“Emotional Fitness Dojo” as mine & Burt’s final love child.

I lost the love of my life to a recurrence of liver cancer right before the pandemic hit the west coast.

As a lone mother to a young child, I navigated returning to our life in southern California — without a car or a home — just as quarantines became a familiar occurrence. Prioritizing mine and my son’s mental health amidst a country further divided, environmental calamity and worldwide chaos and confusion, my singular job has been to feel - all of it.

Our child was the third that Burt was pleased to have a hand in helping to raise.

In June 2019, my life partner, Burt, who is the father of my son, survived eight rounds of chemotherapy as well as forty-eight sessions of upper head and neck radiation. By the time he had begun conventional treatment, seven months before, his cancer was 4th stage as it had traveled down into the lymph nodes in his neck and he had a few tumors in his liver. I, on the other hand, was roiling in acute anxiety. With my appetite suppressed, I felt repelled by the kitchen. Disconnected from feeling my own hunger, I would then forget to feed my child in the mornings and, by early afternoon, he would be in full meltdown. “Why are you crying?” I would sneer at my 4-year old. “Because I am hungry,” he would cry, and I would sweep my sweet baby up and whisk him off…