Today’s issue is a little different.
I am sharing a short essay I wrote sometime last year, that has yet to see formal publication. It comes in anticipation of my least favorite day of the year, July 3, the anniversary of my father’s death. Like all things grief, the intensity of the day itself is unpredictable. Some years, I forget about it entirely. Other years, I fall into a funk around Father’s Day and stew there until Fourth of July celebrations end. Last year, a wave of grief hit me in a coffee shop in Milwaukee, followed by a rush of excitement over the circumstances that brought me to Wisconsin in the first place.
This year…well…jury’s still out. It’s been six weeks since my knee surgery, and in between the stretches where it feels like a bulldozer is running over my psyche, the liminal space in between emotion and response has forced radical acceptance of whatever or whoever shows up.
The who of all this? My goodness. Both personally and professionally, a few extraordinary beings arrived without fanfare. When they came into my awareness, my first thought was: There you are. And a beat later: But why did you show up now?
There’s a sense of being out of time and place, of both the familiar and unfamiliar, of tying up loose ends while unraveling a new story. There is the distinct knowing that everything is linked, without any conscious understanding of how. There is a sort of energetic collision, a string of connection transforming from invisible to undeniable. An unspoken agreement, a heartbridge to another realm. Steady and beating, stirring up all that is unknown.
Heartbridge
Recently, while reading a memoir by a dear friend, Y-Dang Troeung, I turned the page and was greeted by a demure, black and white photo. I brought my right thumb and forefinger together and placed my fingers on her body, attempting to zoom in on the static, paper image. It was only after a few attempts that I realized what I was doing, and I burst into tears.
On November 27, 2022, at the age of 42, Y-Dang died of pancreatic cancer—the same disease that took my father when I was fifteen. In the photo, Y-Dang is standing in front of “The Killing Tree” at Choeung Ek in Cambodia, where Cambodian infants were killed at the hands of Pol Pot and his genocidal regime in the 1970s. Her right side body faces the camera, small enough to fit within the center third of the photo, barely distinguishable from the bridge she stands on and the tree still caked with dried blood.
A Canadian national bestseller, her book Landbridge: Life In Fragments, depicts snippets of Y-Dang’s life as the literal poster child for Cambodian refugees in Canada, all of it written during precious waking hours during the last year of her life. A career academic specializing in refugee studies, the work is all at once an elegy to the freedom and imprisonment of political asylum, a reflection of the Cambodian genocide told through her family’s lens, and a series of love letters to her young son, Kai.
As is with all art, we view it through the lens of our experience. I cannot read Y-Dang’s words without stirring the ghost of my father, a man who—other than a loose connection to the same general war (my father fought in Vietnam) and cancer of the same name—bears no ties to the woman in the photo. Yet it is through Y-Dang that I have been turned to face the dregs of grief, and through her that I have found fragmented answers to hanging questions about my father’s death.
Did he know what was happening? Was there pain? What kind of pain? What would he have said if he could speak?
I can’t say for sure what I was looking for when I tried to zoom into Y-Dang. It is something I do with digital photos of those who matter to me, in moments of loneliness. The act of bringing their face toward me is comforting, somehow, and seems to strengthen the invisible string that tethers us together. But something is lost in images of those who are gone. In death, that string releases, replaced by a nebula of energy that is no longer linear, but everywhere all at once. Not being able to zoom in, not being able to see the image clearly, is the ever present unease of living.
In the beginning of Y-Dang’s book, she quotes Michael Allaby’s definition of land bridge: a connection between two land masses, especially continents, that allows the migration of plants and animals from one land mass to the other.
I would like to add a new word to the lexicon: heartbridge. A connection between two souls, seemingly distant from one another, who provide a path of release and understanding both to each other, and for those who stay behind.
"Heartbridge" love this, I feel it too.