The Cost of a Broken Line

I've been quieter lately. Well... at least about Holding the Line.

The truth is that I do not currently have the heart for these conversations the way I once did. I started this platform because I believed deeply in the importance of holding the balance between who we are as Samoans and the systems we inherited through America. I believed we could protect both our culture and our people while growing in a way that benefits all through the western systems, if we were willing to have the hard conversations.

But grief has really complicated things for me. The only reason I ever came back home with such a deep desire to serve this community was because my father loved this place with everything in him. He loved our people even when less than stellar choices were constantly being made. He believed in this island despite its many flaws. He believed in our culture - the way it was always supposed to be and not the way it's been so misused. And because he loved it so much, I loved it too.

Now he's gone. ........

In the aftermath of losing him, I have found myself carrying an anger I do not yet know what to do with. Anger over learning that the hospital here overdosed him for years while he trusted the system that was supposed to care for him. Anger that after more than 30 years of hard work and service, the retirement waiting for him was heartbreaking. Anger that even in death, there were people and cultural politics that tried to stand in the way of burying him on the land he worked and sacrificed for.

The more I sit with it, the angrier I get because none of this was unknown. We knew about the brokenness. We knew about the complacency. People have been calling the hospital “the morgue” for years because too many people seemed to leave there worse than when they arrived, or never leave at all. And still, everyone learned to live around it. To accept it. To survive beside it. The systems that were supposed to protect our people slowly weakened through silence, pride, politics, and neglect, until the people carrying the heaviest burdens became the ones paying the price for all of it.

So I am at a standstill. I do not want to force conversations about "holding the line" while my spirit is unsettled and while I am still wrestling with the reality that the very place my father loved so deeply is also the place that failed him in so many ways.

This space was never meant to be performative. And I refuse to write from a place that is not honest. And right now, honesty looks like grief. It looks like anger and it looks like trying to reconcile the place my father loved so deeply with the ways it failed him.

I know these conversations matter. I know that. I still believe it. But before I continue trying to hold space for everyone else and these conversations, I need a moment to sit with what this loss has done to my spirit.

For now, I am simply at a standstill.