, if you could call it that, winds its way up the hill, and as I walk, I look for the name of the hostel where I know my Tio is staying.

When I find it, I check myself into a room, store my passport under the mattress, and venture out to find him. I wind my way around the cement streets, noticing a few restaurants, a little pharmacy, and a market. I then make my way back down the hill around the other side of the hostel, and that is where I find him, sitting on the pier down by the water. Pier is a generous term, really, it’s slats of crooked wood laid out between some pillars, and to be honest, it doesn’t even look safe. I call his name and join him at the end.

He stands for the bear hug and exclaims he has been waiting all afternoon for me to arrive. He is so happy I am here, and I am so happy I am here, too. Without much fanfare, we sit down together and catch up a bit. He wants to know how my dad is. He is fine, still riding his motorcycle to work every day. I want to know about his neighbor, Mark. He is fine, still eating so much chile it burns when he pisses.

“That fucker owes me $180 bucks,” he informs me.

We talk until the sun starts hiding behind us, and he says, “Let’s go meet the gang.”

My Tio is in Guatemala with a handful of his students on a photography trip, something he does every now and again in his role as the photojournalism professor at New Mexico State University. I happen to know these students from my many visits to my Tio’s darkroom, and it’s a boisterous reunion that soon turns into a drunken reunion. We park ourselves at a tiny restaurant at the top of some stairs, eat something that was advertised as pizza but was definitely not pizza, chug Gallo beer, and dance like white idiots to Latin music. We are a mess.

“This isn’t a salsa song, this is merengue,” I announce a little too loudly, my beer sloshing around in my stomach.

“You'd better slow it down, darling,” I hear my Tio say as he takes a swig from his seat at the table.

I was happy before. Now I am happier. It’s as if I know the joy of this moment will stay with me forever. It is as if I am realizing in real time that I am who I am because of my Tio and because of Guatemala. There is no merengue-dancing, Spanish-speaking, world-traveling Lauren without Tio. We share a smile and a knowing.

Suddenly, I am a little less happy because I go to the bathroom, see there is no toilet seat, attempt to hover above, pee a little on my own jeans, and realize it’s time to call it a night. I am a mess.

We do indeed call it a night, settle up our painfully small tab, apologize for being those Americans, and walk arm-in-arm down the hill to our hostel. I cling to my Tio, an antidote to the beer wobbles from which I am suffering, and even in the moonlight, I can see he is still smiling. We all are. We are in love with life, and life is allowing us a night of sentimentality and revelry. I can’t know exactly what he is thinking, but I imagine he is drinking in the night air, as happy to be alive as I am.

The next morning goes as one would imagine. I awake. Oh no. Why? Why did I drink all that beer? It must have been ten thousand beers, but there is a rap and a knock, and somehow I’m at the door.

“You’re burning daylight.” It’s Tio, and he is saying the phrase he has always said. The phrase my dad has always said. The phrase my grandad used to say. Daylight is useful; don’t waste it. Yada yada.

“We are going into town, the boat leaves in forty-five minutes. You should take a shower, oh, and drop those jeans at the laundry,” he instructs me.

I can’t even smile, but I manage a nod.

Forty-five minutes later, we are boarding a boat back to Panajachel for the day. People want to explore and shop, and I want to crawl in a hole. Our group boards in the middle, and some locals get it up front. The boat is a fiberglass, medium-sized, motorized canoe. It is blue, and I can see that it has “Relampago” hand-painted on the sides near the bow. Relampago means “Lightning Bolt” in English, and the name seems quite aspirational.

I am slow and queasy and still musing on the boat name when, in my head, I hear lyrics to Lyle Lovett’s song;

“If I had a boat,

“And if I were like lightning,

I wouldn’t need no sneakers,

I’d come and go wherever I would please.”

I had the urge to sing it to my Tio, knowing he would know the words, but the boat takes off loudly, so instead I hum it in my head and try not to barf. The breeze on my face actually helps, and I start to feel a bit better. I gaze out over the water at the palpable beauty of this July morning, and some of those happy feelings from the night before start to return.

In the row in front of me is Tio. I see his big, broad back, and just in front of him sits a small boy and his mother in the front row. She is clothed in Indigenous dress, the reds, blues, and yellows of her skirt contrasting beautifully against the blue hull.

I am taking in the scene when suddenly, the young boy reaches his hand over the side of the boat. As his fingers touch the water, he lets out a giggle as drops fly up, glittering in the morning sun. He is so happy, and his mother smiles on. The boy then reaches a little deeper, and instead of drops flying behind him, he is casting a wave of water that is now landing square in the face and chest of my Tio.

I, too, am catching a bit of spray on my face, but Tio is getting fairly drenched. I think he is going to lean forward and tap the boy or his mother, maybe call out and ask the boy to stop, or even to scold him.

Yet Tio does neither. Instead, he hunches up his shoulders, tips down his chin, and hides his face under his hat while the water rushes in on him. He endures the water for the sake of the boy’s joy.

At this moment, I love my Tio more than ever. I love him for his gentle nature, his easy-going way, his consideration, and his influence and love. I know that he is tucked under his hat right now, not grumbling about getting wet, but reveling in the little boy’s happiness and wonderment of the water on his fingertips and the rainbow in the splash.

I know this because when the boat stops, my Tio turns back to me, water dripping off the brim of his hat, and I see that smile in his eye and the upward crease at the corners of his mouth. He is in this life to love deeply, to care for all things large and small, to explore, to study light, to read, to be still, to get lost in music, and to live simply and with meaning. I will forever remember Guatemala, Lake Atitlan, dancing, the hangover, the Relampago, and I will certainly always remember the boy who just wanted to feel the water, and my Tio, who happily obliged.

“The doctors have decided to halt his treatment and call in hospice,” Amy whispers to my mom and me under the blinding morning sun, as we stand outside the hospital in early October.

A gentle breeze lifts Amy’s short white hair from her forehead as her eyes glint with tears. She is my uncle’s girlfriend and has greeted us downstairs and outside the hospital room, where he now lies.

“What!?” I want to retort with attitude, but didn’t. Childish petulance beaten out by self-awareness and maturity. As of yesterday, we had been told my Tio was feeling better and would be getting released today. There had been no talk of this hospice bullshit.

Amy starts to tell my mom the details, and I turn and make my way inside. I can’t fully grasp what she has said. I mean, does my uncle have liver cancer? Well, yes. Does he also have diabetes? Well, yes, too. Did he just get emergency medivaced from Las Cruces to Albuquerque so they could remove his left eye from some unknown and sudden infection? Yes, again.

But hospice? I mean, really? My uncle has nine lives, and by my count, there must be at least a few left. Right?

My bravado, solid as I rode the elevator up to his floor, falters enormously when I dip into his hospital room alone. I push aside the enormous wooden door, which has his name written on a dry-erase board. I call him Tio; our family calls him Ricky, but for the rest of the world, he goes by Sterling, his middle name. Sterling Trantham, such a strong name for a strong man. I pass through the door and push aside the privacy curtain. My eyes adjust to the dim light, and I see him.

Or what is left of him…

The barrel-chested man I knew was missing. In his place lay a barely breathing skeleton with an eye patch. What the fuck? His arms are rail-thin and covered in tubes. My hand instinctively goes to my throat, an unconscious attempt to soothe the growing knot that was suddenly suffocating me. My body burned with emotion as I quietly rolled a chair up to his bedside and reached for his hand. When I did, he opened his remaining eye, and as it focused, I saw that he recognized me.

“Hi Tio,” I managed to squeak out as he weakly squeezed my hand.

“Hello, my dear,” He replied in a whisper.

Silence for a beat.

“You’re looking handsome with that eye patch,” I said, adding an element of soft teasing to my timbre.

“Oh, you know it!” He slowly articulated, his dry and cracked lips turning up in a barely visible smile.

I rub his hand with my thumb and try my absolute hardest not to completely lose my shit. Eventually, my mom comes in with Amy, and soon we are joined by more family members. The mood is savage, the sadness hangs like fog in the air.

After a while of us sitting quietly, taking turns patting his shoulder and making small talk, he announces, “I want to die at home.”

The room is quiet, and he looks at us, his single eye glossing over to match the rest of ours. His expression is one of expectation. It appears he has accepted his somewhat unexpected hospice determination, and in his silence, he is commanding that we accept it too. He wants to go home.

The day is Wednesday. Amy immediately began making arrangements to get him home. The hospital in Albuquerque is roughly 220 miles from the home they share in Las Cruces, but by Thursday, it becomes apparent that it will be difficult to get him there. Once he went on Hospice, insurance no longer covered transporting him, and quotes to rent a medical transport van started at $10,000.

By Friday, the options are fairly exhausted. He either dies in the hospital against his wishes or we pool together $10,000 to take him on the three-hour journey south. Even as we discuss it, we know he would hate it. Tio was frivolous, known to scoff at meals over $10 or hotel rooms over $40.

On Saturday, I go visit him alone, and while it didn’t seem possible, he appears even more skinny and frail than just a few days ago. I sit by his bed and reach for his hand. We spend the afternoon talking slowly and truthfully. The sun filters in through the window and casts shadows across his failing body. I want to know things, and he is present enough to tell me. I ask him many questions about his life, and I listen as he strings together his answers.

When I can see he is getting tired, I ask him one final question.

“Tio, of all the life you have lived, what is the one thing you will remember the most?” Thinking he might answer with his favorite place, Guatemala, or his lifelong passion, photography.

Instead, he answers with a single whispered word.

“Amy.”

In all his years of life, the one thing he will remember most is Amy.

My heart swells at the beauty and simplicity of his answer, and I say to him, “What a wonderful thing to be loved so well.”

“It’s about time,” he croaks out with a bit of sarcasm and humor.

I know what he means. Before Amy, he could never quite get it right, pouring himself into the wrong relationships, making a mess of things, choosing the wrong person, being the wrong person. He and I have this in common.

As if reading my mind, he says, “How could we have gotten it so wrong?”

“I have no idea, Tio,” I answer him, “But at least you got it right this time.”

He smiles sleepily, and I decide to leave him to rest. I gently let loose of his hand, pull the blanket up to his shoulders, and bend to kiss him as he begins to doze off.

I stay for a minute longer to see him cast in the fading autumn light. I think what an irony to find yourself the love of your life, only to then find yourself on your deathbed? It was only three years ago that he and Amy met. In such a long life, they only had a short time. Right then, I resolve to get my Tio home to be with Amy so he can die in their home.

By Sunday, I have it figured out. I went to some online van rental website and searched for the perfect ride. I needed a van with a side door, a back door, and a bed that wasn’t too high. Sprinter vans were out; the beds are usually up on platforms. That left me with a handful of options, and I eventually came across a listing for a 1980s-something Volkswagen Westfalia. It looked to be in good condition, had the doors we needed, and a bed in the back that was low to the ground. I hit BOOK NOW and made an appointment to pick it up from the owner’s house in Albuquerque on Sunday afternoon. For $600, we could have the van until Tuesday. I call the hospital and tell them to prepare my Tio for release; we are taking him home.

My mom drops me off at the place, and a guy named Eric comes out of his house with the keys to the Westy, as I am to learn that is what these vans are called. The VW Westfalia is apparently a cult classic, with owners joining Westy clubs and fans who very specifically seek them out as camping road rentals. This one is white with a brown interior and has that classic rectangular shape. I am a little taken aback when I see it. I knew it was old, but on closer examination, it’s actually old-old. While it is in good condition, the dials on the radio are ancient, the brown dash is faded and sunburnt, and I am only just now realizing it’s a stick shift… of course it is. I give my mom my widest eyes. I can definitely drive a stick, but no one ever accused me of being good at it.

As Eric shows us around the eccentricities of how to operate the stovetop, sink pump, backup battery, and the electricity, I nod and smile, knowing we won’t be using the van for any of that. I can’t tell him that we are using it to transport my dying uncle home on a last pilgrimage; it doesn’t seem necessary.

It’s time to go, and I am so grateful for the circle driveway; it means I don’t have to stick shift this thing into reverse on the first go. With a wave and a salutation, Eric says, “Take care of the White Lightning”, and goes back into his house. I push in the brake and clutch and fire it up. Thankfully, I don’t grind any gears as I pull away, making my way to bust my Tio out of hospital jail. First, I have to stop at the store, he has requested sugar-free Werthers Originals and grapes.

When I get to his room, the nurses have him mostly packed up. They snip his hospital bracelet off with a pair of rounded scissors, and before it gets dropped into the trash, I slip it into my pocket. A souvenir, I guess? I then tote a few plastic bags out to the van, and when I come back, they have him in the wheelchair, ready to go. He has a bit of new life to him. He is going home, and that shows on his face.

They wheel him out to the drop-off loop where I am parked, and they inform me that, for liability reasons, they aren’t allowed to lift him or help us get him loaded. They are nice, and I can see that maybe they would if they could, but they can’t. I ask them to at least stand him up and turn him around, so I can sit him on the van floorboard. I back into the side door and squeeze my arms under his arms and do my best squat lift. I groan, and he groans, and there is a hustle and a bustle as my mom maneuvers to swing his legs around. In the van now, we just have to get him on the bed.

“Hang tight, Tio, you are halfway there,” I tell him, so very worried that he is in pain or that I might snap one of his arms clean off his body. At 120lbs, I think we must weigh about the same now… that is how small he has gotten, but he does not complain. He never complains. We all take a deep breath, and I lift-big one more time and get him sat on the bed. I am grateful for the time I’ve spent lifting and squatting in the gym, as if I had been building muscle for this very moment.

My mom holds him upright while I run around to the back door, reach in, and pull him fully onto the bed and flat. My mom tucks him in with pillows and blankets all around, and as we hand him his snacks, he gives us the biggest smile I have seen in all my life.

“Ah, this is so comfortable… this is what I am talking about.. this is luxury…. I haven’t been so cozy in ages…” He showers us with compliments, and I can see he means them. He is so relieved to be out of the hospital and on his way home.

“Amy is waiting for you,” I say to him as we move him around, making final adjustments. He will have to lie there for over three hours, and we want to make sure he is set.

The last thing I ask him before I make my way to the front of the van is if he noticed that this was a VW. It’s bittersweet that of all the vans on the internet, this vintage VW is the one I found. Tio loves VW’s. Loves them. He used to have a bug, and he was so proud of that thing, he would wax it up on the reg. For Christmas, he would even give me little VW bug ornaments or send VW stickers in letters.

“Of course I noticed, this is the best van in the world,” he responds happily, his eye patch sliding up a little too far on his forehead. I reach to pull it down and pat him on the arm.

“Ok, let’s get outta here,” I say.

A minute later, the engine fires up, and it is so loud and grumpy, but when I look in the rear view mirror, I see that smile still cutting across the landscape of his face as he starts unwrapping his caramel candy.

What he doesn’t know is that he is in for the ride of his life. Right off, I can’t find first gear. I am pushing and chugging and stalling, and as soon as I finally get going, I have to stop on a hill and wait for the gate to open. Then stop again on the same hill to merge into traffic. Sweat starts beading on my brow as I am overcome with worry that he will be in pain while I bounce us all around and out of Albuquerque. I immediately stall again. More pressing, more grinding, more jolting, more engine dying. It’s as if I have never driven a stick shift in my life. I am stealing glances back at Tio, and eventually, he starts hollering at me.

“You’re in the wrong gear!” He bellows, and I am suddenly shocked and in disbelief at the lack of frailty in his voice.

“No, I’m not,” I holler back.

“Yes, you are!” He wastes no time in yelling back, and I think, Wow, that is a lot of sass for a dying man… how very Trantham of you.

Really, I am just grateful for that tiny glimpse of my old uncle, the one who has a voice and is not afraid to use it. Now, if he had added a “fuck” or a “shit” in there somewhere, then he really would have sounded like the Tio I knew.

Soon, the fifth time is a charm, and I find the gear, hit the sweet spot in the clutch, and we burst out onto San Mateo Boulevard like we just robbed some place, and even through the shaky mirror, I see that smile again.

The White Lightning proved to be anything but lightning. In the 200-plus miles to Cruces, I think we maxed out at 67 mph. We also couln’t communicate between the engine noise, the hot wind bursting through the barely sealed windows, and the racket from the “a/c” (in air quotes, because I don’t know about Tio, but I certainly didn’t feel much cooled air).

An hour south of Albuquerque, we pull into the truck stop at the Lemitar exit, where my other aunt and uncle are waiting to meet us. That is the exit where they live, and we open the back door, and they lean in to say their final goodbyes to Ricky. The gasoline smell is overwhelming, and my stomach is turning as I watch them tenderly and affectionately tell them he is loved. My mom leaves the extra car with them, and she gets in the van for the rest of the ride. She lies next to Tio, and we take off again, another two hours or so left on the journey.

I feel better now, knowing my mom is back there with him. I don’t have to keep looking in the mirror, praying to see his chest rising and falling. My mom now has her time with him; he has been her brother-in-law for over forty-five years, after all. Later, she says he was living the high life, soaking it up, asking her to feed him grapes, knowing he was fully capable of feeding himself those dang grapes. We had a good laugh about that, even though he could have asked for the moon, and we would have tried to make it happen, so feeding him grapes was alright by her in the end.

The rest of the ride is hot and loud, and I am left to navigate the desert landscape and grieve my Tio, knowing this last journey home is it for him. After all our Central American adventures together, all the books we shared and songs we listened to, all the photos we took, all the texts and phone calls, all the storytelling, it was all coming to an end. It was as if I was reading my favorite book, getting to the last chapter in real time, and my heart was breaking.

When we finally arrive, after a missed turn and some more gear grinding, Amy is waiting alongside their dogs and a hospice nurse. We reverse-engineer the maneuvers, and this time I pull him out the back doors with my arms under his arms again. We set him down in a wheelchair, and he gets rolled into the house. When they reach the front door, Amy points to the blooming bougainvillea potted on the porch.

“It’s blooming for you, Sterling,” she says sweetly before rolling him into the dining room, where they had replaced the table with a hospice bed.

This will be his final resting place, in a home that could be featured in any number of fancy magazines, filled with trinkets from across the globe and furniture from Mexico. Amy had printed some of Tio’s famous black and white film photographs and had them displayed about the house. Their home is full of desert air and love.

After we get him settled on the bed, I ask him what he thought of the day.

“That was the best ride of my life,” he reiterates, still energized. “That was just like riding the Chicken Bus to HueHue,” referencing all the ancient and bumpy school buses we rode in Guatemala to cities with names like Huehuetenango, Chichicastenango, and Quetzaltenango.

Later, though, when he was on speaker-phone with my Aunt Monica, and he didn’t know I could hear, he told her the drive home was like “riding a donkey” and “I didn’t know if I would survive it”. I smiled. That was my uncle, the exaggerator, and I was soaking it all in.

Later, I wondered the same question I had asked him. How had I felt about the day? I realized what I felt was gladness. I was glad that I was equipped to get him home. There were many options, but the solution that day was mine. While everyone else was capable, I was the one who, in this situation, was given the gift of action. Everyone was playing their parts. My dad and Aunt Monica had already spent many days with him in the hospital following his medivac to Albuquerque and had since rotated out. Amy was handling all the financials, hospice logistics, and so much more. My mom was caring for everyone’s emotions, as she does so beautifully. For my part, though, I felt deeply honored to be the one to drive him home.

Somehow, we had all boarded this morbid death train for Tio Ricky Sterling Trantham, and as reluctant as we all were, we didn’t have a choice. That is what death teaches us, I guess. There are some choices in this life that we don’t get to make for ourselves.

The next day, after he slept a full night and had a belly full of eggs and potatoes, Tio looked so good. His skin has regained some color, and as I sit with him, he starts telling me a story about a time he was visiting some friends in Jovales, Mexico. Their great uncle came riding in after thirteen hours of coybowing on a horse.

“That fucker rides up like a goddam Hollywood actor, and he was ninety-four years old, ninety-four!” He reiterates for emphasis. “I thought I was going to make it to that age, too. Man, Mexican cowboys are the real Marlboro men, they are some tough mother fuckers.”

His cursing and his animation mean the world to me. I say, “Tio, that’s the first curse word you have said since I got here five days ago. I was really worried about you, but now I’m not.

We talked a lot again that day, and I have a chance to read him a chapter in my upcoming memoir. The chapter is all about him and what he means to me. It’s surreal to use my left hand to scroll down the pages about him on my laptop and my right hand to hold his dying hand. It’s surreal and also an enormous privilege. The book is not out yet, and might not be for some time, but my Tio gets to listen to his chapter as I read it aloud, and that is a gift I will never forget.

When I am finished, he says, “All I ask is that you mention me on stage when you win your first Oscar.”

I laugh and roll my eyes, happy that he is happy with what I wrote and also not telling him that the Oscars have nothing to do with publishing a memoir. But I understand what he means; he thinks I should win an award for the writing, and that is his way of saying he is proud of me. What more could I ask?

I do have one last question, though, and so I say, “What will happen when you die, Tio?”

His answer is beautiful.

“Oh, I know what will happen when I die. I have already seen it.” He informs me. “And I am not afraid.”

“Oh yeah,” I say, “tell me.

“First, I will see a light,” he says, taking a pause. “Then I will get closer to the light and then closer and closer still, until I am absorbed by it. Then I will realize I am not separate from the light at all. I am the light.”

My eyes grow wide, and I wonder if he knows what he has just said. You see, all my life, my Tio, the photographer, has been obsessed with light. When I was fifteen years old, he told me, “What makes a photographer an artist is their relationship to light. All of the world is made up of light, dark, and shadows. That is it.”

So when he tells me he is the light, my heart is at peace with where he is going.

“Hombre de Luz,” I say to him, referencing an old Instagram handle he used to have. “You have always been made of light, Tio.”

“Si, Hombre de Luz,” he repeats, and our eyes glimmer at each other as if there is some lasting secret between us. He has always been the man of light, and shortly he will be the man of light for all of eternity.

He is home, he is going home, and soon he will be just a brilliant beam of light, warming my face and heating my bones wherever I go.

I turn the ignition, and I think, “Let’s call Uncle Ricky.”

I am about to say it aloud, but almost as quickly as the idea formulates, I remember, we can’t call Uncle Ricky.

Uncle Ricky is dead.

Almost every day for the last year of his life, while he was in the final stages of an eight-year battle with liver cancer, my dad and I would call my uncle on the way home after working out. The route home from the gym is short, so the calls would be short too; ten minutes to update and connect. Mostly, I would drive and listen while two brothers checked in on each other.

“Did we wake you?” My dad would ask, already knowing the answer.

“Hell no, I have been up for hours.” My uncle would respond. His voice resounding from the speaker, weak yet distinctly resolved.

The brothers would report on how well each of them did or did not sleep the night before. My dad would list out the farm chores on deck for the day, and my uncle would talk about the errands he was going to run. The conversations would soothe me as I drove, flipping down the visor to block the morning rays from piercing my eyes. It wasn’t just the routine of these phone calls that brought me comfort; it was more than that, it was being a witness to these two men deepening their relationship with each other, knowing that the older brother was going to outlive the younger one. There were three of us on the phone, but I think death was there too, half-listening as he sat near the window of Ricky’s kitchen.

In all my life, I scarcely ever saw the two brothers together, maybe just three or four times throughout my 42 years. They lived very different lives; my dad, an engineer who traveled the world - from Russia to Argentina - building businesses and having a family. My uncle, a photographer who firmly planted himself in the southern desert near the Mexican border, and who in some regard was a lifelong bachelor.

They lived separate lives, and because of this, my relationship with my Uncle was wholly mine. While my dad didn’t spend much time with my uncle, that didn’t stop him from making sure I did.

The summer after I turned eleven, my parents sent me from Alaska to New Mexico to visit my uncle in his dusty adobe house. I stayed a week or so that year, and every summer after that, too. Actually, for most of my life, I continued the tradition, visiting my uncle in the blazing hot summer months. For weeks on end, we spoke Spanglish, drank black coffee, ate Hatch green chile, listened to albums front to back, and I called him Tio. The time with him became legendary in my own mind; even as I grew, the visits stayed the same. It was always just him and me, and the mess of stray cats he was always caring for.

Lots of times, he would speak to me about my Grandfather, and I would rest my chin in my hands and soak up the stories he would weave. They captivated my mind and stirred my heart, giving me pride in my family who came before me and stoking a desire for adventure within me. They spoke to me of the marrow of life, and all that.

My dad retold memories too sometimes, but the two brothers’ stories seldom lined up. Their tales unfurled in that familial fashion… yes, they had grown up together, but they had wildly distinct experiences. I’d return home and relay something Ricky had told me, and my dad would roll his eyes and declare, “That never happened.”

The one thing my dad had that my uncle did not was a few more stories about their mother. Ricky was just eight years old when she died. She was called Toni, short for Antonia, and she had gone out for ice cream in San Antonio, Texas, one day and never returned home. The red 1959 Pontiac Bonneville she was driving careened into a tree, and no one really knows why. The report said she was killed instantly. My dad was ten, Ricky was eight, and my aunt Monica was five. My dad was sure their mother loved him best, so when she died, he felt he had lost the one person who saw him for who he was. My uncle didn’t have much reference for who his mother was, so instead, he went on to forge a deep relationship with their father, my grandfather.

At the time of Toni’s death, my grandfather was on assignment in Asia, so the kids said their goodbyes to desolate Texas and were sent to Okinawa to live out the rest of their adolescence. They landed on a military base just as the Vietnam War started kicking off. My dad said that when they enrolled in school, they were with a lot of other kids who understood death, too. The only time a Principal came to a classroom was because someone’s parent had been killed in action. They would call the child to gather their things, and the kid would walk out into the hallway and usually disappear forever.

I imagined twenty or so little kids, sitting breathless at their tiny desks, watching the Principal’s shape fill the doorway… waiting for the moment… waiting to hear whose name he might call.

Death was just a part of how my dad and his siblings understood life, and the brothers ascribed meaning to their lives based on that. They carried with them the loss of their mother and the forboding sense that their father might be next. Each of the boys built their personalities with catastrophe at the center and coping mechanisms for spackling. Losing their mother, then later their father when he was just 52 years old, coupled with their unique childhoods, seemed to inoculate my dad and his brother against death. They always spoke about death like a ship sailing out to sea with a scarcity of sentiment. Death was … a farewell… a photograph on the mantel and a mention on Dia de los Muertos. Through osmosis, I think I absorbed those sentiments from them.

Then again, I have had a different life, one in which death has been predominantly absent. Sure, I have lost some people, but my great-grandparents lived well into their nineties, so I was in my late twenties before I started sitting in pews staring at caskets. I’d had one childhood friend who we lost around that same time, and while I still think of him, most of my bereavement has been siloed into just a handful of experiences.

That is, until Ricky died.

His death is here, it’s with me, I feel it in my memories of him. I feel it in those moments when my dad and I are driving home from the gym, and I want to call him. I feel it in the songs we shared and in the food we used to eat together. I feel it in a good novel and in the meow of a house cat. I feel his death deep in the part of my indigenous Mexican bones.

However, I do admit, his death has not been a shattering experience. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Instead of being overcome with grief, I find myself happy. I am assured. I am full of love. It’s a privilege I regard with reverence. Maybe it’s this way for me because of the relationship we had? My uncle was one of the most important men in my life, yet we would sometimes go ages without talking. Maybe I’m in denial, and I just assume we will catch up again when I am not traveling or when he is not working? Maybe I am just waiting for my phone to beep with another sunset snap he just took? Maybe it is because death was so often a topic of discussion in the retellings of his life to me that I was influenced early into the acceptance phase of the stages of grief?

More likely, however, I am not as broken by his loss as I feared I might, because the summers I spent with him never felt like real life anyway. Our time together was always away from my normal life and away from the rest of the world. We could have been in the Sahara or the South of Spain for all it mattered. Those summers were magic. They were scenes from an Isabel Allende novel, and chords from a Gypsy Kings song. Those summers were poetry, full of life, and sometimes the memories feel like a film strip playing in slow motion in the back of my mind.

Those summer days belonged to us. They were our days, our afternoons, our caked adobe bricks, and our starry skies, and sometimes they don’t seem real. They feel imagined, not lived.

Ricky is gone, but our summers they live… suspended in time. Death took him, but the magic of his influence in my life remains.

Now, when I am driving home from the gym and I want to call Uncle Ricky, I just imagine we are sharing a beer on the cement slab behind his house. We toast to death and nod to the setting sun… just he and I and the mess of stray cats he was always caring for.

Subscribe now