Today, for the 5th time this year, I’m putting on Nomad. Less than 3 minutes in, while the camera sweeps over gorgeous Patagonian glaciers, piano pinging, Bruce Chatwin’s voice is reading about a piece of brontosaurus skin in his grandmother’s cabinet: I’m already bawling.

Today is a day I’ve dreaded for nearly a year: this morning I finished writing the last page of my beloved late Mama’s llama journal. I cried when I finished my last entry. I loved writing in this journal. My mom loved cute, kind of kitschy things, the type of little details and objects that would make her smile in her day-to-day. I’ve picked up this journal nearly everyday, the cover a carefree llama blissfully smiling while on a bicycle. Now that she is gone from the earthly plane, I get to think of her little moments of joy and sweetness that composed her inner landscape. 

My mother was a very hard worker. She was a first-generation immigrant from the Philippines to the US, and the 4th of 6 children. I think if she had it her way, she would not have chosen to work as hard as she did. Above all in her life, I know she loved me and my two sisters and worked to hold our family together – much of our life was in a survival mode. She found moments of adventure for herself through it all, little valves to express her fascination with life and the planet. Her moments of adventure and of rest were precious, and in the last years of her life she found more moments of rest and felt the feeling of freedom that comes with deep rest.  

When my mom went on hospice after just six months from her initial diagnosis of biliary cancer (later diagnosed as metastasized pancreatic cancer), my twin sister and I were the caretakers at her side day and night. We used a weekly planner to log her medications, anything of medical significance; and a journal, the llama, for dreams and observations that didn’t fit in the planner. Mom-isms. 

The last day of her life was sweet and weird. I didn’t know at the time but she was telling me throughout the day that it was her last day. All day she had me and my sister running around, near scrambling for the right kind of popsicle, and she made me re-do a 7-Up slushie a few times (I finally got it to her liking!) Cancer is fucking horrendous, but there were so many hilarious moments that day, and so much beauty.  

Towards the end of the night, when things started to get very strange, her body started rapidly going through the death process, there were moments where I couldn’t do anything. I just sat in a little bedroll, having moved from my sister’s couch to the foot of the hospice bed. With tired eyes wrenched wide open by witnessing the medical events and simultaneous miracles that were happening, I furiously logged everything that was happening to my mother. I’ve never witnessed anything so breathtakingly brave. In the weeks after she died, I started using this journal to write my grief, lessons through the depths of mourning, and the ebbs of “personal development” that happen after great loss. 

Sometimes the pain of losing her grips me so deeply, clawing at my heart and lungs and shoulders and chest. 

I love you so much, Mama. I miss you so much every day.

Mama died in the early morning hours of October 17, 2021. I found out recently from watching an episode of Architecture Digest Open Door (lol) this was also the day Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker got engaged. I love picking up these little facts that don’t quite tarnish the date but give it a spin: like… life just goes, it never stops. Whether we like it or not. The spirit moves seamlessly into new forms. We try to hold on to the body, or these objects, or attachment to significance, but they dissolve into impermanence over which we have no grip. It’s all a mystery, and we can only release whatever grip we think we have. 

Now back to the documentary.

The shared points between Herzog and Chatwin are romantic, weaving and bumping over more than a decade of friendship that took place over many continents. In the film, Herzog retraces the themes and ideas of their earlier years in a retrospective of Chatwin’s life and adventures. There are echoes throughout of Herzog’s past films as well, we see a tapestry of a shared philosophy, regarding the origins of the bloom from which humanity moved and how ideas and songs and paths developed. Herzog follows an “erratic quest” the best kind of quest! Chatwin’s “What am I Doing Here?” spans several years and all across the globe. Nomad is like that, and I won’t spoil the adventure or philosophy or storytelling of the film. If you haven’t yet seen it – just do it. It’s ghostly and mind-blowing and perfect. I’ll only write about this little bit, about a part that pertains to my shared feeling of honoring the life of a loved one. 

We trace an outline of Chatwin’s origins. There are several scenes with Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin’s biographer. Shakespeare describes that each of the objects that Chatwin coveted, the things from his grandmother’s cabinet of curiosities were “the clotheslines upon which his stories were hung.” The objects from his childhood were the inspiration points, where Chatwin followed the drama of the object to its source, which in turn became adventures to be immortalized in great books. We visit Silbury Hill, the mythical origin place that was Chatwin’s pivot. “Everything that came after was an echo of this.”

We get a glimpse of Chatwin’s notebooks. We are read the last lines that Chatwin ever wrote, in one of his moleskine journals. Herzog closes the book. He says (with the perfect dramatic cadence that only Herzog could utter): “The book is closed.”  

With Herzog retracing these footsteps, the echoes of the closing of Chatwin’s book reverberate, prompting new chapters to open. As I close this notebook I shared with my mama, I await opening a new chapter, in her footsteps. ❤