somatizar
Part of grief is everything changed. Why do the same?
Author’s note: I created this story based on a series of kitchen conversations with Maria. To live in the presence of someone else’s grief is both a powerful and humbling experience. Maria carries an unmatched gratitude for life despite her grief, and the way she sees the world is rooted in a calm spirituality. It’s difficult to explain the unexpected surprises of grief’s presence: especially in the workplace. Maria so eloquently captured the non-linear rises and falls of grief in our conversations, and I can only hope that Somatizar gives justice to her feelings and experiences.
[Name changed for privacy]
Maria’s room is just as she is. It is already filled with a hundred stories and moments lived, though she always seems open to adding something new. Tchotchkes in her living space follow no particular set of rules, other than being an anecdote wrapped in a perfect day (“I found this on the street when I was biking down Valencia at a pop-up shop”), or simply for being a late millennial type of cool.
It isn’t clear if a theme for the room ever existed. Maria’s desk is covered with journals, half-read books, and a wide-screen computer monitor that was rescued from the sidewalk on a random afternoon. There’s a vintage mirror on the dresser with a light brown rope lining the edges that she attached using a bottle of old glue she found under the TV stand, conveniently left behind by a past roommate. There’s a shag rug striped with all shades of the rainbow. The rug sits confidently over three-fourths of the hardwood floor, as if making a statement, both loud and noncommittal, that there will be no specific color to dictate the rest of the room’s decor. Framed paintings from flea markets and yard sales line the walls, a couple of nondescript sketches of women and others of traditional Mexican art. Some of the furniture was pieced together with care on late weekday nights from cardboard packages (less common) and others purchased from transient twentysomethings on Facebook Marketplace (more common). Sometimes I’d join Maria on her escapades, and we’d carry her purchases on the 23 bus and up the stairs to the second floor of our blue Victorian house.
Maria and I both work in our rooms. Occasionally, I’ll wander to the kitchen in the early afternoon to refill my coffee cup and find her sitting at the gray high-top table plucking dead leaves from a potted plant and watering the stems with a beer glass she took from a dive bar back in college. She is always careful in her work, as dedicated to her houseplants as she is to her career protecting land across California.
Once, Maria caught me in an attempt to dump the dirt from a succulent pot into the shared garden area in the backyard. I had forgotten to water the plant, then overwatered it, and there was only one meager petal remaining, bursting around the edges with liquid before it would inevitably crinkle. She insisted on taking the pot to try to bring the succulent back to life with that single petal. I questioned if the plant was a sign that I give up on things too quickly. Maria never does, though, and she is adamant that no matter the seasons the plant has endured, there is always room for growth.
I hear the knock on my door sometime before noon. It’s a Monday in September. “My brother is dead,” Maria says. We hold each other for a period of time that passes slowly, like waiting for the last drop of rain to creep down a windowpane.
Later that day, I tiptoe back into her room. She’s sitting on her bed with her laptop open. Her suitcase is half-packed with clothes for a work trip to Colorado she will no longer be attending. Life-size maps of the Monterey Coast down to the Central Valley are rolled in tall cardboard boxes in the living room. In the environmental field, you always remember your first maps. A pair of army green cargo pants that remind me of Kim Possible hang over the side, and her hiking boots are on the floor. Only a few days before, I watched Maria scramble to print the maps, calling different printing services businesses to ensure the size and quality would be correct. The maps are a piece of art, really, and I find their sudden irrelevance haunting.
Her face exudes urgency while she looks at flights to Mexico, as if waiting an additional hour to purchase her ticket could mean the seats will sell out. It’s subtle through her movements—fingers tapping against the keys, eyes glancing in rapid motion. Her phone buzzes every few minutes with a message, sometimes from her parents and other times from a friend checking in. I can tell it pains her a bit to not respond right away; she’ll pick up her phone, read the text, and set it back down. It must be overwhelming, I think to myself. To write back a message with genuine thought might take five minutes, or ten, and there are many of them. She’ll likely get many more as the days continue because that is just what happens when you are loved by as many people as Maria is. How does someone handle etiquette in a time of grief?
By the early afternoon, two of her friends, Juan and Mauricio, have arrived. They are sitting in the living room, helping Maria arrange her items before her flight. My gut reaction: It is Monday afternoon and they are not at work—they are here. Why are these my first thoughts when I hug them hello? Surely a few hours within a conventional workday may be sacrificed for the sake of a grieving friend. Some part of me knows that it wasn’t even this deep from Juan and Mauricio’s perspective, that they would have left in the middle of the most important meeting of their lives to fly to Mexico with Maria if she’d asked. That is just what family does, even if they don’t share blood.
That night, I take Maria to the airport. When I get back to the house, it feels emptier than usual.
According to the Civil Rights Department, California law guarantees up to five days of bereavement leave for private sector employers with at least five employees, and all public sector employees. This law was passed on January 1, 2023. When I went back to research state labor laws, I recall my initial surprise that a state as (comparatively) progressive in employment rights as California had only just recently created a policy.
I read through the FAQs of the policy, which are written in formal, objective statements. An employee must be employed for at least thirty days, and one has up to three months to exercise their bereavement leave. The document clarifies that there is no cap, should multiple family members pass in a single calendar year, though the policy is limited to the following: parents, children, grandparents, siblings, and qualifying romantic partners. Employers are not required to pay employees during their bereavement leave. An employee must provide documentation with proof of death, if requested.
Maria’s experience as a hybrid worker with a laptop is different than that of an employee who shows up to a physical location with hourly wages, just as bereavement in its formal context is not the same as grief. Maria went home to Mexico for two weeks following her brother’s passing and began work again seven days later. She worked some days on the couch in the living room as her parents scrambled around the house with visiting family members, rearranging flowers that arrived in troves, shades of yellow and red and pink. Other days, she was tucked away in her childhood room. She could have opened up her laptop sooner, or delayed checking email for a few more days had she chosen to. She was advised by her boss to take the time that she needed, even if she didn’t know what she needed at the time.
“I began working again as a distraction, but I also care about what I do and the mission,” she tells me later, when making sense of her return to work. Work-life balance at her company is prioritized in tandem with a deep reverence for California land. Her bosses are primarily women who run families themselves. “They are just as excited about the environment as they are about picking their kids up from school,” Maria says.
A few months have passed since Maria went home to Mexico. I sit across from her in the kitchen at our gray high-top table with my laptop and a cup of ginger tea. She is chopping vegetables that she picked up from the farmer’s market down the street over the weekend while a piece of salmon in plastic wrapping thaws in a bowl of cold water.
I ask Maria what grieving another human feels like because I have no idea. I have only experienced grief through the loss of my own identity.
“Something in my body changed,” she says. She describes the way food began to move through her system like water trying to flow through a clogged drain. Her body began to react differently to certain textures before she began to experience a subtle aversion to all food.
“There’s a word in Spanish,” she says. “Somatizar.” Somatizar is the physical expression of stress and emotions through the mind-body connection. Her body knew. In some sort of sick prank, grief was playing with her digestive system.
I ask how she adjusted at work to these changes. As she speaks, I notice that she latches to the word routine, referencing it often, as if it is a placeholder for a million other words to pinpoint the meaning of her oscillating states of being. There was how life used to be: a cycle of high performance and high function, with various phases in different spheres. Each sphere had to have a perfect rhythm, but that rhythm quickly became impossible. “Part of grief is everything changed. Why do the same?” she says. “I now have the chance to listen to my body and mind and have more routines.”
There was a different routine before. Maria started her day around six with a morning stretch under the light of her various lamps and a few minutes of meditation. She used to go on sunrise bike rides with shots of adrenaline, up and down the hills of San Francisco. She felt in control. Work was eight to five without stopping, and food was on the go. A certain level of consistency was maintained.
The alarm continues to go off at six. At first, during her initial state of grief, Maria would jump out of bed seemingly without effort. There was something about throwing herself into something to feel nothing. Her heartbeat pumping against her chest in anger, telling her to find something to do. But that didn’t last. “I am more mindful now. I cannot push myself like that most days,” she says. “It was natural to want to distract myself.” She stays in bed longer now, lingers later. Working for eight hours without disruption no longer made sense. Short breaks, deep breaths in the middle of intrusive thoughts, and focused work for thirty minutes is what is needed now.
“There was a lot of frustration because I didn’t feel engaged with the work. An extra level of sadness was created. I was not enjoying something I used to enjoy. I am not functioning the way I did,” she says. Days began to split into a four- to six-hour sprint in the morning and another sprint of concluding items in the evenings. The bare minimum needed to be enough some days and a deeper flow state without breaks on other days. Breakfast was eaten. Her energy was restored, slowly, and later in bursts.
“It’s hard when you are no longer you.” She takes a deep breath, thinking about her next response. “I’d say it is a better version of myself. It’s more sad. It’s more vulnerable. It’s more slow.” She looks up at me, contemplating. “Those aren’t bad adjectives, though. I just wasn’t used to having them.”
I ask Maria how her perspective on work has changed. “I had a fear of long-term healing. But you have to accept that it doesn’t happen on your timeline. I saw a quote once that says ‘time heals everything.’ But time doesn’t have responsibility. It’s what you do with it. Sitting in front of a monitor for eight hours somewhat mindlessly isn’t necessarily as meaningful as diving into something deeply for thirty minutes and letting it drive you naturally.” I watch her chop another carrot slice, and for a moment I wish that I could unhear this statement. That time moves more in our control than we wish to believe, that healing tends to move in tandem with life instead of in a period of separation. There’s no pause button, no fast-forward, and it’s a painful reality of existence.
“There’s more outside of work. When you work in a field where it feels personal, though, where the mission is bigger, it is hard to think that this is just a job. Being able to learn from mentors that prioritize well-being and healing, who are just as passionate about their kids as they are about changing the environment, is freeing. It sets me free.”
Maria and I sit in camping chairs facing dark silhouettes of spiky black pines over the hillside. The trees are beginning to regrow after a fire scorched most of the forest a few years before. The day was hot and cloudless, and the black sky sits clear.
We’ve timed this moment perfectly. We know what is coming. It’s just past ten and only a matter of minutes before the moon will creep through an opening in the trees in front of us, as if we are watching a movie on a screen. By the end of the hour, its light will illuminate our surroundings with such brightness that artificial light will no longer be needed.
In our friendship, we’ve normalized acknowledging periods of sadness. For Maria, time passes in many emotions and frequently without control. “I know there are unanswered messages on my phone right now. I don’t know how long they will go unanswered. But I just have to be where I am right now and nowhere else. There is no other way to be sometimes.”
The moon creeps up. It’s an image we may never see again, a wild sensation in our bodies as it encaptures us. Sometimes, if you don’t look in front of you, small moments of light might pass without notice.
The algorithm brought this to me at the right time. Thank you, truly.
I really appreciated the vulnerability in this piece and how beautifully you captured the details of something so tragic. I felt like I witnessed someone else going through tragic grief recently and so much of what you wrote and quoted resonated. Thank you for writing this!