Under the milky way tonight

Photo Credit: Gina Masequsemay, taken 8/14/2026, Thousand Islands Lake, Inyo County National Park

Leo season was rough this year. My mother lost a sister and a brother within an exact week. She was understandably upset at first even though both had had a long life – the younger was 89. I had planned a backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevada, during which my aunt would be buried. I asked my mother if she wanted me to stay. She said no. I did want to go on this trip. I had been training for this opportunity to see the Perseid meteor shower on a new moon at about 10,000 feet. My mother said she was fine, but I wasn’t sure she was putting up a brave front. I asked my brother Albert for his assessment. I’m old enough to know that grief comes in waves. Though Albert lives on the other coast, he talks to my mother regularly on the phone. He was fairly certain that my mother was being honest with herself and us. Albert also offered to come to LA. When we first came to this country as parachute kids in 1982, it was this aunt and her family who had taken us in. He could watch over our parents, and I could go in peace.

Then, two days before I left for the trip, I learned that my good friend Linda had just died. Linda had been getting treatments for a rare form of cancer for more than a year. We had just had lunch together a few days before they performed another procedure on her. We ordered way too much food. We laughed. We made plans to see shows and travel together next year. Linda had been wanting to retire in Portugal, taking full advantage of her fluent Portuguese. She researched towns that had a major hospital where she could continue receiving treatments. In other words, she was optimistic about the procedure. That lunch was no different than many meals we had shared together. Two days after the procedure, I texted Linda to see if she had been discharged. I didn’t hear from her, which was typical, especially if she was recovering. The following night I texted her sister May to be sure.

May wasn’t just a friend’s sister. Yes, I did meet May in the mid-2000s through Linda. May was a Dodgers fan like me, but she was one of those people who would never get game tickets on their own. So Linda asked me to buy tickets for all three of us as a hangout. May wouldn’t go with Linda without me because she'd get spicy when Linda peppered her with questions about the rules of the game. I would sit between the sisters, tsismising with one and talking strategies with the other. That would go on for a while, until Linda lost interest in baseball and found other things to do with me. May and I continued to go to games (until last year when I started to boycott the Dodgers).

May replied to my text right away: Linda was staying with her, healing. Assured, I went to bed.

The next morning, I woke up to May’s text that Linda has passed in her sleep.

This one hit me hard. As I grew older, I had become no stranger to death – the most devastating one being my grandmother almost 15 years ago. The rest was either like my mother’s siblings who had lost a lot of their faculties to be independent, or parents or spouses of good friends. Quite a number were young, younger than me in fact. They felt tragic, but they also felt distant. I showed up for my friends, more so than the people who had passed. Linda was different. She was family I chose. We chose each other. This was a direct blow.

I kept the backpacking trip, and I packed a flask of vodka with me to the mountains. On the first leg of our ascent, we were a group of three. On the second morning, I told my two younger fellow travelers, Jess and Justin, about Linda while they were having breakfast. (They had known about my aunt and uncle already.) I was going to find a tree for my own ceremony. I didn’t want them to think I was whisking off with a flask in hand like some covert alcoholic uncle. About a hundred feet away, I found a pine tree that had a couple of inches of split in its bark, revealing a smooth center. I pressed my hand there, lowered my head in reverence and recalled a memory for each new ancestor. After each, I poured a line of vodka into the ground. With my aunt and uncle, I asked for forgiveness and offered gratitude. With Linda, I made an offering. I cried a little, and the hot tear traveled down my cheek, leaving a cold streak that matched the chill of the morning.

When I came back to our camp, they thanked me for sharing about Linda and one of them, Justin, gave me a hug. We then continued with our day, a five-mile trek up another thousand feet to meet with the rest of our group. On a break, Justin asked me how Linda and I met and what she was like. I smiled and said Linda was smart. She wrote a book about the manongs but she treated them as full human beings, not focusing just on their labor. I said if you had asked the manongs who they were, being a worker was probably not even in the top five. That’s what they did to survive. Linda wrote about them being dancers, lovers, sharp dressers, boxers, gamblers, risk-takers. Their desires, their joy and creativity were what many social movements, rightfully class-based, neglected. What intersectional possibilities do we open up for organizing when we let people define themselves beyond the issues that we want to illustrate with them? This framework informed my own writing about the AIDS movement in my research and about other progressive movements in my consulting to this day.

She was well-loved and respected by her students at Cal State Long Beach, from which she had just recently retired. Especially to the Filipino American students, she was den mother. One of her mentees became a tenure-track faculty at UNLV not long ago and published a book about organized sports in the Fil-Am community. Linda’s colleagues at CSULB were planning a book talk on campus for him in the fall that would double as a stealth retirement party for Linda because she didn’t like that kind of attention and had become more reclusive in her illness. Linda wanted to be seen like the rest of us, but she didn’t care for the spotlight.

I couldn’t believe how much I was telling them. But more good stuff kept tumbling out of my mouth. Linda could’ve been a Scorpio like me: generous but not forgetful when crossed. She was loyal to her friends, but to others it might come across as nepotism. I had been a beneficiary of that. As an adjunct faculty at CSULB, I had a key to her office and didn’t have to slum it with the other part-time lecturers in the crowded storeroom that still managed to house a few open computer terminals and a medium-sized conference table. Linda had her share of detractors like any good Scorpio, real or pretend. She was also a little vain. Up until her illness, I had never seen her without make-up. When we settled on a date for our last lunch, she said she hoped I wouldn't be shocked by her appearance. I replied, “It’s a date. Come as you are.”

  There…warts and all, as fleshed out as the manongs she wrote about.

Before we moved on, I thanked Justin for his questions. They helped me remember my friend.

I knew the four-day trip would be hard on me physically when I signed on, and now I was bracing myself on the emotional front. Even before we arrived at the basecamp, Justin ran over something on the highway and blew his tire. We had to walk about a quarter mile in the middle of nowhere, half of which in pitch dark, to find two bars of cell signal to call AAA. Then we waited more than two hours (even though the towing company was two miles away.) As a result, we arrived at the basecamp close to ten in the evening and had to set up our tents in near darkness. On each of the first two days, there was a thunderstorm that lasted for hours. The first thunderstorm, when it was just the three of us, was the worse of the two storms. It brought down hails as we were just about to wrap up eating. At one point, the lightning was less than a second after the thunderclap, meaning it was close. We scuttled into our respective tents only to discover that water was threatening to seep underneath them. Our sleeping pads felt like water beds. We were in our tents for more than twelve hours that night.

The second night, now in a group of ten, the air was freezing cold after the storm because we were so much higher in elevation. I had not prepared for the trip well. I didn’t bring gloves (I always forget them), and my headlamp ran out of batteries. The sky was finally clear and moonless. I thought I would be at least rewarded by seeing meteors raining down from the sky. I saw one shooting star from inside my tent, most of my body from the neck down wrapped in my mummy sleeping bag. Even then the night still proved too cold. The last thing I needed was to get sick. So I closed up my tent fly and fell asleep to the voices of my companions outside.

Being this close to the stars, even for just a few minutes, reminds us how insignificant we really are. The universe doesn’t care. It moves on. There’s so much we don’t know, or that we will never know. And grieving makes you weak. Cooped up for hours at a time in those two days, I thought that maybe there wouldn’t be much more to my journey, this one or the longer one that is my life. Maybe I had reached my creative end. I had no stories left to tell. In the end, under the milky way, nothing really mattered.

We survived the storms. The next day, we started to descend the mountains. We set up camp for this third night close to where we had been the first. It was our last night. The next morning, we would spend half a day to head back to the trailhead where our cars were. It wasn’t a bad trip. Somehow I had managed to stay dry. I rolled my ankle twice without twisting it. I had some good laughs with friends old and new. I had come to do what I wanted to do to remember my family that had transitioned to the next realm, even if these mountains and sky refused my grasp. No epiphanies or transformation. Maybe that had to be enough.

Then after dinner, Justin asked me what my offering to Linda was. I couldn’t tell if he noticed, but I held my breath for a second. My offering to Linda was why I cried the other morning. In that moment, I wasn’t sure I was ready to be that vulnerable to share.

Suddenly something rushed the clouds away from my mind. The stars were in clear constellations, and I realized I had taken the wrong lessons from nature. We didn’t succumb to inclement weather. We were awed, but not cowed, by the vast alien sky and its infinite probabilities that seemed out of reach. We weren’t paralyzed by the whims of bad luck. We kept prodding on. Everywhere around me this week I saw evidence of this human tenacity and our indomitable spirit. Starting with Paul, the fearless 79-year-old Chinese American leader of our pack, working with the next generation of Millennial naturalists like Justin and Kim to train two youngsters six decades his junior in our group. Or my friend Gina showing young women like one of the preteens on how to be comfortable on a trail, wisdom that she probably wouldn’t be able to get from her father on this trip. Or the Ahwaneechee people Paul told us about who have steward this land for centuries that allowed for my reflection. Even earlier that day, we encountered a Black woman with a self-proclaimed trail name “Wreck” who, after hiking more than two thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in 2025, came back at the young age of 70 to finish the part she couldn’t last year because of heavy snow. Wreck took it one small step at a time. We kept an eye on her as long as we could.

It wasn’t just those I named. The whole trip, everyone fed each other and shared other resources. If someone had a challenge, we problem-solved and fixed what was not working for them. We got water for anyone who was running low and tightened their tent against the gusts that would surely come with the thunderstorm. In the morning, we did yoga stretches together – sun salutations to the actual sun – to loosen our muscles. We traced new routes on soaked maps to make sure everyone’s needs were met. We took turns leading the pack, accommodating different paces, so we could stay together.

And best of all, we helped each other remember our stories by staying curious.

So, I gathered up my courage and said to Justin, “I told Linda that I would take care of her sister May. That was my offering.” May doesn’t need that much taken care of. She’s a grown and capable woman. But Linda the oldest sister was always worried about her, ever since May quit her job more than a decade ago to take care of their aging parents (who have now survived their oldest child). They fought like sisters, but Linda was anxious that May didn’t have a nest egg as she was growing older herself, or that May would be even more isolated if she was not here. I didn’t mean I’d take care of May like a parent would a child. May doesn’t need me to give her food or shelter. I would take care of her, just as I had been taken care of on this trip, by friends and strangers on the trail. I would catch her if she fell. I would help her up. I would take care of May, just as she would me. Or just as Linda had.

         It wasn’t a new offering. The sky didn’t thwart us. Even if I don't always see them, the stars have been tripping over themselves to tell me this all along:

Take care of each other.

Take care of each other.

Take care of each other.