Vocabulary of Grief

On the second stop of our European Christmas market trip in 2024, Michael and I visited an Instagram-famous bookstore in Bucharest, Romania, Cărturești Carusel. On a table near the entrance I found a small terracotta pin with the word “Dor” and a small heart on it, created by a Romanian artist. I didn’t know what dor meant, but I was immediately drawn to it, and carried it in the palm of my hand as we browsed for books by local authors (we got a gorgeous copy of Dracula, which is of course set in the region, plus Mihail Sebastian’s “For Two Thousand Years”).

As we went to pay, I handed over the pin and asked what dor meant. The cashier very earnestly informed me it was one of those barely translatable words, but the closest meaning is a melancholy longing or yearning, a type of nostalgia which isn’t necessarily about the distant past, perhaps for something you love very much but are separated from and cannot access. Yes, I thought at the time, I know this feeling very well.

When we moved to Tokyo in 2001, I heard a cicada bug for the first time.

They are all over Asia, but in America they tend to be concentrated east of the Mississippi River. I was born and raised and had lived my entire life up until that time in California, where they supposedly exist in modest numbers but are not common. I’d never even heard of these huge insects which live below ground and emerge in the summer to scream mechanically about the weather, about mating, or about being disturbed while hanging out in a tree. The first time I heard their distinctive noise, I was struck by a strange sensation of deeply missing something I’d never even previously experienced. It felt like nostalgia for a brand new thing, not something in my past.

Looking back at that time in my life, I know I was both alone and lonely, living longterm for the first time in a foreign country. I was a new mom with a tiny baby, a husband who regularly worked 10-12 hour days, six days a week while opening a new Disney theme park. I had no friends there and it was before smartphones or Facebook or video calls — just very slow dial up internet. We lived far outside the metropolitan area which means I might go weeks without hearing anyone but Michael speak English. Even the signs where we lived were only in Kanji, hiragana, or katakana, not a single letter of the Roman alphabet to be found. Everything was new and different, even the bugs with their strange sounds. At the same time, we truly believed this would be our one-and-done experience of living abroad, so every day that passed meant we were that much closer to the end of what had been a dream of mine since childhood. I now wonder if my feelings of being homesick and overwhelmed with this amazing new adventure blended together with the cicada song, creating a soundtrack for my lonely but yearning heart. Whatever the cause, the sound of cicadas continues to trigger a vague sense of longing and wistfulness within me even now, twenty-five years later.

Each year as the temperature begins to rise here in Hong Kong, I listen carefully for the first cicada of the season. It’s one way I mark the passage of time, but it’s also a good day to begin using mosquito spray! And then as summer begins to wrap up, I’ll ask myself each day, “will today be the last time I’ll hear a cicada this year?” For people who grew up around them (or have had them get stuck in their hair like Michael’s sister Heidi), they are more of a nuisance (or horror) than something whimsical to look forward to the way I always do.

The last two weeks have been an endurance test filled with pressure and stress.

Being told we have two months to find a new place to live instead of being allowed to remain here until the end of our lease in October was a shock I was not prepared for. Every day has been spent combing through listings, talking to real estate agents, calculating and recalculating our meager budget, visiting the dark, sticky flats in that budget, and then laying awake all night alternating between crying and hyperventilating at the surreal compressed schedule of having to not only pack up all our belongings, but to somehow downsize and address the issue of what to do with all of Michael’s stuff.

The day we got notice of having to move out, I opened Michael’s wardrobe to look at everything. He was fastidious in all things, but nowhere more than in how he liked to hang and fold his clothes. My own wardrobe is a complete disaster, but Michael’s is a thing of beauty and order. As I stood there looking at his clothes, I was struck with the knowledge that every item in there was placed there by Michael himself, with care and precision. It was the first time I realized that when we leave this place, I will need to box his things up like we’ll do with all the rest of our stuff… but I won’t be unboxing them and placing them neatly in a new closet or dresser for his use at our next place. This terribly obvious piece of information was such a jolt. I spent the whole night swirling through fresh panic, anxiety, and deep sorrow over being forced to remove tangible evidence of Michael’s existence.

A few days later the man trying to buy this flat knocked on my door and asked to come in and look around because he’s never actually seen the inside of it. I was home alone, in my pajamas… of course I said no way. He had a mask in his hand because he’d “heard someone was sick,” which is how I found myself telling a total stranger at my door that my husband had been sick but had actually passed away, leaving us not only scrambling to find a new home but doing it while in the thick of grieving and managing the significant amount of administrative work that comes along with the death of someone outside the country where they hold a passport.

That afternoon I had to go present paperwork to the Hong Kong government to remove Michael as a director on the company we started together during Covid, again talking to strangers about Michael’s death and wondering how I’m going to manage everything business and finance related on my own.

That evening the boys and I went back to look at a rental we’d seen the week before, this time with measuring tape in hand to see which pieces of our furniture will actually fit in a place half the size of our current place. And then we returned home again, where I googled, “am I having a heart attack?” while wondering how I’m going to manage not just the business and finances but every single other thing in my life without Michael here at my side.

On Thursday we made an offer on the flat we’d so carefully measured, and Friday morning we heard back that the owner accepted the offer ($500 USD a month under our carefully budgeted amount) and our terms for a new lease (two years, they won’t sell it out from underneath us, leaving us homeless again after a year) and now one stressful thing can be crossed off our massive list of other stressful things.

After that bit of relief, my younger son Benjamin and I walked to a nearby coffee place, as is our custom on Fridays, his day off. We had a frank discussion about our situation and how uncomfortable it is to feel so vulnerable and exposed through this process of being booted out of our home prematurely and having to scramble to find a new one while our financial situation is far from steady. All our other moves while abroad have been somewhat passive, always at the service of Michael’s career. This one was a choice my sons and I had to proactively make together of what we wanted to do next individually and as a group. But Ben and I both agreed the new place looked better every time we viewed it, and though it often seems as though stability hasn’t always (ever?) been our family’s highest value, it felt good knowing that no matter what else happens, the next two years our housing is secure and paid for using insurance funds set aside for this purpose. Everything else we can figure out as we go. I had my first fleeting glimpse of the three of us actually being okay instead of drowning in this season of continual peril, and I tried to hold onto it.

Halfway through our walk home, iced lattes in hand, I heard it: the first cicada of the season.

I whipped out my phone, trying to record the sound, laughing while out of nowhere bus after bus suddenly rolled past noisily obscuring the sound of my personal harbinger of Hong Kong’s changing seasons. I pocketed my phone when I realized I was only trying to record it to send to Michael so he didn’t miss out while he was in the hospital. Michael, I reminded myself for the thousandth time since December 7th, is not actually in the hospital and will not be hearing any more cicadas. A visceral sorrow mixed with the cicada-triggered nostalgia and longing, and I remembered the barely translatable Romanian word dor on my pin at home. At once I knew it belonged to the sound of cicadas and the grief, and yes even homesickness I feel for my sweet husband who is not here with me.

Later I did a deeper dive on the entomology of the word dor, finding it comes from the late Latin word for grief and pain. Knowing this, I’m not surprised how drawn I was to that pin when I first saw it. Our European Christmas market trip was a lot of things, but one of the reasons we were taking it was to help me in the grief I was feeling about having lost my Mama at Christmas. Usually my favorite time of year, I’d found myself avoiding anything having to do with it. But for the fifth anniversary of her death, I wanted to try the opposite and dive into the deep pool of Christmas cheer as a way to find my way back to the joy I’d once felt. Not to numb or ignore the pain of such a significant loss, but to practice holding both sorrow and joy at the same time.

I confess I don’t know when I’ll be back to feeling joy again. It seems extremely distant and almost impossible from where I’m standing after these two very intense weeks with several more intense weeks on the horizon leading up to a very difficult move. But I have this small pin made by an artist in Bucharest attached to a piece of art I created over a decade ago during another time of feeling both alone and lonely while living in Shanghai, and both of them speak to me of what has been and what will be again. I remind myself there is a possibility of a future Heather who can laugh and feel glee even while deeply missing her Beloved, because there is a past Heather who stood far away in an icy winter wonderland with a cup of hot cider in her hand, listening to a children’s choir singing Silent Night, feeling peace while both joy and sorrow swirled around in her heart.

For now there are so many difficult decisions to make on what to keep and what to let go of, a difficult task when my whole home is filled with beautiful items which tell a story of Michael and Heather together, and removing any individual piece feels like erasing a chapter in this long book of amazing adventures. In my head I can convince myself how that is not true, but my body doesn’t seem to believe it just yet, judging by my pounding heart, shallow breaths, and long bouts of crying at the end of each day.

Please continue to hold my sons and I close in your thoughts and prayers as we leave this final home where all four of us lived together and move under duress into a new place as a family of three, not feeling very brave about anything. And as always, thank you for the continued support. I used to be so good at sending cards and letters and texts, which means I will one day be good at that again. Right now just know I read everything that is sent my way, from cards and emails to just a daily emoji, and I’m so grateful. Thank you.

More soon.

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