Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  You may have felt like a prisoner to your anxiety, but don’t forget—you also hold the keys that can release you from the pain. Now it’s time to pick them up and see which ones work. A NEW WAVE TO RIDE: What are some steps that you’d like to take toward your wellness to grow mentally, physically, and emotionally this upcoming week? With sustained effort, how do you think you might feel differently in a month, six months, or a year from now? CHAPTER TEN WHEN YOUR SURFBOARD BREAKS Things started out fairly routine with Sam. They wanted to discuss their recent breakup with a partner. As a queer, nonbinary, white, atheist person, they had been to therapy before and had a positive association with it. They considered this a “tune-up” to process their new relationship status. While they were disappointed that the relationship didn’t work out, they weren’t distraught. They were simply giving themselves space to reflect and feel. You go, Glen Coco. But then, things changed. Overnight. Sam came to their session in tears. I’d seen them upset—but this was next level. I said, “Sam, what’s going on? I can tell something is wrong.” They answered, “I can’t believe I’m telling you this . . . but my family home burned down last week.” “What?” I was shocked. “Yes. A fire blew through town so quickly. The winds were wild. One minute we were told to evacuate and the next we were driving up to see our house in ashes. I just can’t believe it.” I responded, “Sam, this is truly awful. I am so, so sorry.” We sat together while they cried. Nowhere to be but here. Sam eventually said, “This just can’t be real. I have so many memories in that house. Christmas Eve dinners. Birthday parties. Getting a puppy and playing with him in the backyard. To know that it’s all gone is devastating. I can’t accept it.” My heart ached for Sam. While I hadn’t lived out their pain directly, I had felt something close. Being a California psychologist, I’ve had many clients experience the trauma of ravaging fires, and it’s hit close to my own childhood home. While my family narrowly escaped having our home burn down by the Thomas fire in 2017, my best friend, also named Lauren, lost her family home that day—on her birthday. I’ll never forget hearing her tell me while I sat on a plane, “It’s all gone, Lauren. My home is gone.” All of our childhood memories flashed before my eyes: building forts in the backyard, playing with Barbie dolls in her playroom, and dressing up for Halloween in July (we always took months to plan out our outfits in advance and still do to this day). When she told me the news, I immediately started crying on the plane. I didn’t care that people saw. Her home was gone and there was no getting it back.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Don’t stop yourself from writing because you’re afraid of tears flowing or anger swelling. Let it bubble up to the surface for you and breathe into it. Set aside some time in a safe space to say what you wish your younger self could have heard at that time. If it feels hard to get started, here are some prompts to guide you through: • When is a time in your life that you remember feeling scared, in pain, or confused? • What do you wish you could have told your inner child in those moments when you were anxious or hurting? • If you felt abandoned or life felt out of control, what do you wish could have been done differently? How would you make a choice now as an adult to protect that younger version of yourself? If you feel inspired to continue healing your inner child, there are so many ways to get in touch with the younger self that still lives inside of us. Many of us cut ourselves off from that version of ourselves—we block off memories, things we loved at the time, and that childlike sense of curiosity and play because the vulnerability feels too great. While we can’t change the past, we can begin having corrective experiences in a safe way where we learn to re-love what brought us joy or heal what brought us pain. What’s different is that we can parent ourselves—this time in the way that we wish it would have been done. Unlike in childhood, where we have so little control much of the time (let’s be honest—we’re often at the mercy of the adults around us), as adults we have more power to choose the outcome and resolve our narrative. Here are some ways to reconnect and restore your inner child: • Look back on pictures from your childhood. Think about or write a message of healing to the child you see looking back at you. Frame it and put it up as a reminder of your dedication to taking care of that child within. • Join an intramural sport, take a dance class, or do another physical activity that you enjoyed as a child. Get back into that state of play. Perhaps if that activity became excessively competitive or a source of pain, you can repair that relationship with a new experience of it, particularly without any parental or coaching pressure. • Do some artwork. As children, many of us painted, drew, colored, or sculpted.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother laughed. A daughter again? You’re the same daughter until you die, she said. Once, I asked her what happened to a body when it died. She said it became a story, and death was just another translation of it. Another time, I asked if gegu was true, if daughters really used to stir-fry their own flesh to feed their sick fathers. My mother said, It’s as true as you. She’d laughed and said I was conceived in her mouth, born between her teeth and tongue. If she kills Agong, I said. Will you take him home then? Will you bury him in the holes I’ve made? Will he become a story? My mother stopped laughing. She sat down on the bruised tiles and folded, perching her chin on her knees. A story? she said, looking above my head at the leak in our ceiling. I’m running out of them. One last one, I said. A story to make Agong safe. I got down on my knees and took her feet in my hands, remembering the time my brother and I had scissored through the socks. She let me hold them, her ankle-bones smooth inside my palm, stones shaped by my worrying thumbs. With her feet cradled to my chest, my mother said she’d never told me about her toes, the lineage of their loss. What she chose. I told her I thought Hu Gu Po ate them, that Ama had weeded them from her feet. She said no, the toes were casualties. When I asked her which war, she said I wouldn’t know it by name. If this story is supposed to sheathe me, I said, it’s too late. I’m already drawn. I’m already your best weapon. My mother said I wasn’t any kind of weapon if I didn’t know what I was forged from, what I was shaped around. The river, I said, trying to give her a beginning. But my mother said the river was nothing like either of us: It couldn’t hold a hole. When hit with a stone or a fist or a baby, the river opened to swallow the body but sewed itself shut around it. The river is revision, my mother said, but you’re no river, so what I say is what you need to remember. Don’t delete anything from me.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The words appeared in a kind of banner, held aloft by cherubs; but beneath them there were three or four smaller headlines - they said things like Ben and Milly Announce Their Engagement; Knockabout Acrobats to Wed; Hal Harvey and Helen’s Heavenly Honeymoon! I knew none of these artistes, nor did I linger over their stories; for in the very centre of the article there was a column of print and a photograph from which, once I had seen it, I could not tear my eyes.Butler and Bliss, the column was headed, Theatreland’s Happiest Newly-Weds! The photograph was of Kitty and Walter in their wedding-suits.I gazed at it in stupefaction for a moment, then I placed my hand over the page and gave a cry - a quick, sharp, agonised cry, as if the paper was hot and had burned me. The cry became a low, ragged moan that went on, and on, until I wondered that I had breath enough left to make it. Soon I heard footsteps on the stairs: Mrs Best was at the door, calling my name in curiosity and fear.At that I ceased my racket, and became a little calmer: I did not want her in my room, prying into my grief or offering useless words of comfort. I called to her that I was quite all right - that I had had a dream, merely, which had upset me; and after a moment I heard her take her leave. I looked again at the paper on my knee, and read the story which accompanied the photograph. It said that Walter and Kitty had married at the end of March, and honeymooned on the Continent; that Kitty was currently resting from the stage, but was expected to return to the halls - in an entirely new act, and with Walter as her partner - in the autumn. Her old partner, it said, Miss Nan King, who had been taken ill whilst playing at the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, was busy with plans for a new career of her own...Reading this I felt a sudden, sickening desire not to moan, or weep - but to laugh. I put my fingers to my lips and held them shut, as if to stem a tide of rising vomit. I had not laughed in what seemed to be a hundred years or more; I feared more than anything to hear the sound of my own mirth now, for I knew it would be terrible.When this fit had passed, I turned again to the paper. I had wanted at first to destroy it, to tear or crumple it and cast it on the fire.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When my father sent money from the mainland, we folded half of it into the duct-taped shoebox under my grandmother’s bed, gave the rest to pay our late rent. My mother’s period was three months late. She miscarried in bed while I slept in my father’s place, on the moonsoaked side of the mattress. Blood ribboned between us, and I woke with both wrists bound in red. I checked my body for a wound, but it was nowhere on my body. My mother sat up in bed and corked her crotch with a fist. She told me to get a bucket. I ran to the kitchen and emptied a bucket of brine into the sink, scrubbing away its ring of salt with the hem of my shirt. When I brought her the bucket, she squatted over it for the rest of the night, her blood baying into it, making a sound like a trapped dog. The air turned to salt and crystallized around my lips and eyes. I fell back asleep, and when I woke my mother was still crouched on the floor, naked from the waist down, staring down at her blood like a mirror. In the morning, I helped her carry the bucket to the bathroom sink. The blood was only two inches deep, but it was heavy as bone. As if death had a hidden density. We tipped the bucket together. Later, my brother would complain that the sink wasn’t draining properly, that something down there was clogged. I would catch my mother spooning beef broth down the sink, feeding the drain like a mouth. _ In my version, Meng Jiang Nu marries another tree. This other tree is a daughter like her, with branches too soft to be switches, a trunk holed into nests. The tree is marrowed like bone. The story silvers into a mirror: One day, while stretching her roots under the soil, Meng Jiang Nu butts into the roots of another tree without a shadow—a bone-tree—and the two are married through friction. By striking their branches against each other, they invent fire. Unlike Meng Jiang Nu, the bone-tree eventually outgrows her soil, her roots forking into human feet, her fruit ripening into a face. The bone-tree dresses as a boy and becomes a gardener, guarding Meng Jiang Nu with a pair of silver shears. Late in the empire, the bone-tree is drafted to build the Great Wall. The Wall contains so many corpses—so many men dead of exhaustion—that it can be built through the night. Bone is a source of light. When the bone-tree dies working on the Wall in midwinter, her bones are so cold they shatter into sugar. The next worker in line paves over her body and moves on, builds the next rung of the Wall’s spine.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  It’s helping me cope.” Is it, though? While you can busy yourself at times, you ultimately have to face the ghost of grief that is lurking in your shadows. There’s never a good time for pain. I don’t know a single person who says, “Yep, now would be a good time for my sister to pass away. I’m ready.” Yeah—said no one ever. You can try to postpone your pain, but trust me, it’s going to still be waiting for you. And then there’s this . . . This is probably going to sound weird to you but in some ways, grieving can feel good. When we honor what we’ve lost, we’re acknowledging the meaning that has been present in our lives. It’s hard to grieve something if it didn’t matter to you. And not to say that you should feel guilty if you don’t feel upset by a recent loss, but there’s a difference between ignoring pain that is clearly there and forcing feelings that weren’t there to begin with (which is totally okay, by the way). Ultimately, honoring our grief is a way to honor ourselves. It’s a form of self-care. When we acknowledge that our healing process is more important than deadlines at school or work or the comfortability of our friends, we’re giving ourselves a powerful message of self-love. This is something I had to remind Sam of. They were so ready to jump into action with everything that needed to get done after their home burned down. Sam was masking their emotional exhaustion by physically exhausting themselves with an endless list of to-dos. They made it impossible for any emotions to come to the surface because they were so preoccupied with their tasks. Their body was starting to deteriorate, too. Letting go of sleep, eating well, exercise, and just straight up sitting with their sadness, they began experiencing a profound fatigue. Their stomach hurt, their head ached, and their skin became pallid. They looked and felt miserable, but they felt that they had to throw themselves into their work as a way to cope. I called this out in session one day. “Sam, I’m worried you’re not taking care of yourself. I can tell that your body is hurting. I think it’s trying to tell you something.” They hesitated. “What will happen if I slow down, though? Won’t I only feel worse?” “You might at first. That sadness and pain may be felt in its entirety. But you won’t be expending so much energy trying to fight it off anymore. What do you think your body is trying to tell you?” I could tell Sam knew. “That I need to sit with it. I need to listen to it.” “What’s stopping you from doing this?” In Sam’s case it wasn’t that they were afraid of their body’s reaction. They just worried that no one would be there to catch them if they fell.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The sadness of Black Elk’s confession – that he believed he had been given a mighty vision but that it was “given to a man too weak to use it” – is a haunting reminder of what a visionless world can do. It can break the hope of a nation. It can destroy faith and leave people in a wasteland of sorrow and isolation. Black Elk’s people died in the snow, as did my ancestors when they walked the Trail of Tears. They died because they were captives of a power without vision. They were the prisoners of a system without a Spirit, a soulless machine of greed and racism called colonialism. Today, four decades after my vision, as a man not much younger than Black Elk when he told his own story, I can see clearly. I can see the blood in the snow. I can hear the lament of my people and because of that, I will not be too weak to use my vision for all it is worth. Even if I am only a single person with a small vision to share, I will proclaim it and release its healing power. I am Choctaw and I am Christian. I have the vision of the Crow. I have walked two paths all my life. I have held the hoop of my faith together. I have come to understand what caused the pain and death that was visited on my nation, and I know that it was not the will of a loving God. The Messiah I knew as a child, the Jesus of my ancestors, walked the long Trail with my people. He was there. He suffered with them. He is not the white man’s god, but a Native healer who made his own vision quest, not once, but four times. He went out to make his lament and he was given visions. He was not afraid of the silence. He was not afraid to speak about what he saw and heard and felt, and consequently, he changed the world. Now you and I are called to do the same. We are like Black Elk. We are like Jesus. We are human, weak and without power. But if we take the risk, if we make the effort, if we claim our own sacred space to invite the vision of God into our lives, we will be transformed. We will receive the wisdom and blessing of God and be given all we need to do our part in rolling back the evil that separates us from one another and from all living things around us. The Jesus of the Trail of Tears, the Jesus of the Lakota and the Choctaw, the Jesus who went to a lonely hilltop and made his lament is the One who shows us the way. He found his vision, changed his name, and saved his people. He was purified. He was with his trusted friends. He made himself open to the sacred.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  With the decision of the highest court in the United States behind them, they thought Native American nations would truly be able to live as allies of the Americans in peace and cooperation. But it was not to be. In one of the darkest episodes in American history, Jackson, despite his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution, ignored the decision of the Supreme Court and stepped into the role of a military dictator. In effect, he nullified the Constitution. With no legal authority he unilaterally decided to settle “the Indian problem” in his own way, by force. While many people today have never heard of Worcester vs. Georgia , and are unaware that one of their presidents violated the Constitution by refusing to enforce a Supreme Court decision, saying, in effect, “the Chief Justice has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” they have heard of its aftermath, The Trail of Tears.10 The Choctaws were the first to go. Under the terms of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1831, they were herded off their land by the American military and made to walk on a death march through the Ozark Mountains to land outside the jurisdiction of the United States, the refugee lands that came to be called Oklahoma Territory.11 Oklahoma is a single word made up of two Choctaw words, okla , which means people, and humma , which means red. Essentially, my ancestors knew that they were going to a place that would soon be populated by other Native American refugees. Therefore, they named it as a sanctuary for all “red people.” It was also a sanctuary for all “red Christians.” The Choctaws who died on the Trail of Tears were Christians. The image of Christians driving other Christians off their land is not what most people associate with “how the West was won.” Popular American history tends to portray the conflict between Native American nations and Western settlers in a much later time frame, well into the last decade of the nineteenth century when remnants of free Native peoples fought their last desperate campaigns against insurmountable odds. That image is accurate, but actually, not normative. The experience of the majority of the Native American population had nothing to do with covered wagons or warriors on horseback. It was far less dramatic, but just as deadly to Native rights. It occurred largely on paper, using intimidation more than cavalry charges. Like the Godfather, the United States made Native people an offer they could not refuse. Under duress, they were made to sign treaties ceding huge portions of their land to the Federal government. These treaties were repeatedly broken by the American government as more land was confiscated and the people evicted by force. Native communities, usually already decimated by diseases for which they had no immunity, were stripped of their lands by fraudulent means, and then deported, either to concentration camps called reservations or to Oklahoma Territory.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When you were born you laughed instead of crying. It impressed me. I liked your honesty. I humored your helplessness, your misplaced faith in my body I lifted you from the river a fish in my fist loosed you into the rainbarrel with your sisters you were the last to girl back snakes chewed the mud spat it back out venom in the soil spreading to the sugarcane sour this year trees retracting their roots we begin to eat the cotton roll them into balls our bellies full of our fists the neighbors go to hunt the snakes but they rescind into the water sink to the bottom pretending to be stone Sometimes I dream raking the river with my teeth staring every fish in the fin none are you. You saltiest of my fishdaughters I steered you by the tail in my rainbarrel what substitutes touch: water hunger I dreamed the clouds were calves I killed to feed you in the morning only cotton swabbing my belly I envy the river its boneless I After weeks your sisters turned back to daughterbodies not you yearly a fish you photosynthesize light into bone I feed all my daughters full of cotton my daughters so empty they shit streams of fog one day I’m home I see your sisters standing around the barrel where you glowbone your sisters so thin cotton infants in their bellies doorknob knees ghostfins I see my eldest with her fist around you your bone in her mouth your sisters hunched together taking turns biting into you scales sequinning their tongues I beat them till they let go too late I forgot what you looked like as a girl I saved what they didn’t swallow some bone an eye-pit when your sisters shat out your ribs I returned them to the river beat its surface blue with my hands the neighbors told me water can’t bruise said I will never be forgiven they saw me drop my children into the river did I really think they would be returned to me the same species it’s true there was a whale in the river one summer before you were born you head-butted my belly blue wanting to get out of me to see it no one knew how the whale squeezed itself in but it was there I swear it was a whale I pet its jellyhead it mooed at me you laughed from inside me too tickling me on the day your sisters ate you I asked the river to give me back a girl again instead it spat out a fish-hook at my feet said go hook yourself another daughter*

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  As you process your experience, it doesn’t mean you “find the reason” for why things happened as they did. As is often the case with grief or trauma, there’s no good reason. We can learn and grow through the experience, but part of the processing is sitting with the reality that sometimes that evil popcorn struck in your life and it just plain sucks. One of the best things you can do as you process your loss is to honor what has happened. While you may engage in a public ritual, such as a funeral, 80 percent of people also engage in a private ritual to reflect on what has happened. 188 This can be impactful if you’re seeking closure over a breakup, a job change, or a friendship ending. I often do this with clients, including with Sam. They decided that they wanted to frame a picture of their house and put it up in their new room. This was a way for them to remember the memories that were encapsulated in their family home. They didn’t want to forget, and the photo was a way to remind them of that home’s significance. It wasn’t a memory to be buried. You can engage in your own ritual. It can be something you do one time, daily, or on an anniversary. This can be a healthy way to process your pain, rather than push it away. Having a ritual can also integrate the loss into your daily lived experience more often—it doesn’t have to feel like a distant memory that grows more and more faint. Here are a few ways that you can incorporate a grieving ritual into your life: • Wear something that represents the loss (a necklace, a ring, etc.). • Get a tattoo that symbolizes the relationship. • Have a place that you visit that brings back important memories relating to the loss. • Put up a picture that reminds you of the relationship, either in a frame, on your phone, or on your computer screen. • Carry something with you that makes you feel more connected to the person. • Write a letter to the person or experience that you’ve lost. • Light a candle while you reflect or meditate on what’s now missing. • Listen to a song that reminds you of what’s changed. A NEW WAVE TO RIDE: Is there someone in your life who is grieving and you would like to support? Is there someone you could let into your life to support you? How can you honor the losses you’ve experienced with more intentionality? WHEN YOU’RE AFRAID OF THE WAVE THAT’S COMING Grief is inevitable.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her voice - ‘Oh, Ma, what’s up?’ - pursued me up the stairwell, followed by Mrs Milne’s murmurs. In a moment I was in my own room again, with the door closed hard behind me. The little bits and pieces I owned, of course, could be bundled together in a second, in my sailor’s bag, and a carpet-bag that Mrs Milne had once given me. My bedclothes I folded and placed neatly at the end of the mattress, and the rug I shook out at the open window; the few little pictures I had pinned to the wall I took down, and burned in the grate. My toilet articles - a cake of cracked yellow soap, a half-used jar of tooth-powder, a tub of face-cream scented with violet - I scooped into the bin. I kept only my toothbrush, and my hair-oil; these, together with an unopened tin of cigarettes and a slab of chocolate, I added to the carpet-bag - though, after a second’s hesitation, I took the chocolate out again, and left it on the mantel, where I hoped Grace would find it. In half an hour the room looked quite as it had when I had first moved in. There was nothing at all to mark my stay there save the cluster of pinholes in the wallpaper where my pictures had been tacked, and a scorch-mark on the bedside cabinet where once, slumbering over a magazine, I had let a candle fall. The thought seemed a miserable one; but I would not grow sad. I didn’t go to the window, for a last sentimental look at the view from it. I didn’t check the drawers, or go poking under the bed, or pull the cushions from the chair. If I had left anything behind I knew that Diana would replace it with something better.Downstairs all seemed ominously still, and when I arrived at the parlour it was to find its door shut fast against me. I gave a knock, and turned the handle, my heart beating. Mrs Milne was seated before the table, where I had left her. She was less ashen than before, but still looked grim. The teapot stood cooling on its tray, its contents unpoured; the cups lay huddled on their nest of saucers beside it. Gracie sat stiff and straight on the sofa, her face turned effortfully away, her gaze fixed unswervingly - but also, I thought, unseeingly - on the view beyond the window. I had expected her to weep at my news; instead, it seemed to have enraged her. Her lips were clenched and quite drained of colour.Mrs Milne, at least, appeared to have reconciled herself a little to my departure, for she addressed me now with something like a smile. ‘I’m afraid Gracie is not quite herself,’ she said. ‘Your tidings’ve quite upset her. I told her you’ll be coming to see us, but - well - she’s that stubborn.’‘Stubborn?’

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  How lucky he must have felt when his ship came sailing in! He must have known, when that letter came from Hawaii, that he had been chosen after all; that he possessed the grace of his name, the baraka, the blessings of God. With the degree, the ascot, the American wife, the car, the words, the figures, the wallet, the proper proportion of tonic to gin, the polish, the panache, the entire thing seamless and natural, without the cobbled-together, haphazard quality of an earlier time—what could stand in his way? He had almost succeeded, in a way his own father could never have hoped for. And then, after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not escaped after all! To discover that he remained trapped on his father’s island, with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive, like a wicked, yawning mouth, and his mother gone, gone, away …. I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other people. The silence killed your faith. And for lack of faith you clung to both too much and too little of your past. Too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties. Too little of the laughter in Granny’s voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire. The loyalty that could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles. Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love. For all your gifts—the quick mind, the powers of concentration, the charm—you could never forge yourself into a whole man by leaving those things behind ….

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Horatio Bardwell Cushman, 18991 One of the best places to begin a study of the first vision quest of Jesus is in the graveyard – and not just any graveyard, but in the ones still found in some areas of rural Mississippi and Alabama. The gravesites are like small mounds overgrown with grass, trees, and vines. They are hard to identify because they blend into the natural surroundings. Some remain intact; others have been plowed up, their contents lost long ago. These little mounds are the graves of my distant ancestors. They are Choctaw burials, usually dating back before the beginning of the nineteenth century CE. Prior to the arrival of the Christian missionaries, my ancestors would place the bodies of their dead on scaffolds, in a way not dissimilar from the scaffold burials common to many Plains nations.2 The dead were escorted there by the family as they grieved and then left for a long period until they were almost completely decomposed. Once this natural process had occurred, the family returned to the scaffold with a religious specialist known as a “bone picker” who cleaned the bones and reverently placed them in a box. The boxes of the dead collected by a local community were kept in a special place set apart – a “bone house” – until the holding place was full. Once there were enough boxes of the dead, the whole community carried them to a common place of interment where they were mixed together and covered with earth, creating the small mounds that people honored as the final resting spot for their loved ones. All of this began to change in the early years of the nineteenth century. Presbyterian missionaries arrived in the Choctaw nation, a geographic area covering most of the current state of Mississippi and extending through other settlements into Alabama, Louisiana, and even Texas. Along with other Native American nations in the southern part of the United States, the Choctaw Nation quickly embraced Christianity. Choctaws, along with Creeks, Cherokees, and Chickasaws found the theology of the new religion easy to adapt. These Native nations already understood that there was one God. Choctaws understood the story of the Exodus because we have a very similar migration narrative in our own history: long ago two twin brothers led the nation on a long migration to the promised land, Chahta yakni , the Choctaw homeland.3 Like almost every other North American indigenous nation, Choctaws called themselves “the People” in recognition of their covenant with God to be the people of a particular sacred land. Even the Christian story of Jesus as the Messiah made sense to Choctaws. It was not hard for my ancestors to comprehend that humanity needed redemption. After their first contact with Spanish conquistadores, they believed human beings could certainly be in need of salvation.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The place of women at the cross, therefore, is the antithesis to the image of Pocahontas at the font. They are not there as handmaidens to the Lord; they are not there to be redeemed from the sinfulness of their being; they are not the symbols of a mythic fall from grace that has cursed humanity. In Native American theology, they are there to birth the spiritual transition of a human being from this reality into the reality of God. They are the midwives of the Christ. Pocahontas is a visual aide for the fourth vision quest of Jesus because she symbolizes why he went to the cross to make his final lament. Millions of Native American women have lived and died in obscurity. Their stories are untold and unrecognized, but we know from history the truth of what they endured. They were targeted by white men for extermination. They were abused and exploited. They went into exile and suffered. They are still referred to by a slur that demeans their dignity and denies their reality. The poster child for their experience is a cartoon character, a subservient female receiving her redemption from white men. In this context, Pocahontas and Sacajawea stand for every person who has ever been exploited and marginalized by a dominant society. What happened to Native women happened to other women of color. It happened to men of color. It continues to happen to a great many people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. It happens to people of all ages and both genders. It happens to people who are gay or lesbian. It happens to transgender human beings. It happens across lines of economic class and social privilege. The list is long, but the story is very much the same. From the Native American viewpoint, Jesus did not have to come to die for the actions of First Man and First Woman. Jesus had to become the Native Messiah to show us, once and for all, that we are all the same. We are the tribe of the human beings. We are family. We are related. As self-evident as that may seem to some of us, it is an historic recognition that has yet to be achieved. The statistical truth of the experience of Native women is symbolic of the racism and exploitation that continue on a daily basis around us. Humanity still suffers daily and deeply from religious intolerance, racial violence, and endemic warfare. The most fundamental lessons of kinship seem to elude us. Therefore, the Native Covenant and the Christian theology it supports becomes critical. It becomes life-giving. It becomes liberating. Native American Christian theology shifts the focus of the fourth vision quest from individual salvation to communal redemption. It moves our attention away from the mantra that Jesus came to die so “I” might be forgiven and inherit eternal life.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Your birth came easy to me involuntary as breath. From birth knots were your only form of speech: to say your name you knotted a string in three places you knew all the ways to tangle a thing I predicted your life knotting around your neck I kept so many things away from you jump ropes sewing thread purse straps Still you came home every day with cinched wrists young branches recruited into bracelets garter snakes scars you could braid your own hair before you could speak tied knots into it one for yes two for no three for don’t bother me when you were hungry you unraveled a knot two if you were thirsty you spoke to me in undoings I hear your wife is a Hakka woman a tour guide in the south that you two are running a hotel now her fingers reading your knots in the dark I hear you buried a pair of scissors together on the beach for the wedding I want to know what you fight about if you ever mention me the mother the summer I took you and your sisters to the far shore the one facing the mainland the ghost- bridge you asked why so many people once crossed the Strait there was a war a war a war our island was captured for I told you the sea here is sold to the biggest bidder the country where my own mother taught me before crossing any body of water you pay it a coin a bracelet your life How much do you know about forgetting? When your wife slips a finger into you do you think of it as a birth? Her mouth mentors the dark between your legs she pickles her tongue in you I am not asking because I want to know how you are loved by a woman once I kissed my girlcousin my teeth all rotted the next month flew out of my mouth as flies once I tried to teach you speech pressed your hand to the woodstove waited for you to say let me go your palm sizzling like pork the skin grew back bark your word for mother is missing here’s a story you were born cordless you cut it yourself leashed* to no one born to leave me I raised all my daughters like the dead: your dead father the first man I married died a red spy born a bastard: the son of a servant & a landlord he had night-sight born with nocturnal eyes he believed rich men should be rewritten without bodies he tied his own father to a fence flayed him with reeds years later your father arrived on my island a boat we didn’t recognize the soldiers brought guns a language

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In human society too, the emperor Justinian (r. 527–65) believed, there should be a symphonia of church and state, a harmony and concord based on the incarnation of the Logos in the man Jesus. 105 Just as the two natures—human and divine—were found in a single person, there could be no separation of church and empire; together they formed the Kingdom of God, which would soon spread to the entire world. But there was, of course, a massive difference between Jesus’s kingdom and the Byzantine state. As the barbarians crept ever closer to the walls of Constantinople, Justinian became even more zealous to restore the divine unity by vigorously enforcing the supremacy of “the emperor’s church.” His attempts to suppress the Monophysite party permanently alienated the people of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. He declared that Judaism was no longer religio licita: Jews were now debarred from public office, and the use of Hebrew was prohibited in the synagogue. In 528 Justinian gave all pagans three months to be baptized, and the following year he closed the Academy in Athens that had been founded by Plato. In every province from Morocco to the Euphrates, he commissioned churches, built after the style of Constantinople, to symbolize the unity of the empire. Instead of providing a challenging alternative to imperial violence, the tradition that had begun in part as a protest against the systemic oppression of empire had become the tool of Rome’s aggressive coercion. In 540 Khosrow I of Persia began to transform his ailing kingdom into the economic giant of the region in a reform based on a classic definition of the agrarian state: The monarchy depends on the army, the army on money; money comes from the land tax; the land tax comes from agriculture. Agriculture depends on justice; justice on the integrity of officials, and integrity and reliability on the ever-watchfulness of the king. 106 Khosrow devised a more efficient method of tax collection and invested heavily in the irrigation of Mesopotamia, which previous Persian kings had neglected. With the proceeds he was able to create a professional army to replace the traditional aristocratic levies. War with Christian Rome was now inevitable, since both powers aspired to dominate the region. Khosrow employed Arab tribesmen to police his southern border, and the Byzantines reciprocated by hiring the Banu Ghassan, even though they had converted to Monophysite Christianity, to patrol the frontier from their winter camp near Damascus.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "When I first received the intelligence of the death of Claude and of your son Louis, I was so utterly overpowered (tout esperdu et confus en mon esprit) that for many days I was fit for nothing but to weep; and although I was somehow upheld before the Lord by those aids wherewith He sustains our souls in affliction, yet among men I was almost a nonentity; so far at least as regards my discharge of duty, I appeared to myself quite as unfit for it as if I had been half dead (un homme demi-mort). On the one hand, I was sadly grieved that a most excellent and faithful friend [Claude Féray] had been snatched away from me—a friend with whom I was so familiar, that none could be more closely united than we were; on the other hand, there arose another cause of grief, when I saw the young man, your son, taken away in the very flower of his age, a youth of most excellent promise, whom I loved as a son, because, on his part, he showed that respectful affection toward me as he would to another father. "To this grievous sorrow was still added the heavy and distressing anxiety we experienced about those whom the Lord had spared to us. I heard that the whole household were scattered here and there. The danger of Malherbe601 caused me very great misery, as well as the cause of it, and warned me also as to the rest. I considered that it could not be otherwise but that my wife must be very much dismayed. Your Charles,602 I assure you, was continually recurring to my thoughts; for in proportion as he was endowed with that goodness of disposition which had always appeared in him towards his brother as well as his preceptor, it never occurred to me to doubt but that he would be steeped in sorrow and soaked in tears. One single consideration somewhat relieved me, that he had my brother along with him, who, I hoped, would prove no small comfort in this calamity; even that, however, I could not reckon upon, when at the same time I recollected that both were in jeopardy, and neither of them were yet beyond the reach of danger. Thus, until the letter arrived which informed me that Malherbe was out of danger, and that Charles and my brother, together with my wife and the others, were safe,603 I would have been all but utterly cast down, unless, as I have already mentioned, my heart was refreshed in prayer and private meditations, which are suggested by His Word ....

• From Bestiary (2020)

  You define a daughter as something done to you at night without your permission I dream Agong in the window a face I forage for resemblance the only thing we share is sorry you say there’s no such thing as death only debt only deferring the next life I once thought you’d given birth to me directly skipped my mother entirely you conceived me by screaming into a peach eating around its seed planting it inside your shit watering it into me a story like all stories treeing out of you all stories are about ownership I’m mistaken: you aren’t the tiger spirit you’re the woman it wears you tell me choices are made by men militaries language is not what’s said but what’s silenced Agong told me today I could become anything by mimicking it he lay down in the middle of every road said now I’m every way home I pen his mouth here by punching the page Agong kneels in the yard digs a birdbath where I rinse my hands you say a mouth is all I wanted for you my name goes nude maiden name meaning what survives is what I choose to remember _ After I feed the letters back, Ben and I stand over the holes as they breathe. The moon a bared tooth. We ask our mothers if we can sleep out in the yard tonight, and when they both say no, we do it anyway, build a tent out of blankets and brooms. My mother watches us out the window for an hour, then comes out with a quilt to use as our roof, the one with Ama’s denim river sutured down its center. She brings the border to her nose and breathes all the blue out of the fabric. Then she hooks the blanket over our broomsticks, hanging it above us, and the river is resurrected as our sky. Ben and I fall asleep paired like quotation marks, my mother between us, my mother the thing we speak. I couch my head on my mother’s belly and listen to her bowels fill with wing-beats. She perches her fingers in my hair and names each strand with her hands, singing a song that Agong learned from the crows, a song about camphor trees that grow to be girls.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It was dark in the stairway, like turning the night back on, but we all followed after him. We scattered on the square rooftop, big as a parking lot, where wet lines of laundry hung heavy and dank as meat. Someone had burned something recently and the air was full of gossiping smoke. There was a chicken coop in the center of the roof, made of plywood and plastic wrap, and the two hens inside looked dead. My brother was standing at the edge, where the rooftop ended. Where the railing buckled its shadow around his waist. I was the one who got the closest. My thumb snagged the belt loop at the back of my brother’s jeans, but he had already climbed over the railing, the rust sloughing off on his hands. I came close enough to see that. He didn’t jump so much as sprint past the sky. He didn’t fall through the air so much as become it. Then my father was behind me, lifting me by my hair, saying Come back from there, come back. I didn’t know if he was talking to my brother or me. My mother had not moved since we got to the roof. She was a statue of salt, solidified by my eyes, but I saw she was speaking something, willing his wings. The building was at least a hundred stories, and when we first saw it from the window of the taxi, my brother said, It’s like a big boner. A big boner in the sky. I told him to shut up, it was not, it was beautiful, with rows and rows of windows opening like eyes. Wouldn’t you want to live somewhere like that, I asked him. The whole world in your window. My brother said, No, I’ll never live where he lives. Now the building was not tall enough. I needed it to never end, for the ground to be as far back as history. My mother, the one who watched, would tell the story better: She would say my father loved kites so much he became one, that my brother borrowed new bones. We both watched my father follow my brother as if tethered, yanked along, tied ankle-to-ankle by a kite-string. I grabbed at his ankle, but the weight of his want was too much for me. When my brother was halfway down and my father a breath above him, their bodies began to rise. They plateaued in the air, horizontal like kites, and flapped in the wind before riding it upward and out, blade-arcing through the air. My brother breached a cloud, rising up past the roof where my mother and I stood, our hands on the railing, our mouths round as sirens.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ma left the morning after. She’d said nothing about the penis, my sister, my arm. Dinner still on the table from the night before, flies redacting the fish from its bones. She’s gone three days before Ba notices, and even then he only asks why we’ve been eating porridge for every meal. Jie and I walk him to the bus, adjusting his hairnet before he boards, telling him to get off the bus when the road runs out of trees. On the fourth day, Jie and I forget to wash the spoons and bowls. Collars of mold strangle everything. Ba and Jie and I eat in front of the TV, scooping cold rice porridge with our hands. We look like a litter of pigs, suckling on our fingers like this. We watch Monkey King cartoons on the Chinese channel, translating the Mandarin into Ba’s first dialect, watching his mouth mime ours. Ba laughs at the sound effects, what we don’t have to translate: In this episode, the Monkey King gets buried alive under a landslide, and the little rocks rivering down the mountain sound like gunfire. Pa pa pa pa pa pa, Ba says. Then the Monkey King gets rescued by a monk who asks for a debt paid in bones, so the Monkey King castrates himself and hands the monk his penis and says, Enough? Ha ha ha ha ha ha, Ba says. When Ba is asleep, there’s only the news. That’s when we see Ma’s factory on fire. We recognize the blacked-out windows. The whole factory haloed in flame, smoke we can’t smell. There’s a close-up of ten hoses spraying the flame at different angles, each one leashed to a different little man. Jie says the hoses look like alien penises. While she laughs, I watch the stretchers, scuttling in and out of the building like beetles. I wait for Jie to tell me. To tell me Ma must be inside there. To say Ma is ash. Or she can’t be, she is in our old house stroking a picture of our three sisters, she is on her knees in the next room praying, she is in the kitchen scraping away the mold that is our fault, she is undressing Ba in the bath and oiling his back. The reporter on-scene speaks too fast to understand. We scan the screen for a body count, but there is only the day’s temperature in the left corner. Jie shuts off the TV and we watch the last ghost-strand of static wriggle in the center of the black screen, then flatline.