the Infinite

on Chosen Family/on Deathwork & Griefwork/on Grief/on Love

dissolving into Light: even the least of these

Posted on 8 April 2025

cw: pet death

On Sunday afternoon, our beloved Callie crossed the rainbow bridge.

We knew it was her time. We were not surprised, but the softness with which we held her for the past several weeks was the gift we could give her. My two adult kids who are here sat deathwatch with her, sitting and laying on the floor near her, so that she would not be alone. I was out of the house but I had put one of my lightweight shirts over her as a blanket because she was getting colder as the time waned, and I wanted her to be able to have me with her in some way.

A few times over the past couple of weeks we thought she was slipping away for the final time, but she would rally again and every morning when we woke up it was a gift to see her still there, still breathing, still asking for careful pets and for the vitamin-enriched treats we got especially for her. We loved her so much. We tried to love her extra for the family members that couldn’t be here with her physically. We cried and talked to her softly and each of us told her, more than once, that it was okay whenever she needed to go, that we would miss her but we would be okay. We told her she could go see her sister and mom again.

I left the room a lot to go sob over the sink from time to time, because I didn’t want to be the adult that was crumbing, but I didn’t hide my tears from anyone. Allowing sadness to briefly drag us underwater is necessary, because without that experience we can’t have the sensation of the life-water of grief lifting us back up so that we can breathe again.

I trained as a death doula and I have found a deep meaning in giving a good death to anyone who is actively dying. For Callie, we talked about it and we believed that meant giving her comfortable space to rest, access to clean water and food and the litter box, treats to help her with nutrition, careful fusses when she wanted them, and not to be left alone. We gave her a good death. We did our best.

This week we will be able to have her cremated and, hopefully, we will have a footprint card and an urn to keep with us. She will always be part of who we are.

One of her favorite places to sit was the counter-top, which normally nobody is allowed to do, but it was easier for her to manage a lot of things from that vantage point. I would sometimes crouch down below her so that I could look up at her face and talk to her, and in one of the moments I had with her like that, I had the energetic and visual sense that she was slowly dissolving into the brightness of the Light. It was a brief but wholly sacred moment and I will cherish the mystery of that moment.

On Sundays every week, those of us at the Thailand house participate in the regular village practice of giving an offering of red Fanta at the village shrine, which is just down the end of our street. My eldest wanted to give the offering on that day, and wanted me to go with, so we walked down in the heat and humidity of the early dark to the illuminated, ornate shrine. I stood nearby so that Vincent could be fully immersed in paying our respect to the spirits and gods of the land here, and as soon as it walked up to place the open can on the shrine base, a medium-sized white short-haired cat suddenly stood up and almost hurried away. We both slowed down our movements and the cat stayed, and I asked permission to take a photo of the cat that was not strictly speaking A Cat.

The Mysteries can’t be explained, only experienced in order to be known. I think I’m learning that even experiencing a Mystery does not mean it can be fully comprehended. The only thing we have is what we noticed, what was revealed, and how much we can remember and map into our own hearts so that we can keep it with us.

Even the smallest of our cats, the youngest, the one who was a stray, the one whose eyesight was poor because she was sick early in her life, the one that lost her mother and litter mate and other family members — she was precious and her life had meaning beyond what I can comprehend.

I am grateful for the way she showed up with us. For her utter naivety, her enthusiasm, her happy purrs, the way she drooled when the fusses were Just Right. For how much she fought to stay for just a while longer. For the love she accepted from us.

I am deep in my feelings this afternoon and even though I have errands to run still today, I will hold this feeling warmly in my heart because it is part of the mystery for me. I cherish the grief because it tells me that I loved intensely and wholeheartedly enough to feel the loss of who I loved.

xox,
Nix

epilogue:

flowers in my hair makes me wish that you were here
when my mind goes away, oh, I hope that you’ll be near me

flowers in my hair makes me wish that you were here
when my eyes go away, why my time goes

maybe one day
I’ll end up in a place
where I’m not afraid
and the sun never sleeps

no sad goodbyes,
and no fights,
and no crying
we’ll sleep in the arms
of an orange breeze

and I hope to see you
just out of my side view
and just maybe then we can be,
my pretty

flowers in my hair makes me wish that you were here
when my mind goes away, oh, I hope that you’ll be near me

flowers in my hair makes me wish that you were here
when my eyes go away, when my time goes

— lyrics from Flowers in My Hair by Wes Reeve

featured image is a photo by Maxime VALCARCE on Unsplash

on Happiness/on Hope/on Queerness/Ten Things

ten things: an earthquake and the joy of fandoms

Posted on 5 April 2025

It’s been too long since I wrote something and I keep trying and I just don’t like what I’ve written. I have the drafts to prove it.

So you get another Ten Things list.

1. I am almost four weeks into my Thailand stay and it is weirdly quiet here, except for the EARTHQUAKE WE HAD LAST WEEK (March 28). I have never been in a building during an earthquake that lasted almost a minute. It was enough time to stop dissociating and realize it was still happening, which is awful. And we are over 400 kilometers from the epicenter in Myanmar.

2. Our youngest kitty, who is seven years old and was born a stray cat but adopted not long after into the family, has been declining in health almost since I got here (this is where our cats are staying) and we are not sure if she is going to make it. We are prepared for every night to be her last one, and when we wake up and she’s still here we are surprised and grateful; there is nothing we can do for her except give her love, fusses when she can manage them, treats, and access to comfortable spaces, food, and clean water. We hope and we are also trying to be realistic. It’s upsetting but it is what it is and she is precious to us.

3. My fandoms right now consist of: Stray Kids, ATEEZ, occasional other kpop (there’s A LOT of new songs and behind the scenes and music videos and unscripted content and I can’t keep up lol), and Korean and Thai BLs (boys love if you’re not familiar with the acronym). And I had the sudden realization that since I’m *in* Thailand right now, and Thailand is not a terribly large country, the likelihood that I will be in or near locations where the Thai actors or their production companies are located is pretty big —

4. Which is why I freaked out this week after making a hair appointment and then adding directions to the calendar event, whereupon I discovered I would be literal blocks away from the GMMTV location and one of the set locations for a BL I’ve loved recently. I literally freaked out. I almost fell off my chair, in fact. I am not even kidding.

5. Anyway I am getting my hair cut finally, hopefully it turns out as queerly as I am planning. Either way it will be a huge relief to get it cut even if I don’t like it, because if I don’t like it I will get some electric clippers and shave it all off again. Anything but the curly fluff happening right now.

6. All the grocery stores and the cell service store and the pharmacies and a giant food court and probably a hundred other stores are inside the biggest mall I’ve ever visited, which is where we go for all our errands. It’s called Fashion Island and it is huge but navigable, and I keep hoping I will accidentally see a celebrity there, which isn’t completely off base, and when I spot singers and actors I am familiar with on promotional posters for cell phones and bottled water I get stupidly excited. Yes that IS Bambam. YAY FOR ME

7. I can’t underestimate the way that the experience of participating in fandoms has changed me as a person. I didn’t even know this was a thing. I never got to do this. I am so excited about new songs and new music videos and new episodes of shows and behind the scenes footage and clips of BL couples doing promos and silly publicity events — I can’t explain how giddy and satisfied I feel with this. I love it. And I’m a little upset that I didn’t get to start this back in my 20s. I feel like I didn’t even know anything about anything until I was into my 40s.

8. I see the news coming out of the states — and the responses from other countries — and it is astoundingly awful. It’s almost a parody of itself except it’s actually happening, and the stark reality that if I ever went back I would be in the biggest danger I could possibly be in is like a red blaring warning light making siren noises in the background. I don’t understand and also I do understand. This was inevitable, in the way that terrible outcomes are always the result of all the complexity of choices that came before and led up to it. It was always going to end up this way because the chain of choices led us here.

9. So I’m on Threads every day and catching up with my fandom mutuals and seeing a bit of political content, and I know that when there’s a larger influx of political posts it’s because something AWFUL has probably been happening — it can be tricky being 12-15 hours ahead of everything happening in the states; for instance it is 12:03am on Saturday here right now but that means it is 12:03pm on Friday afternoon in Eastern Time in the states. I’m either online when people are having their late-night panic attacks, or I’m on when people are waking up and trying to figure out how to react to what’s going on. Either way I feel so bad for everyone and I try to be as supportive as I can.

10. Lastly — I want to make an observation of myself; my ears have learned to hear the Thai language spoken as something that feels familiar, because I have now heard it for long enough that it sounds like a thing I love to hear. I know how my brain works and that’s the initial reason I started watching so many Thai shows (the second reason is because there are so many good queer/gay Thai series). If I’m staying here for a while, I want to love the way the language sounds, in the same way that I love the way spoken Mandarin sounds, and the way spoken or sung Korean sounds. It feels like a piece of something I would categorize as home. It makes me feel safe, like the world is big but not bigger than I can hold inside my own heart and mind.

Maybe that’s the best outcome of going places I’ve never been before. Discovering how easy it is to love the beautifulness and culture and sound of a place I’ve just begun to know.

Usually I give you an epilogue made of song lyrics, but the lyrics to the songs that move me right now are mostly in Korean, and they mean so much to me partly for the lyrics but also for the way the songs feel and sound and how they make me want to respond to them. I have been practicing dancing (not very well) and I am listening to music that gives me joy and makes me want to fully inhabit my body.

So here is a song that I love right now, a very recent release from two of my favorite Stray Kids:

TRUMAN by HAN and Felix from Stray Kids
on Spotify
watch the music video on YouTube

I hope there are things in your life that bring you joy, and I hope you can fully enjoy them for at least a couple of minutes at a time. I hope that the discipline of hope is possible for you. I hope that tiny shards of sunlight and starlight make their way into your heart where they will stay. I hope that you will be safe.

The despair in the world affects me even at a distance, because it doesn’t feel distant at all when it affects people I love. I am always here if you need a friend.

xox
Nix

featured image is a publicity photo of Stray Kids for the dominATE world tour

on Chosen Family/on Decolonizing/on Generational Trauma/on Grief/on Harm & Reciprocity/on Rage

write me out of the family bible

Posted on 1 March 2025

cw: unfiltered discussion of disowning my family of origin

I still have memories of my family of origin, a lot of them bad, some of them good. There are memories I have wanted to hold in my heart and keep forever, but as time passes and fascism rises, I realize that I saw what I hoped was true, and I heard what I wanted to hear but not always what was said.

My parents’ generation doesn’t have the same habit of recording marriages and births and deaths in the frontispiece of a heavy leather gilt-edged family bible, but the generation that raised them did, and many before that.

Even the concept of keeping your genealogy recorded in a very specifically Christian relic seems less of an innocent throwback and more of a cultural statement soaked in blood. You believed or you didn’t. You went to church or you were whispered about. You got married and had kids or people suspected you of being wrong somehow. You stayed in the same religion and denomination you were raised in or you were scratched out of the family bible. You toed the line or you were disowned.

there are already people I won’t ever see again, people that probably pretend I no longer exist.

I want to take this chance to disown those I have hoped could change. I don’t think they care, so it’s not for them that I’m writing this. It’s for me, to help me continue to let go of the anger, shame, betrayal, injustice, and grief. I am letting go of whatever hope I still hold.

to the woman who carried me to term and gave birth to me:

I disown you. Take me out of your family bible.

I visited your Facebook page to see if there was any news I needed to see, if your dad is still alive, if anything has happened that I might want to know. Your profile avatar says that you ‘stand with Israel’. Your public posts make no goddamn sense. You posted a meme of that un-elected South African racist billionaire who keeps buying and ruining things. I hope he goes to Mars and burns to a crisp as he passes through what little atmosphere that planet has. You learned no lessons from your parents about what fascism did to the world the last time it reared its poisonous head like it is now. You are foolish and your choices will be your undoing.

You are not my mother. I am not your child. When it is your time to die, I will not be there. When you are buried or your ashes are scattered, I will not be there. I will read no poems, I will write no eulogy. I will not cry for my mother when you are dead. I will not mourn you. What I grieve is who I thought you were.

I am ashamed of you, and so I disown you. You have no right to be called my mother, and if I still refer to you that way, it’s out of habit — not because I believe that you actually are.

Do not speak my name.

to my sister, who I protected from dad’s anger with my own well-being:

I disown you. Take me out of your family bible.

You know better. You will be 42 years old this summer. If you could ever have changed who and how you are, or understood the world better so that you could act with compassion and an awareness of how you have been complicit in harm, you would have already done it. You are not my baby sister any more. You’re a grown-ass woman who has chosen to be who she is.

I have waited decades for you to understand that you cannot be neutral in the face of injustice, no matter what shape the injustice takes. I have waited for you to realize that refusing to make a choice is itself a choice. I told you years ago that if you weren’t for me, you were against me, and I know you hated that because you told me so. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it any less true.

Your place in history is the worst side. You are passive, you compromise your values, you do not show your sons how to be their best selves in this broken world. You wait for your god to save you and you don’t realize that you are already damned, because you have damned yourself. You are foolish and your choices will be your undoing.

You are no longer my sister. I have sisters. I have siblings. You are not on that list of people and you never will be again. There is such a thing as too late, and that time arrived a while ago.

I am ashamed of you. Of all the people in my family of origin, I had the most hope that you could be better, but you have disappointed me until the taste of hope on your behalf turns sour in my stomach. I used to be your big sister, but no more. If I still refer to you as my sister in the future, it is out of habit, not out of connection or relationship.

We are not family. Do not beg me for help when they come for you in the night. Do not cry over the choices you have made. Go back and try again, and do not speak my name.

I’ve already said so many things, online and in person, that it shouldn’t be confusing to anyone now or in the future that I am and will continue to be on the right side of history.

There’s not really a need for me to publicly call out the people in this post, but I feel like there is so little that I can do; and I need to reserve my energy for the things that matter, the things that I do for my family, and if there is enough left — the things I do for my other loved ones. My resources are finite and I must spend them wisely.

Even if it means I need to write something like this in order to remind myself over and over and over again to stop checking to see if they’ve changed. Nothing ever comes of chasing hope for people like that except disappointment. And I don’t have enough fucks to go around, and if I did, they still don’t deserve to have them.

I will miss what I thought was real, and I will heal, and I will be a good example to my children and all the ones I love.

And for anyone who’s not with me, you’re against me — write me out of your fucking family bible.

I know this was a rough one. But I read The Diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid, and I was raised to be a good little Christian Nationalist, and I lived decades unaware of the contradictions in my life and the harm I was party to; and when it hit me like a wave (the first of many waves to come), I began to change.

I would rather die in a concentration camp, denied the right to flee to another country, than be connected to the people who would send me there.

I have no family but the one I choose. And I will choose them over and over and over again because I know what it’s like to choose the wrong thing and suffer because of it.

May we all be brave as we hope for the things that deserve our hope. May we all find the light.

xox,
Nix

epilogue —

there were song lyrics here, but it was the wrong way to end this piece. I’m glad that I was able to write something encouraging at the end — for myself and maybe for you — but the music was wrong and it bothered me enough that I needed to take it out. I’ll do better next time.

featured image is a photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash