Litany of Remembrance

originally drafted by the author for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Service of Remembrance, Massachusetts General Hospital, Saturday, October 5, 2024. On the occasion of Perinatal and Infant Loss week.

For each life that was planned and whose conception was ordered,  

We remember.  

For each life that has come into this world a surprise,  

We remember.  

For each infant whose lungs were underdeveloped and who was unable to breathe,  

We remember.  

For each infant whose brain or heart could not help them live the life we dreamed about,  

We remember.  

For each mizuko, each water baby who was not yet fully grown before they died,  

We remember.   

For each birthing parent whose body ached with milk they could not give,  

We remember.  

For each secondary parent who felt utterly helpless to change things, 

We remember.  

For each parent held captive who could not get free from addiction to be with their infant,  

We remember.  

For each grandparent who saw their own child, beset on all sides by grief and confusion, helpless to fix or change,  

We remember. 

For each parent tangled in the razor-sharp web of injustice who could not be with you before you died,   

We remember.     

For each parent who lost their life trying to bring life into the world,  

We remember.  

For each doctor, nurse, and provider who worked tirelessly for healing and restoration, 

We remember. 

For each sibling who never got to share their kiddo the lessons they learned and the delights they discovered, 

We remember.  

For each Godparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, or loved one who cannot shower or spoil their little one, 

We remember. 

For each person whose partnership dissolved and buckled under the weight of the loss of their child,  

We remember.  

For each parent who chooses to put on a happy face and pretend they’re okay when they’re not okay,  

We remember.  

For each parent who allows their grief to surge and rage like a storm-tossed ocean,  

We remember.  

For each loved one and friend who came alongside us when we thought we were alone

 We remember.

For each person who made us feel a member of community in our grief,

 We remember.

For each salty tear that begins to water the seed of our gratitude and our love,  

We remember.  

 Parent of every heart and every loss, we remember our losses today. We remember every sob, tear, and sigh. We remember the providers who did everything they could, even though it couldn’t give us back our child. We remember those who cried with us as we said goodbye. Be present with us in our reflection and our grief. May we be accompanied in love by the memories of our Beloved Babes. May we feel comforted by our connection to one another.  Amen 

 

An Open Letter to my Niece on the Anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson

When I began this letter, you were about to turn six, I think, and will be entering the first grade soon. It’s astonishing to think that you, an exuberant, delightful, opinionated, and joyous little person will be old enough to fall in love, to feel arousal, to desire intimacy with other people. Maybe these things are true about you know—it’s a story that grownups tell ourselves that feelings like this only come with adulthood. It helps us make sense of being human, which is a strange, marvelous, difficult experience. It’s not fair that it minimizes your experience, but you’ll find as you grow that grownups are seldom interested in what is fair, despite what we say.

I try to imagine you as a teenager: I am hoping that you don’t feel an overwhelming sense of pressure to perform, to be the best, to do and live in ways that make your parents happy. I know your Uncle grew up this way and I think your father did too, under the burden of our parents’ hopes, fears, and demands. I did too, and it was hard on all of us. So my hope for you is that you have parents who love everything about you, even as who you are is different than who they are, and different than who they wanted you to be; I hope your folks are brave enough to let you live free, and that they teach you the useful lessons you need, instead of hiding in their fear. I hope you are clever and thoughtful, and unafraid to tell the truth, and than you are brave enough to be yourself and not too worried about fitting in, though this is a big deal when you’re a teenager (and also a big deal when you’re an adult). It’s a story that grown-ups tell ourselves, that we have this life thing figured out. It keeps the fear and anxiety at bay. It’s a lie. The better we get—the better you get, darling girl—at riding the waves and the shifting sands of living, the more we don’t have to know, or have to have figured out. We can watch, and consider and feel, and then respond. It is a deep fear that requires us to exercise control, to attempt to exercise control over others. I’m sad and sorry to tell you that adults try to control others a lot: we might couch it in ideas that sound nice, but at the end of it, it’s all about power.

Most of us have not learned the lesson that the only thing we can control is how we respond to circumstances. We cannot make people believe what we believe, we cannot make them act the way we want to act (and often don’t act), and we cannot make them feel what we feel. We’re better off for all of that, but many of us think the world would be better if everyone else just did and thought and said what we do, what we wanted.

Another lie.

Niece, I am deeply, deeply sorry. I am so sorry that the laws in this country have made you less free. I come from a family that experienced poverty on both sides. Poverty is far away from you, I think, unless many things have changed. Your father has a good job that is valued by our society, and capitalism has rewarded him, so you likely don’t know what it’s like not to have enough to eat for dinner, or to watch your parent choose to feed you and to forgo eating themselves. Both my parents came from large families. My grandmother had her first child at fourteen. Can you imagine that? Waves of nausea and vomiting during homeroom and first period, gaining so much weight you can’t safely participate in gym class (do you even have gym any more?) or soccer or gymnastics or kung fu? Struggling to carry your books and violin over your baby bump? And now you have this whole other person for whom you’re responsible, you have to feed and keep alive and care for. What you want doesn’t matter anymore, because all of your energy and desire lives at the feet of this other life.

My grandmothers didn’t go to high school; they had kid after kid after kid. They were Black women who came up during the Great Depression and World War II, have you learned about those yet? They lived during Jim Crow, and they had few, if any choices. The part of me that loves living—loves strawberry ice cream and the feeling after a good run, and loves my friends and your Uncle and delights in skin against skin—is grateful that they were able to have families, despite all the trauma and the struggle that were part of that. The part of me that exists outside time, that can see my grandmothers as women, wishes desperately that they’d lived in a world that valued and honored and legitimized their bodies, their existence, their desires and choices. Niece, I’m sorry because you do not live in that world. You live in a world that tells you that your body is only valid if it looks this way, if it loves this way, if it talks or sounds or works or thinks this way. Now you live in a world that wants to force you to breed this way; it is actively taking steps to steal from you your capacity to make choices about how you govern your reproductive health. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that this issue is not one that was dealt with once and for all, and has resurged as a frontier of control. I’m sorry that you and so many other young people have to think about this, that instead of abortion being as accessible and affordable and as destigmatized as dental care or eating your veggies, it is against the law in some parts of our country. I’m sorry.

If you are living now as you have been living as a girl, you live in a state where the government seeks to protect your right to choose, access, and hopefully afford an abortion, should you need one. But this might change—one thing that seems true is that white people will not dissolve American apartheid without a fight, and while I hope that your state won’t go the way of others in our country, I am no longer surprised by the atrocities that white people will commit against themselves in pursuit of committing atrocities against people of color and culture; I know what white people will do to protect and uphold white power supremacy.

Because you are related to me, you are related to other young women and folx who seek to live and love and learn and be happy, just like you do. Because we all live in this country, their journey to freedom is obstructed by similar stones and potholes to your own journey, though they are not identical. I pray that you will cultivate solidarity in your heart for these people, your kin, who do not live in states that wants to protect their reproductive autonomy. They live in states that want to arm teachers instead of banning assault weapons, and who want to force parenting on people who might choose otherwise. I pray that you might know them, that you might care about them, and should you be given the chance to care for them, that you would relish it deeply.

When I was a teenager, my mother said to me, if you get pregnant, that’s it, you’re out. This house wasn’t meant to hold three generations. It taught me that pregnancy is a negative consequence of unsafe sex. There are many consequences of unsafe sex, and there are some consequences of safer sex; some of them are negative, some of them are positive, and some of them change over the course of your life, seeming positive and then becoming negative as time goes by. Some consequences change with treatment, and some of them never change. I wish my mother had taught me this, that pregnant was not something I had to be if I didn’t want to be. I wish that she had taught me that abortion was not something I had to be scared to talk about, scared to want, scared to have, and I wish that she had taught me that abortion is not sinful.

Are, these words, sinful, sin, even words you know, niece? Are there people in your life who tell you that God loves you less if… and then fill in the sentence with whatever they think is right? Is someone using the marvel and mystery of Divinity to try to regulate your behavior? Are you treating yourself this way?

I don’t know today. But if, at any point you want to talk with me about this, I am here for it. I am a woman of faith who believes at my center that That Which Is Divine has given you, and me, and all of us the capacity to make good, wise, righteous choices. I believe that nothing separates us from relationship with Divine. And I would be deeply grateful to hold space for you as you discover what you believe about being a person, about being in relationship, about your self-determination. I love you, and I am here for you.

forever,

Shen-shen

start from scratch

Cleansing.

This is the word that keeps coming to me. Not in the green-juice/maple-syrup-lemonade/detox way: it comes more like a scrubby, exfoliating way, with a heavy handed large woman who removes the top layer of your skin with warm water and rice flour and a mitt made of dried seaweed, that makes your skin sting so much you must be glowing, and then you thankfully get wrapped up in a large, heavy towel, and feel so relaxed that the idea of moving is a remote boat drifting away from you on the horizon.

Like, you are emptied, nothing that you’ve ever had or known is present, and you have to start from scratch.

Somehow, I missed Covid. It shut down the practices and changed the policies (for a while at least) and it made us take stock of everything, and I missed it. I wore a mask and isolated just like everyone else, I vaccinated and boosted, and I never caught it. It seemed impossible. I must have had it and not known it, I thought to myself.

And then, two weeks ago, my father-in-law, a long-since retired computer scientist, an American immigrant from Taiwan, and a proud and reserved father of three sons, two daughters-in-law, and a granddaughter, Lung-Hsiung Chang, died. We knew he was dying, kind of: he had no terminal diagnosis, but the complications of his dementia were ravaging, his vitals were messy, and his baseline plummeted. Thankfully, all three of his sons were in town when he died, and his oldest, my husband and partner, was with him, along with his wife. I came as fast as I could, but I was unable to say goodbye before he’d gone.

When I am with people who are grieving someone who is dying or has died, I tell them that grief is merciless, that they should take impeccable care of themselves, care that might not make sense to those in their community that don’t know or understand why they’re all of a sudden so different. I tried to remember this, shoving clothes into a weekender bag and fidgeting in the back of a Lyft to the airport. I tell people that all you have to do is be there for someone who is grieving—you’ll want to do something, but your presence is more meaningful than anything else. But this was not enough when I was sitting at my mother-in-law’s feet as she sobbed, being told for the second time that her husband had died, and having forgotten, a cruelty of her own dementia. It was not enough to think, well I’m here. It was not enough to be reminded, I’m here for them, when the dynamics of rejection and distance that run my in-laws stung repeatedly, when all I wanted was to soften with them, and talk and listen, and these things were impossible. I’d forgotten that family dynamics don’t go away in hardship, that they dig in. It made for a painful and complicated week.

Taken on a walk I took.

I watched my partner with his mom, his brothers, his father’s memory, and I wondered what he was feeling. When he let me, I held him, I kissed him. I went on walks with him. I reflected him, his family, his father, back to him. After a few days, I took from him the sneezing and sniffling that he was carrying—this happens all the time, anytime he gets on a plane, he catches something, another cold, great. But when I was convulsing with chills in bed days later, too tired to eat and dragging myself from bed to bath and back again, it just seemed like an inopportune time to get sick. But it didn’t stop me from throwing my arm around my mother-in-law and holding her as she moaned and worried over whether her husband’s spirit would be able to hear or see his ancestors without his glasses and hearing aid.

It was only after I had left central Ohio, when my anesthesiologist brother-in-law said to his brother, hey, maybe you should test, and he did, and my husband told me he’d tested positive, that it occurred to me that on top of the mercilessness of grief, I was wracked by the mercilessness of Covid.

It’s been two weeks to the day since Lung died. I tried to go back to work, and Covid said, nope you’re not ready yet. I had a birthday—quiet, lowkey, subdued by loss. I spoke with a colleague, who suggested I write about the intersection of grief and Covid. And all I can think is cleansing. I feel Wiped Out. I have no energy, I am unable to complete a sentence without forgetting key words, it’s like every direct object just disappears. I feel raw and unable to move and like anything that I used to know how to do, or take for granted, I have to do all over again. I feel like I am starting from scratch.

There’s a voice inside me that wants to remind me that there are probiotics and practices and things I can DO in this beginner’s mind place to renew my safety and my comfort. But this voice is just trying to protect me from those around me who don’t understand and who would wonder why I’m not working harder or to where I disappeared. I am trying to be attentive to the voice that wants me to love myself instead, who says, jess, you cannot go faster than you can go. You are worth starting from scratch. Consider all that you can do that you couldn’t do because you hadn’t unlearned what grief and Covid have stripped away. I try to listen to that voice, and to remember that I have a job, and I have a home, and I have so much privilege and comfort that the starting from scratch is so well-resourced. I turn into my practice and I listen, and I remind myself that just as before, I can only ever do what I could have done with the help of Spirit, the wisdom of my Ancestors.

be/longing

“Your god loves me more than you.”

*

I was sitting with a patient recently, at the foot of his bed in his room. He was in one of the nicer rooms in the warren that is the hospital: spacious, sleek, with a wall of windows and furnishings in whites, grays, and brushed steel. I was grateful to have found a chair. I prefer to sit in patient visits, especially if there’s a chance that I’ll be there for a time and we’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation. What we talk about is almost always up to the patient: family, treatment, anxieties, frustrations, or even if we talk at all. Today this man was sharing with me his faith journey. Like many patients I see here, he started out in the Catholic tradition, and through a circuitous route, has wound up worshipping in a large, mainline Protestant denomination. This winding road isn’t a problem for him, experientially or theologically. When recounting a near-death experience, he shared, “No one asked me for my papers, no one said, wait which one are you—or, you know, you have to pick one—there was none of that. You know this, all these different traditions, that’s us, you know, that’s a construct.”

I nodded silently. I think along similar lines often, and seldom do I hear people say this. Often when I enter a room, I get a look and someone says, I asked for a priest, or I hear what religion are you? as if religion is a precursor for our capacity to be present and vulnerable people together present to one another’s experience of illness, struggle, transformation, or death.

It is not.

But not today. Today, I could be with another person who does not need me to wear a collar or be a different gender or race or sexuality in order to shed tears with me about his anxiety of how his daughters will cope if he dies as a result of his surgery this afternoon. True, after we have prayed together, he does ask me for a priest to come and offer him Sacrament of the Sick and the Eucharist: evidently his Protestantism is not flexible enough for him to allow me to share with him the Body of Christ, or anoint him and offer him to the safe touch of God. I’m not bothered by it. (Incidentally, I have questions about why I’ve chosen a profession that invites so much rejection of me, but that is an exploration for another day. I suppose the TL;DR answer is that I haven’t chosen it, I’ve been called to it.) I make a note to put in a consult for the priest who will be in later in the day, and I take my leave. Some days, like today, it’s so busy that it’s easy for me to confuse one patient with another, but all day this gentleman lingers like fragrance on my clothes. What he shared about the meaning of faith communities, about his family, about his theology: they turn over and over in my mind.

There are communities he has been in, and I have been in too, where the badge of belonging is significant. What do you believe is a way of determining who is in and who is out, who is “safe” and who is “threat”. There is simply no room for the radical notion that there is no such thing as binary, dichotomy, duality. To consider that this is possible is to give yourself away to something or someone that will almost certainly hurt you. I have clear memories of growing up a Black woman in a white Midwestern suburb, and learning the hard way that my brand of Black did not belong with the accepted brand of Black in my communities, sometimes—and quite painfully—not even in my own family. Having come out as bisexual not too long ago, I wonder if I will come to experience the biphobia and erasure that I read about from others in the bi community. Will gay and lesbian friends I haven’t yet made whisper about me, or condescend to my face, saying that I’m lying to myself, that being in a relationship with a straight man makes me straight and not queer, or that my relationship is destined to degrade while I’m on my way from straight to gay, as if bi is no more than a junction on a train line? The nature of belonging feels incredibly divisive in faith communities. My faith tradition of origin has in its history a legacy of determining whose faith is real and true enough, who is a heretic, who is a witch, who is other in some “dangerous” and “threatening” way that must be destroyed. As someone traversing the path toward ordained ministry in the Christian tradition, I acknowledge this openly, and doing so allows me to recognize it in other places, spaces, and moments. It doesn’t give me more power, nor authority; it gives me a kind of experience that comes from previous and repeated injury, injury my faith ancestors have inflicted, injury my faith ancestors have repented, injury my faith ancestors have denied.

If my patient is correct, if these assemblies of theology, polity, ideology, and practice that we have gathered ourselves around and called religion is a construct that allows us to understand That which is Greater, what do we claim to be true about our particular construct? What can I distill mine down to, and does it look the same as yours? If not, or if so, so what?

*

In Spanish, word translates to palabra, which has in its etymology parable or parabola, or I set side by side.

*

your god loves me better than you.

At my altar this morning, weaving in and out of my head among my mantra was this utterance. your god loves me better than you. On the heels of its echo I considered my Jewish and Muslim siblings, and the union where our Venn diagrams of religion intersect: That whose Name shall not be spoken, the Lord of Hosts, the Great and Merciful; Abraham the father of your faith, and mine; the seeds from which Semitic religions grow, and depending on who you ask, whence they mutate. I think of how often it seems these faith traditions have looked at one another and uttered this sentence to each other. I have the real way, we have said. I am chosen from among us, we say. I am the most blessed and beloved, we say. What is the takeaway of speaking to one another this way? It allows us to make those among us who are not chosen, who are not special, who are not on our same way, to be counted as less-than. It allows us to make a comparison that puts us in a one-up and them in a one-down. And if there is a they that is not we, and if they are one down, what can’t we do to them?

*

Words matter.

I say this because people around us are worked up about the words we use to name, claim, deny, rebuke the actions of our people, our governments, our allies, our enemies. Words matter. They are imperfect and narrow and ill-fitting approximations of the feeling or the experience or the reality we know and are trying to share. And they matter.

I recently reread some passages from My Grandmother’s Hands that have come into bright and sharp relief for me in the past months. Among them are the idea of clean pain and dirty pain. I don’t want to spend too much time on it here, but I’d encourage you to read it if you haven’t: it’s easy to follow, it has incredible, helpful strategies for being a person, and if you let it, it will change how you see yourself and the world from which you come. I think almost daily about the investment it asks us to take in our own trauma: not in allowing this trauma to define us, but to consider the ways in which trauma unmetabolized is running us.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will run your life, and you will call it fate.”
— Carl Jung

I look around the world and see war, murder, extermination, destruction, dehumanization, fear, and profoundly destructive duality. I see a determination and a clinging to the idea that there is us and there is they, and they are bad and we are justified, and we will see who has the final word. All I hear in this rhetoric—regardless of where it comes from and regardless of who it's demonizing and dehumanizing—all I hear is unmetabolized trauma. I think of patients and family members saying to me, bad stuff happens but I don’t want to think about it, what good does it do to talk about it, and I imagine pointing at a newspaper and say, you don’t have to talk about it, but the bad stuff has a way of finding its way to the surface whether or not you ignore it. I paraphrase a line that one of my favorite writers wrote into a story: when your pain is this great, of course the hair you tear out is your own, of course the house you burn down is your own home. The thing about unmetabolized trauma is that it doesn’t just harm those we visit it on, it harms us, too.

“Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality. Over even longer periods of time, as it is passed on and gets compounded through other bodies in a household, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture.”
— Resmaa Menakem

That patient I recently sat with talked about dropping a rock into a cesspool and the “ripples of shit” that make its way out and effect everyone. I think about how the world has behaved since 2020, and since October 7, and about our unhealed trauma rippling out, and what consequence it will have, what will people two, five, ten generations from now be doing to each other (in the name of faith!) because they think it will keep them safe, because they need to feel like they belong. You will not hear me advocate for an us/them binary. You will not hear me advocate for any kind of militaristic conquering in my understanding of faith, of “good versus” anything else. You will only hear me advocating for a love so radical that it changes us. It doesn’t erase our traditions, it doesn’t dilute our identity; and it recognizes the threshold where these become obstacles to connection with one another, and the harm done by our mis- and dis-connection. This love invites us to reach and move beyond that threshold into a circle where none of us is on the outside. Because this love makes us vulnerable and invites risk, it has to be sourced by the Divine. We have shown time and again that we are simply incapable of anything else.