12-13 July 2020

Dearest Fazal,

Children holding children.
Do we ever stop taking care of one another?

The dates of these portraits are 1993 and 1994. Two girls mo­ther­ing their siblings, one pair from Somalia, in a refugee camp in Kenya; the other pair from Rwanda, in a refugee camp in Tanz­ania. Survivors of a famine and a war. And you were there, Fazal. I knew you traveled to Rwanda, but I didn’t realize you were there as the genocide was flaring. I came later, a decade and a year later.

These sisters tending to their brothers: Alima Hassan Abdullai is keeping Mahmoud close, her right arm secures him on her lap, her left hand holds his forehead tight. He leans into her with his head pulled back as his eyes focus on you. Her gaze is direct. Wezemana is sitting on a wooden folding chair, weary, as her brother Mitonze sleeps, his cheek rests on her back as his little legs wrap around her waist. He is bundled in a cloth tied tightly in front just below her shoulders. She looks up, her eyes are shining. I wonder if those are stubborn tears.

I cannot look into the eyes of these daughters, sisters, and not see the likes of them holding our son who was also in a refugee camp in the Congo in 1994, as I mentioned to you in an earlier letter, trying to find his way back into Rwanda to his mother and grandmother. This is a recurring horror. Wezemana and Louis are close in age and both bear the same intentional scar on their forehead, a cut made to release the fever from malaria. Call them siblings in sickness and war.

I held my brother Hank here in the desert for close to two months after he almost died from the coronavirus in March. By held, I mean we were inseparable in those days of his healing, walking together, eating together, and sharing the silences when words were few. He was among the vulnerable ones, having lost half of his lung to “desert fever” when he was working pipeline construction in Phoenix, Arizona. In the fall of 2015, he spent 32 days in the hospital, and I spent those days and nights by his side. By his side, I mean I never left him until he could walk out of the hospital on his own. We learned our DNA is an exact match in 2004, when as siblings my brothers Hank and Dan and I prayed at least one of us could be a donor to our brother Steve for his stem cell transplant, a last effort to save his life from lymphoma—but none of our stem cells match except Hank’s and mine.

“Hold on to each other,” the doctor said. We held Steve with our hope. It was not enough. He died in 2005.

I reluctantly went to Rwanda seven months later at the invitation of the artist Lily Yeh to help build with a local community of Rwandan women a genocide memorial. I originally told her, no, I was afraid of Rwanda’s history of so much death and sorrow. But I knew if I didn’t go, I would regret it. Louis Gakumba was our translator. He became family. Living in Utah, he and my brother Dan became close. Louis and I were together when I learned of Dan’s death by suicide in 2018. We were driving to Wyoming. After Brooke called to tell us the news, we found a meadow, got out of the car and sat down on solid ground. Louis held me as I could not hold my brother.

Time. Time together. Time apart. Zadie Smith says, “Time is how you spend your love.”

You and I just got off the phone a few hours ago after learning our friend-brother Jonah Yellowman lost his blood brother to Covid-19 last night, knowing one week ago, Jonah lost his son, his firstborn the one who carried his name, from the virus. I wrote to Jonah and sent a photograph of a lit candle burning on his behalf. You called him and through the distances shared his pain. To both of us he said, “It’s not fair.” And it isn’t. I thought of your photograph of the winged widows gathered in the Bhajan Ashram offering their songs and prayers to Krishna. I believe in the collective power of sharing our grief and the healing that comes when we help carry that blow and burden for each other be it through prayers or songs or presence.

A sorrow shared is a sorrow endured.

Another friend-sister, Alexandra Fuller, a writer from Zambia, wrote this to me this morning, after the second anniversary of her son’s death: “…The intensity doesn’t change. A deeper, quieter, less forgiving, more lively grief replaces the screaming white-hot sparkling pain, the swampy filthy impossible depths. This grief is beyond words, like all miracles. If I get going toward the old, terrible, material loss, I can’t imagine surviving. It’s all about giving it to God. God has it all anyway, so holding on is useless…”

And she sent this poem she had written the night before:

God knows, you need God to get through the
death of your son.
Mary knew.
I have therefore reclaimed that loving,
compassionate space from the weaponizedold
bastard of my youth.
My God is not up for grabs.
God is me.
God is also Fi, and
of course, Mary, andevery bee, beetle, princess, frog, and atom.
God is infinite.
All the rowdy beauty, all the love, all the pain,
all the intolerance, all the irritation, all the
irrationality and all the anger: God is all of it.
God is the towering madness of grief.
That’s a mind-dissolving thought.

When I was in Rwanda, the refrain I heard repeatedly was “Mana y’u Rwanda wagiye he?” Where has the God of Rwanda gone? In this, poignantly one hears the echo of the famous Rwandan proverb, “God spends the day elsewhere, but He sleeps in Rwanda.”

Was he asleep during the genocide? Or was he weeping when it rained on the 800,000 bodies left rotting and buried in those thousand beautiful hills—feeling as helpless as we do today over the deaths that have laid at Jonah’s feet.

My god has feet of clay, dear Fazal. I don’t believe in him. I believe in these girls who are holding their brothers in times of hunger and terror; I believe in our mothers and grandmothers who held us at birth; and I believe in Earth who accepts each body as a blessed offering to life and death and love.

Always,
Terry