In January 2014, the four of us were flying home from a Christmas trip to Australia. We transited in Auckland and I called my mother, who had seen her oncologist while we were in the air. “He said that it is in my stomach, in a knot. He said that this is the end.” Whenever I fly through Auckland now I can feel it, my knees buckling, my 8yo and 11yo trying to hold me up. We flew on to San Francisco where I held my beloved and very elderly cat Bebe while I booked my own flight back to Australia. I left Jeremy to take care of those scared little kids, and I never saw Bebe again.

When I got to Barraba Mum had been set up in the palliative care room at the local hospital, which had its own lounge with foldout sofas. My brothers and her friends would come and go. We played mah jongg for hours. I curled up with Mum on the sofa and we watched the Last of the Summer Wine on my laptop. Her friends had made her a beautiful patchwork quilt and we wrapped ourselves in it. There was so much joy. The nurses said it sounded like we were having a family holiday, and we were. We told a lot of jokes. One morning I asked her what she wanted for breakfast: “Gin and tonic.” “Coming right up!”

I sometimes say that Mum went nova. In four weeks she poured out twenty years of unconditional love. When Bebe died, Mum held me and said, “It’s okay to cry.” I said “Mum, if I start crying, I’ll never stop.” She said, “Yes you will.” I think about that all the time.

When she died, the nurses let me help wash her body, and I cried, and I kissed her cooling flesh. It was the honor of my life to attend at my mother’s death. I think of the radiance of her love, and I think of my clarity in the moment. Let me carry that grace in my heart and hands all the days of my life.

I tested positive for Covid on Sunday, my first time. The last of my family to get it, nearly five years into this global panny-D in which we find ourselves, I thought I was doing the tests wrong.

I’d been run-down since Thursday. Cortland Street was closed to traffic for the first time but I missed Halloween. On Saturday afternoon I could only ride my bike as far as Potrero del Sol, to look at the Day of the Dead altars and the squares of the AIDS quilt in the crisp autumn sun. Marigolds and grief. I cried for the lost boys who should have been my queer elders.

By Saturday night my temperature was 100.6 and it took some effort to breathe. When I finally called my doctors on Sunday, wheezing, they sent me to the emergency room. In the friendly robot taxi I wept for the people who went to the ER with Covid in 2020, and who said goodbye to their families through iPads, and who died. Me, I had x-rays which ruled out pneumonia, was given paxlovid and all the steroids and came home to quarantine in the attic.

Election day is a more reliable trauma trigger even than the week in which both my parents died. I spent the morning text banking in Michigan, then I howled all through therapy, deep, racking sobs for all that we have lost. Afterwards the cats insisted on taking me out into the garden, where the linnets and phoebes and hummingbirds and crows had various constructive things to say.

I took portraits of the sticky monkeyflower and hummingbird sage and Douglas iris. I chatted to my sister in outback NSW. I scrubbed out the bird-feeder with hot water and soap. That’s about all I had in me, and now I’m back in my college kid’s bed, looking over Excelsior and San Bruno Mountain as the sun sets into the Pacific. May all beings know peace.