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On February 4, 2026, Dr. Elaine Cagulada performed a poetry reading, Neda: Words for My Darling. The following piece is a recounting of the night written by Dr. Tanya Titchkosky, Professor of Disability Studies in SJE, on February 8, 2026.

Elaine, Queenie, Dr. C – these are the three names with which Rod Michalko introduced Elaine Cagulada* with yet another name, equally legitimate – Poet – to the room at the Tranzac Club in Toronto on Feb 4, 2026. Elaine was joined by friends, family, activists, artists, sport writers, medical professionals, students, and mentors, disabled and non-disabled people, more than 40 combinations thereof, for an evening billed as a “journey into the ineffability of grief.” People traveled on this especially cold winter evening from all over Toronto including Scarborough, and from other cities, Oakville, Pickering, Bowmanville. The poetry reading based on Elaine's book-in-progress, “Neda,” honours her late mother, Zenaida. The packed room, Elaine’s warmth, and perhaps her engagement with “loops of love and loss,” as she put it within which we are all caught, kept me attentive, stilled, and even needy for this offering of artistry as a reckoning with what can unmake us. 

Elaine’s grief-journey entailed a moving account, ranging gracefully and sometimes raucously, between the tragedy and comedy of grief tied to the loss of her mom to a dramatic medical crisis. The poetry was profound in its artistry with surprising phrases (pots as hats, hats as drums, letters as noodles), and in its commitment to never stop struggling to create in those losses, making something unexpected of the Poet. 

This collection of poems, performed on the risky edge of feeling what one means to say, needs to become a book since any straightforward prose recounting (such as mine) cannot do justice to how Elaine depicted the transformation of her childhood babysitter into her mom, and then her mom’s transformation into suffering incarnate, coming under intensive medical care, and then passing on. Neda, the book to come, will eternalize the tormented beauty of Elaine’s poetry. In the room that night we were generously gifted, along with short interstitial accounts filled with laughter and tears, a sense of the life that generated Elaine’s poetic creations. 

But Neda, the book, does not yet exist. So, for now, I will recount tiny bits of Elaine’s verse that left me wishing to move more permanently into her words and try to face what love and loss might mean as they come together. 

…

Elaine begins by suggesting that her poetry arises from 

Behind time’s curtain. 

Peaking around this curtain, Elaine hints at one of the questions animating her account:

How do we let our suffering breathe? 

This question nurtures Elaine’s willingness to go on and wrestle with 

the loops of love and loss.

In her struggle, Elaine follows M. NourbeSe Philip’s sense of poetry as language under pressure. But what sort of pressure did Elaine bring to bear upon the language of her loss and her love? A response can be found in her pearl-hard understanding that loss, love and perhaps life itself is…

an expanse that has no name

[and yet]

Nurses imagination 

[An aside: At this point, the growing hush of the room showed our collective captivation with Elaine’s modulated voice calling us to listen to words uniquely articulated through a gravitas touched by joy. It is that strained joy that comes when realizing that people can carry a sorrow so full of loss into words that matter both to their self and to that of others. Imagination was nursed, mine, perhaps, too well. Elaine’s poetry rendered some expanse yet to be understood and I heard a door, that I could not see, open and close, followed by the sound of footsteps on stairs that I also could not see. And in this disconcerting set of sounds, I heard a need to keep listening to the spirit that transcends a sense of individual loss. Sorrow’s universe opened a little more.]

And what remains, when poetry peaks from behind time’s curtain where suffering breathes?

All that’s left is a miracle of a bond.

This bond is like the sun of the Philippines where Neda and Elaine’s father were born

That sun hits less of a veil.

Connections, bonds, abound, revealing some of the meaning of one to another. 

Soon, though, the story moves. With the death of her first mom, Elaine’s Father moves with child Elaine and her older brother to other countries, eventually to Canada, Edmonton. In the midst of many babysitters, she meets her “final babysitter” in her magic castle full of candy, games, purses, pots and pans on the kitchen floor, drums. This final babysitter becomes her mom. 

This is Neda.  

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says her mom, as Elaine sought out all her mom’s loving attention served with caring, cooking, eating, cleaning. And, of her mom’s “What?” Elaine finds:

Frustration dressed in a word

Yet, her mom’s presence filled with laughter, enjoying Elaine’s need to need her so, dancing through discoveries of past and present family relations…

Till Joy itself is exhausted.

It is through this story of a babysitter who becomes a mom, of a family remade, of a growing care bigger than joy itself, that comes up against the fall that is illness, fully felt, where we glimpse Neda’s eventual passing-on as a harsh, harsh turn. 

And, with this turn, I can’t justly recount the moving artistry of Elaine’s poetic depiction of crisis, illness, and loss. We all need Neda if we are to grasp this storied life caught in the devastation of bodies failing and what that might mean: 

Maybe its better she doesn’t [we don’t] know how bad it was

For the courageous poet, though

Loss has gained my every attention...

An attention which, now and again, makes the poet wear her 

braids like condolences. 

Such loss changes the daughter who grows toward an unexpected hope to not return as the person she was before. After all, her mom won’t

Come back, be with what’s yours.

…

Between the birth of this mother-daughter relation and Neda’s passing on, lies some of the most powerful hospital writing I have ever experienced. I took no notes during this part. I couldn’t. 

The sense of being held within the medical purview as it works on but, also, works past the significance of the failing human body, whose capacities disintegrate and bleed out in the aftermath of stroke, is powerfully rendered in the poems that proceed Neda’s burial. The tragedy, graced by Elaine’s solemn poetic, was also laced by an ironic sense of how hospitals and funeral homes continue the same as ever in their alienation from our collective loops of love and loss. Neda is a poetic encounter that demonstrates the “cruel radiance” of poetry as Rod Michalko’s introduction put it, a radiance that, in this case, emanates from the experience of being unmade by grief. 

Elaine Cagulada’s performance of Neda risked the disintegration that comes with full engagement with a consciousness of the universe of sorrow. And, yet she offered the listener a call back to composure through laughter as well as through her depiction of suffering love. In this reflective gaze we, too, might now believe that we can remake what has unmade us. 

With Neda we experience the powerful and brave possibility of the poetic – and whatever else happens, there is a care-filled creativity in the midst of rupture. In our times, touched as they are by tyranny, and in life being such a companion to death, Neda ultimately invites us to consider what ruptures provoke our creations and how we can better care for what unmakes us. 

_{*Dr. Elaine Cagulada, University of Toronto, Social Justice Education Alumna and Research Officer for Disability Matters and co-editor of DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies. Her forthcoming book is Storying Singularity.}