Para Todos, Todo; Para Nosotros, Nada.
A life full of family & collective struggle, and the quiet terror that none of it guarantees someone will be there at the end
I have built a life out of people.
Not in the shallow sense. Not a list of contacts or passing connections. I mean I have rooted myself in others. In family. In comrades. In lovers. In struggle. My life is dense with human connection.
I come from a large family. Siblings, history, noise, conflict, loyalty. The kind of family that leaves marks on you, shapes how you move through the world. I am a mother. I raised my son with my own hands, carried that responsibility through exhaustion and uncertainty, and watched him become someone real and whole.
I have three partners. Three different forms of love, three different ways of being seen and held and understood.
There is so much love in my life that, from the outside, it should be enough.
And yet.
I go home alone.
This is the contradiction I cannot resolve, no matter how dialectically I try to think through it.
Because I understand contradiction. I live inside it politically. I organize around it. I believe that everything moves through tension, through struggle, through opposing forces that cannot be neatly reconciled.
But some contradictions don’t resolve in time for the people living inside them.
Some just sharpen.
My life is one of those contradictions.
On one side, I am embedded in collective struggle. I organize. I lead. I take on responsibility when things fracture. Recently, everything broke open at once. Internal conflict. Line struggle. People leaving. Documents scattered across hands that could have disappeared with them.
So I stepped in.
I gathered everything. Secured it. Stabilized what could have fallen apart. Took on leadership not because I wanted power, but because someone had to hold the line.
I am building something that is meant to outlive me.
On the other side, I am a single body in a quiet room at night.
Because beneath all of this, there is a material reality that does not care about my commitments or my clarity or my discipline.
My heart is failing.
Congestive heart failure is not poetic. It is not metaphor. It is a timeline written into the body. Fifteen years. Maybe twenty. Maybe less, if stress tips the scale early.
I can feel it already. The stairs that take more out of me than they should. The moments where my mind slips, where words stall, where I have to reach for something that used to be immediate. The quiet awareness that my body is not stable ground.
I know what comes next.
Oxygen tanks. Slower movement. A narrowing of space, of possibility, of independence.
And then, eventually, an end.
What terrifies me is not that I will die.
It is how.
Because capitalism does not just alienate us in life. It organizes our deaths, too.
It fragments us. It disperses our families across distance and obligation. It reshapes intimacy into something negotiated, scheduled, constrained by survival. It ensures that even those of us who are rich in love can still be poor in presence.
I have family, but not one that lives together in a single place.
I have partners, but not ones who can share a daily, material life with me.
I have community, but not one structured around collective living.
So when I imagine the end honestly, I don’t see a circle of people around me.
I see an empty apartment.
An empty bed.
A body that stops, quietly, without witness.
And that is the contradiction that breaks me open.
Because I have done everything I was told would make a life full. I have loved deeply. I have built relationships. I have given myself to others, to my child, to my family, to my comrades, to the work.
And still, I cannot secure the most basic human thing.
Someone there.
Someone present.
Someone whose life is materially intertwined with mine in a way that does not dissolve at the end of the day.
It feels selfish to want that.
It feels like I am betraying everything I believe in by centering something so personal, so intimate, so small compared to both the scale of the work I do, and the amount of people in my personal life who love me.
But the truth is, this is not separate from the political.
This is what alienation looks like when it reaches all the way down.
Not just isolation, but fragmentation. Not just loneliness, but disconnection between love and presence, between care and structure, between what we feel and how we are forced to live.
I want something simple.
I want to come home to someone every night.
I want to cook for them. I want to be there to greet them at the door. I want to sit on a couch and exist next to another body without it being temporary, without it being scheduled, without it ending.
I want warmth that stays.
I want to be held in a way that does not require negotiation with the rest of the world.
And I want it before my body makes it impossible.
Because I know what is coming.
Five to seven years before day-to-day grows more difficult. Fifteen to twenty before I am gone, if I am lucky.
Time is not abstract for me.
It is counted.
Measured.
Closing.
And still, I do not step back.
I will not abandon the work. I will not retreat into a smaller life just to chase comfort. The masses matter to me. The future matters to me. What we are building matters to me.
So I live inside the contradiction instead.
I give everything I have to something collective, something enduring, something that might outlast this system that makes even love feel incomplete.
And then I go home.
Alone.
Most days, I am fine. I laugh easily. I hold others. I move forward. I am seen as strong, capable, even stable.
But underneath that, there is something quieter.
Fear.
Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a steady awareness that one day my heart will stop, and there may be no one there when it does.
That all this love, all this connection, all this life I have built, might not translate into presence at the end.
I do not need solutions.
I do not need to be told it will be okay.
I just need to say it plainly.
I am surrounded by love.
And I am afraid of dying alone.
And both of those things are true at the same time.