Her Hands His Eyes — Entry 10
There is a chapter in this book that I almost didn’t write.
Not because I didn’t know what happened. I knew exactly what happened. I was there.
Not because it wasn’t important. It is one of the most important chapters in the book.
I almost didn’t write it because I wasn’t sure I had the right words for it yet. Some things take time before you can put them on a page. Some grief has to sit with you for a while before it will let itself be written.
This chapter took me the longest to start.
I was twelve years old when we went back to Thailand.
I had not been back since I was six. Six years in America. Six years of Maryland and Catholic school, and learning to be someone new in a country that was still figuring out my name.
And then we went back. Thailand brought the grief I’d carried for six years.
I thought I knew what to expect.
I did not.
There are things that happen to you when you are very young that you receive but cannot yet carry. Someone tells you something. You hear it. You set it down somewhere inside you when you are six or seven years old, because you do not yet have the capacity for it. Then you do not even know you have set it down. You just keep going. Because that is what children do. They keep going.
And then one day, you are twelve years old, somewhere that makes it real in a way it never was before, and it arrives. All of it. Six years later.
“Some chapters you write.
Some chapters you survive.”
When Grief Finally Arrives
I was not prepared for that.
I don’t think anyone can be truly prepared for that.
Writing this chapter, I had to sit with it all over again. The twelve-year-old girl who went back expecting one thing and found something else entirely. The grief that finally arrived in a place that made it impossible to outrun.
Some chapters you write. Some chapters you survive. This one I survived, and maybe that’s why it matters so much.
This chapter also contains some of the book’s warmest memories. The two things exist together, the grief and the joy, the loss and the homecoming. The way they always exist together when you go back somewhere that holds both.
That is the thing about this family’s story.
Nothing is just one thing.
It never has been.
“Nothing is just one thing. It never has been.”
Next week: the photographs from that trip. There are not many. But the ones that exist stopped me cold.
