Against Death

Every video I create
every photo I shoot
every poem I write
is a bullet fired
in a war against death
that I will inevitably lose.

But just because you’re on the losing side
doesn’t mean it’s the wrong side.

What is a video
but a fever dream?

What is a camera
if not a time machine?

What is a photo
if not your beloved
frozen in amber?

What is a poem
if not a perpetual motion machine,
a story told and told
and told again?

This is how people defy physics
and transform into pure light.

The Irish say
the final death you die
is the last time someone
speaks your name.

If that’s true, I hope my voice
echoes your syllables
off the azure arched ceiling of sky
for eternity.

This is stupid and it’ll never work.
I can only scream for so long,
and this clock someday winds down
and ends up in the landfill of time.

But the way my wife’s cheek feels
beneath my palm,
I want to believe
that softness
will never vanish from the earth.

I want to believe that “alone”
is just a temporary condition.

I can’t believe in god
so this is where
I pour all my faith.

This is a foolish dream
as all dreams are foolish.

And beautiful.

Kevin Reitz, 1998.

Maybe you only live
as long as your heart
remains a child.

Jung Chin, 2003.

I hope my cynicism
does not kill me
long before it decides
to cease its beating.

Lily Chin-Woo, 2013.

Maybe this
is the only death
I can refuse
and if so, I will find a way
to make it sufficient.

Hung Yoo Chin, 2015.

I don’t want the earth to forget us.

You, someday.

I don’t want the earth to forget us.

Me, someday soon.

So let’s remember together.

Death has made us all
into hand grenades,
and to love anyone
is to pull the pin
and hug your own murder
tight to your chest.

How noble
to fight the war
you know you cannot win
but refuse to ignore.

How noble
to not go gently

to rage
and in doing so,
become the light.

Death Lessons

For my grandmother

 

Death doesn’t move.

Everlasting in its immobility

modern colossus mocking us,

the only inevitable thing

worth believing.

 

We are a blink, a joke without a punchline

shouted into the surf,

a mouthful of salt water

our only reward.

 

The most uncomfortable part

of a hospital bed

is standing next to it.

I want to die at home.

Hot soup after shoveling snow

and dying under a familiar roof

are probably the only comforts

you can really count on.

 

Some batteries aren’t rechargable.

Soap operas go on forever,

with new actors

playing old characters.

I wish life could be like this,

but commercial breaks are murder.

The series gets renewed

but the actors all get fired.

We watch reruns

and wonder what happened

to that guy.

 

Death is a lay off.

It’s the world downsizing,

how it says

like a broken camera,

you need to focus better

on the central subject.

 

Death is a crappy teacher

who hands you a textbook

and a syllabus

and says

you’ll figure it out on your own.

 

Death is the math of relativity

instructing you

on how stark moments become

when they come with time limit,

 

Death is  the fingertip

pinprick at sunset

that makes dusk orange flare vivid.

 

Writing the Grief, losing track of time.

I’m back at work today because I was beginning to forget what day it was. Separated from the structure of the five day work week, I began to lose track of which day was which, what I had to do, what commitments I had made. I’m the kind of person who makes a ton of commitments, gets bogged down by them, gets stressed out over them, but almost always completes them and feels good about that. I schedule my life out months in advance. I give time to people, causes, and organizations. Keeping it all organized and together, as well as prioritizing what matters to me and what doesn’t – that is an important component of who I am. Or at least who I think I am.

When my mother died, I dropped everything. I don’t drop everything for anything. Or anyone. But there was never any question that I would cancel all my plans and spend time with my family. The clarity of purpose was brutally sharp.

Now I’m back at work, full of an uncertain future, in a life that I finally feel like I own, and the only thing I want to do is get on schedule again. Start committing. Work harder (or blog harder, in any case). But my work has, for so long, felt like a rut. Why do I keep doing this? Why do I feel like I need this?

Maybe it’s the distraction. Maybe it’s the structure. Maybe it’s because when I get deep into a project, I can feel like I still have both parents. Right now though, I need to get back to work.

Writing the Grief – religious sentiments

Religious sentiments in the face of tragedy used to really piss me off, for various reasons. Two I’ll cite here are: 1) they usually seemed to minimize the sufferer’s pain, and 2) they felt like snake oil.

Now that my mother’s dead, I understand why people apply them. Because when things don’t make sense, when people are in pain, they reach for something, anything, to ease that pain. And that’s human. And natural. And I understand it and deal with it so much better now, I think.

As I grow older, I learn to better appreciate perspectives that aren’t my own. Worlds that aren’t my own. Words that aren’t my own. I’m growing up, who would’ve thought?

Writing the Grief, the last few days.

So I’ve been away from this blog, away from Facebook, and away from my e-mail for a few days, which, if you know me, is an extended period of time. During this time, I’ve delivered my eulogy twice, seen my family members weep over my dead mother’s body multiple times, seen my father cry more in the last few days than I had in the last thirty years, and said goodbye to the woman who birthed and raised me while simultaneously celebrating her life.

It’s not an emotional stew. It’s an emotional avalanche. It’s everything, all at once. There was a Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns finds out that everything is trying to kill him at once, but because the disease can’t “fit through the door” so to speak, he just couldn’t die. That’s kind of how I am right now, but with emotions instead of diseases. I’m not… numb per se. But I’ve got a million things going on right now and I’m not sure what order to feel them in. Overwhelming is an understatement.

My mother is being cremated and interred in a small, idyllic cemetery near my childhood home. Today was the last time I was going to see her body. That feeling is still sinking in. As much as we all like to say that they aren’t in that box, they are, in a way, in that box. The morticians did an amazing job; my mom looked the way she did five years ago, before the disease really ravaged what was left of her body. While a dead person is still a dead person, it was astonishing. That made it both easier and harder. Her gaunt, skeleton-like appearance when she first died was indicative of all of her suffering, and in a way, all of ours. Her restored appearance, post-embalming, erased that almost completely. But it also made it less real – the death, the loss. Today, in the last few minutes we would have with her, it really slammed me.

Both viewings yesterday and today were lively affairs, believe it or not. My family is not one that succumbs to morbidity and despair easily. These last few days we saw friends and neighbors and family members that we hadn’t seen in years, sometimes decades. There was a lot to talk about. There was a lot to catch up on. It was easy to get lost in the joy of that. To get swept up in the love and support. And there was a LOT of it. It was weird for me. I’m used to being the supporter, not the supported. It’s hard for me to accept any of that. But I did my best, and it really did elevate my spirits.

At the end of each day, my father spoke about his life with my mother. He spoke about how they met, what their lives together meant. He broke down throughout the eulogy, but true to his character, he struggled onward, and conquered his tears each time. I was proud of him for the moving and meaningful things he said about my mother, about her character, about their love, without a script, without a safety net, with all that emotion, with everyone watching. Then my Aunt Betty, my mother’s older sister, spoke about their lives together as protesters, as sisters, as family. They told the story of my mother’s sweet sixteen, and how they rehabilitated an old stable behind their house, how they cleaned and repainted it, and how much the boys loved my mom. She also mentioned how my mother held the banners the highest and laughed the loudest. My father always said I had a lot of my mom in me, and I think that’s just more proof.

Then I gave my speech, which I’ll probably post later. I went off script near the end, regarding two things – my last memory of my mother and what this has taught me (This is actually way rougher than I delivered it during the eulogy because I am currently soul-deep tired). My last memory of my mother was the evening of Wednesday, May 29th. She was having trouble breathing because of congestion. She was death rattling, I realized later. My sister and father were pumping her chest, helping her breathe and clear the congestion. I couldn’t do much really besides hold her hand and say, “We’re all here, mom. We love you.” The care that my sister and father gave my mother was astonishing and loving and beautiful. They are my heroes. I am not afraid to say that. They are my heroes.

The other thing is this – I saw all the friends and family around me, and I knew that I still had far more than I lost. Even though I was heart broken, I knew there was so much in my life to look forward to, so many people in my life who still loved me. That is an amazing feeling – that there is still so much and so many people in my life to treasure.

Then we all paid our last respects, and that’s when all the joy and all the life fled the room. Maybe I’m selfish. Maybe I don’t want to face the reality of death (a definite, and likely, possibility). But as soon as we started focusing on the death itself, we all started hurting again – as if all the joy we found (or at least I found, I can’t speak for everyone else) died with all the wonderful talk. Suddenly it was just us, alone, against the enormity of death. And I fucking hate that.

Carolyn said that these two things aren’t mutually exclusive – that celebrating my mom’s life and mourning her passing are meant to go together. I know she’s right. I just hate seeing the people I love in pain. I hate being in pain. (Who really likes it?)

I had trouble tearing myself away from the casket today. I couldn’t bring myself to touch her (kissing her cold forehead on Friday afternoon was the most awful experience of my life, but I couldn’t stop doing it) so I squeezed the edge of the casket in my hands as hard as I could. And in my head, I promised her I would live every day of my life in her honor. I would take the days of my life and use them well, in the ways that she never could because she was so, so sick.

I’ve been in a rut with my job for a long time. I think it’s time I started looking elsewhere, trying to figure things out. I need to do something, anything more. I have too much to give, too much love in my heart, too much care for the world, to burn a third of my life churning butter for my corporate masters. Life is just too precious.

I have to say that my mother’s sickness and death is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, full stop. But at the same time, I can feel vast vistas of existence, of possibility, opening up before me. Before she died, the horizon only held death and pain, and the possibility of more suffering – hers and ours. Now… who knows? My mom’s been sick since I was 13. I’m 30 now. I have no idea what my life can or could be. But I’m going to find out, one way or another. Before, it seemed like any effort I made would be doomed to failure. Why? Because my mother was going to die. Now? Who knows?

I want to find out. For the first time in my life.

Writing the Grief, June 2, 12:12 AM

I’m realizing how much of my life revolved around my mother’s impending death. My mom has been sick since I was thirteen (and that was only when she was diagnosed, symptoms were already going on already), and now, seventeen years later, she has succumbed to that. And her whole condition has been getting steadily worse as time went on – from limping to the wheelchair to bedridden invalid. It’s been really tough.

My mother has been in hospice since March 6, 2012. I know because that’s the day that Mass Effect 3 came out. (Spoiler: Thane’s death scene prayer to Kalahira DESTROYED me) Suddenly a day I had been looking forward to for almost a year because a day to dread, to fear. And that has influenced a lot of my thinking post college. The future has been something to dread, something to fear, for so long. All possible outcomes of all possible conditions (work, love, art) were painful and terrible and absolutely certain. Nothing held any real promise. Nothing could actually change the situation I was in (much like nothing could change the course of my mother’s disease, the prognosis, and the outcome).

I can see that now. It is an amazing thing, to have this perspective, no matter how much pain I’m in at this moment.

That being said, I don’t have a fucking clue what to do now. I know now, more than ever, even as these posts are inspiring people and bringing them comfort (or so my friends tell me, maybe they’re just humoring me), that art should be the direction my life takes. But for a really long time, for my childhood and my adulthood up til now, I was “the guy with a terminally ill mother.” That is a really fucking weird thing to be. Especially when the disease isn’t something common like cancer. I’m not trying to minimize the pain that the family of cancer victims feel, but it gets really fucking exhausting describing your mother’s illness over and over and over again. It begins to define your life. It begins to define YOU. So who the hell am I now? I don’t know. My fiancee said that we’ve been on the downward slope for so long, and now we’ve hit bottom, and there’s nowhere to go but up.

But by that same logic, I have NO FUCKING IDEA what up looks like. I haven’t been going up since 13. I’ve spent more of my life going down than going up. That’s insane to me. My friends have called me a pessimist and I’ve always insisted that I’m a brutal realist, but maybe my friends were right. But maybe I was also right to be a pessimist. What did I have to look forward to?

This is most identifiable in my feelings about my impending wedding. I haven’t been able to look forward to it. All the little details (centerpieces, decorations, music, clothes) have meant so little to me. Pondering and dealing with them has been very frustrating to me, because all of it seemed so disgustingly inconsequential compared to my mother’s impending death. How could the future be anything but a painful, awful, shitty, unfair disappointment? How could any of it matter? Any of it at all?

And in a way it didn’t. And maybe it shouldn’t have. But my mother is dead now. Her suffering is over. My grieving (and in a way, my suffering) is just beginning. But this is also the beginning of the end. It’s a new chapter. And the last chapter lasted seventeen fucking years. So I’m lost. I’m feeling around in the dark, finding the furniture with my shins, which adds to the hurt.

My parents’ house (and I’ve taken to calling it “my parents’ house” again, not just “my dad’s house”), which was never an easy place for me to be, has become a minefield of old memories. Anywhere I go, anywhere I step, I find something to remind me of my mother. It’s awful. But I’m finding that the bad memories, the ones that hurt me in the past, are fading, and the good memories, the ones I want to remember, the ones that are hurting me RIGHT NOW, are the ones that are appearing in bold, full color, high definition. Memory is burnishing my memory of my mother. I think that’s natural. I think that’s inevitable. And I think I’m okay with that.

I mean let’s be real here. I was sobbing over a fucking leg brace five hours ago. This is not going to be easy. I’m still figuring out who and what I am. And where I’m going. But that’s okay. It’s day by day now, and there’s no telling where the day may lead. And in the words of Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half, “not knowing feels strangely hope-like.”

Writing the Grief, June 1, 7:48 PM

I started to lose it the longer I spend at my parents’ house. I was in the backyard and the sight of my mother’s laundry line almost drove me nuts. I started to freak out and lose it. I ran inside and needed to be alone, and went into my sister’s old bedroom. It was like that moment in a horror movie when the victim runs from the monster and slams the door shut and thinks he’s safe. But it turns out he’s in a room FULL of monsters. And then it’s just all over.

My sister’s old bedroom is full of my mother’s things. A workout bike she never used. Tons of her old clothes. Old meds and medical devices. I ended up weeping with my mother’s plastic and metal leg brace in my hands. It felt like all I had left. In a way it was. This is going to be a long, hard road.

Writing the Grief

Stuff I’ve written on Facebook and elsewhere since my mother’s death:

June 1, ~10 AM

 

The thing that’s bothering me most today is the fact that my mom won’t be able to see me get married. We were going to Skype her in, use live webcasting, something. Now she won’t be there to see it. I don’t believe in ghosts, heaven, souls, etc., but I know those who do would say now she has the best seat in the house, with no disease, no fear, no worry. Sometimes I like to believe that.

June  ~12 PM

Right after my mother died, the only comfort I found was in poetry. It was the only thing that made sense. I’ve been struggling to figure out what I want my life to be about for the last few years. Now, I think I know. Thanks mom. I miss you already.

 

June 1 ~7PM

It’s not the same house without my mom. I had taken to calling it “my father’s house” a while ago, partially out of anger at my mother, and partially because my dad was the parent I was able to interact with the most. Now it truly is “my father’s house” alone and that is really really fucking sad. The gut ripping despair and agony I can deal with. It’s this ongoing, low grade, background-radiation sort of sadness that’s hard to deal with. When I start to relax, I remember that mom’s dead, and then relaxing becomes impossible, something I can’t have and don’t deserve.

From May 31, 2013

My mother, Lily Chin-Woo passed away at noon today. The last person to speak to her was my sister. She told her, “You are an inspiration to me every day.” She died peacefully, in bed, at home. My father and my sister provided amazing care to her throughout her illness, which lasted over a decade and a half. To say that they are my heroes is a vast understatement. My mother’s pain is over now, and that is a relief to us all. All things end, even those both beautiful and terrible.

I was about to leave to see her when I found out. I was planning on reading her poetry today, but I never got a chance. That was an immense blow.

While I am hurting, and the grief comes in waves, at the moment, I feel strangely at peace. I no longer have to live in fear of my mother’s death. The worst has already come and gone. My mother and I didn’t have the best relationship, but in the final months, I forgave her, told her I loved her many times, that I would be okay, and that it was all right for her to go – that we would be all right, even without her. The anger I once had for her is gone – gone like her body, ephemeral as a ghost. Like it was never real to begin with. I feel like a different person. Weeping into my father’s shoulder, I asked him if my mother was proud of me. He said, “Of course she was! What kind of question is that?! She loved you and she wanted what was best for you!”

I read her poems from Li-Young Lee’s “Rose”, an amazing book of poems by that Chinese American poet. The most potent and relevant of which was “From Blossoms”

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

On my way home to my apartment in Jersey City today, I saw people dressed up and ready to go out to the city, to bars, to nightclubs. They will dance. They will drink. They will meet and hook up and fuck and dream and love and do all the amazing life-affirming things you should do on the last day of May. And I am deeply comforted by that for some reason. Life goes on, as it should. As it always does.

I am incredibly thankful for Christine Bolesta and Chris Kulawiak, who were there for my family and me today, who are practically family themselves. And without Carolyn, the love of my life, I never would’ve made it through this. And last but not least, thank you to everyone who has offered me care and love and support in person or via Facebook. My mother has been in hospice care since March of 2012. This has been an arduous marathon run. Thank you, everybody, for helping me see this through to the end.

I’ll know more about services soon, and I’ll post about it in the next few days.

I love you all.

How soon is too soon?

“When’s the right time?”

 

This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately. Recently, Ed Koch died. In case you didn’t know, Koch was the mayor of New York from 78-89, during the AIDS epidemic. You can read a bit about his record here. http://gawker.com/5980791/ed-koch-is-dead?popular=true (Yes, I know it’s Gawker, but it’s a pretty good article regardless.)

 

On the day of his death, I was driving around in my car, and heard a lot about how sad it was that Koch died. This irritated me. Many activists, including Larry Kramer, founder of GMHC and ACT UP, accuse Koch of murderous indifference and inaction to the suffering of the gay community in those days. I brought this up on my Facebook the day of (You can see the posts on Feb 1). While I received support, I also received criticism that it was too soon to mention these things.

 

My question is: when is the right time to start discussing the foibles and failures of public officials / celebrities after they die? One day? One week? A month? A year? This is an honest question.

 

Does it have to do with the egregiousness of their offenses? There is obviously a line in the sand somewhere. Nobody was sad when Eichmann was assassinated, and nobody shed any tears when Pol Pot died. At some point, a person can do so much evil that it outweighs any potential good. (Note: I don’t believe that Koch’s mistakes even approach those of Eichmann and Pot.)

 

 

Does your proximity to the wounded parties affect it? I would say it does. There’s a difference between, say, someone posting on Facebook and someone protesting a funeral. I was compared to the WBC, which I thought wasn’t at all accurate – mostly because I was standing up for queer rights, not attempting to destroy them, and my proximity to Koch and his loved ones was fairly distant at best. I didn’t, and wouldn’t, go to Koch’s funeral and hold a sign and shout.

 

But there’s something that really sticks in my craw when people defend Koch’s right to die on clean white sheets, and afterward have his image burnished, while gay men died by the thousands in New York City, shunned by hospitals and ignored by the government, in incredibly painful and humiliating ways, while many Americans called AIDS some kind of holy retribution against queer people. How can we be silent? How can we forget that?

 

On another note, my friend Thomas Fucaloro asked me how discussing Koch’s callous failure to address the AIDS epidemic in the 80s helps today’s victims. After doing some thinking, I decided that we can’t address the present state of an issue without understanding and remembering the history of oppression that helped create this issue. AIDS got as bad as it did for a reason. Koch is not the only person who shrunk away from this issue, nor is he the only one to blame. But his actions should not be forgotten. Remembering helps us struggle, helps us connect to our past, and remember who our enemies are. It’s not the rotating cast of cardboard villains presented in entertainment news – it’s the people in power who would declare us less than human.

 

How long did it take us to truly remember what Christopher Columbus did? Andrew Jackson? These men are absolutely blood-soaked. And there are places in America where children are still not learning the truth about their history. This should worry anyone.

 

Mourning is important, but I believe that remembering the stories of our nations, particularly the stories of oppressed and silenced communities is also important – It may be even *more* important.  When you see history through rose-tinted glasses that glamorize our successes and obscure our failures, you fail to learn from it.

 

If I’ve learned one thing in my life, it’s that fact. “Never forget” is more than a pithy slogan – it’s the only way out of oppression.

 

In closing, I must admit: I am terrified that the death of George W. Bush will lead people to claim that he “helmed the ship during a difficult time in American history” rather than acknowledge that his actions precipitated the massive erosion of civil rights and international war that claimed thousands of American, Afghani, and Iraqi lives unnecessarily. How did we forget the lessons of Vietnam, and the violence, surveillance, and suppression of dissent that took place in the 60s? Grief at the deaths on 9/11.

 

From 9/11 to Bush to Ed Koch, I don’t believe we should never let grief blind us. When do we get to talk about a person’s mistakes, and during what time must we only talk about their successes?