Forced Flight ~ Learning to Fly

I’ve always found the turning of the year strange and often underwhelming from a celebratory perspective. Don’t get me wrong, I partied my ass off in my youth. But most years, it simply doesn’t feel resonant with where I am actually at.

So much of the world greets the new year with noise, parties, toasts, lists of accomplishments, shiny declarations about what will be different now that the calendar has changed. And while there is nothing wrong with celebration, I find myself wanting to sit with what usually goes unspoken.

After all, it’s just a date on a calendar.
We are the ones who’ve changed... whether we acknowledge it or not.

The parts of the year we don’t post about matter deeply.

The grief that didn’t resolve neatly, because does it ever?
The heartbreak that fundamentally changed us, even if we look the same on the outside.
The moments that initiated us into versions of ourselves we weren’t ready to become, but became anyway.

This year was hard.
Fucking hard.

Not in a vague, generalized way, but in a raw and real way. A body-keeps-the-score kind of way. A soul-rearranging way. I am not the same woman I was before walking this terrain, before being stripped down to what is essential.

I lost a dear friend of twenty-six years, Chris Cohn.
Rest in power, my friend. I’m still in shock that you are gone. I loved you, and I continue to love you deeply.

In the past month, I also lost another beloved friend and father figure, Larry Weinberg. I am profoundly grateful that I was able to say goodbye, hold his hand, share that sacred space, and witness the profound transformation in his daughter and his sweet grandchildren. I witnessed a love that did not disappear even as his body transitioned.

I am also carrying grief that does not fit easily into sentences... betrayal from one of my own children that cut like a knife. That wound is still open. Still bleeding. I am tending it as best I can, learning slowly how to move forward from my center rather than from reaction, how to choose unconditional love without abandoning myself in the process. I trust that as I delve into this work, healing will come in its own time. But sheesh, I really didn't need another wound, especially from someone I love so wholly.

Alongside this, I am navigating the ongoing complexity of my father’s situation. I am still grieving the loss of my paternal grandmother and the grief of not truly knowing her. At the same time, I am grappling with new family relationships that I’m not sure resonate as safe or trustworthy. All of it hurts profoundly, especially because I so deeply want to reclaim some of what I lost in my childhood.

Family dynamics and ancestral wounds are deeply triggering. Painful. And wildly transformative.

These are not things that translate easily into resolutions or celebrations.

And I refuse to ignore this initiation.

This sorrow... these moments, are the fertile ground from which any true intention for the coming year must grow. Ignoring them is like planting seeds and never watering the soil. How can we tend our dreams while refusing to tend what is breaking open inside us? Ignoring what wants to grow into the light of consciousness and heal. Have you noticed how the word "ignore" lives inside "ignorance"? Ignorance is born from an absence of attention, shaped by what we repeatedly refuse to see; what we stubbornly ignore shapes us, for better or worse.

Here is what I know to be true:

We cannot open to what we want without first acknowledging what broke us, tempered us, stripped us down, and asked us to grow beyond who we thought we were.

We can acknowledge trauma, speak to it, and heal it without becoming its permanent home- you are not your trauma, my friend. 

Vulnerability is strength, let me say it louder for those in the back: vulnerability is strength, not weakness.

Peace is not something we declare.
It is something we cultivate through action, often amid suffering.

Deep peace is earned through presence, surrender, forgiveness, and the willingness to stay uncomfortable long enough to receive.

So if you are arriving in this new year without a list of bragging points, without a polished vision board, without the energy to perform, while grief still grips your heart, you are not alone.

You are standing at a threshold that asks for tenderness, deep trust, and self-love, not self-abandonment, which is the root of self-destruction. You are being gently asked to stay present, to refuse the urge to check out simply because it hurts.

I am here with you.

This year, I am not making resolutions.
I am making space for my own healing.

Space for grief.
Space for complexity.
Space for truth.
Space for the parts of me that have suffered quietly for too long and deserve deep care and rest.

If you are here with me in this moment, carrying a year that profoundly changed you,, please hear this:

I see you. I send love from my heart to yours.
You are not required to rush your healing because others are uncomfortable.
You are not required to redeem your pain, so it makes sense to someone else.
You are not required to be inspiring, cheerful, or palatable. Give yourself permission to just be.

You are allowed to begin anew by telling the truth and honoring the beautiful, messy, nuanced reality of grief.

What follows is a poem I feel called to share about my father and about this year. It lives at the center of my heart. It is raw. It is long. I wept a river while writing it. It names systems, losses, and love that cannot be fixed by optimism.

Please take care as you read.

---

Content Warning / Gentle Invitation

The poem below contains themes of grief, family estrangement, elder care abuse, homelessness, dementia, and systemic neglect. It is deeply personal and may be difficult to read.

If this is not the moment for you, please feel free to pause here.
There is no obligation to continue.

If you do read on, know that you are entering sacred ground.

---

TO WHOM MY FATHER BELONGS

I.

Once, many moons ago,
I sat at your feet
while you played your guitar,
your voice low and gentle,
singing softly to Jamie and me.

I remember the orchards,
fruit trees heavy in late summer,
almonds dusting the ground,
a treasure trove to be gathered.
I remember riding in the back of a pickup,
no seatbelts, no fear,
the reckless grace of the seventies
Before we learned how easily
A world can fracture.

I was happy then.
Carefree.
A true child.

I loved you without question.
I was yours...
a daughter stitched to your shadow,
certain the earth would always hold.

Then you were forced out.

I remember every visual detail of the moment,
each sound, each tearing apart,
your tears, my tears, Jamie’s sobs,
all our lives breaking open at once.
I did not know then
that my childhood would die shortly after you left.
That innocence would not fade...
It would be burned.

Childhood should have carried
the awe-filled promise of morning,
sunlit days, unguarded laughter,
a field where the wind moves gently through tall grass
and the sun keeps its vows.

Instead, it was torched.

Only later did I understand:
Innocence leaves the body
the way a fledgling leaves the nest,
not ready, not taught,
pushed into the air too soon.

There is shock in that fall.
There is terror.
There is flight learned the hard way,
Or maybe there is damage when that fledgling plunges innocently to the ground,
in shock,
struggling to breathe,
having to heal its broken wings before it can begin again.

You vanished from my world,
from my sight,
from the life I thought could not continue
without you still somewhere in it.

And so began the endless search...
for you,
for me...
as though I could not be found
unless you were found too.

Years passed.
Decades.

And I learned, slowly, cruelly,
that the world knows how to steal a man
and name the theft “elder care.”

They stole my father
after a lifetime of searching.

He had two living daughters.
A mother who was still alive.
A brother.
Two sisters.

All of us- reachable.
Not a word.

---

II.

Oh Father,
Why did you wander for forty years?

What broke so deeply
that the streets felt safer than shelter,
That alcohol softened what memory refused to release?

I imagine the sky felt kinder
than the Catholic chapels of your youth,
stone walls heavy with silence, shame,
and unspeakable abuse of power,
with prayers that never stopped
the dying or the pain.

The youngest boy of nine children,
Six brothers, two sisters...
You watched brother after beloved brother pass away,
many gone by their own hands
in ways no child should have to witness,
and you,
the one who remained,
carrying survival like a sentence.

My sister and I kept from you,
distance enforced by wounds
No one knew how to tend.

Your family of origin,
a place to return
when loneliness
and the gravity of homelessness pressed too hard,
only to learn again and again
that your childhood home
was an empty house with no roof,
offering memory but not safety.

So the road called you back.

At least there,
no one asked your name.
Anonymity gave you rest...
a forgetting,
a laying down of the story
you carried like armor.

Heavy armor.
Never protective.
Only grinding you down...
bending your spirit,
breaking your body,
stealing everything
except for the need to keep moving.

And I searched for you.

Relentlessly.

Like a daughter who still loves,
despite it all.

Impossible,
like scanning the night sky
for a star that had already fallen eons ago.

And then the cruelest joke:
When you were finally found,
You were locked away.

Corridors sealed and colorless,
air thick with suffering
that arrived too early
and stayed too long.

The first time I visited,
You stared at me in disbelief,
as though I were a memory
that had stepped out of time.

Your mind held the past and present
like a shattered kaleidoscope.

Your knee, broken, but healing...
did not stop you
from rising with your cane,
moving slowly, proudly,
eager to show us around.

You spoke of coffee, as though it were the sacrament that had replaced your addiction to beer.
Your stories drifted in and out of years.
Fascinatingly coherent and muddled all at once.

And when I asked if you knew who I was,
You said my name.

Every time...
You knew my name.

You held my arm.
You begged us not to leave.

Then I visited again,
holiday gifts in hand,
a mug that read:
All you need is love and coffee.

They wouldn't let me stay long.

You were dulled...
drugged into absence.

And then,
The visit where everything was gone.

Your cane.
The mug.
The gifts.

You lay moaning with every movement,
bedsores blooming like betrayals.

A wheelchair staged nearby,
a prop to suggest care.

And now,
a bed that screams alarms
If you dare to remember
You once could stand.

---

III.

Fucking California.

Five generations, 
Both my mother’s blood and my father’s
drove roots into this soil,
only to discover rot at the core.

Greed.
Deceit.
Manipulation dressed as progress.

If only your forests were not stitched
into my bones.
If only your rivers did not run through me
like blood.
If only your winds did not whisper spells,
trying to call me back.

Never again.

You are beautiful and brutal,
a place that treats humans like debris,
strewn across filthy streets,
stepped over, ignored.

And now you have caged my father
in Stockton...
a prison disguised as memory care.

Anyone who praises California
should sleep one night
on the streets of Stockton.

A place is only as good
as how it treats those
sleeping in its gutters.

A cousin says,
“At least he has a roof over his head.
At least he has food.
At least he is warm.”

Yes.

And still,
It is a tomb with fluorescent lighting,
waiting efficiently
to escort each warm body
toward an untimely grave.

I believe he would have chosen
the open sky.
Cold air.
His own terms.

They call it memory care.

But nothing here nourishes memory.

When I tell them how he remembers me,
they contradict me,
rehearsed explanations for his planned erasure.

Memory lives where love is.
Not where strangers treat a man
like a cleanup job.

His things vanish,
quiet theft,
caretakers pretending to care.

The coffee mug disappears.
There is no more coffee.
There was never love here.

His meager possessions
slip into the pockets
of people who believe
He will not notice.

Or worse...
that he does not matter.

They laugh at him.

I hear mockery, not care.

I see a man vanishing
while the world calls it help.

---

IV.

We are on the third guardian.
Or the fourth.
They change like wardens.

When Miracle Messages found him in 2020,
With my heart in my throat, I called the conservator.
She told me she’d inform me
of any changes to his conservatorship.
I never once heard from her
after that first phone call.

I asked questions.
She had no answers for.

By law, the family should have been notified.
We were not.

California is lawless and soulless,
where the poor and the homeless are concerned.

I wanted to visit him immediately.
I was told I had to wait.
Covid.

I finally saw him in 2021.
I’ve visited every year after,
from out of state,
out of love, out of hope.

No one told me when guardians changed.

That first guardian knew I existed,
but said nothing to her successors.

Then the call came about four weeks ago.

Not from his guardian.

From hospice.

They were shocked I existed.

Shocked.

I asked why hospice was initiated.
What changed.

No answers.
Only repetition:
“We’re keeping him comfortable,”

I said I had just seen him in March.

Shock again.

I mentioned bedsores.
Missing belongings.
Neglect.
I asked why they’d moved him
to a new room with no roommate.

They had no answers...
only justifications.

I do not trust hospice.

They put a nurse on the phone,
words halting, fractured,
telling me bedsores are normal.

Normal.

A system that cannot prevent bedsores,
that screams neglect,
can still decide a man’s fate
with a single signature.

They say there is nothing to be done.
No lawyer will help.
I’ve asked.
I’ve flushed six hundred dollars an hour
down the proverbial toilet,
begging for help from lawyers who specialize in elder care,
My pleas fall on deaf ears while they slink away with my money.
Emails unanswered...
The corruption is unfathomable.

My father’s voice echoes in my head,
begging for his mother,
asking me when Mom and Dad will be picking him up,
confused as to why he has been forgotten
in this horrible place,
a case number,
an “expiration date” assigned by his latest warden,
the ending carried out by hospice
in the language of comfort.

---

V.

There is guilt braided through everything.

Guilt that I cannot stop it all from happening.
That I do not have the home
or the means
to give him a dignified ending.

And anger,
that he left Jamie and me.

I thought I had forgiven him.

Then my grandmother, his mother, died.

I sorted her boxes.
Stories. Photos. Letters.
School pictures of her nine children,
mixed in with their very own obituaries.
My heart aches
for how many children she outlived.

And there we were,
pictures of my sister and me,
kept carefully.

Then I saw him.

Photographs of my father
with his family
during the years he vanished from our lives.

Birthdays. Holidays.
My cousins were the same age as we were.

And the anger returned.

It had been easier to believe
He was lost to addiction and the streets
than to know
He lived a whole life without us, his two daughters.

And even still...

If I could,
I would lift him
from that alarm-rigged bed
the way his mother once held him as a newborn.

I would wrap him
in fierce, tender forgiveness.

I would take him into the sunshine,
place his cane in his hand,
the hand that once held my small hand.

We would go to the ocean.
Then Joshua Tree.
Say goodbye to California.

I would smash the alarms.
Undo the locks.
Undo the cruelty
that pretends to be merciful.

I would return him
to himself.

---

VI.

Here is the unbearable truth...

I do not know how to rescue my father
without a miracle
or a financial windfall.

I have prayed for more time, begged the gods to no avail.

The machinery that grinds the poor
into ghosts
is vast.

And I am small.

All I can do
is love him.

Speak what happened
out loud.

Witness his life
without shame.

Love is the only frontier left.

And I will not abandon it.

---

VII.

Dear Papa,

You are not, nothing.

You deserved more.
Your tragedy was never a verdict on your worth.

I am sorry I could not help in time.
I never stopped searching.

You will always live
in the constellation of my heart.

I will honor you
by healing these ancestral wounds that have found their way forward in time.

This system may not see you.
But I do.

They can steal your cane,
your mug,
your freedom, and ultimately your life

but not your worth.

This poem is my heart
reaching for you
across all the years we lost.

This poem is a claim.

This poem is
To Whom My Father Belongs.

And I declare these words sacred, 
in their raw, unadulterated truth.

I release myself
from the lie that love must rescue
to be real.

I release the blame
that curls inside my chest
like a second grief.

I did not abandon you.
And I forgive you
for your abandonment of me.

I did not fail you.
I arrived with all the love I had
to a system that does not care.

Father,
If there are rooms inside you
where fear has taken residence,
May they soften and resolve to a place of trust and ease.

If the walls feel closer than breath,
may some part of you,
even without memory,
know you are held, that you are still loved

May the parts of you
that are still wild,
still walking,
still laughing behind the eyes
remain untouched
by the machinery
that does not know your name.

For myself,
I ask for permission to rest.
I am so tired of this pain I have carried for so long.

I lay down the weight
of being the only one who sees,
of being she who remembers
and does not forget.

I grieve what is happening,
while also holding the sorrow
of what never had the chance to be.

May my love root me
instead of hollow me.

May I remain soft
without surrendering my truth.

And to whatever listens beyond walls,
beyond policies,
beyond locked doors,
I say this clearly:

This man is loved.
This daughter bore witness.
What happens next
does not erase that.

I seal this bond
not with endings,
but with presence.

I release what I cannot change.
I keep what is eternal.

Give him back,
if not to the world,
then to love.

So it is held.
So it is spoken.
So it is enough
for this moment.

---

In Closing

My intention in sharing this is not to seek consolation, but to be true to my own process. Writing is deep medicine for me.

I share it because silence feels like a second erasure.

I share it because love does not stop being love when we cannot rescue those we love from themselves or from systems that do not care.

Witnessing matters.
Presence is everything.
It is deep, resonant magic.

As we step into this new year, I hold this intention close:

To remain vulnerable and kind without surrendering truth.
To allow love to root me, not hollow me.
To rest when I must.
To speak when spirit calls.

If you are standing at your own edge-of-dawn moment... unsure, grieving, raw... I see you.

You are not alone.
You are not broken.
You are arriving.

With all my heart,
Azalyne
The Rose Witch

May the season hold you gently.
May the light meet you where you are.
May your heart shine like a beacon of love to those around you.
May you release what is not yours to carry.