I’m sorry I couldn’t go to your wedding and that my explanation was vague and seemed rude. My doctor wouldn’t let me fly. I couldn’t find the words. I worried that mentioning pregnancy loss would cloud the conversation of your celebration.
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On the day after Thanksgiving 2022, I dragged my husband to a thrift shop outside Boston to look for a book I'd donated nearly twenty years ago. It started as a Twitter dare the week before. I was chatting with some pals about a book an ex-boyfriend gave me when I was twenty and we were at the height of a love affair that lasted seven years. My ex died in February, and I was having a hard time talking about it; most people didn't seem to understand why I was so upset about the death of a guy I broke up with so long ago. The easiest thing to do, sometimes, was to play it for laughs; at least that way I got to talk about it a little, with strangers who didn't know me well. "Why don't you go look for it?" someone said. "You never know, and it'll be a great story if you find it."
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My mother’s eyes registered my arrival, but without her dependable smile. The bones of her face were sharp and craggy, her nose slightly humped from a childhood fall, her eyes blue and deeply set. Tita, who cared for her, had dressed her in her brightest blouse and hung a necklace round her neck. Mom was crooked in her chair and not pretending, while a cheerful string of rainbow-colored letters on the mantle shouted happy birthday for her eighty-ninth and last.
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“Dear Poo, I’m sorry I’m writing this in a letter, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you face to face…”
We’d been in our new house just a couple of weeks when my dad—Da—left a letter and, with it, left us. He was gone. And none of us knew what gone meant. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. She called Grandma to try to decipher his note. Whatever sense they made of it wasn’t shared.
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When my ex-husband told me his father was dead, he said it casually. The way you'd mention an alma mater, or that you'd lived abroad for a while.
"My dad died five years ago," he said. We were at work, in a courtroom with no privacy, dressed in our lawyer suits. He reached down to tug up his socks when he said it. I remember searching for significance in how he announced his tragedy while adjusting his outfit. It made me wonder if his father's death was an easy thing to bear. Or if it were so painful he needed to reveal it in the bright bustle of a courtroom, with busied hands. He usually seemed so guarded.
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The platter was lovely. It was a vintage looking black and white interpretation of a sea turtle on melamine. The species was a Kemp’s Ridley. Despite being the rarest and most endangered sea turtle in the world, it is the most common turtle to see stranded on the beaches of Cape Cod.
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My daughter’s fortieth birthday is soon, and I’m looking for something special for her. It’s a tradition in our family. At particular milestones, the mother gifts the celebrant with a special piece of jewelry, other “heirloom” from her own life. I’m looking for a piece of my history—something of me to stay with her as she moves toward all she’s becoming. When I turned forty, my mother surprised me by crocheting a lovely blue throw that I still can snuggle under on cold nights. I don’t have time to create something, so I sort through my jewelry box, looking for just the right thing.
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I’m seated in the passenger seat of my old gray Prius teaching Zahra how to drive. She is in the driver’s seat intently watching the traffic light, waiting for the moment it turns green. I sit quietly so I don’t disturb her concentration. She’s wearing a black blouse with long sleeves and black pants on this hot summer day; her headscarf is absent. I’ve known her long enough to know that she wears a headscarf only when she wants to. “It’s not for religion,” she’s told me before, stopping short of telling me why she sometimes wears it. I’m wearing a short skirt and a tank top in light colors. Despite our different appearances, I feel a strong emotional kinship with her.
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I rush to the quai in the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Flinging my small case on the train, I jump on. Moments later the train pulls away along the track, heading to Nice.
Slumped in my seat, I can relax, breathe, and observe those already settled in my compartment. Business people, couples, and single travellers surround me. One small figure catches my eye—a lady in her early sixties, dressed in a double-breasted camel hair coat, green beret, and smart brown leather gloves. She is elegant, with red lipstick. The slight nervousness of her fidgeting hands is familiar.
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“I’m done,” says Leigh, her voice full of defeat. But she’s angry. There’s always anger.
I heave a sigh, and my shoulders slump. “I think I am, too.”
My eyes are puffy and red, my nose feels like it’s clogged with cement. I need some Advil. And a drink.
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On the darkest dark night of winter, one small light marks the start of the festival.
This darkest night is the longest night, too. In winter, in Maine, daylight can last maybe eight hours—if you’re lucky. And as the moon of the month of Kislev wanes from quarter, to sliver, to new, the Chanukah festival begins.
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What was said: The cancer has returned, Bob. Your pelvis lit up like a Christmas tree on the PET scan. There’s nothing more to do, but go home for hospice.
What it felt like: We’ve scheduled your plane crash, Bob. Prepare to depart at Gate 7D.
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The two-seater Toyota truck rushed through the darkness of early morning in Fayetteville, N.C. We were on our way to the hospital on Fort Bragg’s Army base. My pain made sitting up monumental, whimpering inevitable. I was aware of every centimeter of my body and yet, somehow, also entirely outside of myself. God, it hurt.
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“Did she really say that?” I was shocked, yet I wasn’t. There was a strange quality to my awareness those days, like the water coming to shore and retreating again. I was listening to myself through insubstantial headphones, muted and tilted slightly.
My mama nodded. She kept tinkering about the kitchen, pressing the button on the coffee machine and side-stepping back to the sink. I watched her in silence for long moments, dangling my feet from the bar stool with the nervous energy that took hold of me while I was mulling over my grandmother’s statement.
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On the day of my best friend’s funeral, I received a friendly text from a colleague asking how I was enjoying my summer. Not knowing I was in despair, I did not want to distress them. So, I replied with a number of clichéd nautical terms. I felt like a ship without an anchor. I was lost at sea, set adrift. This proximity to water, without the sight of land, creates disorientation and resignation. My early grief came with a strange apathy born from a newfound loneliness and struggle. Will power and the habit of duty kept me tethered to the deck. I hoped I was not at risk of falling overboard. I am not a strong swimmer.
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When I sent Karen the picture of the great blue heron that had sidled up to me as I sat reading on the beach, she did not yet know that she would die soon. Of course, neither did I. She was sick, and her illnesses were frequent and never satisfactorily explained, but we still believed they would be cured, that someone would figure them out and apply the right treatment.
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Fucking first times, my therapist calls them. First holidays, significant occasions, anniversary of the death. The first time after you’ve lost someone, lost a child. It caught me off guard the first year, things that I didn’t expect took me to my knees. Easter, why did that leave me weeping, lashing out at everyone, feeling like a horrible failure? We weren’t religious and even if we were, Nel was most certainly not. She’d called me from prison the last Easter she was alive, Happy Easter! I tried to chirp at her. She stopped me mid-happy.
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A / Anyone
You want to become anyone, a head placed on any random body. At the county fair, faces from the crowd fill the cut-outs where heads of farmers or cows should be. The souvenir photograph, a reminder of a new identity. You want to go into witness protection, become someone else, anyone else, an image the mirror recognizes. This is normal.
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06.25.2022
Umma understands one out of three of my poems. This is why she declares I sound like a poet. I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her before I gave up on art, small girl of ten brimming with precious audacity not yet oxidized by sharp gust of outside air; recited Jabberwocky in a basement, sang Maya Angelou over the counter of an addressless existence. As long as we had no house, I could not be contained. But I gave up on art when I got my first room, blunt molasses space concretizer of reality, snuffer of dreams. Word became flesh and I hated mine, blunt molasses block of pound. What words could soften the thud of me hitting air?
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The box from James arrived months after my birthday, tattered and misshapen. In it, a black-and-white striped purse, gray scarf, face masks, a knockoff Purple Rain CD, and two cardigans: one small yellow one for my eleven year old daughter and another for me the color of a bright orange Boston autumn leaf where James and I had gone to college together.
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