Without a Star, &

I thought I knew something about loss. Fireworks burst over the Salvadoran coast, blue, red and green, each pulse a heartbeat, a flower blooming then wilting, the spit and crackle of unseasoned wood. It was New Year’s Eve, entering 2022, and we were grateful to let go. We thought we’d been doled out enough loss; in a span of three years, we lost my father, my father-in-law, my mother’s brother and sister, two good friends, and my grandmother. But loss does not seek permission to enter. It steps right into our lives, without regard to the current scene. Life does not keep a balance sheet of losses; they accumulate and sometimes come back-to-back. Throughout my life I’ve experienced complicated crises: our family’s exile from El Salvador due to the civil war; the destruction of our Miami childhood home in Andrew, a category 5 hurricane; a car crash at age 21 that left me with a shattered pelvis and forced me to learn to walk again with 12 pins in my hip; a Salvadoran earthquake of 7.6 followed by a second 6.6 earthquake one month later; and of course, the COVID-19 pandemic Those all left deep wounds, but the 4am phone call I received that New Year’s Eve taught me I didn’t know anything about disaster. 

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My earliest memory revolves around fear of death: My mother’s fingers deep in the back of my throat, the retching contractions as I vomit into the noonbright lawn. My cousin and I had celebrated a tea party with cough medicine that was high on the dresser, but still within my reach. It was creamy and sweet, and we’d nearly finished the bottle when my mother walked in and hauled us outside. I can still see my nanny’s white uniform resplendent in the sun as she holds my cousin’s head to release fountains of pink tea. 

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Disaster revolves around death—the orbit pulls, we swim against the current, the edge we float above. It is so slight, a turn of wind, seconds away, an inch too close. And we deny ourselves the possibility of recognizing it; we think, It won’t happen to me, or Not today.

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A 4 am phone call almost always points to disaster. My mom had a heart attack. She didn’t make it, is what my sister said, and the phone fell out of my hand. Each of us called her my mom and when we’d say things like, My mom said I could use the car tonight, it led others to believe she was not our shared mom. She signed her cards: Tu Mamy, and in that way, for each of us, she was a unique, and personal mother. And so, on January 1, 2022, after a rosary of many other losses, my sisters’ mom died, my brother’s mom died, my mom died. The last of our elders. I received this information in waves, pulses. My room shut against everything, dark as a sky with no stars. With each thought, each realization, She’s gone, a bright white burst.

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I spent a good measure of that night focusing my attention on some undefined place on the floor, imagining this is what yoga teachers tell you to tune into when you’re attempting a balance pose. “Let me begin again,” I thought, “Let me begin again as a speck / of dust caught in the night winds / sweeping out to sea.” And I was both perplexed and saddened I couldn’t remember to whom I should attribute those lines. The curtains must remain drawn. No sun could shine on me that day. I looked at the stack of poetry books on my bedside, and toppled the tower onto the floor, concluding thus: all poems must now end with this line, And now, my mother is no longer in this world. Even your poem, Philip Levine, asking to begin again, even yours. 

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The chronology is broken. Everything is disjointed. I am without direction, without a guiding light. The word disaster originates in the mid 16th century from the Italian dis-astro: without a star. I can only provide fragments; the weaving comes with time. Poetry begins when I question language—what is rimmed with silence, and what I can point to, invite others to witness alongside me. Details surface; I become hyperfocused, things are juxtaposed, my mind goes on a circuit of obsessive repetition. In laps, in lapse, in layers of earth, mantle, core, manticore. Prayer is incantatory and poetry evokes. In poetry I believe I can make those leaps, link the empty spaces. The closest approximation to the portrait of Two Fridas sitting alongside each other, sharing arteries. Perhaps that is what disaster requires—that I give you my piece and I receive yours and we understand that is our currency. The connection is what we behold. The real disaster is what goes unnoticed.

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To say Salvadoran women are aguantadoras is a true, but sad reality. To be resilient is to be constantly on guard, weathered, seasoned for emergency. A doctor friend of ours who traveled the world operating on children with cleft-palates said he discovered the best nurses are from El Salvador. They are perpetually alert and never flinch in crisis. But does that mean they always expect the worst? How to accept all things in equal balance? Talking with my dear friend who lost her husband of twenty years in a bicycle accident, we agreed that once you’ve experienced a deep loss it’s not about glass half-full or glass half-empty. When you’ve touched ground, I tell her. Yes, she says, When you get to that point, it becomes clear you can carry sorrow at the same time as you feel joy. Rilke says it best in his poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Beauty and terror. Not beauty or terror. 

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December 31, 2021, our altar decorated with sand dollars, pink fingernail-thin halfshells, yellow plumeria, seagrape leaves large as dinner plates, and a branch of bougainvillea. We offer our findings from the last days; my husband and three children lay out the treasures as a show of gratitude and a prayer for blessings. Crowning the altar, Virgen de Guadalupe candles and sandalwood incense burn all day long. 

My extended family’s past New Year’s were a potpourri of traditions, in addition to Catholic mass, fireworks, and twelve grapes, there was the Walter Mercado-recommended yellow or red underwear, the rolling suitcases paraded at midnight, the bucket of water tossed onto the driveway, the tarot readings. On this night my siblings, my mother, and I were in different places but a videocall brought us together. My mother’s tarot reading ended on the ten of cups promising harmony, bliss, and divine love. My last words to her: This is going to be your year, Mom!

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Disaster begins with the unexpected. And I have always been unhinged with this need to foresee. Everywhere, I look for signs, try to conjure a divination. Every year I re-read Letters to a Young Poet and Rilke tries to teach me to “love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.”

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In her last weeks my mother wore only flower-embroidered house dresses, already tight around her middle, and when she wasn’t reading or on the computer, she spent afternoons smoking alongside the orchids on her porch, hacking her wet cough, and in the overfull ashtray, a pack of half-smoked cigarettes perfectly lined up, symmetrical as gravestones. I am a disaster, she’d say to us. Doctors said her heart and veins seemed to be clear, maybe it was anxiety and so they upped her Xanax, but more tests proved her COPD was flaring up and she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Those final days she walked around the house like a deep-sea diver connected to a tank, tube in nose. 

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My mother was my first reader and editor. Bedtime stories sounded in her voice. My poems had to pass her filter. She gave me a leather-bound collector’s edition Rumi with hand-painted illustrations. It holds a version of the poem I repeated as I imagined her walking through her house, towing the oxygen tank, breathing shallow through the tube. My favorite version of “The Diver’s Clothes” is the translation by Coleman Barks. Everything runs together, there are no limits to the self as the speaker morphs from diver to the diver’s empty clothes, to the fish they seek, to the surf, to “the sound of no shore.” The speaker beckons to us and to themselves, we are the past and the present, we are the beholder and the beholden. We are not or; we are the ampersand in the constant loop of and, and, and.