A Year Ends

A year ends. I find myself remembering a Christmas spent in a hospital room. I remember the room, but not the year. A memory sits alongside stories of friends who are unwell, parents undergoing treatment, a neighbour’s death. The proximity of the frightening and the unbearable. I am still stuck on the word press: what presses, what impresses.

Endings are powerful fictions. We are wrapped into and wrap ourselves around them. At a moment of simultaneous genocides—a time of calculated and arbitrary killing, of multiplied and compounded deaths—endings press, endings hurt. We are pressed into the folds of other endings, I am trying to get at something about how the particular kind of cruel and arbitrary endings that saturate our now compound other endings at other times: holidays compound grief, always. At a time of genocides, the unbearable feels even more so.

I am not sure how one lives with the unbearable. A year ends. Endings are unbearable fictions. Perhaps I am stretching metaphor: a page turns. I am always stretching metaphor—how else are we to get at and to feeling?

It is a fiction, of course, that years end: more persists than we dare to acknowledge. Obligations. All the emails one does not return in December, because kiDezemba. Another fiction. A necessary one. I envy the carefree levity of it all.

One year, my stubborn mother pushed a chemo treatment to January, because she wanted to have her christmas. It is nice to believe that we can choose our endings, even as such a faith might be utterly shredded by the arbitrary cruelty of the compounding now.

Yet.

A few months ago, I noticed ibises had built a nest in one of the trees. I wondered if the nest would survive the heavy rains and the kites and the crows. Now, I hear the shrill—very loud—cries of young ibises. Very loud. VERY LOUD.

I dislike the conceit that new life offers hope for the future. A baby is born. Hope is renewed. At a time of genocides, not even newborn babies are spared.

Yet.

We wrap our old and renewed griefs around the unbearable now, and they are folded and multiplied: unthinkable and compounded endings wrap around our bones. We are arthritic with loss. We hobble around our endings.

Yet.

If I have insisted on a we, on our we, it is because I keep learning from Mariame Kaba that everything worthwhile is done with other people. If we hobble toward this unbearable ending, it is because we hobble with each other. If we must stop to catch our breath, we wait with and for each other.

A year ends. We sit with the unbearable now. And listen for the next breath.