Dear Nanay,

It looks like we’re going to miss All Saint’s weekend and your second death anniversary prayer/food gathering with the family.

And Christmas. This is going to be my first Christmas without the rest of the family, as we’re being extra cautious and not doing any socializing without a vaccine. If anything else, your eldest is still paranoid as heck about health.

It’s going to be difficult on top of an insane year and I remember when the lockdown was first announced, we discussed as cousins how we were going to keep you at home if you were still alive, and who would have to tell you the news. What we thought was a month long inconvenience is now a hellscape with no end in sight.

And now you have Bacon with you up there, I hope you guys are splitting those shake shake fries that you’re having all the time.

I miss the family and being able to just be in the same room and pick at the same food, or rib each other to make unnecessary expensive purchases at each other, and the possibility of travel.

But we’ve been so lucky to not have lost any human this year to covid, not like hundreds of thousands of families in the world and I’m not discounting that. Small miracle considering how many people we essentially need to interact with on a daily basis.

I miss sitting next to you and hearing you make snarky comments about the rabbits and telling me they’re all fattened up for slaughter. No, they still can’t be eaten, and now they have lavender in their diet, so they might have a slight potpourri like taste. (That sounds horrible but I know of a French guy who might find that good)

What can we say after most of a year being in lockdown? The fear that it will be even longer still? The uncertainty of what we face in still unprecedented times?

So I’ve been trying to get out of being in my head a lot of the time and listening to a better voice, one that used to be Anthony Bourdain. It’s been difficult trying to find solace in a man that died by suicide. However, just hearing him speak still gives me that sense of a friend who’s going through things too, but will always be willing to listen.

So I will take his words, sent to David Chang by email after a night out.

“Be a fool. For love. For yourself. What you think MIGHT possibly make you happy. Even for a little while. Whatever the cost or good sense might dictate. Good to see you. Tony.”

This is my new mantra, however semi-destructive it might be to my liver, my kidneys or my knees. Cheers AB.

We’re all living in a dystopian world, and we’re all having to deal with this apart from the people we’re living with.

Somehow it doesn’t feel real. What’s happening to everyone in the world right now. And while I can genuinely call myself fortunate, my family is healthy, together and keeping each other in what these times can only call sane, you can’t help but feel for everyone else going through crap right now.

I guess it’s the demonizing of other people that’s making it harder. Everyone is facing a kind of isolation but also trying to be there for each other. Where we used to just run to each other for a real hug or just being in the same room, now it’s the one basic thing that’s keeping us alive and safe. We don’t know who has it, and a once innocent handshake can now literally lead to someone dying.

No man is an island, but it feels like we’re all now islands apart. For an unclear period of time. Until there’s a clear cut cure, until we know we can survive this as a species.

Technically, life hasn’t changed that much for me, I get up, I go to work without changing out of what I slept in, make food, eat food, clean up. But there’s something isn’t it, when your mere being is a threat to life. I am sure every introvert started this thing sure that they would be winning at isolation, but now more than 30 days later wanting to be with the people they’re not living with, or just feel the “normalcy” of everyday socialization. Of finding an end to the uncertainty of what will happen to us, or the economy, or the people at risk, or the possibility of finding a way to be with each other again.

The world is turning on each other a lot of the time, and it seems like we can’t celebrate anything, or mourn anything without getting some backlash. And I have been a coward, hiding, lurking at other people’s posts and writing while not being able to put into words what it is that’s going on, and overwhelmed with feeling everything and nothing all at the same time.

I’m closing one chapter of my life and starting a new one this month, which is scary in itself, but also a miracle in this climate. I will acknowledge how fortunate I am to be able to do this and keep going, but also know how far I’ve come in the past year (in weight gain at least, further than ever before).

Even a joke feels insensitive. And wrong. But I do hope that people find pockets of joy in this time. And if you can hold on to it and keep it close, do it.

This isn’t my secret, but I’ve thought about the poem a lot. When times were hard, and things didn’t seem like it would get better, there’s doubt sometimes. And why wouldn’t it be now on everyone’s mind?

Writers, television, movies romanticize suicide. 13 Reasons Why was a horrible way to depict the aftermath of it. Like justice was being done because the girl died and left tapes, and there was justification for the act done. It’s dangerous, showing the past with the present because it doesn’t feel like Hannah, the girl who killed herself, is really gone. The flashbacks, the glimpses of her like she would be back, are tired, triggering images that can send people the wrong message about what the aftermath is for people that have taken their own life.

It’s not pretty. It ruins the lives of the people that love you. It will make them blame themselves. It will make them hate you for not reaching out. You won’t be there to feel validation for the pain you’ve caused the people who you think deserve to feel the pain of you being gone by your own hand.

THERE’S NO GOING BACK.

There’s only a corpse to bury and the cleanup after. I’m not trying to guilt trip you, as I know sometimes existing is just hard. But we can forget about the realization of all that comes after. You can’t haunt the people that have made you feel the way you do into submission or feeling bad about it. It’s even harder to explain why you think it needed to happen in a way that will make it okay to the people you love that have been left behind.

I’ve been thinking more about the aftermath of suicide after Anthony Bourdain died. What drove him to do it, how his family and friends must be feeling, how the world is still reeling from his loss. I’m still reeling for his loss. It’s devastating, and I never even met him.

So think about if even one person will feel hurt about your loss. And how you will most likely shit your pants when you go, because we lose control of our bowels when we die. How your stuff needs to get packed. How the family will have to talk to the people that will visit your wake about how they didn’t know it was that bad.

And I’ll keep myself to this poem when the bad days roll around too.

“Fuck the poets of the past, my friends. There are no beautiful suicides

Just cold corpses with shit in their pants

And the end of the gifts.”