DIARY OF A PLUNGE YEAR | Valk Fisher
The year’s early months are the darkest where I live – I will not say “home,” for the Portuguese mountain village in which I live is one in a string of homes I’ve made over places and time, and home, I now know, is not so singular. In this place, in the year’s early months, everything in the mid-distance is engulfed in thick fog. There is a red lighthouse in view of our living room window. This, and its bright light, are undecipherable beneath grey.
So, too, is my mind this year; I try to wrap my head around its wars and displacements and famine and protests. Suddenly, it is the last day of February. Outside, and in the news, it is still bleak.
Where does a body take refuge?
I lace my sneakers, the same Asics model I’ve worn since I was 15, when I lived across the ocean from where I am currently– now, 25-years older. The shoes are not stylish, but they are reliable, their no-frills-ness devotional, speaking to a less-spoken-of reason why people run: something about finding refuge.
I consider all the running I’ve done in this make of shoe, the refuge it’s made: for a hospitalization with keto-acidosis, a diagnosis with type 1 diabetes; my partner’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis; two miscarriages; a pandemic and the support it eradicated when my daughter was born; the death of three grandparents; one left with a mind that no longer knows my name, her memories slipping in the forgetting of Alzheimer’s.
There is no way to run from grief, I have learned, though there is a running through it. As if moving your body in grief celebrates the love that exists alongside it, majesty being the flip-side of loss.
I am out the door in my running gear and park by the Atlantic coast, over which rocky cliffs in shades of light brown to burnt red tower over white-tipped waves. I run south, the wind blowing salt in my face. There are no bathers. The waves are wild, and I am small at their feet. A news story from late last year in my mind: a boat carrying migrants capsized off the coast of Libya. I consider the families that were displaced that year, some of whom you now see here, in Portugal, a country historically open to foreigners. At pre-school, my daughter has so many new Russian-speaking classmates that she comes home speaking snippets of the language – davai, niet, spatsiva, she says. A balloon pops at a birthday party, and a Ukrainian girl explodes in tears. I wonder what she has seen.
What is it to leave the place of all recognition, to find a sense of place, if not home?
I run further on this grey day than I have in months, the longest run since I gave birth to my son, two years ago. I feel something like recognition, a version of my 15-year old self.
When I am done, stretched, changed, and in the car, I see my phone is beeping. It flags 42 new messages, and they are all on one chat. I open the thread I share with my Chilean cousins, where we exchange news of new babies, invitations to weddings, and photos surfaced from the 1990s.
I read the message from [C]. Again. Again. Again.
[D] esta en el cielo, it reads, but I do not understand. After many days of high fever, he was operated on for meningitis, but he could not recover.
He was 2.
He was my son’s age, almost exactly.
I do not understand, or want to.
I call [C] to clarify what still is not clear. I cannot put the sobs coming out of my mouth into complete thoughts. His voice is hollow, as if it is coming from a faraway tunnel.
I hang up and face the blue-grey expanse of Atlantic in front of me, with its lineup of waves crashing into sand, and I run towards them, not stopping until I am underwater, the white-topped waves washing loudly over me.
I walk from the sea to my car and drive to my son’s pre-school. I am early. In soaking clothes, I take him in my arms, and what I want to do is keep him like this, his curls on my lips, his lisping attempt at language, Mama, why lyou ahh wet? – I am grasping for something I know can’t be, for our bodies to never turn on us. Stay, like this, I pray to a deity I have come to know best in crisis. Can some sacred things stay safe?
For days, it is hard for me to look at him, the roundness of his face, the way he’d rather run than walk, to anywhere and to anything. His joy for life is magnificent and fearless, his heart open, not yet having known the large losses.
In my heart: Do not cross the street. Do not leave my sight. Do not leave.
I am afraid to live, as if another sense of home has disappeared – the sense of home that exists not within walls, but in knowing everything will be okay.
I am in free-fall.
Each day I awake and am afraid to see the world.
All I know to do is keep running. I head to the coast.
That spring, [C] visits Portugal. He comes in passing, in the way we allow ourselves to be in and move through places and spaces when life suddenly upends.
He arrives with two bags. We’ve got ten days, he’d said, and I wondered what we’d do with the time. He stays for longer.
His presence becomes a form of grace. We gravitate around each other these days, like moons around their planet. He wakes early to practice yoga in the dark, to meditate using mala beads, while I brace for the flurry and joy of school mornings and young children.
After drop-offs, [C] and I come together for runs by the water, moving side-by-side along the coast, our breath in matching rhythms. When we finish, we jump in the ocean clothed, but shoeless. We swim in the salt, then sit cross-legged on the sand, drying under May’s mild sun.
Something begins to soften, as if running alongside someone, parallel in their own pain, could alchemize grief, as if salt water could cure inner wounds. For the first time since [D] died, it feels easier to laugh.
One night, [C] makes gin-and-tonics, with lemon and lavender from our garden and freshly-ground pepper and thick cubes of ice. We sit cross-legged on the living room floor, watching the sun set. When it is dark, we light a candle and leave the lights off.
What I learn from him in these weeks: a body in devotion, words for gratitude, for all the things to learn and to thank for simply having been. A language for openness despite loss. Thank you, he says, each day to [D], for all you’ve shared with us.
I begin to see grief everywhere, in bodies of all ages and sizes, in skin and its sweat, in waves as they crash.
The language of gratitude is a tending to, if not absolution, of pain that lives inside us, I think. This pain can be large and also small, and can make a gentler home in our days, if we know how to run alongside it, if we can accept it as a constituent part, the way salt is always in the magnificent sea.
This takes time.
I run-plunge through the end of the year. On its last day, I plunge in water so cold that I shiver for the rest of the afternoon. Afterwards, I walk through sand dunes to my car. I pass a café, which people frequent more for the view than for coffee or food. It is full of Americans, many of whom moved here after the election. I see a woman sitting outside, cross-legged on a picnic table. Her face is beautiful, with deep lines drawn across it. There are sad creases around her eyes. With sun on her face, hands in her lap, eyes closed, back straight, I know she is somehow home.
The year turns. I return to the ocean, plunging into a sea that feels like the place I somehow came from. Salt and healing, majesty and loss. The water is frigid, and also, it warms. The waves come, and go, and come, uncontainable, impossible to keep. As if asking: if you can’t contain me, what will you learn from me? Thank you for grace, I say, for all you share with us, a devotion I extend to the waves holding my body, to the body itself, in all the turns it might take.
Valk Fisher writes non-fiction, poetry and children's books, often on the subject of body. She runs writing-for-wellbeing workshops and is a PhD researcher at the University of Lisbon in writing-for-wellbeing applications in narrative medicine. She is finishing a memoir on illness, motherhood and care. More work can be found at valkfisher.com. Follow the Broken Body Love Letters Project, an initiative that invites first-hand narrative of life with long-term illness / disability @bbodyloveletters.