Here we are, nearly a year since I’ve last written in this space, though I’ve been writing non-stop here and here and here. I’ve kept notes on what I want to say when I sit back down to respond to any one of the crises that have unfolded since last August. Hurricanes without relief. Gun violence without control. Hate without condemnation. I have notes on #metoo and #timesup and the teaching of consent, on raising daughters in this empowering era, still rife with cultural narratives that must be questioned and changed. But the time I have to sit and write, I work. I work at the kitchen counter as I assemble meals. I work while V. naps. I work during three-hour stretches of school or camp or babysitting. I work many evenings after the girls go to bed and on weekend mornings when Ryan is home. The notes remain notes.

Then children end up in cages in the United States of America and I must sit, full stop, and write, here, now. I hear their cries in the detention centers where they are kept and confused and I cry with them. I remember the cries I heard in an orphanage in Santiago where small children, who were taken good care of, were developing without parents. I see the images of mats spread out over the floor, mats on the floor for children who have no idea where their parents are. Parents who have no idea where their children are, when they might see them again, or how they are being treated. Were that my reality, I would lose my mind. I nearly did when I handed the body of my stillborn son back to the nurse. Little feels so unnatural, so traumatic.

I wonder how the trauma of separation will continue to impact these children, perhaps for the rest of their lives. I read about a mother deported without her 8-year-old son. I read about a 9-month-old baby flown to New York without her parents. I watch Rachel Maddow break down over “tender age shelters” and I break right down with her. I think about the babies who were nursing up until the moments they were separated from their mothers. My daughter wouldn’t take a bottle, and I wonder if they are able to eat or sleep or smile. I got debilitating infections while nursing under the best conditions, and these mothers are imprisoned somewhere, breasts hard with milk that will be gone soon and an avalanche of ache from being physically and emotionally removed.

This, all of this, is counter to human rights, to human compassion.

This is the United States of America in 2018 and I write it down as living history, knowing full well that words may do little, but silence does ever so much worse. This is not 1942, though it is like Japanese Internment Camps. This is not 1850, though it is like enslavement, like the taking of human bodies. This is not biblical, though the bible has been invoked to justify these monstrous actions, just as it did to justify those that came before it. This is not the law. This is political leverage. With children.

This is child abuse. This is kidnapping. This is wrong.

This may have “stopped” by executive order. From what I understand, that order does not include plans to reunite 2,300 children with their parents and that there isn’t even reliable documentation to do so. It’s suspected that some of these families will never be reunited. No document can change the horrid fact that separations over several weeks at the southern border of the United States have ruptured thousands of lives.

And I know that feeling, living a different version of it these last six years. Because this is also June. If year five was a landmark, year six was a threshold, as my friend and loss mom, Kari, put it to me about the years adding up, about people moving on. I crossed it with a sacred few. The four of us went to a summer festival to honor the day with things children love: music and face painting and rides. Lorenzo was remembered within a circle around us, smaller than in years past, but perhaps the closer for it. And never in the measure that living children are remembered on their birthdays. Words may do little, after all, but silence is still worse.

As with other deficits, I focus on what is had. On those who remembered fiercely with me, who cried with me, who checked in before, during, and after the day. Who remembered my grief as well as my son. Who find him in hearts and tell me they are thinking about him on many days of the year.

This June 2, the first that’s also fallen on another Saturday, I found fleeting peace. Hearts turned up everywhere. I held one sister and watched the other ride her first Ferris Wheel, as she and her father, his father, climbed again and again into an overcast sky, brightened by a beating sun somewhere behind it. It was the closest I could get.