we can't be together if we're dead

I wrote this reflection originally for IG stories and am recreating it here. People in Gaza are dying of hunger every day, and many many people are at the point of starvation that even if they get food, their only chance of surviving is with significant medical help to treat refeeding syndrome. Here are some places money can go to help: The Sameer Project, The Zaynab Project, Gaza Funds

I have this raw, sort of childlike plea in me: I don't want to watch a million people die. I don't want to feel the minutest parts of my heart drift that much further away from each other as they accommodate this megaton of mortality, a density decrease which increases my own comfort with my own death.

Does this happen to you too?

It's like after the grip of panic has had you for too many days, the hold life has on you begins to falter. Like my substance, whatever makes me up and stitches me here, has become less dense. We're all close to death anyway (the stick-thin limbs, the gaunt eyes, the children begging for heaven so they don't have to share a mango) what would it be if I left some few units of time before my children? I can feel something in my chest go awry, my heartbeat is catching some way it's not supposed to, and it's painful.

But facing mortality and loving life are not different things, they are the same thing. Sure enough my heart beats on, and with that I remember that I LOVE life, like deep in my bones I love it, like the game my toddler plays where he is taking care of an invisible baby he can't find, or the way my oldest is trying to learn magic tricks, like all those broken-open moments I had this week with people and the lake and my fiddle and the butterfly that danced outside my window.

But refusing to face death and its consequences and realities: that's a very different thing from being alive and it's a certain kind of deadness.

I don't want to see all these people in my life differently who act unperturbed, but I do, because that's a deadness.

We can't be together if we're dead. We can't make it if we're dead.

But being alive, which I remember is the same thing as facing death, gives the body ideas about what to do for each other and ourselves, in the face of death. Even if it doesn't always work or we won't see how it could or how it does, even if we can't make sense of it.

People in Egypt have thrown bottles of rice into the sea which have reached the shores of Gaza. When they heard the news, people in Lebanon and Cyprus joined them. Scientists are mapping the currents so the next round can have even surer success.

These bottles of rice and formula and food, they are really staying with me, and the people mapping the currents, and the Gazans braving the beach to find them. I hope we all throw some bottles, plant some seeds, shed some tears, launch some flotillas, drive through some borders with trunks full of food, more and more and more of us.