Her Hands His Eyes is a journal written in real time about writing my book. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 4 Start from the beginning with Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know. Open The Box.
This was a hard week.
I am not going to pretend otherwise. That is not what this journal is for. This journal is for the truth of what it actually feels like to sit down every week and write a book about the people you have lost. And this week the truth is that I struggled.
I sat at my desk and I stared at the ceiling. I took deep breaths. I exhaled. I stared at the ceiling some more.
I called Chris at work.
Not for anything specific. Just to hear his voice. Just to say these feelings are very large right now and I need someone to tell me that is normal. That is what grief share looks like from the inside. You reach for the person who knows you best and you say I am not sure I can do this and you wait for them to tell you that you can.
He always tells me I can.
He would come home from work and sit with me. Just sit. The way he has always sat with me through the hard things. Not fixing. Not solving. Just present. He would say it’s okay. He would say these feelings are normal. He would say let’s talk.
So we talked.
I told him I was not sure I was ready to open the box. Not the cardboard box. That was already open. I meant the other box. The one inside me that I had been keeping closed for twenty-four years. The one that held everything I had not let myself feel about my father and my mother and the life we left behind and the life we built here and all the space in between.
I told him I was not sure I was ready to go that deep.
He said you already are.
The Sentence That Stopped Me
I went back to my desk.
I sat down. I took another deep breath. I started typing.
And then four words came out that I did not plan.
I see this through my father’s eyes.
I stopped.
I read it back.
I see this through my father’s eyes.
And then something shifted. Quiet. Certain. The way the truest things arrive. Not because you thought them up but because they were already there waiting for you to be still enough to hear them.
Because it wasn’t just his eyes.
That is the moment grief share becomes something you cannot ignore. When you realize your grief does not belong only to you. When you realize it never did.
“It was every person who ever stood in a kitchen and made something from memory.”
It Was All of Us
It was my mother’s hands in every kitchen she ever stood in. Hands that never measured anything. Hands that just knew. My grandmother on a train with dried beef and sticky rice feeding people the way she always fed people. Without ceremony. Without fuss. Because that was simply what you did.
My cousin in the rice fields. The aunts I only knew through photographs my father took. The uncles who appear in slides I am still working through one by one.
Chris carrying a box from state to state without once saying open it already. Twenty-four years of patience. That is its own kind of love.
My boys growing up at my table not knowing they were learning something. Remi at the stove asking to learn. Standing there the way I once stood watching my mother. The way she once stood watching hers.
All of them.
All of us.
This is what grief share does when you stop running from it. It opens up into something bigger than yourself. It connects you to every person who ever loved someone and lost them. Every person who ever stood in a kitchen and made something from memory and never wrote it down because they never thought they would need to.
My eyes filled up.
I didn’t cry. Not exactly.
I just looked up at the ceiling and exhaled.
The kind of exhale that comes when something you have been carrying finally has a name.
This was not just my father’s story.
It never was.
“To make sure that what lived in their hands does not disappear when they are gone.”
What This Week Taught Me
I learned something this week about writing through grief.
You cannot do it alone.
I thought I could sit at my desk and work through it by myself. I thought that was what writing meant. Solitude. Discipline. Showing up even when it is hard.
That is part of it. But only part.
The other part is calling Chris at work because the feelings are too large to hold by yourself. The other part is letting him come home and sit with you and say it’s okay and mean it. The other part is grief share. Finding the people who will sit with you in it and not try to rush you out of it.
I am still not sure I was ready to open the box.
But I opened it anyway.
And Chris was there.
And the words came.
And now I understand what this book really is.
It is not just my story. It is every family that ever carried its history in food and hands and memory instead of words. Every grandmother on a train. Every mother in a kitchen. Every father behind a camera pointing at ordinary life because he understood that nothing announces itself as important while it is happening.
It is all of us.
I am writing it for Remi, Samantha, Jackson, Brook, Stetson, and Charlotte.
So they know it was all of us.
So they know they are not alone in it either.
What Comes Next
This is Entry 4 of Her Hands His Eyes — a memoir written in real time as I open the box.
In Entry 5 what her hands knew. The recipes she never wrote down and what it took to find them again.
