All of them had been so sudden. Death. Now you see them, now you don’t. That was my experience of the deceased, the ones closest to me. Mother, father, sister, brother, brother. With you through their time on earth, then gone in a flash. Departing like lightning.

On my thirteenth Halloween I stayed over at my dad’s apartment on the other side of town, and for hours, well into the morning, we watched a live taping of a paranormal investigation on the Discovery Channel. The host was blond and the psychic had an earring and they were somewhere historic in the UK. The night-vision camera gave the TV an eerie green glow, the blond host had big eyes like a doll; we were rapt with attention. There were sightings of children who’d passed and mothers in cloaks and fathers who walked about in suits. Tapping and knocking and tiny objects making incremental movements. Orbs abound. EVP recordings. 

Mary Catherine was sixteen when she was diagnosed with liver cancer and barely twenty-one when she died. I traveled to the depths of despair after she was gone. I found my way back by convincing myself I’d never have to return.   

I was wrong. 

Looking through the gallery of the dojang I take a seat and fixed my eyes on my son. Justin bowed and stepped onto the mat. He had perfected his poomsae and was nervously excited to complete his belt test in hopes of being promoted from a yellow to orange belt after months of practice. Proud parents flowed into the room in anticipation of the event. A tide of chatter rose above a sea of phones that was primed to capture each child’s accomplishment.

Her name was “Roxy” and she was the coolest person I’d ever met. 

“Do you like Zach or Cody better?” She asked me while digging a piece of driftwood into compacted sand. The twig split apart in her small hands, and she proceeded as if it hadn’t, just to spite it.

“If this doesn’t get better, I may have to cater Christmas.” 

The words hung in the air like the smell that affixes to your hair when you’ve been frying chicken cutlets over the stove in anticipation of the holiday. My Italian American ears burned. Christmas was Christmas. The women planned menus, stood in long lines at Waldbaum’s, the Italian salumeria, the bakery. The men drifted between courses in various states of uprightness and sleep while the women - elbow deep in sudsy water - tried to figure out who forgot to stir the sauce, causing it to stick to the bottom of the pot. 

To the boy I never loved, 

You walked over, reached in my car, and shook my hand. Then it was over. The last time I saw you.

My grandmother, Nana, taught me how to braid. She pulled me up to the circular dining table as I held on to my stuffed animal, placing him into a chair next to me. I watched Nana focus as she cut three pieces of green yarn, fern green yarn. The strings were a modest length, but to a six-year-old, they looked like my height.  As she taped the three strings to the table, she explained the art of braiding. 

When I was small, the line where the grain fields met the sky through my bedroom window was the edge of the world. I stood on my tiptoes at that window, little fingers pressed hard into the scarred wood of the sill, nose pressed to the window screen that smelled of thunderstorm and dirt.

The slumbering house cradles the echo of your footsteps as you wander its sleepy halls.  Sleep should have come for you hours ago, but your anticipation has successfully warded off any chances.  The contractions come so lightly and irregular that you wonder if it’s even labor.  Perhaps it is the Braxton-Hicks you read about.

The NICU carried a low, steady hum that seemed to live inside the walls. Machines breathed in rhythm. Monitors blinked in soft pulses. My daughter, Charlie, lay beneath a warmer that cast a pale glow across her skin. She was six weeks early and small enough for my hands to meet around her torso.

I am a mother and a daughter. But I was not mothered—at least not in any traditional sense. Five months after they met, my parents were married: She’d just turned twenty-one; he was six months younger. They bought a house with red stairs, a half-block from the beach in Santa Monica. Five years later, in 1970, they had me. But in March 1973 my mother divorced my father, and a few months later, she called to tell him that she was leaving me at her parents’ house in Berkeley. The next day, my maternal grandmother met my father at the Oakland airport with me in her arms. My mother cut off all communication with her family and friends.

I found out I was pregnant at three in the morning after the Spring Equinox Witches’ Market. Spring still felt very far away, I was still in my big Canadian coat, still wearing rubber gloves under my winter cycling gloves to break the wind, which the man in the Leith Walk bike shop taught me to do. Before I accepted the new job in Edinburgh, my husband and I talked endlessly about the weather. Was it really as bad as we imagined? Could we really live up there?

Four days after the passing of my father-in-law, my wife and I welcomed our foster son. He came to us at five months old, barely sitting up on his own, and deliciously full of baby rolls. Twenty months later, he left our home and went to live with his biological mother for the first time in his life. We were parents for almost two years, but that title was taken from us.

Not all transitions come with clarity.
Some arrive as quiet unraveling.

The day he left for graduate school, the air in the house felt different.
Not heavy. Not sad. Just…suspended. Like everything was still waiting for something to happen, even though it already had.

I wonder about the metamorphosis of a butterfly as it is stored away in cocoon-darkness until its evolution is complete, and it begins to fly brilliantly.