what we carry

on processing the hard things alone and with caring friends

1 de enero, 2025, cerro castillo, chile: We woke up to goat stampedes and sun.

Last night we arrived at the farm to a scene: two goats being killed for a New Year’s Eve feast in front of our little house; it was both deeply unsettling and oddly fascinating. I told our sweet Chilean host on the first day that goats are Hannah’s favorite farm animals and he laughed. He’s lived on this land at the foot of the mountain his whole life — raising goats, killing goats, selling goats. It’s surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glacial rivers and perfect, crisp air, both far away from it all and close to the things that matter, really, but mostly very very far away. He says things like “sipo” and “miércoles” instead of “mierda” and “un montoncito” and I’m very endeared by the way he speaks even though I can only understand about 50% it. I say “puedes hablar más despacio por favor?” and it doesn’t matter; he still speaks quickly, dropping ends of words, adding “ipo” to everything, using the typical Chilean ending of “ái” instead of “as” when he uses “tú.”

A sweet “buen día” from our friend and his horse.

After the traumatic loss of their friends, the goats carried on with their evening. They grazed, wandered, tried to eat Hannah’s shoe. We spent hours watching them, sipped New Year’s Eve beers while the late summer sun went down at 10pm. When it was close to midnight, we walked in the dark under the upside down stars to our cowboy friend’s house for “feliz nuevo” and champagne cider and watched a woman interviewing young people on the TV at a party in Valparíso. We’re all the same in this world, really, is all I could think as I watched our companions cheers one another, give out sweet kisses at midnight, listen to folks tell the woman on TV their dreams, hopes, wishes for the year 2025. It doesn’t seem possible that this is what year it is. Where we are there is no cell phone service, no wifi, our friends could be from 1950, 1980. When we left at 1 a.m. everything was silent aside from gentle goat bleats. The sky dark, dark, dark.

Today we’ll go further south to Río Tranquilo before making our way back north. New year feels fresh, I suppose, but also with little fanfare. Here it’s the same; we cheers, we carry on, look out the window, watch the goats, the mountain, the river. I’m feeling immense grief; like I’m needing to move and process things through my body. In two days it’s the anniversary of dad’s death. I’m always tired of grieving but I always need to grieve, it seems. He was in my dream the other night. I don’t know how or where, but he was. I hate him I love him I miss him I am, because of him.

The grief follows, I learn, I’ve learned, I’ve known. Hannah came to find me in southern Chile in mid-December. We’d spend Christmas and New Year’s together hiking, driving, wandering, processing. Somehow we always find ourselves together on holidays: Thanksgiving on my roof, pandemic Christmas at the movies, her birthday at the cemetery, this time New Year’s on the goat farm. We walked for five days together, sharing a tent, a backpack, food — for better or for worse. Half the time we bickered and the other half we gleefully frolicked through fields of flowers, marveled at moss, photographed each other being tiny amongst giant sky, giant trees, giant mountains.

Tiny Hannah, big world.

We complain about the wind, marvel at a wild hare, she tells me about India and I tell her about New Zealand. It’s raining and we’re both soaked and our feet hurt but we’re giggling because we saw a glacier that morning and it was beautiful and have we really been walking for four hours? Was that an eagle? Are we grumpy or just hungry? We load film, make peanut butter sandwiches, eat an egg on the rock overlooking the river. That mushroom looks like an orange! I say. Those flowers look like cartoons! she says. How is the water that blue? Did you take a picture of the iceberg? This forest feels so quiet.

I start with the backpack because I’m less tired that morning. We walk in silence for a while and listen to the wind and the birds and then we talk about it all because we do love to talk. Somehow we always come to the grief, the Great Loss that we both share, but that moves through us in very different ways. I was 17, the oldest, the child of an addict, his death was sudden, quick, sharp. She was nine, the youngest of two; he was sick, so his death was slow, painful, long. We both saw things we shouldn’t have seen in our respective childhoods.

I talk about the moment I realized the adults were doing it all for the first time: my mom at 45, crying into my grandmother’s lap. “Be strong for her” they all told me, and that’s what I did. I became parent-ified, adult-ified, bottled everything up so I could keep it together. She tells me how her mom, her teachers, had no authority over her, that everyone was flailing while everything crumbled so why should she listen to them? She rebelled, did what she wanted, trusted herself more than the adults that were hardly keeping it together.

We walk more, she carries the backpack for a while. We talk about the pain we store in our bodies, how we don’t know what to do with it.

We talk about memories of them, too. She tells me about her dad’s art practice, his film camera, she takes photos of mushrooms and clouds and goats with his old telephoto lens. She tells me how her sister protected her while he was sick, after he died, how they protected each other the best they could. It’s always complicated, though. I tell her how I tried to keep the scariest parts from my siblings, how I had to become another mom to them and how much it hurt them, me, us over the years, how much I hated my dad when he died, how he taught me to take a photo, how much of him is in me, for better or for worse.

I don’t know. There’s something here about being kids in the wilderness and marveling at the rocks and trees and the flowers when there’s been been so much to move through over the years. We were both kids who had to grow up too fast. The kid that I was went away somewhere, she stopped painting and writing and playing piano, and it’s such a gift to get her back when I’m walking, winding, wandering; a gift to share that reclamation with someone else who knows it, too.

Hannah took this photo somewhere in the forest, maybe day one, maybe day four.

Memories are fallible and mine is shifting and changing all the time. I love him and I hate him and some days I’m sad that he can’t see what I’m doing because I feel like he’d love it, cheer me on, hop on a plane to meet me, find me, see what I’m seeing. But he also left me with so much to carry, so much to parse through on long walks in the woods, in lost memories, in romantic relationships, and in conversations with people who do, actually, understand.

We both had to to do so much alone. That’s not a memory, it’s just true. On the trail we share a backpack and most days we don’t have to talk about whose turn it is to carry it, we just know. I load film when her hands are too cold, she fills our water bottles in the stream, we rest when we need to. We do it all imperfectly, but always with care for the other.

3 de enero, 2025: villa mañihuales, chile: Dad’s been gone for 16 years and I am here picking morning raspberries, eating them by the handful, lying in the sun on a rock next to the most perfect blue water and *still* the grief is strong and all feels tender and at the same time sweet and in one year he’ll be gone for as long as I knew him and all the life I’ve lived in between, what would he think of how I’ve moved through, how I’ve carried it all?

I’m trying to learn how to put down some of the things I was asked to carry. It’s a gift to have dear friends and loves who can help me parse through it all; decide what to take and what to leave. Thanks for walking with me if you’re someone whose been with me in one way or another over the years as I move through these things; I hope I can help you carry the hard stuff, too, whenever it comes around. Thanks for reading.