Freight Train

and the ways in which grief as irrevocably shaped me.

One of my favorite songs of all time is one that I heard in a TV show when I was around fifteen years old. The show was, of course, Pretty Little Liars, and the song is “Fright Train” by Sara Jackson-Holman. I rewatched the music video just now, and it is entirely 2010s in the best way. Big hair with a severe side part, Jackson-Holman sings in her black mourning dress, in a graveyard, about the nature of grief. She starts the song with the truest statement I have ever heard: “Grief is a freight train / Oh, what’s a little pain / when you’ve got so much to love.” And this refrain gets stuck in my head, has been snuggled in the wrinkles of my brain for decades, now. Never have I ever heard a more concise or accurate description of grief. It is a freight train. That I heard it in a TV show about death, mystery, youth only has helped me contextualize my own feelings about grief for a number of years.

I don’t like to write about people who die young, because it doesn’t feel right to talk about their lives. It doesn’t feel like it’s my right to write about them when they aren’t here, when I didn’t write about them in their life. I don’t mind sharing about the grief I endured while I watched my paternal grandfather slowly lose her quality of life. When my Ammama died suddenly, I didn’t weep for days, but I sure did write about her. Writing is how I make sense of these things. Love is easy for me to understand. I have always had it in buckets and buckets. I grew up a happy, if dramatic, child. And I have my fair share of childhood trauma and identity crises, but all in all, I have many happy memories and two parents and a brother who deeply care for me. I had a bounding extended family who celebrated me every time I was lucky enough to visit. I had grandparents for most of my life who could talk with me, call me on my birthday, take me shopping, and make me delicious food until they died very recently, well after they saw me married off.

Grief, I have had very little of. I didn’t lose anyone as a child. I never had cats or dogs who died on me. I had fish (I named mine Angel and I loved her so much), and when she died, I wore black for months. My parents vowed never to get me a pet again after that. I was around eight or nine, and they decided I was too sensitive to handle such pain and grief, and they sheltered me from it. But my parents didn’t do a bad job of everything. They introduced me to the class divide pretty early on, through the concept of “seva,” or selfless service. Every third Sunday of the month, my parents took me down to the homelessness shelter in downtown Columbus, Friends of the Homeless, to serve food. This is where my worldview took root. In knowing that these men were down on their luck — and seeing with my own two eyes that most of these folks were Black — I began to start questioning my own house, our cars, the phone I got on my birthday. I’m ashamed that it took seeing poverty to understand it beyond the stories of their own poverty that my parents told. But at the same time, the grief that my parents tried to shelter me from by not giving me a pet, they introduced to me by making me interact with real people, and showed me how grief in life can be moving, can be present, can look like a man who just needs a free, warm meal and somewhere to sleep that night. My little sensitive heart took those lessons and embedded them in my bones. Those visits informed all of my politics from then on.

Grief followed me in ways I cannot really describe. When I was fourteen, my cousin, who was sixteen, died from dengue fever, which is brought on by dengue-carrying mosquitos in India. One day he was “just a little ill,” and the next day he was gone. I wasn’t close with him. In fact, we had many only hung out a handful of times, as I visited Hyderabad and he lived in Delhi. When my mom got off the phone to tell me that he died, I was sitting on our black leather couch (the one we had for over 20 years), and I remember it was sunny that morning. It must have been a weekend day. She said, “your cousin died. I don’t understand how he could be there one day and gone the next. You aren’t supposed to die that young.” The weight in my chest has never fully decreased. I only feel the full weight of it when I see his mother or his brother, which isn’t often, but it squeezes in my lungs when it happens. Reminders of my own blood who is gone.

Working in social justice, I felt the reverberations of every person we lost. The cause of so much loss in that world (in the real world) is policy choices. We choose to privilege some over others. We call some people collateral damage. The choice people make with the degrees that I hold shape the world into either livable for some people and not for others. The grief of that consumed me. One day, when the world felt too grievous for me, I sat under my desk at work and hoped no one would come in. I had read an article about a family friend’s son who was involved with grand theft auto the same day I had to write a response about yet another unarmed Black man who was murdered by the Columbus police. I needed the world to stop spinning for just one moment. When you work in a world like that, the wins feel euphoric because the losses are murder and rape. There are so many more losses than wins. The grief overtook me, but I didn’t know what to call it. I pursued a line of work that nearly ended my life, thinking, incorrectly, that grief signaled my commitment to the world, when all it actually signaled was that I was in grief.

Shortly after that, I lost that same family friend’s father. The first man who ever believed in my writing. The uncle who had given me my first locked journal, who thought of me as brilliant and caring and kind. He thought I could become a writer. I can’t talk about him too much.

Grief is a freight train. Recently, I lost someone who I can’t talk about yet. She was too young, and too bright, and the loss is too recent. Maybe I will feel okay telling you all about her soon, but I’m not sure that’s respectful, at the moment. My best friend asked me how I was doing, and the sad truth is that I don’t think of myself as someone with a lot of “experience” with grief, but I have enough to know that it isn’t just the first part of that stanza that matters. Oh, what’s a little pain, when we’ve got so much to love?

In all of the grief I have slammed into these past few years, they have taught me to turn towards the love. They aren’t lying when they say that grief and love are two sides of the same coin. I hate platitudes, but most platitudes about grief are probably true. To me, grief is like putty. I can shape it into whatever I need it to be. In most cases, I struggle against it, not letting it get the upper hand. But in some cases, like this one, the grief wraps around me like a vine. It holds the shape of me together, painfully reminding me that the molecules that made up the bond between me and this person aren’t gone. Grief is transformational. So is love.

In the aftermath of loss, I have to remind myself that just because a person is gone does not mean that my adoration for them disappears. I have to remember that I am one star in the constellation that loved them. I have to think about how expansive grief is, how mine almost took my life, how that would have left so many people destitute because my life is so full of love. How I am a constellation unto myself, and everyone I have ever loved have been stars in my own sky. There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to die, and I have remember that in my life now, even when I feel excruciating grief, that I don’t want to die. I don’t want to follow the people I loved over that edge. Even at my worst, even when the weight of losing my grandmothers in quick succession sat like an anchor in my chest, I felt sparks of joy.

When my Ammama died shortly before Thanksgiving, I spent those holidays in Seattle with my husband. It was our first holiday as a couple, and we were supposed to go spend my winter break in Texas with my brother, but weren’t able to. I remember one day, my husband and I went to downtown Seattle to see some lights. And it was gross and rainy, and downtown Seattle isn’t very fun, but my eyes go buzzy when I see large structures with little lights. I don’t know what it is, but I feel a little drunk during Christmastime, with all of the dazzling little lights. I’ve always loved Christmas because of it. I love how humans, in the face of the dark, found a way to make beauty out of abundant light. I love how, even though Jesus’ birthday is not actually Christmas, that we fall in love with the season, aching and reveling in what makes us quiet and soft and vulnerable. A baby Jesus. A Christmas tree. Angels and grace. Cultures all over the world celebrate the changing of the seasons. It’s as human as anything else, as sex and birth and, yes, death. In that moment, looking at all the lit up structures paid for by the Seattle taxpayer, something that no one really protests because even the most cynical liberal in Seattle couldn’t make a legitimate case against wintertime cheer (I mean, they could, and they do, but like. Please don’t prove Fox News right, liberals). I wore my most whimsical sweater, the black one with swirls on it, and green trousers, and I tried my damned hardest to let my brain go fuzzy with the joy of a million little twinkling lights. Hand in hand with the man who ran to me across the country the second he got the news that my favorite person died, I tried my damnedest to find what I needed to move forward.

And there, in between my astigmatism riddled eyes, and in the Summer days in Seattle with bright blue skies, no cloud in sight, and in the way my husband’s beautiful brown eyes greet me in the morning when I open mine, and in the paws of the kitty that I’m cat sitting for, tapping my thigh for more pets, and in the colors of the universe all around me, I am reminded about the most cliche, most profound part of grief: that death never means they leave us forever. We simply change form. We simply transform the way we love. The way we honor. The way we respect. The way we know them, in our hearts, for centuries, and forever. I’m not very religious, but I have to believe in reincarnation. There is something I recognize in the bones of the people that I adore, something about them, the life in their eyes, the boldness and curiosity, the humor and their ability to tease out different versions of me. It makes me think that we have all known each other in every lifetime. I have married my husband seven times over in every lifetime (two, in this one alone). Who’s to say I haven’t loved my friends or my parents in some form or another three lifetimes ago? Who’s to say that I didn’t talk about Greek myths with B in the 60s, or organize with J in the 20s? Maybe M and I went shopping for cute skirts in the 50s. Maybe A rescued cats even in the 1780s, and maybe I brought her supplies when she sent a carrier pigeon late at night that she has, once again, brought a baby cat into her home. Maybe, just maybe, in the next lifetime, I will sit with T in a classroom again, and we will debate how to fix the world, and I will stand back and watch, once again, as she actually does it.

I’m not ready to talk about her yet, but I will say fuck Cancer, and fuck the defunding of science, and fuck my own heart for not having more capacity for doing more, fuck my mind for not being the kind that can solve these problems in one go. And praise my body for holding me through this grief, expanding sideways and longways, making me bigger and bigger in how I love the people that I love. Praise my fear and praise my anxiety for keying me into what’s most important to me right now. Praise my urgency and my courage for life, for appreciating it, for taking all the opportunities I can because you don’t always have time. Praise my friends and my husband for crying with me. Praise God and praise the Universe and praise everyone who did the work to keep her around as long as they did. It was nothing short of a blessing.

Grief is a freight train, indeed. It’s impossible to keep it from coming at you. And it comes for all of us, at some point or another. But it is possible to get off the tracks. To instead hop on it, and ride along. What’s a little pain, when I’ve got so much to love?

In memoriam,

Me