Life at Altitude

A letter to my mama

Dear mama, 

Writing to you seems the only way to write. I want to write my way into my memories, to extend a tight rope across weeks that are turning into months. I feel so far from you. I am sediment, dragged down a river by the current of time. Farther and farther, I drift. You are the shore. Immovable. Permanent. Gone from sight as the river bends. 

It was Loren who told me to write to you. From the Venice Airport, flooded with bodies. Bodies like bees in my inner ear. Seven hours of plane caked onto my skin, the remnants of a sleepless red eye. A TSA agent: “Non-EU Passports this way.” Slick floors and hospital lighting. Outside, canals snaked through the city, a floating paradise of cobblestones. A New York Times push notification recently classified Venice as “at risk of over-tourism.” 

It started with a feeling in my stomach. Do you know it, mama? The one I mean? It hurts. It’s more like a warning of future danger than danger itself, but that’s worse sometimes, isn’t it? To be so afraid of what’s coming? To not know?

 A clench. The feeling moved, from stomach to chest. Pressed. Alarm bells in my head. Exit signs and arrows and numbered gates and bathrooms marked by block representations of gender. A passport, thumbed between two fingers. Air like a limited resource. Loren looked at me. “Baby, what’s wrong?” 

I was crying, I realized. And upon realizing, cried harder. Thick, shameless, public tears. 

Grief creeps. It’s impolite that way. It doesn’t announce itself and shake your hand. Doesn’t present a slideshow of what to expect and when and why and how. It’s conniving. Sneaky, snake-like, shape-shifting. It hides in clenched stomachs, tight chests, agitation, rumination. An airport terminal.

It’s only once I’m crying, crying hard enough that my tears can’t be ignored, crying so hard that my sadness is like a blackout curtain against other sensation, that I recognize it. Grief. Grief is longing. Its missing something you’ll never have. It’s vacuous. 

Grief like a tidal wave in the Venice airport. Grief like a truck that runs me over. Flattens me. I cry and cry. 

“Baby, what’s wrong?” Loren asks. 

“I feel so far,” I answer, voice jagged and thick. 

He thinks I mean from home. An Atlantic Ocean between us.

I hiccup. “No,” I tell him. “From my mama.” From you. 

“What if you wrote to her?” Loren’s voice is a hand against my heart. 

Mama, I have to write to you because life keeps happening. It keeps happening and happening and happening and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. It’s happening without you, which seems both entirely impossible and entirely true. 

We flew to Italy to hike in the Dolomites. Mountains that rise like teeth out of the earth, cradling you in the valley of their throat. Alpine cliffs of jagged rock and scattered wildflowers. Bright yellow blooms from limestone. Purple from granite. Teal lakes you can see straight through, little pebbles at their base. We walk from pine forests to rolling hills to the moon. The sun rises and the Dolomites glow orange in its light. You’d love it here, mama. It’s the kind of beauty that would blow you over. The kind of beauty you taught me to love. 

We walk 6, 7, 8 hours a day. Longer than I’ve ever walked. Gaining altitude by the hour. Meter by meter. My thighs ache, my lungs burn. We walk. 

Remember Hawaii, mama? You were bald then. We rubbed SPF 70 on your head and reminded you to wear a hat in the sun. You were cancer free for the first time. Just weeks after completing your first round of chemotherapy. A scar stitched your skin together, raised from sternum to pelvis. Several of your toes were numb. “Just neuropathy,” you’d remind us, when you tripped. 

Remember how we hiked? How you’d Google hikes on the Big Island and send me AllTrails links from your bedroom down the hall? Treks to green sand beaches and through pale blue water, rushing against slick stones. Across volcanic rock and into the clouds, we walked. Through thick greenery, over ocean cliffs. I’d insist on standing beside you, a barrier between your body and the fall. 

You were eight months past a terminal diagnosis. You were beginning to die. We walked. 

In the Dolomites, we pack our backpacks and clip straps around our waists to adjust the weight distribution. We lace our boots with double knots. It is so cold in the mornings, the air like stinging nettle. We pack prosciutto and butter sandwiches. We walk. 

We’re so high up. 9,000 feet in the sky. We feel the dampness of the clouds against our fingers when they cross our path. Still, we climb higher. Step after step after step. My body gets heavier, gravity like a sworn enemy. With each meter gained the air gets thinner. 

“Why is this so hard?” I think. 

“The altitude,” I realize. And that helps for some reason. To recognize my struggle as the product of circumstance. Like maybe it wouldn’t be so hard if things were different. If I was closer to the sea. 

When we reach the top of a mountain I am ecstatic. My sports bra is sticky with sweat and the lining of my raincoat is slick against my body’s effort. My cheeks are red with wind, my smile wide with success. There is nothing like summiting a mountain. The primordial joy of realizing, “I have made it. I am ok.”

You knew that joy, mama, I know you did. With your bald head and your SPF 70, and your lungs that would soon be invaded by tumors pumping in victory. At the top of Mauna Kea on the Big Island, you grinned at me with big teeth. “Take a photo of me in the clouds,” you asked. And I did. 

I’d like to think you’re in the clouds still. So high up, in awe of the view.  

On our final night in the Dolomites, after days of ascension, the feeling in my stomach returns like a punch. It grips and clenches, moves up through my throat and my chest. It twists me with fear, agitation, anger, more fear. The rumination in my brain is like a drug. My thoughts scream at me, berate me, terrify me. It hurts to exist but I keep on existing.

“Why is this so hard?” I think. 

“Grief,” I realize. And I cry. I cry and I cry and I cry. 

This helps for some reason. To recognize that my grief, like the altitude, is a product of circumstance. Like maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to exist if things were different. If I was closer to you. 

Instead, I walk and I walk and I walk. I am walking away from you every day.

It feels something adjacent to good to acknowledge how deeply I miss you. To tell you. To tell you about how life has these pockets of vacuous emptiness now, pockets where you are supposed to be. To tell you that I get swallowed by these pockets and beaten up inside of them. That it takes me a minute, to recognize these pockets as grief. 

It feels something adjacent to good to tell you that during these pockets, I am not ok. During these pockets, I miss you so much that it feels like I’ll never be ok again. I am bodiless and floating, eviscerated with the sheer weight of you’re gone-ness.

But there’s this other moment I want to tell you about, mama. It was later, when the hiking was done. It was evening, probably 8PM but a summer 8PM where the sky is pink and the sun is shy. 

In the apartment of a friend, I set the table for dinner. Thin stemmed wine glasses, long skinny forks. A pot of fondue, rich and creamy, bubbled with cheese on the stove. We smoked a joint out the window, puffing into the night. 

Loren played guitar and our friends sang harmonies together. We googled the lyrics to old pop songs and read from our phones and flitted across the kitchen, dancing. I snuck bites of thick crusted bread intended for dipping and breathed in the smell of gruyere and black pepper.

There was something about this moment that I want to capture for you, mama. The ease of it. Like everyone knew exactly where to be and what to do and when and would never suffer a moment of self consciousness again. The lighting was just right and so was the temperature through the open windows and the sound of the chords on the guitar reverberated through me like a lullaby. I wanted to bottle this moment up and send it to you for safe keeping, a perfect moment to decorate your home in the clouds. 

I was so happy, mama. For that moment, I thought, “I’ve made it. I’m ok.” 

The thing about altitude is that you adjust to it. People are always talking about that. Especially in mountain towns, “adjusting to the altitude.” If you’re out of breath you can descend to a lower altitude, or you can wait it out, adjust. 

Sometimes it feels like I’ll never adjust to life without you. Like I’ll be frozen in a grief ridden stomachache forever. And then sometimes it feels like I am adjusting. Like it’s happening right now, as I write to you, whether I want it to or not. I’m accumulating experiences I’ll never tell you about, making decisions you’ll never weigh in on, eating meals and singing songs and hugging friends you’ll never know.  Life keeps happening and happening and happening and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. 

Adjusting is its own kind of terrifying. Its own kind of sad. Its own kind of grief. People don’t talk about that as much. But I wanted to tell you, mama, because it feels like the kind of thing you’d understand. 

I love you. I’m sending all of my love to the clouds. 

Jessie 

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Today marks two months since my mama died. Over the past month, I’ve found it hard to write. Words that had been flowing so freely suddenly felt blocked and stuck inside. Choosing to write means choosing to feel and after years of feeling a lot of pain and fear, I think my body and mind were asking for a break. 

So I listened, and I took a little break. But feeling matters, and writing is how I know how to do it best. Thank you to every single person who has taken the time to read my writing and to all of you who have reached out to tell me you’ve been touched by words - you brought me back to the page. And to Loren, my love, who somehow knew exactly what needed to be said.