Pectin

This week I went to a memorial service for the mother of some of my dearest friends, Titi Yingling. I had never met her, but I love several of her progeny very much, and I wanted to be there to support them. 

I went to the memorial service very cavalierly, I didn’t even bring tissues. I thought, “Well, I’m here to support the siblings.” But then Guillermo got up onto the pulpit and said, “There are a lot of words I could use to describe my mom, but it’s easier to just show you.” Then he motioned for his other four siblings to come up, the three sisters in between and the baby brother on the end, and he said, simply and presciently, with a tiny crack in his voice, “This is mom.” And I realized then that I did know her, despite the fact that we had never met, and that that was a very special and super power, and then there were hot, fat tears streaming down my cheeks faster than I could wipe them away. 

It struck me several times that day that memorializing your parent is one of the hardest and most emotional things any of us will ever do. This is most especially true if you happen to think that said parent was one of the coolest and most special people to ever be on earth, as was the case on this day with these siblings. There was plenty of music, and a eulogy from their youngest sister that she confessed her therapist had warned her would be “disturbing to the audience.” I told her later that I was glad she hadn’t let that deter her – it was a beautiful poem about vintage buttons and the need to hold your guts in, both literally and figuratively when dealing with a parent’s tragic illness. There were several songs performed by local musicians who loved her (including the absolute sweetest cover of “La Bamba” I have ever heard by a friend and one of her granddaughters), and a story about her smuggling a baby monkey back to America in her purse. It felt like the most perfect way to remember someone whose life was so oriented around art, and her children, and the oddly unbelievable. 

I’ve been reading Cookie Mueller’s collected works over the last month, Walking Through Clear Water in A Pool Painted Black. It’s been a beautiful and weird ride through debauchery and tenderness and the incredibly cavalier survival of sometimes unspeakable violence. “There is a great art to handling losses with nonchalance,” she says. As the writer Olivia Laing (who wrote the incredible introduction to this collection) notes, before reading Cookie’s story, that might come off as hardboiled or affectless, but once you get to know Cookie on these pages, you understand that it’s a necessary “defanging” of pain for her. That her casualness allows us to experience her story with wonder in addition to horror, and that it allowed her to continue on – to cause more trouble, to make more love, to find more adventure. I hope we all get the chance, and that we have to experience less trauma to get there. Her son Max was at the memorial, and it felt very tender to see him there while I was thinking about his mom’s words quoted above, and how true it felt when I saw all those little versions of Titi standing up there continuing her brightness.

It’s curious how autumn is often a time of life transition. So many people I love have lost beloveds recently, it feels hard to quantify.

It also struck me that it is such a privilege to be able to labor over that heartache in its due time, to be able to collect your thoughts and gather your people to mourn and to celebrate a life, while there are so many people concurrently losing their families without the ability to do so because they are either missing, or lost under rubble, or much worse.

If you find yourself feeling heavy, drained, confused, and upset while war crimes are being committed and streamed into the phone in your pocket, I think that’s a very good sign for your humanity. I’ve had several conversations over the last month about the genocide unfolding in Gaza with intelligent people I respect that have ended with either the sentiment that “it’s just too complicated,” or that “not everyone has to have an opinion on social media about everything.” And I just want to say aloud, with as much of my throat as I can possibly use, that that is an incredibly weak position. 

There is absolutely no denying that the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine is complex. As an American Jew who went to religious school for literally all of my formative years, I promise that I have been fed an incredibly large and well-tailored amount of propaganda on this issue. In my young life, I believed a lot of it. And let me tell you, “complicated” is a word that loses its legs when you are getting real time updates from doctors in hospitals begging the world to save their patients, who are laying down their lives to remain there to care for them. I can’t imagine seeing videos of Palestinian children begging to just be allowed to live like other kids do, and still somehow finding some well of support for the government bombing them, the governments funding them, and the people still clinging to support for them. Innocent people shouldn’t get killed because of the brutal policies of the governments that rule over them – not in Israel, not in Palestine, not anywhere. 

This is not a fringe opinion, it happens to be shared by the Pope, the leadership of Doctors Without Borders, The WHO, Democracy Now, and the French government. Do you know how far into madness you have to descend to get the French government to tell you to hit pause on colonialist military operations?

You don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to recognize an inhumane and disproportionate military response on an innocent civilian population, and as someone in whose name and for whose faith this is being theoretically perpetrated, I just want to say, I actually think it’s a really fucking great idea for me to let people know how I feel about it, on social media, at the dinner table, in marches, on the phone to my representatives who refuse to stand up against it – truly anywhere I can. Irrespective of our opinions about how the land division should finally end, we should be able to agree as human beings that we don’t want any more carnage – a ceasefire is the first and only way to begin. 

I know how scared people are to be wrong about this. I know how aggressively people lash out when they disagree on this issue. I’ve seen the Israeli occupation of Palestine be a conversational third-rail for my entire life. And now more than ever, I want people to know exactly what I think of the extermination of a people based on their ethnicity, being ejected from their indigenous land. Genocide is not a Jewish value, and “Never Again” isn’t just for us. 

It is a remarkable privilege for any of us to sit around thinking about this while our bodies are safe, and while the bodies of our family are safe, and if the most you can come up with is that you’re going to stay out of it, that should give you pause. I’m paraphrasing someone else’s sentiment here, but if you’ve ever wondered what you would have done during the holocaust, during the South African apartheid, during any moment that required standing up for an oppressed people – you’re doing it right now. 

So, if you find yourself vacillating between maintaining your daily life, crying over the news, or just over the thought, trying to figure out how to help, and how to hold your friends and families together through whatever unrelated and private struggles you are moving through, let me just say – it’s good and necessary work, and speaks to your humanity and character to be very tired right now. You are the pectin my friends, you are holding us together.

Tell your representatives what you think about this. They work for you. Do not be scared. 

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“Pectin” on Apple Music