Dear Jenny,

This fucking year keeps taking and taking and taking. I can’t believe you are gone. I can’t believe you were, not are. Grief seems natural in theory, but when it’s personal, it feels like water filling the air, getting into my lungs, drowning me. I am so sorry, Jenny. I am sorry that I didn’t know you enough to call you a friend. I am sorry for all those people and all those communities who lost you. I am sorry you didn’t get to grow old, didn’t get to see you girls grow old. I am sorry that this world is so imperfect and so impermanent that we can lose people we love in an instant, even before we know we’re losing them. I loved you, Jenny. It doesn’t take much to love someone this good, this intelligent and kind and determined to do as much good as they possibly can.

This week I have to write an essay about the soul. Does the consciousness exist beyond the physical? I thought I knew what I was writing about. I had my arguments lined up. Now I am staring in the grey March sky and wondering, where are you, Jenny? My ancestors believed that the soul stayed close to the body for nine days, then lingered on the earth until fourty days, before finally going wherever it is the souls are going.

If you come back, Jenny, I hope you come back as a flower, or some other beautiful creature with a gift of photosynthesis. Being human is so freakishly hard, who in their right mind would choose it? Maybe, you would.

I miss you, Jenny, I will always miss you.

I’ve been googling symptoms of seasonal depression, perimenopause and mild bipolar disorder. Theoretically, anything can fit. I wanted to cry at the end of the day, but thankfully the day was Tuesday and dance class. Nowadays, I like walking late at night with loud music in my earphones, especially in Saint-Bruno, where streets empty after 7pm and the crime rate is minimal. I like when people like my social media posts, I love it when they read the same books or love the same movies – I need resonance like I need air. I need one close relationship, someone I can tell stuff to, who’s not across the ocean or unavailable except once a month. I realised today that I work very hard in my relationships. I have to speak a language others understand, which is always their language. I have yo work hard to explain myself, make myself accessible and non-threatening. I want a relationship in which I am not constantly reducing myself to the simplest and most accessible version of myself. This may be the first time of my life I find myself bereft of such relationship, of honest and deep connection with someone. Friend, colleague, mentor, lover – anyone. I am suffocating in the lack of connection. So, with many wishes I am sending out to the universe, here is one selfish wish – I need someone physically and emotionally close, someone here and now.

I think we are heading into some very dark times. We are already in the dark times and it takes courage to admit that we don’t know what the end will be like. We don’t even know if there will be an end. This, perhaps, is the scariest thought of all. What if there is no end? What if our children inherit this dark spiral of violence, lies and betrayal not as a distant memory of trauma, but as an ever unfolding strategy. What if undoing never ends?

I am not sure that I am still anxious about the climate crisis. If we were to die in a rising tide or a hurricane of previously unseen force, it would be a more just and merciful end than killing each other with human deceit. Would you not rather be a part of the ocean?

Which makes me think of the great flood. Imagine it wasn’t an act of a vengeful and angry god, but a gesture of ultimate mercy. Imagine that the flood came as a relief to those too weary to seek justice. Imagine, as it swept over the streets, people finally stopped running and welcomed it. Mothers hugged their children and men hid their tears of relief waiting for the flood to finally wipe everything clean.

I woke up at 6am to get ahead on my research paper on AI and Indigenous spirituality. Instead, I’ve been sitting for the past hour, hugging myself, trying to process the pain and violence. I feel it in my stomach, like a kick, like an attempted rape. I feel it physically. The world smells like rotten pickled herring for some reason. It’s a very specific smell. I wonder if stress can create olfactory illusions. Poetry has gotten me through the past few days, but I think we’re getting to the point where the words will fail me. Just like everybody failed us, even ourselves.

Who started the war? Russia.

Today we had the worst blizzard since 1950s (apparently). They are closing schools again tomorrow and it feels like things haven’t been normal for such a long time. I am trying to do all the things I know I need to do: yoga, walks, swimming. I know I am doing things right, but nothing feels right. I scroll through the headlines without reading the articles. I have too much anger as is. The world hardens me. Then, at the end of the day I get a text from an old friend and it unravels me. Kindness makes me cry. I keep thinking back to those first months of Covid, when my son was just a baby and we were locked up and scared. I had taken up a habit to call my parents three to five times a day, just to make sure. I think I may start doing it again. It’s one of those things, you see, like when you are a child and you decide that you will avoid stepping on the cracks, because as long as you don’t step on these cracks everything will be alright and everyone will be healthy and live forever. So, I am desperately looking for the cracks not to step on.

There are days when I am not ok and there are days when I am disintegrating. I keep interrupting whatever I am doing and picking up a pen to write. Writing feels cathartic, like ripping a bandage off an unhealed wound and letting it bleed. It doesn’t make it easier to breathe. It doesn’t help, but it helps. of the things I wrote today, one is a poem for my friend Louise. I called it A Bouquet of Grief:

A few days ago, Louise shared an article about different kinds of grief.

Without looking at it I knew that I would check every box, still

I looked at it and checked every box, then remembered that lists are not my thing.

What if instead I arranged my grief into a bouquet?

A bouquet is not a haphazard bunch of blooms, but a floral message.

So I decided to sort through my grief, petal by petal, and make it into a gift,

Or something beautiful.

The first flower is normal grief, the one where we move through stages

Never quite past denial, never quite free of anger, always bargaining and praying for acceptance.

The second, anticipatory grief of the future,

Of my own mortality (on behalf of my children),

Of mortality of my parents, friends and loved ones,

Of prospective rare earth mining sites,

Of melting ice caps,

Of polar bears,

Of deep ocean ecosystems,

Of coral reefs,

I can go on for ages

Should I continue?

The third, complicated grief

My inability to accept the loss of the nine-year old son of my old-time friend

Who was killed two Novembers past by a car while waiting for a green light at a busy intersection in Phoenix, Arizona.

The knowing that every morning my old-time friend opens her eyes to an empty world,

The knowing that every morning she prays to God I no longer believe in.

The particular sadness of kneeling besides my bed at night with a long list of people and places to pray for

And remembering that I no longer know how to pray.

The fourth, disenfranchised grief of an immigrant,

Of someone who has lost her name, her sense of place and her sense of humour,

Because things are never as funny in translation,

Who traded her birthright for a G7 citizenship and visa-free travel,

Who sometimes wishes that someone asked her where she is from and gave her time to answer properly.

The fifth, collective grief

Feels almost like joy on the rare occasions when we come together,

We don’t have to grieve the same things, let it be different things,

Let it be different griefs, but together.

The sixth, ambiguous grief, like when a colleague casually asks you “do you have any friends”

And you walk out of the kitchen without answering, wondering why your friends

Aren’t returning your texts and never write first and why you

Still haven’t answered happy birthday messages received last June.

Why in fact you never answer birthday messages, as if you were afraid to believe that you mattered to people.

The seventh, absent grief about no longer feeling hopeful about the world.

The eights, secondary grief, when your children are fighting and you break down in tears

Not because they are fighting, but because of the war, and the climate change,

And the fact that AI will surely destroy humanity, and the fact that humanity surely deserves being destroyed,

But you still feel sorry for it.

The ninth, silly grief (I just made that one up)

When you finish a really good novel,

Or your favourite show runs to the last episode and you feel inexplicable feeling of loss

That you wouldn’t admit even to yourself, because what idiot would grieve about an end of a stupid show, when the whole world is dying.

The last, cumulative grief as a space for everything else

Big and expansive and lonely and saulty, like an ocean.

This morning – I mean the quiet dark morning before anyone else wakes up, the kind of morning that feels like night, my favourite. I like this very early morning, because it feels like the only part of day that truly belongs to me, the one I don’t have to share. This is the time, when I am very quiet, when I function with minimal light and just as little movement. This is the time, when I am very alive. I believe, there are parts of me that are only alive during this time, the hidden, mysterious, exciting parts. This is the time when I write.

This morning I, while writing an essay for my university course, I somehow arrived to comparing the French verbs connaitre and savoir. Both verbs translate as “to know” into English, but connaitre means relational knowledge (to know someone) or practical knowledge (to know one’s trade), whereas savoir means theoretical knowledge, knowledge about something. Similar dichotomy exists in Mohawk (and, I suppose, other Indigenous languages?) and in German, but not in English or Ukrainian. As I learned today, it also exists in Greek. Definitions in French dictionaries and encyclopedia place savoir on a higher level than connaitre. Savoir is a deep, reflective, detached sort of knowledge. It’s a sort of knowledge one arrives at after years of diligent study. Savoir has a reverent ring to it, no matter its subject. Connaitre is more casual. It is knowledge of people, knowledge that comes from experience, also familiarity with the subject.

As I was muling these words in my head, thinking how the birthplace of the Enlightment, the nation of Rene Descartes and “je pense donc je suis,” of Napoleon and the dreams of universal conquest, the harbour of colonialism, chose to elevate the disembodied knowledge over the relational one, I thought, is it a coincidence that the verb savoir is only one letter different from the verb avoir (to have) whereas the verb connaitre sounds like the verb être (to be) and also naître (to be born). At this very early time of morning, this didn’t feel like a coincidence at all. Rather, it felt like revelation. The universe showing its pattern.

I know (I have checked) that linguistically speaking my proposition is nonsense. Both savoir et connaitre stem from latin roots. Yet, I still think that I am right. I think that maybe understanding… feeling the difference between the knowledge as possession and knowledge as a way of being is a key to transcending the paradigm that holds us captive.

It is still winter.

It will be winter for long, too long.

I am wondering about the milkweeed seeds I’d planted last spring. I think I did it too late and this commonest of wildflowers that lines every ditch and abandoned garden plot refused to grow in mine. I wonder if these seeds, now properly frozen, will finally decide to sprout this year. I wonder when crocuses will come this year and how many there will be. I wonder when will be the first day I will feel spring and who will tell me about it.

I managed to squeeze a short walk into my morning routine. What a Friday! The light was a pale, comforting yellow it only ever gets on a morning after a proper snowfall. It wasn’t cold, at least until the wind picked up speed and force, but I kept thinking about a line from Ada Limon’s poem I’d read last evening: “It’s cold today so the sun’s a lie.” I love poetry because it’s the only language I know for telling the truth. What is truth if not a tangled knot of contradictions? And where, except poetry, can we find as much space to hold all these contradictions together?

It was snowing today. A lot.

I actually hesitated, not knowing whether I should write “it was snowing,” “it snowed,” or “we had snow.” What a strange thing to say: we had snow. What a human thing to pretend to own something that could never belong to anyone. No, we didn’t have snow. The snow fell from the white expanse of the sky, quickly and angrily at first, chased by the wind, then slowly, as if apologising for earlier brutality. “It snowed” has a sad finality about it and, not liking the past tense in general, I settled on “it was snowing.”

I got caught in the angry part of snow, while I was walking to my therapy session. During the session, Maya said “you’ve never allowed yourself to fall apart.” She said it without a hint of judgment, but not as if it was a good thing. And I had a moment of recognition, not only of myself, but of my mother, her frail figure at the kitchen table when dad had his accident. She would come home after ten or twelve hours of senseless, back-breaking work, disappear into the kitchen and smoke, smoke, smoke. But never fall apart, not once during those seven years. I recognised her mother, whom I saw only on photos. How old was she, about twenty or younger, when Germans took her from her family and forced her to work at the rope factory as a de-facto slave. Falling apart is not in my genes, we simply don’t do this. There will be nobody to pick us up.

Still, I wonder, what it would feel like. I wonder, if I’d let myself fall apart, just a little, if I allowed myself some deep rest, would the effect of it reverberate back to my mother? Would it travel in time to heal the wounds? Would it actually help?