On Saying Goodbye

It is rainy season in Addis Abeba and evening clouds gather, soon to heap rain on the roofs. Kaki has wrapped her hair in a scarf, wrapped her worn-out body in a bathrobe. After laboring as CFO of a multi-million-birr company, she returns to manage her home: supervising Aster the house-helper, stirring wat over the electric burner, nurturing plants that grew up with her two boys, one of whom is my husband. In this rare moment, she rests on the family-room couch, head propped by her fist. “When I was young,” she says, “Nobody moved.” Wrapped in a fleece blanket on the adjacent loveseat, I listen. I know she is speaking of Dagi and me. We left our life in Addis to purse graduate school in the US, but returned some days ago for a visit. It has been two years. In the dim quiet, I observe Kaki’s face, those eyes full of stories. Lids rise revealing caves, and inside I can see the shadows of nights spent praying alone, hollowed days loud with echoes, missing her son. Missing me, too. She is trying to express this, the heft of a mother’s suffering.

“When the sons got married, they lived in their parents’ homes with their wives. Everyone was always together.” Kaki is speaking of her rural hometown in southern Ethiopia, opening a page of her story, so gently. I have never spoken with her in such an intimate way, didn’t even know her English was this good. For the first time, I am realizing myself as daughter, her as mother.  Did I have to leave first to experience this kind of intimacy? When Dagi and I lived just a ten-minute drive away, we had been too shy or maybe the moment had not been right. Absence changes things: when you return, you see what routine hid from your eyes. You are shaken, broken from cycles. I see. I am shaken, broken. 

“It was better that way,” Kaki continues, and her eyes seek their edges. She does not speak with a sense of accusation or bitterness. When my own mother thinks of Kaki and how much she misses her son, tears glass her eyes, and for a few moments she cannot speak. Now we gather around a flicker of time together in Dagi’s childhood home, sharing bowls of shiro, talking, really talking for the first time. The time is never enough.   

I imagine the world Kaki describes, this place where few ever left. Acacia leaves curling in summer heat. Smoke blooming over an open fire. Bony sandaled feet. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives living intimately intersecting lives. I imagine what could be gained: continuity, stability, community. I imagine what could be lost: flexibility to travel, peer beyond the narrow limits of place, distinguish oneself as an individual. Space. Perhaps what I see as loss would have been no loss to those living a generation or two ago. Then again, perhaps not. 

Of course, I also think of the wives. Kaki has only sons. In the lost world she speaks of, would be content. But as a daughter, I would have had to leave my father’s home. I would have been uprooted. Kaki herself was uprooted. As a girl, she left her hometown for opportunities in the capital, married a local engineer, and created a little haven hidden from the chaotic streets, a garden. Kaki’s Protestant faith also distinguishes her from her Orthodox family, though she hasn’t suffered the closed doors, the thrown stones many Ethiopian evangelicals have. She speaks the language of her hometown rarely, maybe during family visits, or funerals, or weddings. Either Kaki or her family must take the four-hour minibus ride between the southern city to the northern capital. Someone always has to be uprooted.

As people straddling two continents, Dagi and I have uprootings grounded deeply into our heartsoil. They never get any easier. The first time Dagi traveled with me to America was for our wedding—the wedding his mother would attempt to obtain a visa for and fail, a challenge his friends, father, brother would not even try, because what is the point when you are an Ethiopian seeking to enter the Disneyland of America? —The night was cold and rain splattered the stones. The house-helper, Kidist, (her name means “holy”) wept quietly shadowed against the wall of the house. The little Vitz swallowed our luggage like a grave. When we drove away, I watched Kaki on the porch, her face covered in a red scarf.

*

Dagi’s family would later tell us we arrived with the sun. Sun evaporated the rains. The mountain air was warm and damp and burnt fuel bit our lungs. Leaving the airport, we pushed our leaning skyscrapers of luggage down the ramps to the parking lot, where hundreds of faces gathered, expectant. We were expectant, too, waiting for glimpses of three faces: Dagi’s mom, dad, and brother. I wonder why, when I saw my husband embrace his brother Micky, I wanted to weep. And when I embraced Micky myself, how I wanted to weep more. And when I embraced Kaki and Girmesh, I felt the world going all soft around the corners. Kaki handed me flowers wrapped in red cellophane and would not let go of my hand, pressed tightly into her arm. Greetings and farewells, braided joy and sorrow, both blur with tears.

*

At the dinner table, Kaki and I linger over our empty plates, hands still drying. After each meal, we wash our hands, clean fingernails and palms from oil and spice. Aster pours a plastic pitcher of water over our soaped hands, holding a bowl beneath them to catch the sudsy drops. Aster is a young woman who left her family down-country to find work in the big city. She lives in a cell-like room detached from the main house. In the morning I catch her slicing onions by the tub-full. In the evening, she sometimes sits in a corner chair to watch Ethio-TV in the family room. Her smile is illuminating, and rarely disappears. Tonight perhaps the power has flickered off, and Kaki’s face is lit with a solar-powered flashlight hung on the ceiling. She is speaking of her first-born son. “When Micky was going to college, I was sad,” she said. “He was going far, very far.” Aster enters the room and gathers the empty plates, pots, bowls, bag of bread, and basket of injera. Maybe she says something to Kaki in Amharic, the language both of them had to learn to travel and work in the capital; they laugh. Aster disappears in silence. “At lunch, I pray in the church,” Kaki says. I imagine her in the cool dark, away from the workday clock, away from the streets agog with donkeys, goats, dogs, motorcycles, semis, ancient Toyotas, a confetti of human beings.

 Her practice of prayer does not surprise me. She is the kind of woman whose life is defined by separation from self: pressing gorshas into her paralyzed mother’s lips before she died, refusing to sit while her family eats the labor of her hands, welcoming homeless strangers and family members who wander.  I have heard one definition of “holy” as “set-apart.” The Ethiopian Orthodox church calls its saints kidus, the same word for “holy:” set-apart ones. Light separated from darkness. Salt culled from seawater. For Kaki, separation has become a chosen way of life, a way to life. Kaki continues, “In the church, I would say, ‘Why, God?’ and cry. One day, I wrote a letter to God.” I can hear the clang of slippery dishes in the kitchen, a space detached from the rest of the house to protect the pillows and curtains from smelling of onion and spice and smoke. “I wrote a letter on the ground, with my tears,” she said. Kaki is tired, her eyes are tired. “After that, I felt better.” 

*

People in the US ask me if I miss Ethiopia, where I taught for several years, where Dagi grew up, where we passed our first year of marriage. Not much, I think, if I’m honest. I don’t miss the overpopulated streets, the bloated busses, the exhaust-blackened oxygen we were forced to breathe. Then I remember the Alliance Française, which opened to free art exhibitions and jazz concerts. Dagi and I would sit on the stone steps in the courtyard, that cultivated garden under the stars. At the end of the night after the musicians had clicked their instruments into their cases, we would laugh in each other’s arms until deep in the night. (The night depths are not all for tears). I do miss the Alliance.

Of course, missing family is a given.

*

I remember it hit me at the rehearsal the night before our wedding. A round of stained glass colored the chapel green and garnet. I wore my curly hair long and wild. I was flaunting my last day of singleness, perhaps, in my loosed curls. The whole routine clicked into place, until my dad and I stood at the beginning of the aisle, and he took my hand. He was taking my hand to let it go again. He would let it go at the end of the aisle, where Dagi stood. Let go: my rose room on the second-floor of my parent’s home (strange to say “my parents’” home now, no longer mine), my mom’s homemade chicken and dumplings, my known role of unmarried daughter. Suddenly my whole body shook with convulsions rising from some abyss swiftly opened beneath my sandals. In a second, everything became real as my trembling fingers. 

I recall a long-time family friend talking about life after his eldest daughter married and left the house, a neat, white bungalow under shady trees on Elbert. He said he missed the trails she left in the house when she returned at the end of each day: her shoes by the door, an empty plate at the table, a book left on the loveseat. All signs she was still there, still present. Life stirred. And then after the wedding, after she left was like after a funeral. Like a death in the family.

 I wonder if this is how my mother feels, how Kaki feels, when their children leave home. It is a feeling I cannot fully comprehend. I have always been the one leaving for new adventures, not the one left grieving in an emptied house. When I left the US for Ethiopia as a recent university-grad, my gut ached with missing, but it was a missing quickly filled with the rewarding labor of learning the culture, meeting people from around the world, teaching classrooms full of quivering souls. Those who stay, remain locked in the old routines with nothing new to fill the gaping of a loved presence. There were nights in Addis I lay on damp pillows listening to the music my dad would play at home. The loss felt like a physical ailment. Loss is a physical ailment. But my mother’s aching, Kaki’s aching, is different. “It is hard, very hard,” Kaki said once (or was it more than once?). She is an Ethiopian woman, and Ethiopians press their emotions under radiant smiles, hidden under the weight of the day’s labors and incantations of “Thanks be to God.” 

I do not know my own mother’s private aches, what she says to God when the door of her room is closed, but I can tell you what I do see. When I arrive in Indianapolis from Ethiopia and see my arthritic mother at the end of the terminal, she is always jumping up and down, up and down holding a poster board decorated in hearts and rows of exclamation points. When I reach her, she holds me in her strong arms, tight, and that’s when she always breaks down.

*

 One of my favorite pictures of our wedding glimpses Dagi and me dancing. We are dancing on the grass, just beyond the white tent. It is an evening in summer. The photograph was taken just after the father-daughter dance, when my dad and I swayed to Billy Joel’s “Lullaby.” It was taken soon after my father released my hand and my hand wove into my new husband’s. Dagi’s smile is pressed into my ear, and my face is turned away from the camera. I am resting my face on his shoulder, resting. Dried lavender clings to my hair, from that moment our dear guests pelted us with handfuls of the fragrant violet buds as we emerged from the church, husband and wife, walking into the world for the first time as a new kind of one. My curls unwind down the white buttons of my dress, where Dagi’s hand rests. I remember in that moment he was whispering the lyrics of the song, a rap song.  Our rings sit bright on our fingers.  Here are the words that speak when I remember that moment: “And God saw everything He had made, and behold, it was very good.”

*

Creation demands separation. It surprises me how often the word “separate” is used in the first chapter of Genesis. “God separated the light from the darkness,” and, “God said, ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters,’” and, “’Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night.’” Separation creates the order requisite for life. Light is birthed in its divorce from chaos. At the end of the wedding, after embracing our beloveds, Dagi and I drove away in my mom’s little red MG, headlights burrowing a path through back country roads.  

*

About a year ago, my sister gave the universe a new life. She wrestled for nearly twentyfour hours to birth her son, that is, to separate her body from his. In the end, we gathered around the hospital room and rubbed antiseptic foam on our hands and held this fragile and glorious being. Florescent light divided womb dark. One of my sisters wept. His name is Moses. Moses, drawn from the Nile waters. Separated from his family to lead a nation into the Promised Land.

*

If separation is requisite for life, for the stunning emergence of monarch wings, it also lies at the origin of death. After the bit fruit and the shifted blame, Adam and Eve become self conscious of their naked bodies, their vulnerable intimacy. The divine garden walks shuttered. A holy cherubim wielding a sword of flame bars the path to Paradise. Anselm of Canterbury expresses the state of humanity in his Proslogion: 

Wretched, expelled from that home, impelled to this one! cast down from that abode, sunken to this one! From our homeland into exile, from the vision of God into our own blindness, from the delight of immortality into the bitterness and horror of death. O miserable transformation from such great good into such great evil! What a grievous loss, a heavy sorrow, an unmitigated plight!

*

While in Addis for our visit, I have no work or television or phone. In between time with family and friends—joking with Kaki, watching a video of a friend hang-gliding on her Brazilian honeymoon (She is an Ethiopian who left her family in Addis to live down-country with her Dutch husband, a farm mechanic.), spooning bowls of bean soup, sipping tea by the window, all beautiful sources of nourishment—I read. I am reading Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” for the first time. Dagi and I talk often about racism. We must. Marriage, that stunning oneness, has given us the gift of wearing each other’s skins in a way. To see life intimately alongside—however imperfectly—the eyes of a black man has shattered my white paper word. The whole letter burns, but one passage flew like a spark. Speaking of segregation, Dr. King writes, “Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?” Anselm nods from his damp cell in medieval Caen. 

Segregation still splinters my hometown. Neighborhoods, schools. Even churches remain divided. “Don’t talk about racism,” certain white evangelicals complained at a recent conference in the Midwest, after a pastor had just given a talk on the subject. “Let’s get back to the Bible.” 

 Separation as segregation.

Segregation as sin.

Sin as separation. 

Is this partly why saying goodbye is so hard? Like sin, like segregation, like any kind of death, leaving a beloved feels wrong, as if it is not meant to be. Sometimes I wonder if we were meant to live like Kaki’s people down-country, like people across the world lived for ages: never leaving. Husbands never leaving their mothers. Mothers never having to suffer without their sons. The wives leaving, but only once. (The move was painful, but quick.) We were meant to live in close community, a sweet intimacy. We were meant to live always in a garden where everything was green and good.

Or is it that the pain of separation is merely a metaphor for the pain evil causes? “Against you, you only, have I sinned,” cries David, who clove a man from his wife and clove the man from his own breath. Union (Bathsheba spied from the rooftop, gathered from her cleansing) demands separation, and in this tragedy, the separation horrifies. Even the life born of the oneness was taken. When I look at another man too long, there is a tear rent not only between my husband and me, but between God and me. Perhaps I do not feel the pain in the moment, but when I understand my action as it is—the abyss opened and my body shook—I mourn as if for a loss, a separation, a kind of death. Remembering Kaki’s red scarf the night her son left for a wedding across the sea, I find the metaphor apt. 

Police Commissioner “Bull” Connor arrested Dr. King in Birmingham on Good Friday. On Good Friday, Christ cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Christ knew separation: from heaven, from Mary’s body, from the crowds, from His disciples, now from a holy God who cannot abide the heft of humanity’s evil heavy on His Son. Perfect Trinitarian intimacy broken for the first time in the ages. Under a dark sky, Mary weeps. Christ, holding His mother’s heart, holding all mothers’ hearts, gives her into John’s care, he into hers. 

In the end, this separation is a grace. Through it, humans enter the Holy of Holies, iron veil torn from ceiling to hem. Human can be bound again with the divine. Believers are given the call to live as aliens on this planet, as holy ones, set-apart-ones, salty and shook with light. We dream again of walking with God in the garden.

*

One night at the parking lot of Igloo, a new ice cream parlor with cherry-red tables and the best brownie sundae you can find in Addis, I weep for the first time saying goodbye to Dagi’s friends. This surprises me. They had always been Dagi’s friends, not mine, but during our visit I have learned to love them as I never had when we lived here. Routine waters down the transcendence, the grave import of moments. There is nothing like leaving and returning to help you see how things are. G.K. Chesterton: “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.” We had to come back to Addis to see what it was.

I feel this over and over again, as the end of our time in Ethiopia approaches, as we say goodbye again and again: Goodbye Kaki, Girmesh, Micky, Feven, Liron, Aster, Kaleb, Frezer, Agazite, Samir, Marut, Mark, Taffy, Chimon, Josiah, Temesgen, Tsega, Jo, Medan, Kathy, Brett, Heeyon, Theresa, Aki, Deborah, Joy, Chris, Erin, Kate, Yvonne, Schlitz, AJ, Lydia, Zewdu, Ruth, Tsihiy, Girma, Eteye Mihiret. Each goodbye is a small death.

Where the living presence was, an emptiness gapes. But the emptiness is something. In Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus, in which holy fool Arseny travels the known world in an epic journey ending at the place of his birth, Brother Hugo wonders if it is worth getting to know someone if you must say goodbye later. Arseny replies, “There is emptiness before meeting someone, just nothing, but there is no longer emptiness after parting. After having met someone once, it is impossible to part completely.” The ache is something. 

*

We fly from Ethiopian heights and return to Midwestern flatlands. Here I tend a garden where daisies grow. (The daisies are transplants from my grandmother.) I fill jars with their abundance and give them away. Here we enjoy slow Sunday brunches with my parents at their brick farmhouse, the only house set sideways on the street. Here my mother embraces us with every joy Dagi’s mother felt the days we passed in her presence.

We leave one world and unite with another. We break and heal. The breaking is necessary for the healings, and our healed hearts must be broken again. Sometimes I cannot stand the limitations of my own skin. I wish I could rend the barriers of time and place and be with everyone all at once, a gift reserved (blessedly, in the end) for God. I suppose the best I can do is to be alive and aware wherever I am.

*

I remember when I returned to America from my first year of living in Ethiopia, before I met Dagi. Returning felt like a wound un-healing, going back in time. My room felt claustrophobic. Home did not feel like home. Hair bound in Ethiopian braids, an Orthodox cross about my neck, I didn’t even know if I considered myself American anymore. No one understood. Desperate to find someone who would, I met with one of my sister’s friends in a chain coffee shop where the air conditioner was too cold and the service too fast. My sister’s friend had lived a year in Thailand. Our conversation was balm. 

 “You know,” she said. “It’s hard having your heart in two places.”

“Makes me long for heaven,” I said. And I thought of that great severance from earthy life, being born, really born, for the first time. Then I imagined Kaki and my mom together in that place of light, that wedding feast. Their eyes seem to glow because they will not have to say goodbye ever again.

 “Yes,” she said, and her eyes brightened with a kind of longing. “Someday we will be with everyone, all together.” She looked away.

Published in Rock & Sling | Issue16.1