the elsa project

In the spring of 2014, I traveled around the country filming people telling stories about my sister. The project is currently in the editing stages now and will hopefully be cobbled together into something tangible by April 2015. Until then, this is a spot to remember her, to grieve for her, and above all, to be grateful.   If you would like to remember Elsa, we have set up a memorial bench in the redwood grove of the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Admission is free for San Francisco residents and $7 for non-residents.  

[elsagold-blog]

Seeing her go gave me the courage to think that I could do this myself, without fear. I practiced in a dream. I was running along the rooftops of Lower Manhattan when I hit a sheer drop of 20 or 30 stories, and began to fall. I knew I would die, so I gave myself a quick admonition. First: Relax. It’s a long way down, and you could have a hell of an experience before this ends if you don’t tense up and miss it. Second: Stay horizontal so you get a clean hit and don’t make a huge mess. Third: On the ground, before you die, explain that this was an accident, not a suicide. People who love you deserve to know.

Margot Mifflin, Learning to Die.

In the two years since my sister died, I have dreamed about her exactly eight times. One, in the first week, I’m asleep but awake but I feel her there, like a low hum, and then I wake up in my mom’s bed in the world where she is dead. Two, I’m following her and she’s climbing stairs away from me and she tells me her last words in Latin, which translate to “I’m sorry.” (Neither of us speak Latin.) Three, she visits me, and she hugs me, and I wake up, and my body feels like lead. Four, December 2013, twelve days before Christmas, I don’t know whether my dad or my sister is dead and I wake up and message my cousin that I just don’t know whether the reality of being awake is worse than being asleep. Five, November 2014, she has ebola, it’s all very topical. Six, the night before I go to see Mt. Everest, we’re at the movie theater and she’s standing at a floor-to-ceiling window, looking at mountains that are sliding back and forth like glass doors, and she starts to cry as she says, “Well, I guess I have to go now,” and I start to cry and say “no, no, please don’t leave me,” and then we fall to the ground and I wake up and I’m alone in a guest house in Bhaktapur and I sob, really sob, gasping for air, clutching my chest.

Seven, I’m in Brazil, and she’s dancing in the street in a swimsuit, her arms outstretched, a Brazilian flag flapping in her arms. Eight, I remember there’s a loophole and I can talk to her on the phone, but her voice cuts out and I’m screaming where are you? How do I reach you again? Then I run out of the house and I fall to the floor, and by crossing the threshold I’ve traded every material thing in my life to have her back, in the way you just know that it’s happened in your dreams without anything explicitly telling you, except she’s not back, and I’m outside, and it’s dark.

A week ago, I dreamed of dying. I’m driving on the freeway headed for an overpass covered by angry gray clouds, and there’s a tornado, and I drive straight for it because it’s the only way to go. My car flies into the air and the wind is screaming and in the dream I close my eyes and say over and over: I’m going to see Unni. I’m going to see Unni. Relax. Relax. I am going to die now, and I’m going to see Unni. The car plunges towards earth and there is no crash.

I open my eyes and I step out of a spaceship and there are bodies all around me. The military is there, walking on the bodies of dead people. One of them (a scientist? A doctor?) talks about eating the bodies to one of his colleagues, who is visibly disgusted, but the scientist tells him they’re not bodies, they’re just bags of protein and flesh and takes out a fork and scrapes off a piece. The scientist rolls his eyes.

I wake up and I am unsure if the dream means I actually died and she wasn’t there, or I survived the crash and we just changed scenes. I wake up and I am afraid, because I am afraid of dying, and I am afraid that with each passing day and the farther away I get, the less and less I get to see of her.

[elsagold-blog]

Today is the two year anniversary of my sister’s death.

There’s a really wonderful quote by W.S. Merwin that just about sums it up: “Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.” Time, as difficult and frustrating and complicated it can sometimes be, suddenly has only two categories: before and after. This is what after looks like.

There are no flags to raise, no buttons to wear, no causes to raise awareness about when your sister dies suddenly and unexpectedly. There is nothing to do. We have no protocols for this. You just sit and wait for your grief to pass through you, hoping it doesn’t consume you, scratching your way to the next moment so you can breathe again. Except every moment is like a hiccup that never ends, just holding your breath and hoping you get some chance to release again when you won’t feel like this. Some moments are a little easier, and then you exhale. And then you do it all again. The only way out is through.

Every person that I've met since August 25th, 2013 has known me a little differently than who I was two years ago. I am so deeply terribly struck with grief some days that it is all that I can do to put on a human face and move through the world. Living without her is by far the most difficult and most painful thing I’ve ever had to do.

The other side of that is that my sister is part of me and I am better for having known her, and every person that I’ve met is a little better off for having known her through me. On that note, the older I get and the more people I meet, the more I realize she was unlike anybody I’ll ever know in my life. She was fiercely loyal, endlessly brave, and hopelessly curious. More silly and creative than anyone I’ll ever know, and too smart for her own good. Simply put: the most amazing person I’ve ever had the privilege to know, let alone have the privilege to be raised with.

I miss her every split second of every moment. There aren’t any words to describe how much I loved her. There might be a German word for it. Although the Germans are a pretty stoic people. But probably somebody somewhere has to have made up a word for “love so great that it transcends time, lifetimes, spatial planes, and terrible haircuts.”

On today of all days I take that love and I spread it forward and I wish it for all of you that you each have someone you love nearly as much in your lifetime, and bring them a pastry when they most need it but least expect it, because that’s what Elsa would have done.

[conchandall]

April 22 Poem

The Darkness

What is darkness if not the absence of light? What is loneliness if not the absence of love, and silence if not the absence of sound? What are our lives, in the absence of you? Someone who’s had such an impact, someone who’s energy and presence affected everyone around you, people whose ears would perk up at the sound of your voice, and knew some form of happiness was coming to them, in the form of stomping feet shaking dust from the ceiling as you ran downstairs. In the form of a boisterous voice that made our ears twitch, if for just a moment. What is the world, in the absence of you? It’s a little more lonely, and a lot more absent of love.

[elsagold-blog]

by Wesley, for Elsa

[elsagold-blog]

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death...Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (quote from Brainpickings). 

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about moving forward, as I’m getting ready to transition back into school and away from my research year, while also staying anchored in what’s happening right now. It’s almost a week til her 29th birthday. I haven’t been thinking about her as often, although I still think about her every day (sort of like touching on it in disbelief - is this still here? Really??). I relied on her a lot, and now I’m learning how to rely on myself for those things. What she would say to someone who treated me badly. Whether she would drive me to the airport if I needed it. How to hold all that in my brain, and honor her and think about her while simultaneously getting older and moving forward, is a constant work in progress.

[elsagold-blog]

I used to — when I was really intensely depressed and disoriented — I would sit there and think, "I just want this pain to shrink. I want it to get smaller." And, what I learned was, it wasn't really possible for me to miss my father less. But ... that world, the backdrop against which I missed him could be larger, which had the effect of making that pain feel less.

Marie Mutsuki, from After Father's Death, A Writer Learns How 'The Japanese Say Goodbye'. This is exactly how I feel when I travel.

[elsagold-blog]

It is most comfortable to be invisible, to observe life from a distance, at one with our own intoxicating superior thoughts. But comfort and isolation are not where the surprises are. They are not where hope is… Only together do we somehow keep coming through unsurvivable loss, the stress of never knowing how things will shake down, to the biggest miracle of all, that against all odds, we come through the end of the world, again and again — changed but intact (more or less)…

Anne Lamott. Also, "The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?"

[elsagold-blog]

1/1/2015, Chiang Mai, Thailand

[elsagold-blog]

I identified with a lot of parts of this article. Being unable to share in the joy of others in the face of loss - and to care about other people's happiness, while wondering at my own evaporation of empathy as it disappeared before me. The expiration date society sets on grief. But most striking, I think, was the medical student who commented that she should maybe choose a specialty that doesn't expose her to death all the time, and thought she might see a psychiatrist "to learn how to experience loss properly."

If this year has elucidated anything for me, it's this: loss is a part of life. Everyone you love will die; we don't talk about impermanence because it's too hard. Instead we speak in platitudes - they live on in you, they're here with us, they've gone somewhere better - because it makes it easier, less lonely. 

There is no way to experience loss properly. We just don't even do it, as a society. We hide it and we don't talk about it because it's easier, because when most people don't understand how hard it is it can seem futile. 

Every gift you are given will eventually be taken away, including your own life. This is inevitable and undeniable. But I think the way I've chosen to view this fact is that every interaction, every love, every person who impresses themselves upon your life passes through your body, stays with you, forms your muscles and your bones and your vessels. This is what we mean when we say they live on in you. I carry my sister with me everywhere I go.

[elsagold-blog]

11/16/10

me: i think right now time is probably the best?

spend some time apart and see where you are

and then talk it out, hardcore

and figure out if it's really worth being in a long distance relationship

because long distance relationships are soooo hard

you're in one place and your heart is in another

and you need to reevaluate whether it's really worth putting you both through this trouble/hurt

now, for a serious question. is it weird if i eat both a baked potato and a sweet potato for lunch

Elsa: hahaha

yes

well here's the thing

I think it's better for him to be single right now

but for me, I REALLY LIKE this setup

I'M LIKE LIZ LEMON AND CAROL

me: it's weird????

Elsa: why did angela's make you cry a lot

me: why is it weird?

i want to eat both of them!

maybe

if i only eat HALF a baked potato

and half a sweet potato

it's like eating regular fries and sweet potato fries

Elsa: no, it's like I see him on weekends, and then I hang out with my gay friends and eat food the rest of the time

me: because she said a lot of nice/sad/true things

Elsa: also, like barefoot contessa

I don't really see him on weekends. though.

me: well....

if it's not working for one of you, it's not working for both of you

Elsa: oh, you didn't see this episode did you

is that what angela said??

I think having half of both potatoes is fine.

Elsa: I'm so grateful I have you as a sister

me: i'm grateful too!

[elsagold-blog]

What Grief Has Taught Me About Privilege

In the past few weeks I have been devastated by the obvious evidence of the broken, racist system we live in, and I grieve for the families of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and countless others who are mourning their losses at the hands of policemen who were not held accountable for their actions.

I am privileged. I have also struggled. I have been educated, I grew up in a loving two-parent home, and I never feared for my safety or my financial well-being. I have also been marginalized because I am a woman, depicted as something I was not because I am Korean American, misunderstood because my physical appearance says something to people about who I am on the inside rather than who I actually am. Just like all other human beings, I have struggled, and just like all other human beings, my struggle is different from the one you have experienced. My struggle will be different and has been different from yours.

Here I feel like I should stop and acknowledge: there is such a strong tendency to want to play Oppression Olympics. To say that my struggle has been worse than yours, or to want to compare stories, because that’s what we do as humans. We compete and we compare. We relate to one another through our own experience. And the last thing I want to do is to claim that my struggle is the same or is comparable to the massive injustices that constitute reality for so many people, many of my own loved ones included.

But I want to talk about my death experience because it has taught me a few things. I want to tell you about these things because nobody is asking. I want to tell you that it is hard to continue moving forward after someone you love deeply has died. I want to tell you that I am still struggling with the enormity of this loss to this day, a year and change later. And I understand if that language turns you off, because it’s hard to relate to from the outset, because we don’t have a space for talking about grief and loss and death in our society. Because when I tell you, “you don’t understand,” I have had people who purportedly love me say, “you’re right, I don’t understand, so why even try?”

This is the thing, though.

There are things that grieving has taught me about privilege. First of all: we are all privileged in some way or another. Privilege has to do with things you will never know and never experience simply because of who you are. It’s not a perfect analogy, because eventually most people will all lose someone they love, but to not have experienced grief like this you are privileged. And you do not understand the struggle that people who have lost encounter on a minute-to-minute basis.

A year ago, my sister died in an accident. A whole year ago. To someone who has never experienced loss, a year seems like a long time. In the context of our short lives thus far, and in the context of how much I loved her, though, a year is nothing.

And before a year ago I would never have thought to ask someone who had lost someone a year ago: how are you doing? Is this time of year hard for you? Are you still feeling the after-effects of loss? Because you don’t think about it in the same way when it isn’t real to you, in the same way it is my whole reality.

For me, there is no cause to rally behind; no charities to raise money for and nothing to be done. I will never see or speak to my sister again.

It has opened my eyes even wider to the fact that there are experiences in life that I will never have, and that I will never have to worry about, simply because of who I am. It has become even more blatantly obvious that other people can be undergoing unimaginable pain, while I sit in my safe space and write about how heartbroken I am about what’s been happening around me, how I don’t have to be terrified that someone might mistake me for a criminal or underestimate my pain when I go to the hospital, how grateful I am to have been born into safe circumstances. How I am privileged.

That even though I can approximate the grief of Michael Brown’s family, of Tamir Rice’s family, of the countless other families who have lost their loved ones due to deeply ingrained systemic racial bias, I can only imagine.

I can only imagine what it feels like to be terrified that your loved one’s killer walks free. I can only imagine what it feels like to be reminded that the world we lived in has so dehumanized you by your skin color that it’ll take your son’s life with no ramifications. I can only imagine what it feels like to hear that this has happened again and again and again to people in your community. I can only imagine what it feels like to have your most private moments of grief, of photos of you screaming into your son’s coffin or videos of you yelling about the injustices of the racist system we live in, to be splashed around the internet for millions to see.

Just as you can only imagine how I feel to have lost my sister.

But just as I will continue to do about the struggle faced by so many people of color today: you can ask me about it, and you can sit with me, and you can try. 

[elsagold-blog]

This is still happening

Not long ago, I plopped down in the armchair in my therapist’s office for the first time in a while and just sort of sat there, not knowing how to put everything I’ve been feeling and thinking lately into something she could draw from, and she said something to the effect of, “you must feel like - seriously? This is STILL going on? This STILL happening?”

Death keeps taking from you in little and big ways, over and over again. It’s specific at first. We’d RSVP’d to go to this wedding together. We’d signed up for this race together. And then, a year out, there are the missed opportunities. The big things - the holidays are terrible in an obvious way that somehow emphasizes that everyone else has an intact family and yours is sort of irretrievably broken*, highlighting that you used to have someone who always made you perfect homemade presents and for whom you would always buy terrible shitty presents that she loved anyway. Christmases that come and go, and sucker punch you every time you think about how you won’t be gift shopping this year, not like that, anyway. The meals you cook that you would have made together, that you and your parents just ignore now because she was the driving force behind having an American thanksgiving. She was the driving force behind all your family traditions. The little things aren’t that little either. Wanting to text her. Wanting to say Unni (big sister). (Just writing that hurts. I haven’t said Unni in so long, I don’t even remember what it feels like to say it anymore.) Waking up and wishing with every cell in your body that you could just see her again, please, for like, five minutes, maybe? One minute? Seriously?? Not even for one stupid minute??

* This sounds sort of overly dramatic but it definitely is not to say that my family hasn’t come together in a different way. You pick up and glue it back together and move on in the only direction you can. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to have parents who have stuck together and come out stronger than ever, have used this shared experience to only grow closer to one another, all the while setting a really lovely example for me. I went home to visit them a few weekends ago and woke up early to catch them meditating together; later I lay on the floor and felt my mom’s voice vibrating the scratchy carpet of my bedroom as she read a passage to my dad about the importance of being present.

I don’t think most people ever think about the grief of people four years out, ten years out. I don’t think that I ever did before, either. It’s not that I thought they got over it but I just didn’t even consider what that sort of healing was like. It is healing, in a way. It’s stuffing Q-tips into a gaping wound.

People say you’re strong, you’re so strong. And I think that’s right: I am strong. But I am also weak in a way that isn’t abundantly clear to most people. I think of my friend who watched her father die in front of her and how I always thought she was the strongest person I knew but now I know better: she is strong, yes, but not without the gaping hole that continues to gnaw at you decades later when her dad still continues to (surprise!) not be there. And then I think we are all just unbaked, unfinished humans with giant holes in us, for whatever reason, running around and bouncing off one another.

For a long time I’ve felt strongly tied to this image of myself on an island, floating out in the middle of a vast sea, without another human in sight. This feeling, by the way, is magnified when you’re surrounded by people who don’t have any idea what you’re going through. They might know but they don’t actually understand the acute numbness and shock and hollowness of what it actually feels like to miss someone like this. Lately I feel like I’ve been slowly been pulled back to shore, both by others and of my own volition, although I still hop onto the island from time to time. And it happens that moving on involves a lot of meeting new people and trying to figure out how to convey that there was this person who was the world to you but no longer exists, how to explain that you are not whole, but something else entirely.

It’s hard to tell the story of my sister without putting myself into it because I don’t know where she ends and I began. To this day, I still don’t know where I ended and she began. We were two ends of the same continuum. We were two sides of a coin; she was one arm and I was the other. It’s hard, too, to know where to put her death into it because she isn’t just a dead person to me. She is the other part of me that’s gone for a bit, or missing, or put away for a little while, and of course there isn’t just one story; there’s the whole tapestry of her life that will always have holes in it and will always be incomplete, and was, obviously, cut short.

When we were kids, we used to talk to each other in made-up language. It wasn’t that we had a secret code or ever even knew what we were saying or why. We literally used to babble at each other, just nonsense, for hours, climbing up and down the stairs and toppling over couches and babbling. Sometimes I would say “boop boop beep bop. That means, the red balloon is over there,” and she would follow, “bop bop blah blah, which means, I love you!!!”

My sister loved people wholly, uncontrollably. If she loved you, you didn’t stand a chance. She was your friend. She would be your friend no matter what, and didn’t understand why or how people became shitty friends. We spent a lot of time talking about why people leave because to her, walking away from someone she loved was never an option. She just loved people too deeply.

I know, and have always known, that all the best parts of me are from her. I am more daring and silly and outgoing because of her. I work hard because she worked hard. I try to be a good friend and I give gifts out of nowhere because she did. I try to love harder, just like she did.

But yes: I still miss her. I’m still mourning her loss. I still feel alone, and sad, and hopeless, while at the same time feeling like I am so happy and so lucky and can handle anything life throws at me; when life throws you into waves that never seem to stop breaking you feel like you can survive just about anything. She is both nowhere and everywhere to me - she is in all the things I love, all the mountains I’ve climbed and the paths I’ve run and the oceans I’ve swam in - and at the same time she doesn’t exist anymore. Yes, this is still happening. I still can’t believe she’s gone. I still love her. I still miss her. I’m still here.

[elsagold-blog]

On Ferguson, and Equality in Life and Death

Yet those efforts -- our efforts -- too often ignore a central fact: we cannot talk about poverty, race, systems-failure, or opportunity in America without talking about grief. And we cannot talk about grief without talking about those for whom grief is the product, not of one loss or of several losses, but of countless losses, born out daily in the streets and sustained over generations. The story of Mike Brown, and the decision of a grand jury not to indict the police officer who shot him, demands we ask whose deaths and whose grief we choose to take seriously.

[elsagold-blog]

Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking it smiling by the windows looking out in our directions back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators remembering wars and the police at the door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks we are saying thank you in the faces of the officials and the rich and of all who will never change we go on saying thank you thank you with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is

Thanks, by W. S. Merwin, 1927. 

(via Petey, who ran the Boston Marathon in honor of his friend Martin Richards last year and is running for Martin's charity again this year. Please donate if you can!)

[elsagold-blog]

On Kindness - Cord Jefferson

This left me speechless.

I am hopeful that my mother will be around to share many more years with us. But I’m now attempting to find some comfort in the idea that I can keep her close to me for as long as I live by struggling to remain decent, the pursuit that I’ve seen conjure up incredible power during the course of her life. The world takes from us relentlessly. It takes our friends and first loves. It takes our parents. It takes our faith. It takes our dignity. It takes our passion. It takes our health. It takes our honesty, and it takes our credulity. To lose so much and still hold onto yourself is perhaps the most complicated task human beings are asked to perform, which is why seeing it done with aplomb is as thrilling as looking at dinosaur bones or seeing a herd of elephants. It’s an honor to exist on Earth with these things.

[elsagold-blog]

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times, it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not me. There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called “resources”. People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this “common-sense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

 C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

[jennywritesthings]

The longer you are in the world, the more ghosts you will have—memories of what you did badly, memories of what was once good and is no longer, things you want to hold onto but can’t if you are to push on. This is true for people, for businesses, for cities. But progress isn’t about getting rid of the ghosts. Progress is learning to accept that everything you love and everything you are will eventually die; you will accumulate ghosts and be someone else’s ghost. And that’s okay. They hold you back a little, but they also remind you of why you push on. 

[elsagold-blog]

My friend Jenny, everybody, absolutely killing it.

[elsagold-blog]

If you're in the area and would like to remember Elsa, we have donated a bench to the San Francisco botanical garden in her memory. You'll find it in the back of the redwood grove; admission is free for SF residents and $7 for non-residents.

(photos via Cindy Chu)