A Toddler-sized Saudade

 

I find myself wrestling with a specific sort of sadness, one I haven’t experienced in a long while.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I may never live in the US again, and therefore rarely be in close proximity to family and old friends. I’ve given up my longing for the cold, for deciduous trees, for a whole host of things. I’m starting to be familiar with the simultaneous tug of joy and sorrow, at least as it is proscribed in the walk with Christ.

But over a period of couple months, I’ve found myself increasingly wrung out over an extended goodbye, in such a way that it almost feels like it portends something. (In my long sojourn in the prophets, I’ve come to have a wary understanding of symbolic actions and scenarios. I’ve learned that the Lord is accustomed to using strange and repetitive things to get our attention and cause us to think outside our usual patterns. This is what fuels prophetic thought and speech: a heightened awareness of what the Lord is doing in the present that foreshadows what He will do in the future, by relating what is happening in the present to what He has done in the past.)

Sometime in late summer, my little son Ernesto, who had just turned two, started playing with some neighborhood babies his age, facilitated by their nannies/grandmothers, etc. I didn’t notice right away, because I dislike spending time outside in peak Hanoi heat, but I did notice when Nen began talking about ‘Cay’ and ‘Ahreen’. Nen’s nanny Nga explained that “Cay” was a little Vietnamese boy and “Ahreen” a Korean girl. As the weather began to cool, I joined him outside sometimes and observed this tiny toddler friendship. 

Cay is an energetic, acrobatic little guy who likes to pretend he’s a superhero, and climbs and zooms around with an ease that is far advanced of Nen’s abilities. But Ahreen (we later learned that her name is actually Ayun; her nanny could not pronounce it) is a quiet girl who likes to swing and paddle calmly around on a seated scooter. Without any words between them, she and Nen would get on the scooter together and roll around the circular drive-around that connects our 4-building apartment complex, in our quiet suburb. Their little hands casually resting on each other, they spent their outside time in peace that seemed, to my unaccustomed eyes, unusual for toddlers.

When Nen was inside for the day, he talked about Ayun. When I began working part time at HIF, I always make sure to ask how his day was when I returned home. “Did you have fun? What did you do today, Nen?” His response invariably was “Cay” and “Ahreen” – even if he hadn’t seen them that day. I learned from Nga that Ayun also talked about Ernesto.

He and Ayun have a special connection. They make each other laugh. They are gentle together, never making each other unhappy. Watching them together became one of the highlights of my day, a great joy – what mother does not delight in watching her son grow in kindness and gentleness?

So it was with some dismay when I learned in December that Ayun’s family was returning to Korea, with no plans of returning to Hanoi. As the children are so young, it seemed very unlikely that they will see one another again. So young, in fact, that they are equally unlikely to carry any personal memories of this early, precious friendship with them into their childhoods.

I was, and am, heartbroken by this thought. I suppose in some unspoken part of my brain, I had been imagining a lengthier friendship, one that grew as they did, shaping their lives and ours in its sweetness.

* 

Due to a language barrier compounded by my lack of either Viet or Korean, and Ayun’s Vietnamese nanny’s limited English, we did not know when exactly the final parting would come. Each time they played became more charged with this impending final farewell. Was this the last time? The babies’ sweet tendency to have drawn out goodbyes, with both of them yelling, ‘BYE BYYYYYYYYYE’ over and over at each other before being removed by their respective caregivers, only exacerbated the knowledge of their soon to be final goodbye. 

I held up my sadness to the Lord, asking for Him to keep both children physically and emotionally and, if possible, to protect and preserve their memories of one another.

A strange thing began to happen. We learned the family would leave for Korea before Tet, the lunar holiday. They would move into temporary housing, outside our complex, before their flight. Before that, they would vacation for a week at the beach.  As January ticked closer to February, we had a series of goodbyes we thought were final, and I would return home deeply saddened; Ernesto’s every mention of her name was a small lance of pain.

I added her name to our prayers at night; he woke every morning with her name in his mouth.

And then the next day we would see her again. A series of strange delays and mishaps contributed to ‘just one more’ playdate. Every single one was a delightful surprise.

Even COVID lent itself to another day, as their travel plans were delayed due to the most recent outbreak, which came conspicuously timed just before Tet after months of zero cases in Vietnam.

Every toddler in the neighborhood seemed to be out, as all elementary school children had the day off, an early start to Tet in an attempt by the government to slow the spread of the virus. It became an impromptu sendoff for Ayun. Nen and his Ahreen swung side by side, took turns on the slide, and watched the other kids. 

They seemed to hug more than usual, and I wondered whether it was possible that they understood, somehow, that this was the last time they would play together. One more day of sweetness. As we all rode the elevator in our building for the last time, Ayun and her nanny to the 4^th floor, Nen and Nga and I to the 16^th, their sweet BYE BYYYYYYEEEEs brought tears to my eyes.

The next day, she was gone.

I don’t know how long Ernesto will talk about her, how often he will ask to go outside to play with his Ahreen, whose real name he isn’t even conscious of. How many naps and nights he will include her in his list of people he loves.

This long farewell has gone on long enough, however, to rise into my consciousness as conspicuous. I begin to suspect that the Lord has more in mind than simply responding to my heart-prayers and vicarious sadness over the loss of my son’s little friend.

On one level, I believe that these unexpected “just one more” encounters were gracious gifts from my Lord to both my son and to me. He loves children far more than I ever could, and I know deep in every cell that He has enjoyed watching them together – and watching me experience such a sweet development in my son’s life and personality. I have learned so much from their camaraderie – about Ernesto as a person, about the rich blessing of living in Vietnam with a small pre-bilingual child in a COVID world, and about myself as a mother. 

On another level, I believe that He also has intended this painfully extended farewell to embed itself in my heart. There is something here, or many somethings, that I must not forget – just as I hope Ernesto will not forget Ayun.

Partings are common in the Bible, many of them permanent. At the Lord’s direction, Abram left his family and his home and never looked back. Rebekah did the same to marry Isaac, sight unseen - a picture of post-resurrection believers 'betrothed' to Christ. Joseph. Moses. Rahab. Ruth. The remnant of the Lord’s people carried off to Babylon, like Daniel, Esther, Nehemiah. All of these partings came with bitter tears of separation, an uncertain future without hope of reunion, and the fading voices and memories of lost people and places.

Even Jesus Himself was forced to flee His homeland to escape the murder of little children very close in age to Ernesto, Cay and Ayun.

As Christians, our most common identity is that of the exile – a people without a homeland, without a permanent residence, traveling toward a destination, a God we have not seen but have been promised will be ours in the end: Christ.

We can trust that promise because He alone experienced the ultimate undoable separation – death – and by His resurrection tore a hole in it, making it a journey and not a destination, making Himself the gateway between the temporal world and eternity.

Over the past year and a half, I have been on a journey with my emotions. They used to rule me, sadness, depression and anger bottomless, hopeless, aimless. The Lord has been teaching me, softly, patiently, how to feel in obedience to Him – the Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, Who has born our sorrows and burdens and uncertainties. He has been teaching me how not to fear sadness and grief, but to feel it from within the strong, unbreakable comfort of His hands and His heart, where I abide. To let Him guide me in it and through it to do His will, for the good of those around me. I can do this because the scarred hands and heart that built the universe will also, without fail, knit it all back together again better than before, removing every sorrow, undoing every separation, wiping every tear from our eyes.

The great tentmaking traveler Paul, who I think must be the man most well-versed in goodbyes in the Bible, was the one who captured the tension we must live with, those of us in Christ who are still subject to the physical laws of this earth: “Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10).

*

As I was pressing into this toddler-sized grief, feeling pain for the loss of Ayun on Ernesto’s behalf, this tension of “both sorrowful and full of joy” reminded me of something. One of my favorite words in any language also happens to be one that isn’t easily translated into English: the Portuguese Saudade.

The concept has many definitions, including a melancholy nostalgia for something that perhaps has not even happened. It often carries an assurance that this thing you feel nostalgic for will never happen again. Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo called it "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy."

Supposedly it came about in the early days of Portuguese sea-exploration, when a ship setting sail to seek out new worlds meant, for the crew, near-certain permanent separation from everything and everyone they had ever known.

A handful of other attempts to grapple with saudade include:

- a mixture of melancholic longing or yearning coupled with a sense of loneliness and incompleteness

- a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future

- a nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; ‘the love that remains’.

It occurs to me that saudade is the naked state of every individual human soul. This ‘vague and constant desire’, this longing and loneliness and incompleteness, this feeling of having lost something very dear, just out of sight in space and time, reminds me of Ecclesiastes 3:11, which says that God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

I’m not the only one to connect with this.

Philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”

“Humans are searchers, desperately looking for the right measure of worldly desires to fill the hole in their heart. It may be work, or pleasure, or drink. It might even be your husband, or food, or Kentucky basketball. When Adam committed that first sin, we became estranged from God, and the hole was opened, a hole we have been trying to fill with everything but the One who is perfectly designed to satisfy.” - Anonymous

C S Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “If I find myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

There is so much truth in this. It is as complex and difficult to be contained – or explained - as so many of our experiences throughout our lifetimes. I long for Ayun to stay, for she and Ernesto to somehow remain friends, lifelong friends, to remember and reunite in all their adorable camaraderie. Ultimately, at the bottom of it all, I long for Christ to return for us and make all this right, to end the exile and the parting of friends forever.