First things

what follows is a personal walk through a difficult time in my life. There’s going to discussions of topics relating to cancer, death, grief, hopelessness, anger, and spoilers for the N64 game Majora’s Mask. Before experiencing any of these things I never quite understood content warnings but do now. Take them seriously before proceeding. And if this all hit close to home, I’m hope you find comfort here or in the ocean of love that surrounds all of us.

When the ship sinks and when you fall into a hole and are turned into a shrub

When my mother passed from intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and agressive form of liver cancer, it was as if I had hit the last branch of a long fall from a tree. The 4 months between her diagnosis and death was the most taxing time of my life: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I am still years later trying to recover and make sense of how this happened and how we can live with the reality that such trials exist and happen all the time and to so many people while also still getting upset about our Starbucks order was wrong. Watching my mother die and knowing that in the end everything around me and even me myself will one day die is unfathomable and I feel that to comprehend such things is impossible, we only can learn to ride the wave unpredictability and sometimes smile while doing so.

When they took my mother way, I reached out to the minister at the small Methodist church I had only visited virtually and asked for her suggestion on material I could read. She recommended Jonathan Martin’s book “How to Survive a Shipwreck: help is on the way and love is already there”. While I had tried to put on a front of emotional strength internally I was spent, during the days I was busy with funeral planning, consoling others, being consoled. Once it became quiet, I first started gardening, I would listen to Martin’s book as I watched vegetables thrive and die. Evenings were always hard for me, it was dark and gloomy and I was somehow supposed to sleep. A lot of marijuana and prescribed sleep aids were involved, but also a reflexive return to a familiar comfort from my childhood: video games. I’m no hater nor champion of video games, like all media consumption, weather scrolling, TV, or youtube canned fish reviews moderation is key. I installed a N64 emulator and started playing the Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the sequel to the hit Ocarina of Time that made the Zelda franchise.

Years now as I reflect on what has happened and what I am going through now, I cannot help but think and plan that the next time shit hits the fan. I will once again listen to Jonathan Martin’s audiobook, garden, and play Majora’s Mask. And if now you are facing the inevitable loss of something or someone dear to you, may I recommend the same, or at least take inspiration from my experience.

The Falling Out

What’s remarkable with Martin’s work is that despite it’s personal nature he never really states what happened to him that prompted his book. Clues are provided along the way, lost jobs, spiritual reckonings, broken marriages. But he maintains a vagueness that I think helps articulate what actually matters when the bottom falls out: the feeling. Regardless of what factually happened your world coming a part is particularly personal yet universal. And in the beginning of his book, Martin communicates that and especially in the audiobooks comes alongside the reader as well as opens up. When the world comes crashing down it hurts and there is despair.

Majora’s Mask is one of the very few zelda games that is a direct sequel of the prior. To spoil a decades old game at this point, the preceding game to Majora’s Mask entailed an orphan (usually called Link) going on a quest to save his home from an magical demon king by time traveling between child and adult stages of himself. As a child the main character’s home is present and somewhat safe. When he goes into the future not only is he in an adult body but his home is a post apocalyptic waste land with literal zombies wandering about. His closest friends are all dead, his hometown in ruins, and because he has some magic flute and a fairy that dictates everything he supposed to do its all up to him to fix everything. He does and as a reward is sent back in time to try and experience the childhood he missed out on. This is where the next game starts, the game starts with your character now a child again wandering around in the forest by his home looking for the fairy that in the prior game had led you around the entire game. It seems ridiculous but if you suspend belief and imagine yourself a child thrown into an adult body and then sucked back into the body and role of child and torn away from the only source of guidance in your life, the sad pixel character on the screen feels a bit more like you might after your dreams are crushed or your foster home doesn’t work out. To make an already poor situation worse Link is then robbed of his horse and has his magic flute stolen from him by some asshole who can float and wears a creepy as-fuu mask. Link chases the thief into a dark cave where he then falls into a great hole.

Especially as things quieted down in my mother’s home, the feeling of being in a pit or just falling grew more intense. In some ways at that point the feeling of falling had already been present for months or maybe even decades. The cancer was diagnosed as terminal from the start and the removal of any hope nearly a blessing in disguise, there was no escaping this just the inevitable decent. There was something in the end liberating once it was clear that everything regarding my mother’s illness was truly inevitable. I was encouraged by the wiser people in my life to let this experience of caring for a terminally ill loved one change me. And I will say not fighting that process has been for the good. Martin encourages the same perspective in his first chapters. He acknowledges that reality of the disasters in our lives and reinforces my own felt experience that eventually pretending to swim and trying to sink won’t last. In the end the shipwreck will carry you forward to new place regardless of what you would prefer.

you’re now a bush and yes that’s the moon

Back in Majora’s mask after Link’s own descent, he is greeted by the figure who had robbed. Him after a few taunts the thief wearing the titular majora’s mask curses your character and in a erry cut scene for a game designed for children, you are turned into a shrub creature. Or well within the universe that the legend of zelda games takes place, you’re turned into a deku shrub. These are an enemy in the first games, but not the really awe inspiring kind. Instead of a child carrying a knife you now exist as a child made of plant matter that is so light and fragile that as your try to navigate via joy stick you get blown from place to place by in game wind. Link pushing foward in his new form finds himself in a new environment. In quick sucession he’s told that the figure who robbed him and turned him into a bush stole the mask it was wearing and was using it’s power to pull the moon down to earth. And no not in some metaphorical way.

As Link moves out into the world in his new shrub form. He’s talked down to by the locals, attacked by local dogs, and treated as an outcast by other children near his age. All the control you used to have in the previous game are gone and you’re stuck. As you try to navigate this new life, each day the moon draws closer to the town you are now trapped in. Frustratingly until the last moment it’s really only you the player that can see that the god damn moon is coming down.

Grief and personal disaster is isolating. I once felt like I competent adult, but illness and loss led to me cowering in the dark most nights. When I wasn’t in a daze I would look around at people and wonder, do they not realize how fragile life is? Do these people spending 10s of thousands on luxury cars know that children die of cancer? Do they know that there are thousands of people who if they had that few thousand you threw at a flex they could spend a few more days with their child instead of trying to do overtime shifts? I was focused on cancer, but now I can see the countless ways the moon is falling down and I don’t see it. The diseases people battle quietly out of view in the ICU, in the cold under a bridge, in a the abusive foster home, in the sweat shops, camps, combat zones, and all the other spaces that are pits of misery due to both our ignorance and arrogance. And in each, there are full people stripped of their identities and dehumanized as your character is in Majora’s Mask. Children regardless of their age, trying their best to keep the world from ending. Weather that’s desperately trying to find a cure or just water in the refugee camp.

When I first played Majora’s Mask as a kid I think me and my friend watched the moon fall a dozen times without figuring out what to do. But now I had the sense to wait to the last day, go up to the tower, and despite being a bush try to face down the moon. This is exactly what life and the game will force you to do. In a sort of borderline comedic brilliance you in bush form can shoot bubbles and doing so knocks your stolen ocarina out of your thief’s hand. With your instrument back you recall that in fact your still some of time traveling space hero, and play a song to fall back in time to back before the moon fell down.

Having faced the end of a life you do face a sort of end of the world. Me and my mother never got along perfectly, we had that sort of authentic relationship. But when she fell ill we had found a rhythm of life that felt like a comforting retreat for me. While I feel often that this is now missing in my life. When I see clearly I know that I still have many loving mothers in my life in the form of aunts, family friends, and random church ladies. And sometimes I even just recall my mother as she was, the whole person and know that I can push forward.

More in my next post where we discuss taking on new identities, focus on healing over winning, eventually learn to walk upside down, and take in the gifts of the sea.