(Alicia’s voice)
I sometimes think of friendship as a kind of romance — one unencumbered by the beautiful messiness of sex. It holds desire, intimacy, play, and an orientation to depth. It is a mirror in which the other reflects your humanity and your divinity. Your wondrous nature, and your perfectly flawed self.
We were inviting each other to create a queer space, an inside-out space in which vulnerability led. I was challenged with Su not to lapse back into my tendency to be shy or to run away when I feel exposed. The practice was — and remains — to keep showing up. To stay present to the unfolding of a relationship built — from the outset — on the foundation of vulnerability. It is far from easy.
I would leave our time together unable to pull myself from her words, reflections, poetry. Whole poems stayed with me, on walks, on hikes, over meals. One such poem was Su’s Hwan Gap /Psalm 139 in honor of her 60th birthday. The text is theologically rich and beautifully rendered. In it, is a thoughtful announcement of Su’s arrival into the complicated world that she would be given to navigate. Laid bare is the story of her birth and the ghosts that haunt — and will haunt — her becoming. The ghost of a country, the ghost of a grandmother, and the future ghost of her mother. She writes (in this excerpt):
This heaven-crumbling sorrow
I fed on it as I grew inside her
For it was you who formed my inward parts;
Sinews and bones,
heart, eyes, hands, toes
with the silver thread of sorrow, I was woven into a tapestry
not mine and not not mine
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
As I approach sixty
my mother feeds me, yet again
for the impending birth after
the five twelve-year cycle is completed
Nine months of gestation becomes
nine years in her miraculous procreative womb
not the old and dried-up one you would expect
from an 80-something-year-old,
as I remain in her Alzheimer’s world
until, ready or not, it is time,
with the rhythm of her body
I am pushed out, re-borne
a motherless child.
5:40 p.m., she takes her final warm breath,
inhale
the sun still in the sky, and the moon preparing to rise
greets this well-lived life,
exhale.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
I need not ask her
because I know it in my bones
what is in her bones
Grief, yes
Sorrow, yes
Trauma, oh yes
She lays bare her being. The self that has wrestled and wrestles with the many legacies of loss and generational trauma that shaped her existence. Having received this gift, this profound reflection — and celebration — of six decades, how could I say “no” to our journeying together? I don’t and I can’t. Such honesty and openness in friendship is rare. Such a willingness to reveal oneself requires my attention and intention, much like prayer.
Her poems — each of them — has that quality. They reveal the poignant and complicated moments that formed Su and her response to those moments. Each text offers a glimpse of the indelible events that created this fierce, protective, and compassionate human being for whom the world’s “no” is simply an opportunity to forge one’s unequivocal “yes”. In Hwan Gap/ Psalm 139 it’s all there: Su as softened and also emboldened by grief, by sorrow — by the legacies of trauma that could have hardened the heart but instead, for her, broke open the heart to both let grace in and reveal the grace that was already there. She concludes the piece, writing:
This odds-defying love
I fed on it as I grew inside her
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Not a cold Seoul night but an unseasonably warm November day
I walk the bridge across the Mahicantuck,
the river that flows both ways
according to the Lenape people
Bridging two worlds like the river that communes in two directions
Surrounded by the stunning autumnal beauty
with colors dancing, waving, clapping in the wind
Held by my partner’s fathomless love.
I breathe—
Inhale.
Exhale.
In these lines, she is love, loved, and grace embodied.
