I came back to Mexico suddenly, to see my mom, who's sick. I've been spending most of my time in a public hospital. This is a country where the lack of infrastructure and resources is filled by humans, and their communities. There aren’t enough nurses, so patients are expected to have one family member beside the bed to help with some basic care needs, 24/7. Many families who come from out of town to the hospital and take turns caring for their loved ones sleep on a sidewalk by the entrance and set up makeshift temporary camps. The hospital rooms are filled with love, from daughters, sons, grandsons, sitting all night besides their mothers, fathers, grandparents, and getting no sleep. In the intimacy of the shared hospital rooms, we get the picture of family lives, with all their humor and warmth and the shadow of their conflicts. I hear conversations on speaker phone, a son talking to his sister about their dad, and asking her how to finish cooking his fish and shrimp casserole. My mom’s first neighbour was an older man, from a rural place, who was cared for with infinite patience by his grandson, but supported and visited by a large family. When he managed to go on a first tentative walk, my sister said to him “You’re so strong!”, in a frail older voice he replied “Yes, strong, yes, but just my smell!”. My mom’s second neighbour is an older woman, very sweet, cared for by her 2 daughters. They overhear the things that worry us (my mom’s surgery was suspended for lack of funds to pay for the materials needed) and give us encouraging advice as they walk by (don’t worry! they suspended my mom’s surgery too, and still she got it the next day!). I guess when the public institutions and the public support systems are as insanely unreliable as they can be in Mexico, people become each other’s support systems. You rely on your family, your friends, your neighbors. Some working-class neighborhoods are material networks of support that literally keep people afloat. And in the meantime, while sharing a hospital room with another patient and their family, while sharing a piece of shadow from a tree sitting on the sunbaked patio outside the hospital, while sharing a “combi” (minivan type vehicles adapted to become public transportation and usually filled by people sitting and standing) you are too, part of a community, a temporary one, where people will make sure you don’t miss your stop, you have enough shadow from the tree (and some advice on miracle barks that helped them survive their ailments).It’s not what I would call politeness because people overhear conversations and chime in, uninvited, oblivious to any measure of a respectful distance. It’s just this ongoing, never-ending warmth, this constant recreation of spaces where you’re never treated as a stranger. I forget about it when I’m in Canada, but when I come back the contrast becomes obvious, and I fall in love all over again with Mexico.
I just came across this poem by Allen Ginsberg called “Song”. I think it’s intended as a poem about romantic love, but when I read it, right now, in a hospital room, worried about my mom, surrounded by people in other rooms who are also worried about someone important in their lives, it became for me a poem about a more universal kind of love. Allen Ginsberg says “the weight of the world is love”, he says “for the burden of life/ is love”. I can feel the weight of love, keeping us awake, messing up our sleep. But in the same poem Allen Ginsberg says:
but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.
And I know this is true, too. Love is both the weight and the arms where we rest, as I lean on my sister, and my dad, and my friends, and my sister and my mom lean on an amazing community of people who volunteer to stay through the night at the hospital and give my sister and I a chance to sleep, they cook food for us, take care of small domestic tasks we're too overwhelmed to manage. My mom is beautiful right now, full of love for all of us. So much a mom, always, asking me if I ate, if I slept, telling me to fix my posture and stop hunching so much. Love, in the end, this ability we have to care for each other, is what makes the wonderful and terrifying weight of love possible, and bearable.