Without a Star, Surrender

Editor’s Note:
This is the third installment in a three-part essay. Read Part II here

After the pandemic, I understood surrender. 

It was February 2020, my father had just died, we’d sold our childhood home in Miami, and I was helping my mother move, when international borders suddenly closed. Like many others who were separated from their families, I was apart from my husband and kids for three full moons: The Worm Moon, Pink Moon, Flower Moon. Those most desperate were flying into Nicaragua and entering El Salvador via small fishing boats. A good friend who was dying of pancreatic cancer managed to negotiate entry for us to San Salvador via ambulance jet. We landed at a military airport and were received by a medical team and 20 armed men. They allowed my friend’s family to take her home, but I was to be taken to a quarantine center, where I would be held for an indefinite amount of time. I was led to a van with boarded up windows, a plywood separator between the armed guards and me. A back window was cracked open to allow for air and a sliver of greenery. 

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Before my mind understood surrender, my body had to learn to surrender. A car crash at the age of 20 left me bedridden for six weeks, with a shattered pelvis, internal bleeding, and a ruptured spleen. The stargazer lilies in my hospital room evoked Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips”: “Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.”

My mother accompanied me through that summer of morphine-drip hospitalization and traction, a five hour surgery, and into fall’s rehabilitation, which would allow me to walk again. Size zero skirts slid off my hips. I was a bag of bones, and I hoarded pain meds to get high and let days fizzle away. My mother and I watched foreign films and she brought me books I was too dazed to read. I’d survived a disaster worse than my anxiety had ever spurred. As a child, I was terrified of being alone and I’d slip into my parents’ bed every night. For the first time, I no longer felt dread. Rather than spiraling out in fear, the near-miss of death anchored me.

My mother was a death-whisperer. Hay que pedir por una buena muerte, she used to say, pray for a good death. She’d sat alongside many loved ones as they approached their final hours, reading to them, listening to their worries, and guiding them with reassuring words. Hold their hands, she told me, look them in the eye, reassure them they aren’t alone. But you also need to know when to step away because the dead cannot leave this earth if they still have attachments. She described the hollow breath and glazed eyes that indicated they were entering the beyond. In a letter she wrote to her cousin who was dying of cancer: To me, you are unforgettable and if one person knows you and loves you, you continue to exist.

Years later, during my first trip to Europe, I called my mother from Prague and described my solo visit to the astronomical clock in the Old Town Hall, the sun and moon rounding the hours across a zodiac framed by saints and a bell-ringing skeleton. I told her how I’d walked around the plazas, over the bridges, and felt at ease in the ancient city. I was reading Rilke and quoted lines: “Let this darkness be a bell tower / and you the bell. As you ring, / what batters you becomes your strength.” She commented on the timbre of my voice. I can tell you’re smiling, she said to me, you are your own best friend.” Both of us felt the snap of the umbilical cord—to see me alone and happy in the world was her greatest satisfaction. 

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At the quarantine center, the staff knocked on my door five times a day—three times to deliver a tray of food and twice to aim a thermometer at my forehead. I’d pull the chain off the door and, wearing a mask, greet doctors and nurses dressed in surgical blues, masks, plastic face shields, gloves. I’d sit on the bench outside my door while they examined me. The armed guard stood down the hall and tipped his hat, a gesture I couldn’t decipher: I’m watching you, or, I’m looking out for you. I breathed in my own breath over and over again. I waited for the robotic voice of the thermometer to read 36. All I hoped for was health: Eat the stewed vegetables, chew down the meat, swallow. Stay strong until they say you can leave. Other than these check-ins, I saw no one. Always, I kept a chair propped underneath the doorknob. In my head, lines from Tom Andrews’ “When Comfort Arrives” ran on repeat:

Who would look for signs this evening,

when the sky seems wrong from your small room 
and the future appears as something forgotten?

You want to walk and keep walking, 
tense steps toward an early home …

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Those months I spent with my mother during the international lockdown were our last goodbye. A widow of four months, she had recently moved out of our childhood home and into my grandmother’s house. I’d help my mother unpack boxes and she’d read to me from her diary and comment on old photos. We’d listen to Julio Iglesias with my 100-year-old grandmother and though Alzheimer’s had stolen her words she’d still offer smiles and hand-squeezes. I spent the days writing on the porch; my mother would join me in the pool for an afternoon swim. I’d cook dinner, we’d watch period-piece movies, and the next day would clasp its hands around the same routine. Always, I’d look for signs: a chalk rainbow, squirrels chattering and grooming each other on the branch of the Royal Poinciana tree. We were all living stanza by stanza. 

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At the Salvadoran quarantine center, I worked on my Gregor Samsa beetle embroidery and listened to an audiobook rendition of The Metamorphosis: “His room, a regular human room, only a little on the small side, lay quiet between the four familiar walls.” My sister says I was in Martha Stewart jail. Other people had it much worse—in containment centers far from their families, having to share cramped rooms without sunshine or fresh air, with only one bottle of water a day. My quarantine room had two large windows with a view of the rainy days, the volcano with its pillow of clouds smothering its face. I heard Salvadoran birds in the morning, the vegetable vendor in his van with mounted speakers calling out, la papa la papa, la papa. The giant tree by the electric fence of razor wire was loaded with rosy-cheeked mangos. 

The day my husband came to drop off food, I climbed up on the ledge of the window and saw him standing there, six stories below, just outside the walls. It had been so long since another human being had put their hands on me. I wanted to cry, to call out to him, but all I could do was press my body against the glass, the sun hitting my face and extended limbs. Seeing his face, his smile, knowing our bodies were now in the same country. And then the closing lines from Tom Andrews:

When comfort arrives, how will you see it,

by what dark luggage? Your friends know.
Its speech, they say, is a listening;

its mercy is severe—
empty yourself, and again.

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One year after all my elders died, I decided to conduct an experiment on the beach. The seafoam cast its lace over the rocks as I sat hip-deep in the Pacific, palming the black sand. I would let the next wave carry me, let it cover my ears, let my hair tangle around my face as it thrust me to shore. It pulled me back into the deep; I will let the ocean move around my body. Limp doll that I was, my arms arced over my head, my legs swung around, twisting my torso. Next wave: Foam crowned my head, I closed my mouth, but the ocean entered my nose, the back of my throat, my ears. I tried to let go thinking of how I’d once existed inside of water, had once breathed in water. More waves: I let my body be carried. For twelve waves of every month, I let myself be moved. “i did not know how to melt how to fall into another body,” says Juan Felipe Herrera in “Enuf.” Me dejé ir y el mar me llevó, this is my second thought in Spanish, clarifying my original thought in English: I thought I was letting the ocean move around my body but really, I was letting my body move around the ocean. The ocean did not need my permission, it would do what it wanted without negotiation.

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I’ve imagined the life of a lighthouse keeper. I’ve wished for unspooling time and silence, solitude. Instead of comforting touch, I’d choose encouragement from a far-off cheering section, on mute, like the wave of handkerchiefs as a boat pulls out of harbor. The hermit in me loves the concept of “show don’t tell.” When I write I can point to something, describe the parallels and junctures, without having to provide an explanation of how or why. Images do the heavy lifting. Detail and description collapse the distance between writer and reader. Ellen Bass says, “By observing we see more, by describing what we see, we understand more, we feel more, we discover something we didn’t know before we sat down to write that poem. That seeing, understanding, feeling, epiphany is what goes on in the reader as well.” When I think of pain and comfort, Bass’ poem “Basket of Figs” goes further into the intimate exchange between reader and writer, speaker and listener:

That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it, 
cradling it on my tongue like the slick 
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it

tenderly, as a great animal might 
carry a small one in the private 
cave of the mouth.

I wish I could have quoted Bass’ first line to my mother: “Bring me your pain, love.” I think of her dragging the oxygen tank down the hallway in the middle of the night, her heart bursting as New Year’s firework casings scattered all over the streets and beaches of the world. I see her falling to her knees on the white tiles. Did she whisper herself toward her own death? Did it come for her like a sudden wave? Did she feel me close, though I was in another country? I couldn’t have put words together. Words could not have mattered to her at that moment; she needed touch. With each folding and unfolding of that memory I think skin, kin, sting, wing, skim, skiff—touch, a desire that starts close and takes off. She once said she called me into this world, she willed myself to her. I am living through you, she wrote me in a letter, our children tie the loose ends. I fold and notch that memory.

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At the Salvadoran airport, I wait to welcome my son home from college. I stand in a crowd of people—ranging from little girls in spangled party dresses to grandmothers draped in towel-shawls. They talk excitedly and then hush as the sliding doors open. A certain pattern of body language emerges. As each passenger exits the airport doors, they move their heads to scan the crowd, their eyes eager to connect, to find their family. I think of my father, my aunt and uncle, my grandmother, my mother, all my elders—lost to us in three years. “All day the stars watch from long ago,” says W.S Merwin in “Rain Light.” From the multitudes, someone walks towards the person arriving, their arms open, extended, ready to sweep the person into their embrace. The two lean into one another, heads resting on shoulders. And always, as they take a step back to look into that long-lost face, they place their hands on the cheeks of their loved one. They pat and smooth hair and the contours of a face, taking them in, proving to themselves that the person is actually standing before them, in flesh and blood. Merwin reminds me, “My mother said I am going now / when you are alone you will be all right / whether or not you know you will know.” I’ll keep watch and when the door opens on my son’s smiling face, I will surrender into his arms, into the knowing and the unknowing.