Footing in Love / Leaving Tracks
By Geri Gale
excerpts from a memoir: PK, Cancer & the Tragic Ruts of Time
A memoirist’s prerogative is: This is how I remember it, and the power of those words is impenetrable — no one can deny it, refute it — a woman’s memory is her own. Virginia Woolf warned us of the historical desire to reclaim a woman’s room of one’s own.
*
Life is prismatic and each year of life brings on a new hue — a new fragment. This year I’ve been writing in the shade of gray and drawing in black-and-white — the words and lines express a double-edged grief. Sometimes I wonder will the grief ever stop. History tells me the grief is unending.
The memories within the walls of our house — sometimes I can hear them — the sound of bamboo rubbing against a wall. We wore our bandannas and we dug and dug. Those digging days are gone. Now I’m upstairs digging the walls of my soul — extricating the cavities in me.
*
Today the parasitic COVID has colonized human conversation. Millions of wreaths will be laid on graves. Today I wanted to write about AIDS — how gay advocate Larry Kramer said that Ron Reagan’s father was president for seven years before he said the word AIDS in public. Today the COVID-19 vaccine is on a Star Trek Warp Speed trajectory — while approved drugs for AIDS took nearly a decade. Since the beginning of AIDS, more than 60 million people have been infected with HIV and nearly 30 million people have died of HIV-related causes. (Source: The AIDS Institute website, January 18, 2021.) Since a year into this COVID-19 pandemic, as of January 23, 2021, 2.1 million have died worldwide. (Coronavirus World Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak, New York Times website, January 23, 2021.)
*
Writing a memoir is self-displaying energy. It’s full of trepidation of the truth. The written memoir is not the life the writer wished she had lived. In its guts it is a fury, an anger of imagining a different life to share with the world. Writing a memoir reeks of insecurities, smells of lies, screams for a different plotline.
*
With PK I lost my footing in love. I met her in my twenties, and I was in the process of obliteration. I was divorcing everyone in my family, almost everyone from my past. The shedding of skin, like a snake, before slithering into a new existence. I moved from east to west, searching for a place in the world — for identity. Still the aura of loss and loneliness clung to my skin. Then I met PK. Since then, for four decades, we have been caretakers of art and love.
*
Today I wanted to write about money, how it has run through my hands, how people say in the time of corona it is the dirtiest thing on this planet, how soon money, as we know it, dollar bills will be extinct — how I once wore dimes in my loafers in case I had to make a phone call — how I borrowed $20,000 from a friend for my business in 1995, and finished paying back the loan this year, twenty-five years later.
*
Yesterday it took PK forty-five minutes to cut my hair. I sat in the kitchen on a chair with hands clasped wishing she would not be so perfect with each cut, thinking about scissors, how scissors always show up in my work, how I made scissors out of clay in my ceramics class when I was nineteen, how afraid I am about getting cut with scissors, with a knife, with a razor blade, how sharp objects in the hands of a lover are prismatic — various shades of closeness, mirrors, cuts, sound.
Leaving Tracks
There is a low, muted kind of hope lingering in the background. A thread of hope I cup in my hands. The proof of life seen on the marks on a body. A body like a landscape of history. A scar here. A scar there. A crack in the veneer.
RBG died and her death felt like a lynchpin was pulled out. My cup of hope spilled over. She said, “Whatever you choose to do leave tracks, and that means don’t do just for yourself, because in the end, it’s not going to be fully satisfying — I think you will want to leave the world a little better for you having lived.”
Leaving tracks, leaving the marks on a body. The life and death of another woman unspools as we sit and watch the decay of our democracy.
In this time of bereavement for RBG and our country, for her deeply felt humanism, we telescope our eyes trying to distinguish dark from dark.
*
Still, I shrink from the world and run toward the world as I write this memoir. PK is steady and unhurried. She does not deflate. She carries on, and in her carrying on, she carries me. I blindly follow. Yesterday she told me she was a gold master in Solitaire. We will celebrate this achievement. She, too, shrinks from the world (Solitaire) and runs toward the world (helping people). PK pushes through and leaves behind a wake.
She had experienced several NDEs. Her near-death-experiences — her addiction and getting electrically shocked and falling twenty-five feet on a construction job — give her a watchfulness of commitment to finding the light. My cancer was my closest near-death experience. And lately with the lynchpin pulled out, I feel more exposed to death than living.
*
Some people today talk about racism in the United States as if it’s something new, but seventy-eight years ago, in May 1942, PK’s parents — American citizens — and their families — were removed from their Washington state homes, uprooted and carted off onto a train to a dusty, desert, Californian-nowhere town. It was PK’s mother’s first train ride ever, and she was told it was forbidden to look out the window. Mitzi Kunitsugu lived in the concentration camps for two years.
She was given the choice to leave the camps and go to Minneapolis and get training as a nurse. When Mitzi arrived in Minnesota at the Catholic hospital, the white Catholic nun thought she was Native American or Canadian Indian, so the nun told Mitzi she was a heathen and living in sin. Mitzi cared for a man in a coma for weeks who could not speak, and she told him if he ever needed anything to push a button and she would come.
Every morning before their shifts, the head nun-nurse made the Japanese-American women stand in a line and report the status of their patients. While Mitzi was reading her charts, she saw the white light flickering. She asked to leave. The nun said no. Mitzi explained this was the code she had created with her patient. The nun refused her. When the nun set her nurses free, Mitzi went to the room. Her patient was dead. Mitzi swore she would never become a Catholic.
Mitzi remained a nurse the rest of her life, but she never joined a church. PK was raised with a multitude of influences, Buddhism and Japanese traditions, and a touch of her grandmothers’ Christianity.
When I met Mitzi and she told me her nun story, I made her a book. I drew and sewed on tracing paper the image of her as a young nurse, and I sewed a black satin cover of her face with a pearl-like shell stitched to the fabric. I brought her upstairs to my attic room and gave her the book and read her the story and she cried. She said, “No one had ever done anything like this for me.”
PK had told me that Asians don’t cry. Still, I pulled the lynchpin out, and Mitzi shed her low, muted tears.
Geri Gale (she/her) is writing a memoir titled PK, Cancer & the Tragic Ruts of Time—a lesbian love story of forty-two years. She is a Jewish-American married to a Japanese-American and lives in Seattle. Her books include Patrice: a poemella; Alex: The Double-Rescue Dog, and Waiting: prosepoems (Dancing Girl Press). Her prose, poetry, and drawings have appeared or are forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, Foglifter, ang(st): the feminist body zine, Neuro Logical, The Bombay Review, Ligeia Magazine, Poetry Pacific, Adelaide, Bayou Magazine, and Under the Sun.