Monthly Notes from Nethra

SAUSALITO | 06.03.2026

The Constancy of Love

Looking at this photo, I thought of both mothers and the bond they formed. I remembered that my mother still had a beach wrap that she bought for Helena before the divorce, keeping it in her closet in the hope that Helena would visit Sri Lanka again one day. As I grappled with my sadness that they might not see each other again, I reflected on what it meant for all of us to become kin.

I met Helena in 2010 when she came to visit Dave in Sri Lanka while he was teaching at the University of Colombo. We hadn’t started dating yet. Helena and I connected instantly in the midst of an amusing first encounter. When I walked into the food court where we met for lunch, I was startled to see her smiling radiantly next to Dave, wearing a “housecoat,” a Sri Lankan dressing gown that women wore over their nightdresses while doing housework. As she stood in a sea of Colombo’s hipsters, wearing the housecoat with the pizzazz that only she could pull off, needless to say, she caught my eye. I would later find out that Dave had bought it for her from a local bazaar, thinking it was a culturally appropriate form of clothing, a subject of many jokes between us in the years to come.

Helena and I forged our bond as the three of us spent time in Massachusetts, California, and Sri Lanka, drinking hot chocolate in the frosty winters of Byfield and hacking open king coconuts to quench our thirst in sweltering Colombo. We braved the wind and fog together while walking across the Golden Gate Bridge before stringing lights on a large Californian agave that became our succulent Christmas tree.

Sometime between these visits, Helena sent Dave her mother’s engagement ring. In doing so, she drew me into the fold of her maternal love. Our connection blossomed as we became kin.

Helena was unafraid to step outside her comfort zone in the name of love. She traveled with us to rural Sri Lanka, eating food that was too spicy for her in the scorching heat of the island’s arid zone. She adventured with her son, rafting in Oregon and backpacking deep into the backcountry of the High Sierras. She humored Dave as he explored his curiosity about tiny-house dwelling, visiting him in Reno, Nevada, where he lived in a carriage house, raising chickens, living without heat or the internet, and using milk crates as furniture. She readily stepped into unfamiliar worlds and cultivated a sense of intimacy with what was strange to her.

As I left for fieldwork in Sri Lanka and Dave moved into a 28-foot sailboat in Sausalito, she followed our quirky lives with curiosity. She always had questions: Why did we pursue the interests we did? What did our choices mean to us? How did I feel about being on the move? Would we relocate to land or write our dissertations on the boat when I returned? As her son and daughter-in-law followed what seemed like irrational pursuits in the name of anthropology, her maternal gaze took an ethnographic turn, inquiring into the meanings we made of climbing down mineshafts in Sri Lanka and plunging into the cold waters of the Pacific to follow the lives of kelp.

As my kinship with Helena deepened, it would face some unexpected tests as my marriage came to an end. As I made the difficult decision to leave the marriage, I searched for ways to articulate my deep desire to retain the bonds between us. As I looked for alternative ways to think of kinship, I found in the words of Donna Haraway, an ecofeminist scholar, a guidepost for how to envision a new configuration for our love.

Haraway coined the term “Oddkin” to describe familial bonds that are built outside traditional structures of kinship. Her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene provided insights on how we can reframe beginnings and endings.“There is nothing in times of beginnings that insists on wiping out what has come before, or, indeed, wiping out what comes after,” she wrote. Inhabiting our lives requires embracing change and uncertainty. It involves “learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” Living in a thick, ongoing presence, she argued, means living in “mixed-up times” that overflow with both pain and joy. What we need, she pointed out, is to become capable, with each other, of responding to such times by inventing futures as we live them.

Throughout her life, Helena spent a great deal of time by the sea, observing the tides, combing through shorelines and tidepools, paying attention to the effervescent, teeming bricolages of life that the oceans conjoined and rearranged in the ebbs and flows of the tides. As someone who collected seashells that different lifeforms had lived in and surrendered, perhaps Helena understood that some oceanic critters need to change the containers they occupy. She knew I loved her son. She understood that the structure that love was housed in had found its limit; it needed a new configuration to flow in an unobstructed way.

Therefore, when Dave and I transitioned our relationship to a friendship—like a hermit crab changing its shell—Helena and I reassured each other that our kinship remained unchanged. On the cusp of loss, when my bond with her had every reason to break, it tenderly affirmed itself.

Our bond deepened in becoming “oddkin,” as it came to rely on a fabric of love stitched together through forms of accompaniment that flowed through mutual care amidst the twists and turns of life, without the scaffolding it had before. Over the years that passed, at the end of each phone call, we told each other: “I love you. You are family.”

🐚

Five years ago, I had instinctively reached for Haraway’s term as a buoy, as a way of holding onto kinship as the currents changed. I couldn’t have anticipated that her words would have such resonance in what was ahead of us. Writing this now, I revisit Haraway’s words again:

“Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible. Who lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one? What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines connect and disconnect, and so what? What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance?”

Donna Haraway (2015)

Haraway’s words gave shape to my experience of sifting through the box in my basement, as I looked for something I could bring Helena. I ran my hands along the traces of our kinship made and reconfigured. As her terminal diagnosis sank in, I found myself facing her loss again—this time in a way that neither she nor I could control.

I picked out a few things to take with me—a photograph of the three of us smiling in front of our agave Christmas tree, an unsent thank-you card from the weddings to write her a note, and a few sprigs of lavender from my garden that I tied together with a ribbon from the Berkeley wedding.

I packed my bags to leave with shaky hands. As we grappled with the reality that so little time was left, over calls and texts, Helena and I shared a single refrain back and forth: “I love you, I love you, I love you.” The simplicity of this, the power of this, the preciousness of this sank in as I boarded a plane, following a phone call from Dave that Helena had entered hospice care.

Venice: Collecting Seashells, Rooting in Love

I stepped off the plane that night to the news that things had taken a turn for the worse. The hospice doctor who saw her that afternoon had estimated that Helena would leave us in the next twelve hours. As Dave drove me from the airport to the hospice, he told me that she hadn’t opened her eyes or spoken since the night before.

We rushed into the facility, my heart racing in fear that I was too late. When we arrived at her door, I stepped in gingerly. The room was dark, with just the night light on. I made my way to her bed and knelt by it so I could make out her face in the dim light. I took her hand in mine and spoke to her. “Helena, my love, I’m here,” I said, “I’m with you.” I had no idea if she could hear me, but I kept talking to her, telling her I loved her.

“I brought you some lavender from my garden,” I continued, placing the pouch with the flowers next to her pillow, stroking her hand. Through the dim night light, her face was barely visible, yet I suddenly realized she had opened her eyes. We held each other’s gaze for a few brief moments. In the minutes that passed, in the movement of her eyes, a silent exchange took place between us. I often say that love is recognition. Looking into her eyes, I felt the truth of that. She closed her eyes a few moments later, for the final time. In what Dave later described as a remarkable act of volition, Helena had fulfilled her wish to see me.

Despite the medical predictions, Helena did not leave us that night, nor the nights that followed. We entered a period that the Assistant Pastor of Helena’s church described as a long and poignant vigil. As we accompanied her in the interstices of living and dying, I would learn to inhabit its liminality, replete with gratitude and loss.

One morning several days after I arrived, I sat by Helena’s bed, holding her hand. I felt the warmth of her palm. I heard her soft breathing. We no longer had the luxury of words. An ineffable feeling of connection—love without language to express it—washed over me. Time had melted. In place of all the temporal markers that give shape to a day was a kind of continuous present. I felt suspended in time, aware of the ephemerality of our touch. As I sensed into the stillness, Helena’s life—a dream sequence of memories she had shared—flowed through my mind. As I took in the light filtering through the windows, these words came to me: “At the end of life, you see all of life.”

Around me was a reflection of what Helena valued. The windowsill was lined with cards, delivered by an unbroken stream of friends who came to see her. The nurses said they hadn’t seen so many cards in a hospice room before. Her friends read to her, prayed for her, sang hymns, and whispered goodbye through teary eyes. They brought flowers. They read Helena’s prayer poems from her chapbook back to her. She slept under a blue blanket that her Bible study group made for her, patterned with undulating waves to remind her of the ocean. She lay there, in her final days, with all the tenderness she had extended to others flowing back to her, buoyed in a sea of love.

At the hospice, my sense of orientation to time and space felt reconfigured. I couldn’t communicate with Helena to find out how to support her. I had to intuit my way through the days. Throughout the first night, I got up and went to her bedside each time her breathing changed, almost as through some part of me was listening to her in my sleep to make sure I was awake to be with her if she took her final breath. Neither Dave nor I wanted to leave her side. When we did leave, each of us panic-dialed the other, thinking her final moments had come while one of us was away.

After a few days, Dave suggested that I sleep at her place at night and return during the day, so we could take turns to rest. When I left the hospice, I walked to her beach, bringing back seashells and flowers I found along the way.

In the absence of words, I was beginning to learn to find her in other ways. The first night I spent at her place, I walked into her bedroom and saw on her dresser a blue and white card identical to the one in my suitcase. I picked it up and read my own handwriting—the excited voice of my younger self, telling Helena how much we appreciated her for traveling across the US and across the world to attend our weddings. I had no recollection of writing it but felt glad she had received the one thank-you card we had sent. She had kept it on her dresser for twelve years, alongside gifts I had brought her from Sri Lanka over the years.

Later that night, I found my way to her kitchen to make myself some tea. I looked through her pantry and picked up the first box I saw. I smiled when I realized it was lavender tea. Taking out a cup I remember drinking from 14 years ago, I walked out to her porch and sat down. It felt unreal to imagine I was about to lose her when she felt so close. The colors of her apartment, the turquoise cup in my hand brought me home to her. I was walking around in her slippers, about to sleep in her bed, and yet I couldn’t speak to her or hear her laughter.

I sipped the tea, watching the moon rising through the branches of the trees. It occurred to me then that a few miles apart, in the stillness of the night, Helena and I were connected through the scent of lavender. I realized then that when all else falls away, it is the perfume of love that remains.

When I woke up the next morning, I stood on her porch looking at the trees. To the right of her walkway was a banyan tree. To the left was an oak. I saw that their canopies were connected, their branches mingling overhead. I approached the banyan tree to take a closer look at its roots, exposed to the sun. I walked over to the oak. As I crossed the concrete slabs, I noticed that the banyan roots had grown beneath the walkway and stretched all the way to the oak. Peeking out of the ground, it curled itself around the roots of the oak, resting like a paw. Looking at the intertwined roots and canopies, I remembered Donna Haraway and smiled: Oddkin.

Haraway invites us to learn from living beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-date, who inhabit the world together, combining all sorts of temporalities and materialities. These lifeforms, she says, are “replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair.” They refuse to be contained. They combine resources and take shelter together. The trees I was looking at had lived through many hurricanes. To survive in this world, Haraway writes, our task “is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.”

Like the trees on her porch, Helena practiced the craft of making oddkin. I was only one of them. As Dave and I went through her phone to contact her friends to tell them she was at the hospice, we discovered a root system that had held her as her cancer progressed.

There were hundreds of text messages from a network of women friends who stepped in to take care of her. They drove her to her chemo appointments, organized a meal train that continued from January through April. They cleaned her house, brought her brownies, prayed for her, and raised funds to support her in her final days. Helena had moved to Venice in 2015 at the age of 65, without knowing anyone who lived there. In the last ten years of her life, she had grown deep roots that intertwined with the women she gathered around her in a powerful sisterhood that held her amidst the storms.

The Sunset

On the sixth night, I drove home from the hospice in the rain. I noticed bright orange clouds in the direction of the ocean and made my way to the sea. Venice has some of the most spectacular sunsets I have seen. Each evening, it draws crowds to the beach. Some people bring their conch shells with them. On many evenings, as the bottom of the sun hits the horizon line, the cry of a conch echoes through the air, serenading the end of the day.

That night, the sunset looked different. The rain clouds had cleared just enough to let the sun dip through them toward the horizon line of a turquoise ocean. The effect on the sky was remarkable. I felt like I was watching a painting unfold. I was not the only one who was struck by it. I looked around me and saw that the entire beach had fallen silent. Most people stood up to watch the ball of fire descending through the clouds into the grey-green ocean. The silence continued through the sunset. When the sun dipped below the horizon, the entire beach broke into applause.

As the colors deepened in the sky at twilight, the phrase returned to my mind: “at the end of life you see all of life.” I realized that during the past week, as Helena lay at the hospice, I had witnessed the radiance of the life she lived intensify like the sun setting in front of me, saturating the sky.

Shortly before sundown the next day, Helena took her last breath. Dave was by her side, holding her hand. I walked in the door as she left the world. As we sat with her after she passed, holding her hands in silence, I heard the cry of the conch echo inside me.

🐚

In the weeks that followed, Dave and I sat on her porch planning her memorial. One of her friends printed copies of her second poetry chapbook for those who attended the service. We decided to distribute some of her seashells to her friends and rematriate the rest to the sea. Remembering how a friend had hosted a circle at our wedding in Berkeley, inviting our loved ones to read us a poem or share a story, Dave suggested we do the same for Helena’s memorial.

When we gathered in a circle, I listened to her friends share stories about how she touched their lives, how she made them laugh like no one else could, how she taught them how to live and leave the world with grace. They spoke of her love for Dave. They reminded me of how often she said that I continued to be a daughter to her.

As Dave thanked everyone for the words they said about her, a memory flashed through my mind of Helena standing next to him at our wedding, reading a poem she had written for the occasion. It felt as though some circle of life was coming into completion, like a poem that was writing itself.

A few days later, I took out the unsent thank you card that I had brought with me. Dave and I wrote a message to the hospice staff, thanking them for taking care of Helena with tenderness. I then gathered the seashells that I kept—her mother’s lightning whelk and jingle shells, and her sand dollars and sunrise shells. I took them with me and boarded a plane to California to make my own altar to the sea.

On May 15th, as Dave took Helena’s ashes to be interred at her church, I returned to the docks near my place before dawn, carrying two of these seashells with me. I recalled how I sat on the same docks three weeks ago, crying about the thought of losing her.

As I waited for the sun to rise in the east, I looked westward at the mountain. This time, I knew my phone would not ring with her voice at the other end. The tears returned. I steadied my gaze on the mountain. I remembered that I could anchor myself in our love. Helena showed me love’s constancy, its resilience, and its boundlessness. Like the fragrance of lavender, this love is now formless and dispersed, borne by the wind. It finds me in the ocean breeze, in the salt of the sea, and in the roots of banyan trees that know how to intertwine with oddkin.

The sun rose in California as her ashes were laid in the ground in Florida. Feeling its warmth on my skin, I leaned over the docks and placed my hand in the water. Cold currents of liquid gold flowed over my hand. Curling my fingers around the ridges of shells, I held still, reflecting on the impermanence of our forms and the immutability of love. Opening my palm, I offered her seashells—brought from the waters of the Atlantic to the waters of the Pacific—alongside my tears, back to the sea.

🧭

The Inner Compass is sent each month, around the full moon. In Sri Lanka, where I grew up, full moon days are holidays that offer pauses for reflection. The rhythms of the moon and the tides remind me of the cyclical nature of our lives and continue to shape how I listen, navigate, and write.

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