only love

Two weeks ago my friend took his life. What a strange saying—as if we could take our own lives. As if it wasn’t a force so much bigger than him that pushed his neck into that loop of rope. They call it suicide but what is suicide, if not the endpoint of the lie of a self contained by lines, the lie that says we alone are responsible for the weight of our pain? Isn’t this just another way of casting blame on those who have already been pushed and pushed, by numberless acts of cruelty and abandonment, towards the bottle or pill or gun or bus or noose or bridge, pushed until they are gone, and their faraway mother—the one they sent their earnings to in their dream of liberating her from poverty— is sent instead the bill for their cremation?

This is what happened. Last Friday I got a text from my friend, B., who was our nanny years ago in Costa Rica. We had become close, and when we moved to an island in the Pacific Northwest, she and her boyfriend joined us. We had moved twice again since then, but we stayed connected. Hola Tachi puedes llamarme por favor. It was a busy morning, the day we were to heave our belongings from Portland to our new home in Canada. My five year old capered around my feet while I rushed to pack up the Airbnb—the clock was ticking; there was no way I would be done by check-out time—and my partner and twelve-year-old were at the storage unit, loading boxes into a rented truck. After a quick lunch, we got on the road, but as we rolled north, my concern grew—B.’s message had lodged in my heart like a splinter pulsing an escalating alarm. I texted: hola, te llamaré tan pronto como pueda, ¿estás bien?

B. responded immediately: No muy bien D. se quitó la vida.

I called her. It was hard to catch everything she said; her Spanish was fast and blurred by sobs. I wanted more than anything to go to her right away, but we were on a mission; we had hours of driving and two ferry rides ahead of us to get home, the truck to unload, and a third ferry the next morning to return it to UHaul. A couple of days later, with my five year old in the back, I drove back onto the boat, and across the border. Seven hours later I was on Vashon Island. I left my kid with friends, then went to B.’s apartment and put my arms around her, and felt, like I always feel, too small.

She told me, through tears, how sad he had been the day before it happened. He had cried and cried, because the cat he loved had died, and asked her to take him to the beach. B. said no, she was nervous about driving that far, the risk of being pulled over was too high. The next morning, D. started the day with beer. I thought he stopped drinking? I asked. He did, B. said, then he started again. He was frustrated. There was no work. He was alone in the apartment every day, playing video games on his phone. He spoke to his grandmother that morning, and told her he would be home in December. They had pooled their earnings—the small portion they kept after sending money to relatives—and bought land in Nicaragua, near his family. Their plan was to return in a few months.

He sounded happy when he spoke to his family, but then the alcohol changed him. My friend turned away to protect herself. She sat on the floor reaching out to something bigger for help, mumbling a prayer to drown out the angry music D. was playing. Then the music stopped; the apartment was quiet. She turned, and saw him hanging from the ceiling fan. The EMTs were too late to save him.

*

D. was twenty-five. Like B. he was from Nicaragua, the quiet sidekick of the builder who led the construction of our earthen home in Costa Rica. He was a sweet, beautiful boy with copper skin, black curls and sad eyes, so shy he barely spoke, wiry, fiercely strong, and heroic in his competence. B. began dating him, and soon they moved in together. After our house was built, D. decided to make the journey to the United States. We worried about him but couldn’t stop him. He wanted to send money back to his mother. He wanted to save up and buy land and build his own home. He wanted to change his life in ways that felt impossible in Latin America.

A few months later, we decided to move out of the ecovillage. B. looked sadder than I had ever seen her when I told her the news. I found her work, but it wouldn’t be the same; she had loved my baby since he was 8 months old, and we had become family. A month later, once we were settled in up north, B. decided to make the journey to our island in the north, the only way she could. It took her weeks to cross Nicaragua, Honduras and Mexico. Finally she arrived in Texas and applied for asylum, and the border guards delivered her, as if she were a criminal, to a detention center where the air conditioning was turned up so high everyone got sick. They took her backpack and the nose ring out of her nose; they didn’t even leave her a change of clothes. Once she was released I got her a flight to Seattle; the next day I picked her up at the airport. When I hugged her she was trembling and congested, and her body told mine what words can’t communicate.

*

Words feel as inadequate now as they did then. But after D.’s death, with this country accelerating towards dystopia, and who knows how many more brown Latino kids shaking at the edge of the abyss, silence would be betrayal. So I’m trying with these awkward, insufficient words to understand what is happening in our world. I know this is impossible: there are things I will never understand. There are things that can never be understood by those of us who wield passports and credit cards with breezy entitlement. Who go where whimsy takes us and are met with smiles, not guards who force us into detention centers that deny us our humanity. Those of us who live with the assumption of comfort and security granted by white privilege, whose lives were not defined by systemic racism and classist hostility. I can’t know what it was like for my friends when they were babies, and their mothers left them with their grandparents, like they had been left themselves, bequeathing a legacy of emptiness that could never be filled. I can’t imagine the terror of that abandonment, or what happens in the absence of the mother’s protection, or the suffering that becomes reality for the vulnerable kids left behind. I can’t know the grief of the mothers who leave because the poverty is inescapable, the abuse intolerable, and pain has driven them across a threshold no mother should face.

Neither can I know what it’s like to cross four countries on a desperate journey toward uncertain possibilities, crammed into a car with eight or ten or twelve other passengers—a car that won’t stop for you to go pee because stops are dangerous, and there are so many miles to cover. I have never spent a night in a concrete room with one thin blanket to share between a group, or been forced by a cruel coyote to run when I am so exhausted all I want is to collapse, and to cross rivers that terrify me because I never had the luxury of being taught how to swim. I don’t know what that journey was like for D., or what happened along the way. But months later, after he rode in buses from Colorado to Seattle and joined us in our home—he wouldn’t take an airplane; he was scared to fly—his eyes were shadowed in a way they had not been in Costa Rica. “They hate us,” he told B.

Sometimes the divide feels uncrossable. The rift in realities—between those of us who are treated with contempt and threatened with deportation, and those of us who take our easy lives for granted, and travel for fun—is so wide. But the sum of all we can’t know is small, compared to all we can feel when we open our hearts. Living with my Nicaraguan friends, I felt what was deeper than our differences; I felt what connected us. What is harder for me is to feel a connection with the the sociopaths in charge. What is hard for me is to rise above my urge to despise the billionaires whose policies institutionalize such incomprehensible meanness. It is hard for me not to call it evil—that bullying power that built a world in which kids like D. go through hell to get to the land of their dreams, then end up so hopeless they put their neck in the nightmare of a noose. But the reaction of othering feeds the conditions that trap us in suffering. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.

*

A few months after our Nicaraguan friends joined us in our rental, we bought a property on the island. D. single-handedly renovated the main house, and then the apartment above the garage. He pulled up the plastic floors, and laid down the salvaged hardwood I bought at the rebuilding center. He hammered in shelving, cut open walls, and hoisted onto his shoulders the heavy wooden windows that took three ordinary men to carry when they were delivered; one by one, by himself, this boy who probably weighed as little as I do carried those huge windows on his thin back and installed them, working steadily until the job was done. He never complained when I changed my mind eight times about paint colours; he loved painting and completed our walls, as he completed all tasks, with astonishing speed and skill. When he was finished we moved into the house, and he and B. moved into the apartment.

A month later, for complicated reasons, we decided to move our family back to Costa Rica. Again, my heart ached to say goodbye to B.; again, I worried about D.. The boy who shone when occupied with a job was eclipsed by the shadows inside him when the work was gone. And it was hard for him to find work, despite his competence. He spoke no English. Employers said they would call, but the calls never came. Fascist times make people nervous about hiring workers without papers. And so, in the anguish of empty days, D. sedated and distracted himself, as we do, with what was at hand. And the beer and video games—those socially approved drugs and habits that disconnect bodies and souls—numbed his pain so he could go on pretending to be all right, even as they amplified the wails of his inner ghosts, until all that was suppressed became the knot that ended his life.

*

They call it suicide but I don’t believe it. A boy like D. couldn’t make that lunge towards the darkest darkness, that decision that goes against every instinct, unless they had internalized a world’s worth of hatred. The desperation that made his last decision did not belong to D. and his ghosts alone. There was a pain in him that was more than his story explained, despite the trauma it included—a pain connected to the nervous system of history, collected over centuries of colonialism and genocide and racism and classism, ratcheted up by the stress of being undocumented in a nation that is rabid in its collapse. D. was pushed into that noose by a world that tells some people they can have everything they want, while others— those who build our houses, scrub our toilets, weed our gardens, harvest our crops, and care for our kids— must work to the bone and barely survive. And they better keep shut their mouths in public, or risk being deported. But these seizures of xenophobia aren’t new—just another chapter of a narrative that has aimed for the apocalypse since day one. Its author is the liar inside us, that broken part who tells us we are better than them.

I have been too quiet, and maybe we have all been too quiet, like those good Germans who pretended everything was fine, while my relatives were herded onto cattle cars and delivered to concentration camps. I have been too quiet about the horrors unfolding in my backyard, just as I have been too quiet about the genocide being perpetrated by descendents of those relatives who were, a few generations ago, the victims of the monster they have become. The monster we have all become. Every time we look away, every time we ignore a cry for help, every time we suppress or reject a feeling, we add to its power. Its malevolence is as old as the crack in the heart of the world. It has blinded us for generations, with the perks of compliance and the make-up on its face. But blindness is becoming untenable, and hiding from the monster is impossible: its heads are everywhere, and its hunger is endless.

I have been too quiet, but the day comes when you can’t be quiet anymore. The boy who died was not a statistic but a friend, who played with my kid in the backyard, whose gentle smile I can’t forget—and nothing feels more important than transforming everything unconscious inside me, every habit of separation, conviction of superiority, and assumption of entitlement; every urge to turn away and condemn the other. It’s time to go beyond the company of those who are just like me. To open my heart wider than ever before. To practice, with ferocious devotion, our primordial, world-bridging, empire-shattering power—the power of connection.

This power is the outcast within us all, the refugee most loathed by forces of toxic authoritarianism, the trickster fated to unravel their monstrous plans. This power is the brilliance of nature, within whose body all religions, nations, flags and borders are bound to dissolve. No walls can survive her roar; no armies can stop her. She is the god whose laws are entanglement and interdependence, and she will outlive all passing tyrannies. When I am crushed by grief I turn to her, and this is what she tells me: resisting the regime does not require heroism. It requires attention to the people in front of our faces, the people who need help now, whose lives are held in the balance by the smallest of kindnesses. I cannot go back and do more for D., but I pray to awaken for the D.s who are still here. Maybe if enough of us are awake, we can make ourselves into a net to catch the children who are falling, and a force of love that reaches beyond this world, to hold the ones who are already gone.