When someone dies in my life, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing them letters. It’s a way to keep the relationship going: to say my piece, to work out unfinished business, to keep them up on current events. The letter provides a type of closure for me and a type of opening. It’s an acknowledgement my relationship with the person is forever changed, but not gone.

Last Friday was move day from New Orleans back to Seattle via a month-long, self-guided Civil Rights tour which I hope to document here. Before I get back to the topic of letter writing, a brief aside to catch you up on why we’re leaving New Orleans.

We had fallen in love with New Orleans, so much so, that we had put an offer on a 100-year old, remodeled, creole-style duplex in the 7^th Ward. Our dream was to live most of the year here and spend summers in Seattle. We loved our lifestyle. The slower pace, the celebration, the music, the high society mixed with down-home humility, the color, the heat, the charm, the southern hospitality, and God, the food! The lower cost of living and rental income that could flow from the tenant-side of the duplex, would have allowed me to focus on more entrepreneurial pursuits without pressure to bring in stable income for a bit. I had planned to focus on my writing, completing additional requirements towards my healthcare chaplaincy certification, and explore starting a corporate chaplaincy business.

On May 25, we spent our 12^th anniversary experiencing restaurant dining post-COVID for the first time since quarantine and welcomed a local musician into our large open living room for a private, physically distant house concert while neighbors babysat our son—a rare treat, on multiple levels, during those early days of COVID. It felt special, uniquely New Orleans. As we listened to the music, we sat marveling at our good fortune, oblivious to the fact that, on the same night, in Minneapolis, George Floyd was suffocating under the knee of a callous police officer.

As protest over George Floyd’s death erupted across the country, my husband felt a strong tug on his heart to go back home. During our many years in the northwest, he had been working alongside communities most impacted by the criminal justice system and to suddenly be so far away from the people in the movement he held dear soon became untenable.

One night he announced that he had a proposition that would “Fuck up our plan.”

Radical shifts to our plan are not uncommon in our household. We are the couple, who, after losing our parents, quit our jobs, sold our house, and traveled the world for 18-months. He announced that he felt called to go back to Seattle and be with his people in this unprecedented moment in history. From my perspective, there was work to do all over the country, not least of which was right under our noses in New Orleans. From my experience, building relationships and getting involved was open and available—at least in comparison to Seattle. But I understood what he meant. As an outsider, one should let the insiders lead. We were not insiders here. The problem was, saying yes to going home to Seattle, would mean saying no to our New Orleans dream for the time being.

Because my husband uprooted his life to make my dream of clinical pastoral education possible, returning the favor was a no brainer, but it was not without cost.

After many days of late-night deliberation and intentional discernment, we backed out of the offer on the house, I rescinded my application for the fall CPE unit at the hospital, I cancelled carefully researched kindergarten applications for my son, I scrambled to apply to other CPE programs in Seattle (they’re all full), and I started saying goodbye to new friends. Even in a short nine months, I had grown roots.

While I believe that going back to Seattle is the right decision for our family, leaving New Orleans is another loss that needs to be acknowledged. I moped around the city for weeks. Initially, leaving felt like a sandcastle washed away by an unexpectedly large swell or like an early miscarriage when you had just started to get excited about the possibility of a baby. When you’re already grieving, everything can look like death.

The fact is that New Orleans is alive and well, not dead in the least. It’ll be here even if I’m not. And, all the ways I changed and grew during my season here will be gifts that keep on giving.

So, here’s my letter to my temporary home to which my relationship has changed but is not gone.

Dear New Orleans,

Thank you for holding such nourishing space for me and my family over the last nine months. From the moment we drove in, you swept us up in a parade of celebration. Over cocktails and jambalaya at The Spotted Cat, we spent our first late October evening toasting the realization of a long-held dream to live within your boundaries. My son wanted to be the “Star Wars Family” for Halloween, so the next day we headed to the French Quarter to get properly outfitted as “Mom Vader,” “Dad Sidious,” and “Kid Trooper.” After filling up on candy and getting a good scare by the local hunted fire station on Magazine Street, we got a good laugh from “bone-a-fide” satire at The Skeleton House on State Street.

For a city that is no stranger to death, we continued the celebration by contributing the names of the deceased loved ones who brought us here—Tim, Dad, Nugget, Mom, Thad, Helga—to the Dia de Los Muertos altars around town. In fact, I spent a lot of time at your many cemeteries contemplating whether the thing I was presently worried about would matter so much at some future point when I would take my place there.

We swung and swayed with official Second Lines on Sundays. Frequently, Zavi would bolt down the hall to the kitchen where I was cooking dinner, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Mom parade! There’s a parade outside!” as an umbrella-clad wedding party, group of students from the local high school band, or gaggle of musical friends were marching by in front of our first house on Burgundy. We danced to Zydeco music at festivals, attended our first ever Bayou Classic weekend, and caught enough beads to last us a lifetime (and that was before Mardi Gras!).

Your magic brought us an unconventional school for Zavi that challenged us to live more deeply into our values and gave us an instant community of kids and parents. You granted us a beautiful Uptown rental, whose sunlit, breezy, screened front porch provided us sanctuary before and during COVID. Zavi turned 5, lost both his front teeth, learned to ride a bike without training wheels, and can now flip front and backward in the pool and dive down deep to retrieve items. He spent eight weeks at sports camp this summer where he’s more of a sports fanatic now than ever. We flew to Panama from your airport and came home to New Orleans by air for the first time. We sampled King Cake and learned to give into excess at Mardi Gras!

When we moved here, we knew that we were going to have fun, but our spirituality also deepened planted in this fertile soil. I moved here to see whether I was indeed called to be a chaplain. It was an experiment of sorts, expecting a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer at the end. Instead, after six days of orientation, I was given a badge that said “chaplain,” and in a public ceremony, commissioned as a minister whether I saw myself that way or not. I would grow into the title. Over the next five months, I would companion hundreds of patients at Ochsner Medical Center and attend many deaths. I would unpack and repack my relationship to faith over and over again; I would define what type of minister I was and wanted to become; I would come to appreciate the unitary lessons that come through pain; I would learn to pray again; and I would solidify my new career direction even if I’m not yet sure what the destination is.

I started writing too. I had wanted to blog about grief and all our travels up to now, but it took the slower pace of NOLA and the nudge of Tara Mohr’s Playing Big course to help me to leap. I learned to sit still in the Big Easy. I got really healthy too. Thank you for the community at Free to Be Power Yoga, excellent chiropractic care from Dr. Rueben Carter, and a gifted Jungian therapist who helped me to see myself more clearly.

I will miss the long bike rides around town, dodging potholes, and the familiar call of “Hey baby” from friendly locals sitting on their stoops. I will miss picnics at Crescent Park and watching tugboats guide barges along the Mississippi River. I will miss hearing neighbors, Hugo and Sadie, call me “Miss Angeline” when over to play with Zavi. I’ll miss long talks about womanhood, vocation, parenting, marriage, travel, and current events with the King’s. I’ll miss my Dinner Party Table and the brave space we created to process the people we lost.

No, New Orleans you aren’t perfect. In many ways, your scars are on the surface: poverty, segregation, failing schools, lack of infrastructure, hurricanes, humidity, bugs etc. But I loved you just the same. Maybe it was just the honeymoon stage, maybe not. Your charm got under my skin.

It was a beautiful season, even if it wasn’t at all as we had planned. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I hope it’s soon and I hope it’s for more than just a visit.

On Thursday, I will board a plane for the first time since the stay-at-home orders went into effect. What essential travel plans do I have, you ask? My Uncle Mike’s funeral is Friday at 2 p.m. in Virginia. This is the same uncle who I had just spoken with three weeks prior, who sounded happy and healthy, who I would visit every time work travel took me to D.C., and who was looking forward to his future. This uncle was the man who lost his older sister, my mother, only two short years ago. At only 63 and a half, just six months shy of the same age we lost my mom, to the same unexpected turn of events, his sudden heart attack was and is a shock. This uncle is the 8^th close family member that has died in four years.

At first, I railed against the absurdity. The day before my uncle’s death was the three-year anniversary of my dad’s death. I had stayed up late writing my dad a letter, catching him up on everything since he died. I was feeling grateful at the progress, finding that I felt closer to my dad than I had in years. Then came the call from my brother about my uncle the next morning.

Really, universe?! EIGHT loved ones in FOUR years? How can this be happening, A-G-A-I-N?! Have I not learned enough with the first seven? Are you out to get me? Do you fucking care? I guess that was the anger stage of grief.

After I hung up from my brother, before even telling my husband, I instinctually walked directly to the cemetery a few blocks from my house. I suppose I needed reminding that everyone dies. So, why not another one of my family members and why not now? Unable to digest the weight of this truth, next came the numbing disbelief.

Within an hour of hearing the news, I sank deep into taking care of everyone and everything else besides myself; I’m in a chaplain training program after all. There was my uncle’s wife, now widowed after 28 years of marriage just days before her birthday, my three cousins 17, 19, and 28 who lost their dad, my grandma who has now lost two of her three ‘children’ in two years, my uncle’s baby sister—my aunt—the only remaining sibling in her family, my brother and sister who were watching our family shrink before our eyes, and then all the calls to extended family. Then there were circumstances that made my uncle’s death complicated and difficult to navigate, like tricky family dynamics, physical distance, and a global pandemic.

I’ve gotten pretty good at attending to other people’s grief, but somehow, it was hard to roll out the same safe, nonjudgmental, sacred red carpet for my pain. I’m tired. Did I mention that he is the eighth in four years? I subconsciously reasoned that if I can make sure everyone else is alright, I can ignore the fact that I’m not. I’ll call that denial. The difference this time around was that I was aware that I was pretending that I wasn’t hurting; I could handle the fact my uncle was dead by ignoring it; I could take care of myself by denying myself. I was aware of this faulty thinking with this one, I just wasn’t ready to do anything about it yet.

As I slowly started to process with friends, I reminded myself that I know what to do when someone I love dies: lean into what Rumi said, “The cure for the pain is in the pain.” So, I canceled my plans last Monday night, spooned a generous scoop of coconut milk chocolate ice cream into my favorite Trader Joe’s brand sugar cone, and stayed up late watching A Taiwanese Tale of Two Cities, the English subtitled drama set in Taipei and San Francisco that I’ve been watching since we went to Taiwan last year—because binge watching T.V. while stuffing my face with sugar will obviously help with my grief. I’m joking here, but the thing is, it did help!

The cure for the pain is in the pain.

– Rumi

The saddest thing that had happened in the show so far were break ups and close brushes with temporary yet ongoing illness.  Of course, just my luck, one of the main protagonists’ beloved father dies in the second to last episode as she looks on helplessly. Nien-Nien spends the next episode wandering around lost, flying from Taipei to San Francisco only to lie in bed despondent for days, having lost her sense of purpose, refusing to eat, unsure of who she is without her dad. That’s all it took. Her fictitious grief unlocked my very real grief. A full week after I first learned of my uncle’s death, I let the tears flow for the first time.  

In the final episode of the show, Nien-Nien’s friends and family in Taiwan find a stack of old “death letters” she wrote to herself over the years as she had been a sickly child and wasn’t expected to live past her teens. Fearing that she may be suicidal and alone in San Francisco, her childhood friend catches the next flight out of Taipei, despite being newly married and his wife expecting their first child. The friend cooks Nien-Nien the meal her dad made for her when she was ill, and the soup nurses her back to life. She finally admits, out loud, how much she misses her dad and she cries in the friends arms.

I felt like the show got a few things right: when we lose our person, we’re lost, life feels pointless, we’re not even sure who we are anymore, the void our loved one left threatens to swallow us whole, and sometimes being swallowed whole is preferable to feeling all that we’re feeling. The show also showed how life goes on for everyone else, even though our world is unrecognizable. Yet, when someone stops long enough to recognize our pain, it validates it and helps us to take a step towards the possibility of life without our person in it.

I’m going to my uncle’s funeral because I need to show up for me and our family and look and be looked upon. Like David Kessler, author of Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief says, “grief must be witnessed”. That witnessing lets us know that we’re not crazy and we’re not alone. Kessler says that grief is what’s going on in the inside of us, mourning is something we do on the outside. While grief will always be a lonely, solitary road that we must walk as individuals, mourning need not be. That’s why funerals are important and why the COVID-induced virtual option just wouldn’t do. But what about after that? Somehow, unless you’re blessed with religious heritage with prescribed mourning rituals like the Jewish practice of sitting shiva, we in the west have forgotten how to mourn. Maybe that’s why it’s been so easy for some to criticize the Black Lives Matter protests—they forgot what it feels like to hurt on a collective level.

In his excellent book, Kessler tells the story of what a Northern Indigenous tribe in Australia does to tangibly show that someone’s death matters. The night someone dies, everyone in the village moves a piece of furniture or something else into their yard. The next day, when the bereaved family wakes up and looks outside, they see that everything has changed since their loved one died—not just for them but for everyone. What a beautiful way to make loss visible—to witness and mirror grief. That’s why so many have been compelled to make beautiful public art to show that we’ll never be the same after the pandemic and certainly not after George Floyd.

Today we mourn publicly on social media hoping that someone else who has been through it will see us and show us that we’re not alone. We write long tributes; we tell the story of what happened; we post pictures on death anniversaries; we join grief pages (David Kessler has an excellent one); we change our profile picture in solidarity with larger movements. And, this is fine and good, because it scratches the itch to do something.

The best I’ve got right now is to be there, because there’s nothing to be done. My uncle is dead. Nothing I do will change that.

One of the best lessons I’ve learned from six months of clinical pastoral education is that a good question, maybe even one of the best questions to ask anyone who is grieving is “what is it like for you?”

Since I first found out about my uncle two weeks ago, this is a bit of what it has been like for me.