En El Tiempo De Serpientes: A Meditation on Grief, Dying, and Love
By Stephanie Rivera Berruz
…Quisiera saber tu nombre,
tu lugar, tu dirección
y si te han puesto teléfono,
también tu numeración.
Te suplico que me avises
si me vienes a buscar,
no es porque te tenga miedo,
sólo me quiero arreglar.
Te encontraré una mañana
dentro de mi habitación
y prepararás la cama para dos...
“Canción para mi muerte,” Sui Generis, 1972
I have known grief my entire life. I carry the grief of ancestral trauma, the grief of diasporic life, the grief of love loss, and the grief of life’s unbounded pains. Yet, these paled in comparison to the grief that seismically ruptured my world the dawn of November 16, 2022. The truth of death, that truth we know exists for us all, had arrived for Angel, someone whose life was deeply entangled with mine. Death it seemed had arrived for us both. The truth of their departure, the truth of their crossing, crumbled over me with indescribable fury; maimed me in the depths of my soul. Death was a place where grief would come to stay.
The body, the place of felt sense, the place from which we ground, became disjointed and was spread into fragments, torn at its seams. My muscles perpetually tense. My back as if I had been carrying a hiking bag on a tireless journey with no known end. I faced perpetual dehydration. Strangely, it had never occurred to me that tears had to be regenerated, that I needed to drink water to cry, or that my tears themselves were transformed by grief.
[Rose-Lynn Fisher, “The brevity of time (out of order) losing you,” 2011]
Movement exhausted all energy. My body escaped me, ran into the confines of survival the likes of which I had never known — all I could do was sit in my bathtub — lost to time and space. “Steph, you must treat it like a physical wound,” one of closest friends told me. That too was a revelation, grief is physical in a way that only becomes familiar when swimming through its oceans. Time so ephemeral, so fleeting, so meaningless. I could finally feel in my body something I had always known, wisdom I had read in the pages of Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and bell hooks. Esto era un arrebato, mi entrada a la serpiente, mi facultad abierta, I understood, in a different way, how knowing can be so beautifully transformative and painful.
As I waded through my house — bathtub to bed, bathtub to kitchen, bathtub to couch — water it seemed was the only source of life I could find. I had to sit with my grief the same way I did on the shores of salt water, sinking my hands into sand, moving with the force of currents you know you cannot control. I simply let my body flow with the tides; if you fight them, they will funnel you out to sea. I kept thinking to myself: “If I can just make myself liquid, I too might be able to flow through grief’s core.” My ability to focus, my ability to read, my ability to write had evaporated, and I wondered if I would ever be able to return to those practices. However, somewhere in the mycelial-like network of my thoughts it struck me, “You need to return to Gloria, there are answers in the fourth chapter, you know this.”
The fourth chapter of Borderlands: La Frontera (1987) is titled “La herencia de Coatlicue/The Coatlicue State.” The chapter is a grounding place in times of sorrow in my life. It was no surprise I would return to these words, but this time they spoke differently. Here, Anzaldúa describes Coatlicue, the Aztec Earth deity, as a “rupture in our every world. As the Earth, she opens and swallows, plunging us into the underworld where the soul resides, allowing us to dwell in darkness” (68). We need Coatlicue, Anzaldúa writes, because she demands a change of speed, a slowness, that allows our psyche to assimilate experiences. In her words:
The soul uses everything to further its own making. Those activities or Coatlicue states which disrupt the smooth flow (complacency) of life are exactly what propel the soul to do its work: make soul, increase consciousness itself. Our greatest disappointments and painful experiences—if we can make something out of them—can lead us toward becoming more of who we are. Or they can remain meaningless. The Coatlicue state can be a way station or it can be a way of life (68).
The grief, the hurt I carried, had propelled me into the mouth of the serpent whose language I was just coming to know, even if I was well acquainted with the serpent in my dreams. Language in grief, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in Notes on Grief (2021), fails us, it fails to describe its unrelenting weight. But returning to this chapter, I finally felt less alone in this space between life and death. I accepted that my grief lived in an opening, a borderland of cosmic processes. I had to accept its arrival if I was ever going to find a way through. Grief would be a way station, not a way of life, but how? How to make meaning out of an event that only pointed toward meaninglessness?
I had recently been nudged to return to bell hooks’ All About Love (2001), a book I had taught and read many moons ago. Distracting myself the best way I knew how I started course preparation for the following semester. To my surprise, the last chapter of All About Love grapples with loss, death, and love. I lost myself in hooks’ serendipitous arrival and timely revelations. hooks reminded me that death is always with us, but more importantly she reminded me that grief is also about love, it can be guided by love. In her words, “Our mourning, our letting ourselves grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion…In its deepest sense grief, grief is a burning of a heart, and intense heat that gives us solace and release” (201). Most importantly, love she reminded me, was the only way we can hold onto each other after death, for this reason she says “knowing how to love each other is also a way of knowing how to die (202).
Love would be the path through the waystation. I have never been one to dwell on love, but the truth was that my grief was rooted in the love I had for Angel and the way of being I had been able to articulate with them. Shortly, after he died, bell hooks also passed. In an interview with Thích Nhat Hanh, one of hooks’ lifelong teachers on the topic of love, Hanh reflects on the role of teachers, those that point us toward the insights we already carry in ourselves in life’s journey. They are the guides of the heart, the teachers that remind us that beauty can be found in the depths of despair. The guides that “help you touch that nature of awakening and understanding working in you.” Thích Nhat Hanh passed the day I returned to edit this piece. It did not feel coincidental. I feel deeply guided in my acquaintances with death, and I wonder what would it mean to follow Coatlicue lovingly?
It is true that my loss is real. However, life is also movement — the leaves fell, the first snow arrived, I contracted COVID-19, and a global pandemic continued to coat our world. My experience is not singular. I am living…. We are living in wakes among wakes. So how are we to bear loving witness to the many wakes we live in? For myself, threading the pieces together meant changing my perspective on death. I needed to relate to death differently, as more than a mere accident to the human experience, as more than a dreaded fact we shy away from. Becoming acquainted with death has meant lovingly accepting the dynamism that makes human life so utterly mysterious and enchanting at the same time.
My grief still burns. But I sought to put the pieces of my heart together here, an offering of love to those passed who have showered me with love, in word, in touch, in spirit. A Gloria, a Maria, a bell, a Jorge, a Charles, a Thích Nhat Hanh, a Angel, gracias…aqui una ofrenda de palabras.
Acknowledgements
I am so deeply grateful for the loving support of everyone who reached out, who cared for me, who ensured that my immediate needs were met in the wake of my grieving. These words would not be possible without them. Thank you, Kristen, Angelina, Gloria, Darci, Pam Nanét, Ash Ernesto, Estrella, Jessica, Atiba, Sessie, Mandy, Javiera, Gabriella, Alan, and Jamilett. Even in grief, it takes a village.
References
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Notes on Grief. New York: Knopf Publishing, 2021.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2001.
hooks, bell and Thích Nhat Hanh. “Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thích Nhat Hanh.” Lions Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Times, 2017.
Dr. Stephanie Rivera Berruz is an assistant professor at Marquette University and Co-Director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Studies (REIS). She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from SUNY Buffalo in 2014. She is the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship (2017-2018) and The Way Klinger Young Scholar Award (2021) for her work on Latinx feminisms, Caribbean, and Latin American Philosophy. Her research is inherently interdisciplinary and explores historiography, social identity, current political issues. She published a co-edited anthology: Comparative Studies in Asian and Latin American Philosophies (2018), and her work has been featured in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Genealogy, Hypatia, Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, and Essays on Philosophy.