PINK GRAPEFRUIT CUCUMBER ZINGER JUICE.

And I made us a juice to get through. It’s wintery and light, packed with immune system boosting vitamin C and fresh ginger, and hydrating cucumber. It’s quick and delicious and you only need a blender to make it. Its colors and zinginess have given me hope in the midst of much darkness. So. Juice-equipped, let’s talk.

Here’s what you don’t know:

Today, the mother of one of my dearest friends in the world will be laid to rest in the rain-soaked earth of Northern California. As you read this, I might be standing in a cemetery in Mill Valley, or sitting shiva in a betrayingly bright apartment in San Francisco, or continuing to sort out the pieces of my grief in this loss from my grief in the losses that came before. Because before this mother got sick, so suddenly, so brutally, before I had the chance to hold her hand and sit with her in the crystalline stillness of a body’s decay, there was another mother who got sick, suddenly and brutally. My own.

And this friend—I met this friend at the juncture of returning to Maui to care for my own mother in her illness. This friend sat with me and held my hand and hugged me and cried with me when my mom died. And so did her mother. And now, eight and a half years later, her beautiful mother, who often mothered me in the years that followed, has passed.

The unbroken thread of friendship, caring, grieving, empathy, illness, sisterhood, and mothering overwhelmed me. I am grateful. I am heartbroken. I know this is the outcome of love.

So I have been very still, very quiet. The days pass more quickly than I intent them to, and still I can’t summon the drive to go back to business as usual. The loss magnifies other losses—a breakup, a disappointment, the ongoing hour of the news.

Which brings me to what you do know:

Every breath, every step closer to the presidential inauguration feels like a loss. The closer we get the more airless it feels, the more I feel shoved up against an entity that is belittling, insulting, cruel, and psychologically unstable. As a woman, I feel afraid. As ally and family to people of color and queer folk, I feel afraid. As a human being who had hoped for a leader I could respect, I feel afraid.

You know all this because you, too, are living this.

A few days ago, I discovered the strands of white hair (red hair doesn’t gray—it goes straight to snow) above my right temple had multiplied significantly. Evidence of the inescapable, my own progress towards death, no doubt hurry day these fears. I want to look away from these signs of heartbreak, to cover them up, flip my hair so they don’t show, maybe dye them? But I know I won’t.

I won’t because I need to see this progress towards death, as unsteadying as it is. I need to remember every breath is a privilege. I have to know I have been to the bottom and come up again, and here is the white hair to show it. Here is the strength to be with my friend today and hold her hand as she goes to the bottom of her own heart, as she grieves.

Here I am, quiet and still and strong.