I met Andrea 23 years ago when my family was living in a quiet neighborhood of Seattle. She too was a full-time mom raising an infant and two young children. Soon after we struck up that first conversation at the playground, we began easing the isolation of motherhood by sharing the burden of care, taking long walks with baby-carriers on our backs, pushing toddlers in strollers while the older children ran alongside. Afternoons we sat around her kitchen table, holding and feeding the babies while we visited and hoped the four other kids would stay unhurt while they careened around the house and yard between games of make-believe and Legos.

We had only known each other a few months by the time Dtaw and I moved our family back to Thailand where we knew the sanity of a slower paced life with extended family awaited us. But by then, regular sharing of worries and hopes and childcare had solidified our friendship.

When, less than three years later, Andrea heard the news that our six-year-old Chan had died of cancer, she immediately got in touch.

“We have a family trip planned to visit Thailand. Do you want to bring Dtaw and the kids and spend a week on the beach with us?” It had only been a month since my child’s death. My decision-making skills were slow.

“Let me get back to you.” At that time, I could not imagine leaving the place where Chan had died. There, among the dusty, golden hills, everywhere I looked held images, memories of my son. Wherever I was in that place, walking down the dirt road, over the broken, dead grass, in the quiet village, I saw him, I heard his voice. I did not want to leave.

But a small part of me knew that it would be good for my grief, to push myself out of this bubble where I lived so much in the past. And I knew Cody would be glad to see his old friends. Lost in my own pain, I didn’t realize at the time what a sacrifice Andrea was offering, spending her family beach vacation with a family deep in grief.

I finally called her back and said yes.

We stayed in a little hut on the white sandy beach, palms trees lining the shore. As always, we spent the days together with the kids, sometimes joining them as they played in the sand or splashed in the sea. Andrea, in true friend form, followed my lead through the days of grief, letting me laugh and be light and playful when I could, letting me cry and talk about Chan when I had to. In her face I could see and feel how, as another young mother, she could imagine the immensity of my loss. I drank in her kindness and concern as I let the stories and sadness pour out of me.

I will always be grateful for the gift she and her family gave us that week, being willing and able to hold us and our pain.

It was wonderful to see her the other day, over two decades later. We took a walk in the park where we often took the kids so long ago. Sharing stories of our grown-up children and laughing at the way motherhood never seems to end, it was good to feel the strength of our friendship.  

Everything is wet and green and dripping outside. Buttery daffodils, fluttery cherry blossoms, staunch tulips, tender pink camelias, glossy leaves, all are beaded with glistening droplets reflecting the brighter grey of sky.

After a winter of sunshine in Denver, Taos, Thailand, Wyoming, Mexico and New Mexico, this feels like the first rain I’ve experienced in nearly five months. But it feels good to touch moss. It feels good to know my skin is drinking in the moisture. Puddles are an almost forgotten experience hinting at play and mischief. Cement sidewalks are a slippery adventure under worn-out soles of my shoes when the dogs pull at their leashes. Fully embracing the Seattle vibe and climate, I left my flip flops, cotton sundress and cowboy boots back in New Mexico. Here it’s clunky hikers, woolly sweaters and a flannel shirt.

After waking up every morning this winter eager to get out to greet the sunrise, now I sense the darkness of rain and heavy clouds behind the curtains and snuggle down deeper in my sheets and blanket, thankful for softness and warmth, a flexible work schedule, and a cuddly four-footed bedfellow, also content to keep sleeping. I relax into my body and revel in appreciation for this life with its infinite blessings that begin with health, friends and work I love.

I think about my children (grown men now at 22 and 27) on the other side of the world, grappling with the sudden loss of the father they loved so much. And I wonder how to help them.

Their dad would have turned 61 yesterday, March 22nd. Birthdays are not celebrated in Thailand like they are here, but if he were still alive, the boys would have given him gifts, homemade cards, invited family for dinner. Instead, they must move through the day like every other now, still sorting his stuff and tending the garden he planned and planted for so many years. Whenever we traveled along the Mekong when the kids were little, we had to stop so Dtaw could collect a few more huge shiny black rocks from the river to make a circle for sitting under the mango tree. He gathered smaller smooth stones, the color of sand, to cover the ground under the gutters to minimize sticky mud in the rainy season. And he was always bringing new seedlings home when he visited cousins and friends in the country.

At the time I grew impatient with the time he spent landscaping, planting, watering, watching. I wanted him to do something more productive. I didn’t know how to think long term. Today the garden is an oasis of birdsong and blossoms and breezy shade in a town turned dusty and hot and noisy from too much building and business.

Today the boys clip back the endless growth that seems to happen overnight in the hot humid climate. They prune the starfruit, mock acacia and star-gooseberry trees, sweep dead leaves from the dust to cover for snakes and scorpions. In the evening they share a meal with their aunts and uncles and cousins, remembering together what they have all lost.

I am grateful for that. I am grateful that they are in a place where family still gathers, where blood is still thick between relations, where, when they meet people, they are identified as “Dtaw’s sons.”  I am grateful they are where they can be with people who knew their dad his whole life, who can tell them stories about when he was a little boy, a young man, a new husband, a new father. I know they will laugh with family over stories they’ve never heard  and ones they’ve heard before. I know they need that.

People on the street and in the market will talk about their dad often, without fear of upsetting them. Where they are, in a community so connected that death is an almost mundane event, a simple inescapable part of life, people know that talking about the parent or child or sister or brother someone is grieving is essential. There is an unspoken and perhaps unconscious understanding that acknowledging the absence, speaking of the pain is a way of sharing the loss. This distribution of the weight of the grief, must somehow lessens its burden. At least this is what I imagine and believe.

It is good to know that even though my sons are sad, even though they are struggling through their grief and all that it awakens without their mother nearby, they are not alone.

A few seats are left in this online workshop with a small group of writers. Join Little Frankensteins: The Next Creation and find out how playing with genre and constraints can amp up the energy of your poetry and prose. Send me an email to apply.