Dear Harvey,

Yesterday, I drove to work and hoped that the tears wouldn’t ruin my makeup before I even got there. I bent with the Terwilliger Curves and I felt how different my heart is now than 11 years ago. How, in the early months after you died, I longed for a break. Just one emotion at a time, a decrease in intensity, at least. I lived under a landslide of emotions, for months that felt like decades: Grief, despair, anger, terror, isolation. Laughter, awe and pride (mostly at your sister’s milestones and antics), even happiness, at times. Also numbness, surreality, a sense of out-of-timeness. All of it, often all at once. No break. Just earth and mud, rocks and roots, spilling and filling my broken vessel of a heart.

As I hit the straight stretch of road, Mt. Hood camouflaged in clouds to my right, I felt the acute grief of those early days, all softened around the edges now that I’m used to it, used to you being gone. There was a comfort in the way it cut through me, a familiarity, a surefire way to get close to you. There was a beauty in that hard-won softness, an old knowing, a crone-like confidence. There was, as always, the longing for you, like transparent guitar strings, resonate when plucked. And so I plucked at them as the highway curved back around and opened up on the skyline of the South Waterfront, where I’d likely be dropping you at school each morning these days.

Under the towering interchanges as road took me to the right exit, I swallowed hard and dabbed the tears with my first finger, feeling in the farrago of my heart: gratitude. Which soon blended itself so completely in the mire that is become dominate. And then, solitary.

Before I’d left for work yesterday, I had messaged with your uncle, who, on the day you were born, had arrived from San Francisco as soon as humanly possibly. I had messaged with Larissa yesterday, too, about meeting her and Virag at the beach tomorrow and remembered Virag coming to sit with me in the park by our house two days after you died and how it was the first time I’d seen her cry. And how, also in the early days, Larissa sat next to me in the living room as I made a routine call to the doctor and, when I became so distraught and tearful that I couldn’t speak, she took the phone and finished the call for me. How when I was so overwhelmed months later and I started yelling at Vesta for not getting out of her carseat fast enough, Jenn put her arm tight around my shoulders, moved me gently out of the way and took my kid’s hands to lovingly help her out and then gave of us each the hug we needed. When Heather and Emilia, your midwives, came over and called for months just as if there was a newborn to tend to, but instead tended to my newborn grief. When Natalie, my best friend from college, appeared at the entrance of the funeral and I didn’t even know she’d be coming. When Kira showed up at our door with her massage table, more than once, and quietly cared for our aching bodies and hearts. When my Grandma had a tree planted in her front yard for you. When my cousin Dana sent a bouquet, that year and this year, too. How Papa wrote a poem and stood up at your funeral to read it and how your Abuela, his ex-wife, went up there as he cried reading it and put her arm around his shoulders to bolster him. How Michael, my chosen brother, came and parked his car outside of our house many days after work and just sat there, to be there but to not intrude. Our sentry.

So much gratitude and this is only a small fraction of the people and the gestures, the love and support that we received and continue to receive. Without you, and with all that I have discovered, become used to, carried the burden of, I can hold it all now. All at once, in my giant heart that has grown into the shape of your absence. Not only can I hold it, but I revel in it now. I feel so alive, so wholly human, when the landslide comes now. And when the silt settles in the bottom of my heaven sized heart, when I take the next curve, dry-eyed and ready for my work day, all I’m left with is gratitude.

I hit the crest of the Marquam bridge and my beautiful, favorite city opened up its full scape to me. I remembered the moment I felt gratitude and joy, impossibly, on this very day 11 years ago. It’s in my book, so I don’t even have to write it anew. It was one of the best moments of my life and here it is: When you were named.

I love you, boy. Happy 11th birthday.

Love, Mom

(An excerpt from my book in progress: Harvey was born at home and whisked away in an ambulance within a dozen minutes of his birth, as he didn’t have a heartbeat and couldn’t be resuscitated. His dad and my then-husband, Danny, left with him to the closest ER and then once stabilized to a hospital with a better equipped NICU, while I finished labor and recovered enough to get to the hospital.)

“I don’t remember the ride to the NICU, who was driving, which roads we took except that every bounce, every bump, every jostle, hurt. They brought a wheelchair to the parked car and every crack in the sidewalk and bump in the pavement reverberated hot shocks from deep in my belly, down to my torn vagina and into my aching legs. I was wheeled down the uneven sidewalk, through the halls, against the metal grid of where the elevator met the floor. I flinch and wince and suck air in through my gritted teeth. I am getting to my baby.

The NICU doors are locked, secure. Someone pushes a button and we were buzzed in. Big white double doors swing mechanically, opening with a slow grace. The staleness of the medical world. The tan on tan on off-white of the doors and walls and window frames. The buzzing quiet. Through the second set of doors, there is a sign that says we must wash our hands before entering: everyone must, the babies are fragile. I can’t stand up at the sink so someone puts milky foam sanitizer into my hands and it is minty cold as I rub it into my palms. 

“This is Harvey’s mom,” a nurse says. I can hardly believe my ears. 

He named him Harvey. The delight blooms across my entire face. Baby Brother finally has a name. Harvey. The name I chose of the two we had it narrowed down to. We couldn’t agree so decided to wait until we saw him. Certain his countenance would decide. The baby I have never held, the baby who never made a sound, who didn’t open his eyes, laid limp in the arms of his midwives, has a name and, yes, here I am. I am Harvey’s mom.

At some point that morning, alone in one or the other hospital, in shock and sobbing, my nearly forty year-old husband must have been asked what his son’s name was and whether with delay or promptly, with great thought and consideration or just off the tip of his tongue, he said: Harvey. Harvey Richard Walker. And there he was. Born again in the naming, coming to life as he lay dying. Harvey Richard Walker.

I am beaming, ecstatic, joyful, still high from becoming Harvey’s mom just then as I see Danny stumbling down the sterile hallway towards me. He is red faced and sobbing. Arms reaching out to me, zombie-like, desperate and relieved to see me and also not wanting to see me at all. Never wanting to see or know me in this circumstance, in this NICU, in what we are heading towards. I sit there, grinning ear to ear, like an idiot. Still in his house shoes, all these hours later, he falls into my arms, onto the wheel chair and I hold him and say joyfully, “You named him Harvey! You named him Harvey!” over and over again.” And he sobs and sobs.

Dear Papa,

I wish you could have seen her.

Driving to the funeral home, she said “Should I read something, too?”

“Sure,” I said, “if you want to.” Thinking she wouldn’t, thinking there wasn’t enough time between now and the service to write something or find something to read. Thinking, if she went up there and said anything, it would be remarkable: a child, his beloved granddaughter.

She heard me read my eulogy out loud the night before, running it by my partner over the phone. She sat next to me on your bed and listened quietly. And then said, “That was good, Mom,” and leaned her body against mine, as, together, we missed you like we never had before. Like we will from now on.

We stood in the receiving line, next to each other. We greeted all of your people who were able to come: guys you worked with at the liquor store; your mentee and chosen brother Jack who flew up from North Caroline; Jeanie, Grams’ housecleaner of 20-plus years who also had become like family; former IBM coworkers, your cousins and in-laws, friends of your brothers, family of your late sister-in-law, Colin and Taney, Ruth and Ralph, Nancy from NYC, my mom her brother and spouses. I introduced Vesta to everyone, even your buddy Lenzo, pointing out that he had been the most convincing Santa Claus ever, who came to your house years ago at Christmas and left her in awe and delight as she squirmed onto his lap and whispered her list in his ear.

She had chosen an uncharacteristic whimsical white, taffeta dress from Target the day before to wear to your funeral. She paired it with a heavy, black velvet and lace cape and dark, platform boots from the thrift store, the latter very characteristic at 13, as was the winged eye makeup.

She politely greeted each person she’d never known or even seen before, each a familiar and welcome face to me on this particular day, beloveds and constants from my childhood. I’ve been gone 20 years, but they all remember me. They all still love me. And they love her. Saying things like, “I haven’t seen you since you were this high!” and “I’ve heard so much about you!” and calling her “Little Vesta” which you must have said to differentiate her from your mom when bragging about her milestones and accomplishments to the people who saw you through your 78 years.

Vesta grew weary after a longer span of time than I expected and rather than running off with her cousins who were playing in the back of the room, she went to her seat in the front row of the funeral home, slouched down, and pulled her phone out. She stayed like that until we all took our seats and I asked her to put her phone away.

As Reverend Lea conducted your service, she whispered to me “Is this good?” and passed me her phone. In her notes app, was the eulogy she had just written for you, in those 20 minutes. I couldn’t breathe as I read it, the world reduced to she and I and her words glowing form the small screen. She wrote about how she had decided to stop crying when she was 6 or 7, how she stopped seeing the point of her tears (a devastating insight into her father’s and my inability to tend to her sadness and grief for so many of her formative years, but that’s another essay). She continued that these past two weeks, the one you were dying in and the one you were gone for, she saw all of the adults crying. She witnessed our true expressions, how it brought us closer together, how we held each other and the tears soon and often became laughter. How maybe crying wasn’t so bad. At the end of the these paragraphs, she wrote a note to herself: “Tell stories about Papa:”

She was looking up at me with anticipatory eyes and I whispered back, “It’s amazing”, swallowed hard, took her hand and looked back up to the podium where Rev. Lea was inviting me up to read my eulogy (in full, below). After me, came your brother-in-law, reading a letter from your dear friend, Andy, who couldn’t be there that day. As he sat down, Vesta took a deep breathe, stood and walked the short distance to the microphone to face a room full of people who she’d only just met and who love her, some directly and some by proxy.

And she did it. My tears fell in equal time to my heart beating in astonishment and admiration. This 13th year has been the hardest for her. Her brain and body awash in hormones that brought moods and thoughts and feelings she’s never had before; forging an identity in a world that pulls at teens more than it ever has; choosing to move from her small, insular charter school she’d been at since kindergarten to go to the public middle school with four times as many children; interrupting her second month of school to come back to New York to be with her great grand-mother as she died and again at Christmas when you were mostly in your chair, tired and frail, and she and I went to the museum, the grocery and for walks uncharacteristically without you; and the battles inside her that she faced mostly silently and alone, me on the outside, scared, trying to reach her but finding no way in until I finally (finally) started to simply listen quietly and fiercely. She had changed so much over this year, fearful to approach the counter in retail stores, speaking in whispers when addressed by wait staff at restaurants or doctors at her appointments, too insecure to reach out to new friends at her new school, dressed in oversized clothes, dark makeup and hair in her face in an attempt to disappear. My child, who had danced and sang in the living room with abandon, who made us crack up at her spontaneous, singular observations of life, who laughed easily and made friends even easier, had become shy, withdrawn, small and afraid.

Until she stood up there. Until she read the beautiful words she had written. Vulnerable and close to her quick. I don’t think I breathed the whole time she read. She stood up there tall and confident. She commanded the room. Not a dry eye in the house, only the sound of rapt attention and a grieving child. I thought, “Papa would be so proud of her,” still not used to past-tense you. The thought familiar when living 3,000 miles away from you, like I’d be able to tell you all about it later.

Papa, this would have been the proudest moment, possibly of your life. The irony shredding me but also, of course. Where else would she shine so bright? What other circumstance would allow her to peak her head out of her adolescent armor but to share about her one and only, Papa. Now gone. Disappeared, like the phantom of her brother but with a million memories to hang on to.

She got to the “Tell stories about Papa” part and your loved ones shifted in their seats and into humor. She told about how she called you a warthog for your snoring before we even knew she knew what a warthog was. She told about going shopping for all the ingredients and making homemade caramel corn together in your kitchen one Christmas. She told about watching movies together, sifting through until we found one that we could all agree on finally and then you promptly falling asleep in your chair not long after it started. Everyone was smiling and laughing through their tears. I watched my kiddo up there, my love for her matched only by yours, and I not only saw her return to herself, I saw who she would be, who she is becoming. I saw this glimpse of everything being okay. That she will find her way to herself. That this early teen time is not forever. That she knows things in her bones that she is too young to know but that she will make good use of in her life, fodder and marrow.

I wish you could have seen her, too.

Love, Monica

P.S.: After your service and at the reception, people kept coming up to me, remarking on how remarkable she was, how brave and composed, how well spoken and thoughtful. How she made them cry and laugh, all at once. The looked me in the eye to say this, put their hand on my shoulder. They said without saying how lucky I am to have her, to have had you. At first, I was taken aback, expected praise of my own eulogy, as it had been so hard to write and I thought so meaningful in the end. And it was. But it was also a full circle moment, another irony , although that’s not the right word. It’s that while we are at your end, we are at her beginning.

I would do anything tho keep us all here together, for much, much longer. Squeeze that boy for me and give Gram a kiss. I miss you forever. Thank you for literally everything.

__________________________________

Eulogy for Papa by Monica Welty. April 14, 2023. Coleman & Daniels Funeral Home. Endicott, NY.

I just want to stand here and convey to you the countless memories and moments that I shared with my dad in a way that makes them as deeply meaningful, hilarious, heart wrenching, inspiring and life sustaining as they do for me. I want the unique bond that we shared to not live only inside me now, but to be felt by each of you so that it is not lost, so that I am not alone with it. With the most precise language, I want to impress upon your hearts the profound impact Papa had on my life: who I am, how I work, how I’ve created my family, how I find adventure and joy despite devastating hardships. 

But after sitting with my father last week as he was dying, I know that I don’t need to do that at all. After listening to him call many of you, tell me stories about you, share texts he sent, read the comments on Facebook that you left him, I know that each of you has a Rick-shaped impression on your hearts already. That each of you have been uniquely touched and influenced by this humble but great man that was my Papa. And that we will each go forward in our lives alone with that, together with that.

I had a boy, Harvey, who died in my arms when he was only two days old. Being a helpless witness to a newborn bravely facing the inevitable we will all face, taught me that we do not have to be afraid to die. If he could do it, we can do it. And just weeks shy of 10 years later, my father’s death taught me this again and in a new way. His death was vulnerable and brave. I listened to him tell dozens of people how much he loved them, how much they meant to him. I listened to him say final goodbyes with a grace and care and authenticity that I have never witnessed before. I especially want to mention the men on the other end, his brothers and best friends, his sibling and sons, who received these emotional conversations, who choked up, who said “I love you, too,” despite all of their cultural training to do none of that. It was gift to him and to all of us who were there to hear it.

My father gave us all a gift- in the way he lived: bringing good music, delicious food, fun adventures, thoughtful discussions, a passion for his work, a commitment to understanding, if not agreeing, with others, fierce loyalty, generosity and an endless, deep love for his family, friends and country. My father gave us all a gift in the way he died: on how we stay connected to each other despite time and distance, on how to treasure each other, on how to share the most beautiful and heartbreaking moments without wavering from who we are or what is happening to us.

There was some fear around his bedside that he had given up, lost hope, but what I saw and heard from him in his final few days was that there was no hope, he knew he was going to die and shortly, he was ready, at peace and that that was okay. And so I thought to myself “What are we supposed to do now? What is left when there is no longer hope?” and what he answered me in word and action was: togetherness. When there is no hope, we just stay in it together.

My words are waterlogged. Too long in a world I’m only meant to be in for a short while.

When my son died, words flowed out like snowmelt waterfalls. More questions than answers. Trying to make sense, work it out on the page. A shunting of the grief. Now, words pool at my borders. Stuck there. Too much to be said. No words for any of it.

---

They both became skeletons in their skin, my dad and my grandmother. The slow starvation of dying.

---

My grandma was a turtle in her turtleneck on her death bed. It was early October when I walked into her room and said, “You’re ready for Christmas!” because I didn’t know what else to say after our foreign intimacy: hospital bed greeting of side-hug and bungled kiss on the cheek. After “Oooh, I’m so sorry you had to come all this way!” After, when even with people who have been our people since before we were born, there is an awkward silence. There is a death bed between us.

“Whaaat?,” she said in her I-didn’t-hear-you-voice. Not her astonished “what?!.” Not her I-don’t-understand-you “what.” This one is breathier. It’s drawn out.

“Candy canes,” I smiled and pointed to her shirt.

“Oh yes!” she laughed as she looked down in slow motion, took a a few too many beats to register the red-on-white pattern, and more still to run her fingers, bones Saran-wrapped in skin, over the thin, textured, bleached-out hospital blanket. Wiping it clean of its wrinkles. Like when she used to tug at the edges of the placemats on her kitchen table before lining up their edge to the table edge and then tapping its center with four of her full-figured fingers, an approval of orderliness. Like that, but slow. And decades later. And dying.

The skin on her neck was long drapes of fabric, sinking into her collar. A mock turtle neck. She’d close one eye, turn her head to one side and then jut it out to try to get a glimpse of the loud roommate behind the temporary divider. My daughter and I would share a laugh with our eyes and stifle a real one. She looked like a turtle, shifting its little head from its shell on its spindly neck, ready to locate its leafy prey. We’d laugh at our mock turtle Gram. Our dying Gram.

Later, she would exclaim, “I outlived the queen!” and purse her lips in her whadda-ya-think-of-that face. And she did. They were the same age: 96. My daughter had said the same thing on the plane, as we flew across country, hours after hearing of her heart attack and return to her assisted living for comfort care. “Gram outlived the queen!”

“She sure did,” I said.

“You sure did,” I said.

---

My dad’s handlebar mustache was now wider than his smile. “Bring the grooming kit,” he texted from the CV-ICU, “This thing is bothering me.” Nothing should bother him so my aunt cut it off with dull nail scissors, which was all I could find. There must have been a grooming kit in one of his bathrooms but I scoured and couldn’t find it. You can’t always see what’s right in front of you, especially at times like these.

A few days earlier on the phone, I’d said, “It’s called wasting, Papa,” foolishly trying to educate him from 2,807 miles away, “You have to eat.” He wasn’t hungry. He’d lost a lot of his taste in the past 6 or 8 months, maybe a year even. “Half a yogurt on Thursday,” he said, like he was proving me wrong on Saturday.

You can’t know if he’s dying through the phone. But then my cousin called and said, “He looks like Gram did and not because of the resemblance.” Honestly, you have to hit me over the head to see it, right there, in front of me.

He’d been looking like her for months, maybe over a year. Every time I’d bought him a shirt for a present in the last few years, it had been a size too big. Not four months ago at Christmas, he’d repeated again, “That’s okay. It can be a night shirt.” You have to hit me over the head but also there is a room in my mind, maybe a closet, maybe a hallway, where a light does come on. When I hear “not because of the resemblance” I know she means he looks like she looked five months earlier, when she was dying. But I turn that light off quick. Five to ten years the doctor had said, not even a year and a half ago. Switch flipped. Hope is more real than the evidence before me.

“It’s called wasting, Papa. Your body goes from eating fat to eating muscle. You have to eat.”

“Okay,” he said, “send me the protein powder.”

I also sent him a 90 day supply of multivitamins. How are you supposed to know he is dying over the phone? There aren’t even cords or wires connecting us anymore. Just frequency. Just air. Nothing, really.

---

The day before we left to return to Portland, she was so deeply asleep I couldn’t wake her. A tortoise without her shell. A shriveled body of my Gram. Just yesterday, she was asking about my daughter’s cross country team, remembered her dad had gotten married last spring and asked how the wedding was. She was in and out those last few days. Awake and then asleep and then awake again, saying several times with a start, “Am I still I alive?!” My daughter and I, laughing with our eyes and our voices, would say, “Yes, Gram, you’re still alive.”

I began to wonder where she went when she was asleep. She seemed to be farther away than a regular nap, than a normal night’s sleep even. Her breathing became more labored. Her mouth slack and open. The chapstick and mouth swabs abandoned on the rolling tray table next to her adjustable bed. If she was more alive, she would have been snoring. But no, this was the laboring of dying. This was the being born into the next world.

We sat there together, my dad and stepmom, my daughter and I, and I put my hand on her hand and we watched her, not saying anything to each other or to her. The spaces between not breathing at all and then taking a breath lengthening. Once she didn’t inhale for so long, I thought maybe that was it, her last breath. I nodded to my dad who sat forward in his chair, my daughter’s eyes widened and I could almost feel the clenching in her chest in mine. But my Gram gasped again and we settled back in, my daughter telling me later that she was terrified she’d die while we sat there. I said, “I understand. It’s scary. But I was hoping she would. I don’t want her to die alone.” And she said, “Yeah, but I didn’t want her to die when we were with her either.” Me, either. Both.

---

My dad called dozens of people. In the slurred speech of the old, the sick, the dying, he said “Goodbye” at the end. Like you do when you end every phone call. Except these were weighted. Over the few days of calls, he honed his craft. If the person on the other end was choked up, if it was awkward and hard, he’d switch to “I’ll see you on the other side.” and somehow that would free them to say, “Okay, goodbye, Rick.” It was miraculous.

On one of the first days when he was making calls, I walked in to his hospital room and started tidying, plugging in gadgets, asking for the doctor. To the wife of his best friend from growing up he said, “Hi Margaret,” with a pause for when she surely said, “Hi Rick, how are you?”, he said, “Well, I’m dying.” Another, longer pause and then “No, I’m not kidding.” and then she clearly and quickly went to get her husband. When he hung up, I said, “Maybe you should ease in a little,” and we laughed.

After that, he became a pro at his goodbyes, at his dying. It was one of the most incredible and beautiful things I will ever see. Person after person: how much he loved them, reminisces and laughter, apologies now and then like sprinkles on ice cream and then a pause for the truest and most real goodbye they’d ever said. “Until we meet agin.” Just listening, I have never felt so alive as an essential part of me lay dying.

---

I left my Gram there. On her death bed to die, alone. The nurse came in to give her morphine that last day and I’d hoped that that would rouse her. It did not. She moaned a little as the mechanical bed jutted into motion, her head a little further back so the nurse could syringe the medicine into her gums. She went back to her breathing/not breathing, her living/dying, relatively uninterrupted.

My dad said “Okay.” In his way that means, I’m done so we’re all done. It’s a tone I’ve seemingly always known.

“Okay,” I said in the reluctant tone I always make in agreement.

They said their goodbyes. My daughter, tentatively touching her great grandma’s now tiny hand. “Bye, Gram,” she whispered and joined her Nona and Papa in the hallway.

I looked at my grandma, one of my best friends in this life, my champion and advocate, my safe harbor in the storm of me early years, the one who said “You’re moving to Cortland?” a town not 40 minutes away, when I told her I was moving to Portland, nearly 3,000 miles away. The one who compared her opening a store in Binghamton, a small city not 15 minutes from her house, to my cross-country uprooting. The one who had dishes of hard candy with soft centers wrapped in foil that made them look like strawberries. The one who let me push the buttons on the cash register at her store and made me cups of hot cocoa from envelopes of powder in styrofoam cups and hot water brewed in her mini coffee machine. The one who sat with me for hours over tea at her kitchen table, sharing her life with me and mine with her, taking me seriously at every turn of my adolescence and young adulthood. The one who picked me and my cousin up late every August and gave as each 100 whole dollars to buy back-to-school clothes. The one who taught me to fear and respect money and its inevitable loss and perpetual, potential gain. The one laying there, chin up, mouth agape, dark hair finally graying beyond the temples, wrinkled turtle skin along her brow, around her eyes, rippling out from her mouth. The one here for just shy of 97 years. The one.

I leaned over and said, “I love you, Gram,” not able to add a goodbye (I still had a few months before my dad would teach me how). I kissed her forehead, something I am sure she had done to me countless times when I was younger and shorter than her but that I had never done to her. I wanted there to be more than this.

She woke a little, irritated by what she thought was another interruption by yet another nurse. I said “It’s okay, Gram. It’s me, Monica.” And as she fell back away from me, fell back away from this life and this world, she relaxed into the sigh of delight she gave each time I called her and announced myself, each time she received good news. It’s an “oooooh” of a young girl, born in her childhood, I imagine, when given a rare sweet by her mother. Perhaps it’s a sigh she learned from her mother, dead when my Gram was just 13. It is the sound incarnate of pride and joy. It trailed off with her to wherever she went next.

---

My dad went and sat with her the next night. The autumn sun had set. She never woke. He sat next to his mom, just 18 years his senior. His own withering well on its way. Our collective family sigh of relief that she would die before him, not suffer one more loss in a life full of them. Like all full lives.

He sat with her and he put his hands on hers. He told me later, “I just sat there quietly with her. I didn’t say a word. I held her hand and I counted her breaths. And, you know, there was a rhythm to it. About 30 seconds breathing and about a minute without.”

In that image, I saw this: A young woman, her husband at war, her new baby in her arms, almost exactly 77 years from that very night, not 20 minutes from where they sat now. She held her little boy, rocking him in the night, putting one of her fingers in the way of his fist so he might hold on to it. As he fell asleep in her arms, she rocked him and counted his breaths, waiting for their rhythm to develop, waiting for him to be far enough away in sleep that she could lay him in his crib and tuck her own, tired self into bed. Their lives together only just beginning. Never imagining this inverse. Never imagining how he would comfort her at her end.

She died a small handful of hours later.

---

The last place and the only place I wanted to be was sitting alone with my dad in the blue-light illuminated hospital room. The last place and the only place I wanted to be was watching my father labor. His chin up, his moth agape, what was left of his musculature laboring for breath, the crinkle-fabric skin tightening around his clavicle with each exertion of an inhale. I wished to be anywhere else in the world and I couldn’t imagine not being there with him, sitting with him, keeping him company, hoping he knew I was there. Tentatively putting my hand over his, afraid to disturb this process, this last hard work. His hand was cold, his heart slowing the push of warm blood so that it no longer reaches his hands or feet, not even his shins or forearms by then. I had to touch them. To make sure this was real. Really happening. Feel it for myself.

I curled my fingers around his thin palm and I tried to count his breaths. No rhythm emerged. No sense was made. No beautiful allegory except that before he fell into his morphine coma, he had told me, again, about going to sit with Gram that night. And the day before that he had looked at me, one side of his mouth retreating to keep the tears at bay and said “You and I are like Gram and me.” I wished I had smiled a little and nodded and said “We sure are.” But instead, I wrinkled my brow and cocked my head and said “Really?,” not finding the longevity in us, not the proximity, missing the connection.

“Mhmm.” he nodded. “We are,” having to convince me but being too tired to, too dying. Having had to convince of too many things for too many years. Always met with my dismissal, my cynicism. Until weeks or month or years would pass and I”d come back around and tell it to him like it was my idea. Eventually, he told me “I just quit saying ‘I told you so’,” and then leaning back in his chair crossing his arms over his chest, above his then-belly, lifting his eye brows in interest and curiosity, he said, “Now I just do this and say, ‘Oh really? Great idea!’ and then you explain it to me more!,” And we laughed, even me, because it was true.

We are. My dad and me, my Gram and him. Right there in front of me.

So I sat with his efforted, asynchronized breathing and I pulled out my phone and started writing his obituary. I sat with him and began to tell the story of his life. One milestone at a time, one achievement after another. The way he loved this life and lived it enthusiastically. The way he tried to teach me to do as well. To overcome the foreignness of my bittersweet nature he thought maybe he could parent out of me. I wrote the words his friends and family would read, old acquaintances or colleagues might stumble upon, a genealogical researcher might go looking for. While he did the work of leaving his body, I began to write about him in the past tense.

He died a small handful of hours later.

---

Here are the words. I am lighter now. My body resorbing the excess. And then you, taking some of it in for me. Perhaps, finding your story in these watery words. Hopefully, though, by the time they reach you, they are gaseous. Just air.

Dear Harvey,

This afternoon, Karrie rustled me out of bed and away from the TV and sent me down to the nail salon for a little TLC. I was quiet in the massage chair and just tried to feel my feet, my legs, my toes. I tried to feel comfortable. In my skin today but also in the nail salon. I know about body mechanics and always worry about these folks sitting on backless stools, hunched over, inhaling toxic chemicals day after day for not a lot of money. Working on privileged white women, for the most part, like me. I always tell them I do massage, have to so they know why I need my nails short and buffed not polished, but also because I want them to know I work, not like them, but similarly. With my body, for other people. The workers and the owners are often from Vietnam, as they are here, and I am always astonished how quietly they speak, and are heard, across the normally loud rooms. Their words ending in soft bongs that volley back and forth to each other. Occasionally laughter or knowing sighs from everyone in the room, even those certainly out of ear shot, I’d imagined.

Today, it’s just me and the two owners. The woman so tenderly massaging, scrubbing, scrapping and polishing. Laughing gently when my foot pulls away from ticklishness. Confirming the towels are not too hot around my legs, after she has softly tossed them from hand to hand because they are too hot in hers. When she’s done, she speasks to the man working there and tell me to come to his table. 

I have seen him before, older than me but with a younger person’s esthetic. A fitted red t-shirt tucked into jeans with a studded belt and white embroidery embelishments, an Abercrombie and Fitch vibe. His hair is perfectly coifed but also looks effortless, a gray splash perfectly placed for sophistication.

I’d rather stay in the massage chair with the woman doing my hands instead. I’d rather sit there because I’ve done my best to be comfortable here, and in my skin, and he feels a little to “bro” for my energy any day, but especially today. I sit, the pandemic clear plastic shield between us and he is watching Titanic 2 on the iPad propped up at his station. He begins to tell me about the plot and how it’s different from the first one and while I genuinely wonder aloud, “There’s a Titanic TWO?”, this relevation, his explanation and even his earnest attempt to draw me into this move he is clearly enjoying, sinks me a little deeper. I want to leave. I don’t want to be her anymore, my hand in his. It’s one of those days. I also almost started crying at the grocery because I couldn’t find the zucchini for close to three whole seconds. It’s your birthday and your sister is away and you died. I don’t want to pretend to care about a second movie about a ship that already sank. 

I ask anyway, “Does the main character die?” 

He smirks without looking at me, “Only the man again. The girl survives.” 

The woman is now cleaning her instruments in the sink behind him and she looks over at me with a wink and chuckle. I reciprocate. 

I don’t know how we get there, must be something about the ship, but now he is telling me about crossing the Pacific Ocean in a boat. “Fourteen by eight. 104 people,” he says. Not like it’s everyday but also, not like it’s not. “The Pacific Ocean is big,” he says, filing quickly and careful my short nails even shorter, not looking up. I want to know everything. I want to know this impossible feat of statistically improbable survival.

He was 13 or 14. Remembers every minute. The person piloting this tiny boat worked for the American navy. 103 people saw nothing on the horizon, nothing in the sky, nothing on the wind but he saw a storm coming. “There was nothing,” he said, pressing the cuticles off the half moon of my nail in swift, tiny, expert movements. “We go to Malaysia. He says: ‘We have to stop. Storm is coming’. But we see nothing,” rolling one of my fingers after the other over his hand as he works. “But, next day, we see white on the ocean. The waves, white on top. We would have died but he saved us.”

7 days and 8 nights. I don’t ask about what happened before the boat. I don’t ask what was worse.

“Do you know there are flying fish?,” I nod but wish I had pretended to not. As soon as my head is still, I know he knows far more about flying fish, and survival, then I ever will, “They have a fin on the back. They fly. Fish that fly, maybe 2 feet off the water. Thousands of them.”

“You caught them?” I ask.

“They fly into our boat. It is a miracle. They fly right into our boat. Hundreds of them. We can’t cook them in the boats so we dry them in the sun and then we eat them. That’s how we survive. 104 people when we run out of food.”

“And water?” I as. He uses a sharp tool to clip the tiniest pieces of skin away from the sides of my nails. I don’t even feel it. 

“Rain water,” he barely pauses into his next thought but I have enough time to register that he was, in fact, in a storm. More than one to survive a week with no water. I can’t imagine that rain in a tiny boat after fleeing what you are fleeing does not feel like a storm. And also a blessing. And also how you will survive. By opening your mouth and sticking out your tongue to catch some. 104 people crossing a “big” ocean, mouths open, chins up, to the sky.

“That’s how we survived. Flying fish and rain water. When I am in high school, I look in the encyclopedia and I learn that there are flying fish. And I learn all about them. I thought they were a miracle.”

“They were a miracle.” I say, quickly, without thinking. 

He laughs and nods and agrees, “They were a miracle.” Like he’s just realizing, as he oils my nail beds, but also like we’re talking about an underdog sports team coming back for the win. 

Just because a flying fish seems less mythological after he learned they exist doesn’t make them any less of a miracle. Fish that fly: miraculous. Staying alive because fish flew into your boat: also miraculous. Survival: miraculous.

He ended up in Union City, CA, near Fremont and Hayward he tells me, two towns I have heard of after living in San Francisco for close to a decade over a decade ago. He told me stories of a $300 light yellow Pinto; of cutting school, getting in fights, forging signatures on school documents because his dad and step-mom didn’t speak English; divorce and abandonment left him homeless, alone, and sleeping in that Pinto at 16; Dunkin’ Donuts for $1.20 a dozen and $.50 for bottomless coffee; a $30 monthly gym membership so he could swim and shower; garage beer parties in paper cups in case the police drove by. Friends, white friends, he was the only Asian person, he says, but the memories he shares are only fond. Stories only of shenanigans and comradery. Stories of belonging in this land that must have been only slightly less foreign than nothing but ocean for days. The hardship and heartbreak, the trauma and loss, must have been intense. But he shares with me the highlights, what got him through, his joy. 

I want to ask 1000 questions. What happened between high school and now, California and Oregon. How did you get from $3.15/hour at McDonald’s to owning your own business with your family. Who is your family now? 

We walk to the check out together. I want to blurt out, “Today is my son’s birthday and he died.” I want to say this has nothing to do with anything you have told me. These events are utterly unrelated. Mine feels small now, still signifigant, but it has some perspective now, some scale. That will change, but not right now. Now I see where I fit. My ocean is big, too, but only metaphorical and metaphorically so. I want to say “You and I have been through some shit.” Not even close to the same. But shit. Instead, he tells me the total. Back tracks to break down what each service costs. I add a big tip and they both they thank me. “Thank you for telling me your story,” I say. He laughs and says some kind of pleasantry that we are supposed to say in his second language but, for maybe the second time this whole time, he looks me in the eye and I see his whole face and he sees mine. Despite our masks.

Humans are amazing, Harvey. We survive and we don’t and we find ourselves in the same place at the same time and we share our stories and we don’t and we are less alone. We are less sad. You will always be gone and he will never forget how big the ocean is and how there are fish that fly. And, for as long as we live, it will be in astonishment. 

Happy birthday, son. I love and miss you so much that we don’t even have words for it. I love and miss you “big.”

Love,

Mom

This piece was written and included musical interludes within the text (noted below) for the 5th annual reading for Harvey. It was held on Zoom this Covid-year and the theme was “Grief To A Beat: Stories With Music That Shaped and Saved Us .” It featured four writers: Anne Gudger (accompanied on the upright bass by her husband, Scott Gudger), Kate Suddes, Meg Weber and myself. As always, even held virtually, it was one of the most meaningful days of my year. Thank you to the writers, the musicians, Chadson Barton who graciously arranged the music for my piece, my friends who gave tech support, and all who attended.

2007 – You Belong To My Heart

Save for Billy Joel, Tom Petty and old-time country, Danny and I didn’t agree on music much. His whiny, white-boy indie rock grated my nerves, especially paired with the grainy pfft, pfft, pfft of the record player he played them on. He was even less tolerant of my queer, feminist, singer-songwriters, as curved and resonant as the guitars they wielded.

When it was time to pick a song for the first dance at our wedding, I searched for weeks for something we both might like, something with the appropriate sentiment, something we could actually dance to. Billy Joel, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson yielded nothing that fit all three categories. I had love song after love song I’d love but he’d hate. Finally, on my way to work one morning, my shuffling iPod landed on a strong contender.

“How about ‘You Belong To My Heart?,” I excitedly asked that night. 

He looked up from his New Yorker, “That Old 97’s tune?”

I beamed and bounced a little on the balls of my feet.

“Yep!” He snapped his hand into a fist, pumped it in the air in the universal sign of triumph and shuffled-danced his way over to me. We had found our song. 

2012 – You Belong To Me

Our toddler dances on her squat, little legs to the music playing in the kitchen. I sway my hips and rounding belly right along with her, as I chop vegetables to roast for dinner. 

I sang to Vesta when she was in my belly. I stood in the shower, feeling its hot medicine soothe the new aches my body had from accommodating her. I wrapped my arms around the skin and muscle walls of her watery home. I sang as I swayed: “My sweet one/I call you my sweet one,/You’re my only true sweet one,” a favorite little ditty by a favorite band, Phish. 

I made fetal Vesta a playlist. As I drove to work each day, Lauryn Hill sang to us about all her love being her infant son now. The Be Good Tanyas and I assured Vesta that “the littlest bird sings the prettiest song.” But it was my beloved Ani Difranco who had the most important message for us. Me, a person who has never been too sure of this world nor my place in it, I steeled myself to show this baby that she belonged here. Hoping she could hear me despite my swooshing heartbeat and all that gooey water in her ears, Ani and I sang: “You’re going to love this world/If it’s the last thing I do. . .”

With so much more to tend to now, Baby Brother, this little guy swishing around inside me, didn’t have a playlist. He didn’t even have one song. He heard Puff The Magic Dragon and Old McDonald in the car for Vesta and the only singing was the lullabies that put her to sleep. But here in the kitchen came this song I kept hearing on the radio: “I belong to you/You belong to me/You’re my sweetheart”. 

“There it is, little guy,” I thought to him. “There’s your song. It’s sweet and it’s true. And the best I can do until you’re here.”

I didn’t hear any of the other words to The Lumineer’s Ho Hey, just the ones he and I needed, just the chorus, while chopping and dancing and growing inside me.

2013 – I Don’t Know Where I Belong 

After he died, I lay in my bed. Empty. My body so recently full of all that blood and all that baby. My arms holding tight around what was left of him: the skin and muscle of my own belly. His only home.

My new friends, mother’s whose babies had also died, sent me songs that had brought them some comfort. Songs about absence and starlight. Songs with an endless ache. 

Willie Nelson and I sang Eddie Veder’s “Just Breathe”: “Did I say that I want you?/Did I say that I need you?/Stay with me/Let’s just breathe.” My baby never took a breath on his own. Never cried or cooed. His silent soul cocooned in his failing flesh. Perfect on the outside, ravaged on the inside. I needed a reminder to breathe.

My uterus had torn open when he was being born. Blood uselessly spilled into my abdomen and away from the placenta, the cord, his body, his brain. Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy. There are no songs about that. No songs about wasted blood and birth accidents. No words to be put to this particular music. 

2013 – You Don’t Belong To Me

On Independence Day, two months after my son died, I drove downtown for a class at the dance studio that was a second home. Autopilot and rote, it was a place I could take the things I didn’t know what to do with: my body and my grief and the way it was slowly and excruciatingly smoldering inside me.

The instructor told us that the theme for today’s class was Freedom, of course. I stood in the shaky shell of my body and stayed on the outside of everything, where I lived now. On the outside of the joy I saw so clearly beaming from the other dancer’s faces, from the enthusiasm of their movements, from the way they sang out loud to the songs the teacher played.

At the height of class’ playlist, George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90” came on, loud and in all its pop-anthem glory: “All we have to do now!” George and the teacher and some of the other dancers belted out, “Is take these lies and make them true!”

“All we have to seeeeeeeee!,” My eyelids heavy from weeks of crying, my zombie-body making the steps the teacher made, my lips forming silent words: “Is that I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong me! Yeah yeah!”

My boney scaffolding collapsed. I hit the wooden floor boards in a crumpled child’s pose. He didn’t belong to me. Not ever. He was not mine to keep, not the corporeal guarantee I thought myself entitled to. I began to loosen my grip on the filaments of ownership that I thought were cement. I began to let my son go.  I howled my prayer from the floor, in tune with the chorus: “FREEDOM! FREEDOM! FREEDOM!”

2014 – You Don’t Belong To Me – Part 2

Maybe it’s hindsight or maybe my memory serves and the way her name leaving his lips sounding like wind chimes on a warm spring afternoon, really did betray him. Or maybe I was listening for it. Listening so closely now to the way he formed his words, each lilt and tone, the way one becomes vigilant for deceit after betrayal. After the betrayal unfolds itself in front of you like a cartoon shopping list, page after page, comically slapping to the floor.

I stood there, suspended in time, her name still quaking the air between us and I knew. In that moment, I saw the exact contours of this new, next woman. The way she would fit snuggly between us. The way, whether or not she was a perfect fit, he would leave this life we had forced our malformed selves into. And, one year and one month after our son died, he did. 

Because I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me, yeah yeah.

2015 – I Belong To You

I didn’t believe in love anymore, not until the whole world tornadoed into my body the first time I saw the woman who soon would become the love of my life.

It wasn’t so much a courtship as it was a remembering. As it was a catching up, as if we had always known each other but had just been out of touch our whole lives. It was a rediscovery of a deep belief in a true and lasting love we had each longed for and, eventually, given up on, figuring it a childish fairytale and settling into first marriages that matched us good enough but not very well.  

Not very long after we started kissing, we started kissing with our eyes open. Relief waterfalled down the front of me. Seeing her up close, finally. Feeling her soft lips puzzle piecing mine, I felt whole again. I felt whole for the first time. 

Cocooned in my room, glowing golden by the shaded lamp, we lay nearly nose to nose, quiet and listening to the playlist she created and continually evolved for us. Quiet and listening to the stories of each others lives told only through our eyes. Breathing and breathless. Our bodies, snug. Curved and resonating in perfect harmony.

In that moment, the song we were quite sure Brandi Carlisle had written just for us shuffled its way into the room. Without a plan, we both began to sing to each other, right there next to each other, up close, and also across all time and space. Across heartbreak and loss and betrayal. Into the now. Into allowing. Into love. We sang:

“If I had all my yesterdays I’d give ’em to you too

I belong to you now

I belong to you”

Musical annotation:

1. You Belong to my Heart by the Old 97s —— :09-:22

2. My Sweet One by Phish —— :47-:53

3. The Littlest Bird by The Be Good Tanyas —— :53-:57

4. Landing Gear by Ani Difranco ——— 1:09-1:17

5. Ho Hey by The Lumineers ———— :53-59

6. Just Breathe by Willie Nelson (ft. Lukas Nelson) —— :57-1:05

7. Ho Hey by The Lumineers ———— :36-:52 

8. Freedom! ’90- remastered by George Michael —— 3:39-4:07

9. I belong to you by Brandi Carlisle——- 4:14-4:30

This week, I got to visit with my grandmother. And by “got to”, I mean “Got To”. Like I’m going to be 42 in a few weeks and she turned 94 in November. I mean Got To like not one second of it did I take for granted. I mean I get that I am beyond lucky to have this woman in my life, for my whole life so far. Like I get that I have been able to take her presence for granted. For years.

But not this week. Not this week, when I tried to pawn my daughter, Vesta, off on my parents and see her alone. Logistically, that didn’t work out so I brought a brand new book for my 10-year-old. I brought the knowing that she’d have one of my Grandmother’s search-a-word activity books to keep her occupied. I brought my daughter, knowing that she’d hear every word spoken between granddaughter and grandmother, even though she’d be occupied with a brand new book and her great-grandmother’s puzzles. Knowing that she’d hear whatever we talked about like only a 10-year-old can hear it.

As a side note, I also say  “visit” because that’s what my Grandma Vesta says. That’s what she said about her best friend of 82 years who died a couple of weeks ago: “I’d go over there every Tuesday, she’d make tea and we’d sit and visit.” She talked about how they talked every week on the phone since my Gram moved into the “assistant” living, as she called it for longer than she probably should have. The day before, when my father had been there with us, he’d lovingly scoffed at that admonition: “More like every day. You talked to Shirley every day, Mom.” She shrugged him off. Like she does. When he corrects her. Like he does.

On that day, when Daughter Vesta and I were fresh off a red-eye and we all crowded into her room, me, Vesta, my dad and step-mother, at the assisted living facility she’s been in for half of a decade, Gram off-handedly mentioned that she Had To See A Psychiatrist. “Yes,” my dad said sheepishly. Like he should have told me. Like we should be in better touch. Like we don’t communicate like we used to.  Like I should already know this, it was significant enough. “She had a rough time for awhile there.”

“Yes.” Grandma Vesta says. “I couldn’t stop crying for awhile there. And I didn’t know why. It was since…like…Veteran’s Day or something.” She swiped her hand like she couldn’t remember exactly. Like it was nothing. Like the significance of the date, and the crying had no real meaning. No weight.

Then, the conversation quickly turned into how she got to know The Psychiatrist better than he got to know her. Like we do. And, it was true. My dad joked about it but then my Gram rattled off where he grew up, where he went to school, how many kids he had. I almost dismissed it. Like the way they dismissed it. Like we do.

But “alone” with my Grandma Vesta (and my Daughter Vesta) she told me again about The Psychiatrist. She told me that, during this year, there was a time that she couldn’t stop crying. For months. And so, she told her aid that she thought she needed to talk to someone. And the aid said, “Well, A Psychiatrist comes here every Tuesday. You can talk to him.”

She looks at me sideways and whispers from behind her teeth, perhaps so my daughter, whos’ been to a psychiatrist after her brother died and her parents broke up, won’t hear, as if, I, who has had multiple psychiatrists over the past 30 years and even spent some time in a psychiatric hospital couldn’t hear,  “A psychiatrist. In my day . . . if you had to talk to a psychiatrist . . . you were, you know . . . something was really wrong with you.”

I nodded and didn’t wince. “In her day.”

So, she tells me, he showed up at her door. And he came in, sat down and they talked. Visited, one might say. And, as the story goes in my family, she learned more about him than he learned about her. As the story goes: She’s too interested in others. She learns too much unnecessary information about relative strangers. It takes her not 10-15 minutes to get people to tell her their life story.

But he came back the next week.

“It was veterans day,” she tells me. “And we had a service in the auditorium and I don’t know why but I just told my story. I just told the whole thing. And afterward, two men came up to me- veterans- and you know what? They thanked me. They thanked me for telling my story.”

My father is a Junior. His father died in World War II. Just after, really. He was in Alabama after the war ended. They were testing planes and a propeller broke off. It sliced through the plane and killed him. Just him. No one else on the plane. Just Richard Dale Welty, Sr. died: his son just 18 months old, his widow not very far from 18 years, herself. I can’t verify these details. I haven’t heard the story in years, decades. And when I did, it was from my dad. Not from my grandma. I didn’t ask her to recount what she said on Veterans Day 2019. I don’t know what she said at that gathered group of old folks. That room full of people ravaged by war. Those survivors, those veterans, their wives. Not one of them in that room unscathed.

I don’t know what she said but I know that she couldn’t stop crying after she told her story of World War II. Just for clarity, I searched for the name that my biological grandfather went by, the grandfather I never knew, the father my father never knew. Richard? Rick? Dick. “About Dick?” I say, when I land on it. “You told Dick’s story?”

“Yes,” she nods and looks at me like she’s always looked at me. Like she’s always looked at me since I was even close to an adult, since I was a teenager. Since her dining room table with her hands around a mug of tea was this island I could land on, in this sea of chaos that I swam in. Since she was younger and I was young and she made me feel like some sense could be made of this world. Since, what I experienced as wisdom and confidence but was really just her processing and trying to figuring out wherever she was going through nearly 40 years ahead of me, made me feel like I, too, could get my ducks in a row. Like there was a home for me here and somewhere else too. Like I belonged. Like she treated me with equality and value. As a young person who so often felt unmoored, my Gram, her hands around her mug at her table, told me by telling her stories,  that I would be okay. That we were okay. That, no matter what, it’s going to be okay.

“Yes,” she nods and looks at me like she always looked at me since I’ve resembled an adult and I realized what she was saying. I realized that she couldn’t stop crying for months. Since Veteran’s Day. Since she told her story. I realized my 94-year-old grandmother was grieving.  Grieving the loss of her first husband. Grieving, fully and possibly for the first time, a loss that happened 74 years ago. Grieving and not knowing why. Or not able to admit it to me or herself or anyone. Except maybe The Psychiatrist. Certainly not to my daughter Vesta, there on the other side of the room. Who I suddenly realize is listening. Who I instantly remember needs her own feelings of grief validated. Heard. Normalized.

“You know, Gram,” I say. “Vesta and I were just talking about this the other night…” Because we were. Well past bedtime and way too tired, my daughter needed to talk to me. With the earnestness and sincerity, reserved only for the young, the not-quite teenager, the not-yet resembling an adult, she shared with me the latest iteration of her grief. The “who is it safe to share it with now that I am older” grief. The “how do I build trust with others so I can tell them what’s happened to me” grief. The “will anyone ever understand me” grief.

I have been afraid, terrified, that I have given my child my grief to carry as her own. And maybe I have. Maybe her yearning for her brother, for a biological sibling, is my fault. Maybe her twice-monthly attendance at a support group for kids who have lost siblings is of my own doing. I was devastated when her brother died and, in a lot of ways, remain so. And in a lot of ways, can’t grieve with her in the way she needs me to. Her family remembers him. Our friends remember me. Her brother is a presence in her life. At once a mystery and a solid loss. There and not there. Like he is for me. Like maybe we both feel the shame of that. Grieving for someone we never knew. Grieving for too long. Grief that evolves. Grieving.

Because I know she is listening. Because I know she is grieving, Because I see my grandmother before me, so recently morphed into looking like an old lady since she entered her 90s, so recently graying and thinning and slowing.  I open my arm up towards my daughter Vesta, to include her in this moment, lost or distracted in her book of scary stories or absolutely present in listening while pretending not to, as only a not-yet teen can be, I say, “Ya know, Gram, Vesta and I were just talking about this the other night…”

Dauther Vesta looks up at me. Grandma Vesta keens her ears towards me. “When we are grieving, there are other people who are going through what we are going through. Like those men. They have a different story, but they understand. Because you are grieving the same event. And yet, you are always alone in your grief. Like the details of what happened to you are only yours. And you have to mourn those alone, even as you do it with others.”

Daughter Vesta half nods at me at the mention of her name and then looks back to her book. Hearing me or not hearing me. Grandma Vesta says, “That’s right. You know, That Psychiatrist said he’d heard a lot of stories from my generation, but none quite like mine.” She rests her hands on her corduroyed knees and leans towards me, “And do you know? He came back here the next week to check on me.” She leans back and smiles proudly, having made her point. Like she does.

I smile back at her and we move on to the next thing, whatever it was. But, I sit there, between my Vestas, a griever in the middle of generations of grief and I hope. I hope against hope that my daughter grieving now spares her from grieving this loss 74 years in the future. I hope that my grandmother telling her story and then crying for months and then doing what was once shameful and repugnant opens up some new space  inside her. Let’s off some steam. Gives her some relief.

I don’t know how to grieve. Or how to help my daughter or my grandmother to grieve. I just know that we grieve. And that, when we do it together, even in our aloneness, it’s better.

For the reading on the occasion of Harvey’s 6th birthday: Who Are You Becoming: Stories about grief over time.

---

This week, at six years, all the days of the week line up. Like he was born on Saturday and he died on Sunday. Like today is his birthday and tomorrow is his death day. Saturday. Sunday. 27. 28. This year. That year. Six years.

My cells remember. They remind me. Each year, early March, I wake up in a panic. Each year it takes me 3-4 days to realize what’s happening. That impending doom I suddenly feel about the upcoming weekend getaway I’ve been looking forward to for months? The way my heart accelerates and my palms sweat even before I open my eyes each morning? Oh, right. Grief Season. Early march-mid May. The Neanderthalean preservation mechanism in my helixes alights, warns me off. Impending doom, it says. It’s coming, it says. It sure was, I say back.

My cells remember. They prepared for a new baby: extra stores, milk production, bonding hormones. They didn’t stop preparing even though he never nursed or cried or opened his eyes or came home. Postpartum is one of the most intense physiological experiences in a mother’s life. So is bereavement. Put them together? My cells remember.

This year, this week, each cell filled to capacity. Each one. Stem, marrow, bone, neuron, fat, skin. They puffed me out from the inside. Saturated. Swollen. Ready to burst. But they didn’t. I couldn’t. They wouldn’t leak like my eyes did for a year after. Seeping for a year or more. Now I was full to the gills saturated. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go but through, I used to tell myself. 

In the first year, each cell burned. Each one. Once, I was in Mexico, just about 20 years ago now and I ran barefoot into the ocean, mango juice sticky down my fingers and forearms. Mala agua. Bad water. My cousin and I dove and swam and frolicked until we stung all over. The entire surface area of our bodies. Tiny, little jelly fish? That was the best we could decipher from the locals. In the first year of grief, mala agua in each one of my cells. Stinging, invisible tentacles inside. Waves of it hitting me from behind. And also fire ants of anxiety: tiny, hot legs puckering the entire surface of my skin as they skitter. And also toxic blood. Poison coursing through the canals of my body. To the rhythm of my heart. Broken but very much alive.  

I was starving then, no matter how much I ate. Hollow. Deep down in my belly.  Aching. Longing.  The definition of need. His body. Tiny and warm and newborn and alive. Need. After awhile, it faded to “any baby”. After awhile, I stepped onto the spectrum of women who steal babies, women who lose all sense and sustenance and carry a baby doll through the park on their hip, cradle it in a baby blanket in their arms on the bench. Crazy. Like me. Like: there but for the grace, go I.

This year? Longing. Aching. Again. Renewed. For a six year old body. For sturdy. For solid.  For kindergarten. For crashing into my legs before thrusting his arms around them. For Harvey. For here instead of there. For here instead of wherever.

Ash? Stardust? Carbon? Magnesium in someone else’s cells? Where did he go? I don’t know. But he’s gone. And six years later, impossibly, unbelievably: that’s okay. I accept that. But not my cells. Not in grief season. Not early March-Mid May. Not year six when the days line up. Not this week. Not okay.

But most days: okay. Most days: my cells obey. They forget. The alarm inside goes dormant. I go to work. I cook food for my family. I write stories. I track expenses. I make love to my love. I worry about things that don’t matter. You guys, I smile and I laugh and I find leagues of meaning and I sit with the suffering and and and. Most days: That’s okay. Almost all the days now: I’m okay. 

They have found the DNA of each of the babies a woman carries still inside her body. Long after they have been birthed. Long after he died. It is a haunting. It is a thread. It is, as my friend told me 20 years ago, what it is. He is in me. Still. Always. Now. Then. First and six and forever.

I thought to myself that first year: this is what’s going to kill me. I didn’t think it through all the way but I meant cellularly. Grief. Genetic mutation. Stress hormones and too much booze in the years that follow. Cigarettes even. But even just grief itself. It changes us. It kills us. Even as we thrive. Even as we live. A wound that won’t heal.

They say that all of the cells in the human body are renewed every 7 years. Next year, no cell of mine will have been here with you. Put they will pass you down. They will replicate and remember. And maybe that’s part of the myth or ethos of “Time heals all wounds”. Maybe the message decreases overtime. Maybe the vibration of trauma slows in the reproduction. Maybe some of the new cells forget.

As evidenced this week: My cells forget. Except when they don’t. Then watch out. Then cancel plans. Like for writing a piece for your son’s reading. Like for doing the dishes or staying awake or not crying. Then keep your plans. But hide tears from massage clients on the table. But hide tears from happy third graders in the back seat in the last days of playing with dolls.

And then clear as a clear day. Clear as yesterday, to be exact: Return. Renewed. Through another level. Through another layer. Leaning against the flag of the newest mile marker, out of breath and relieved. This year, this week, my grief was pure. It was quiet and it was tired. I was just sad. Just sad that my baby died. That makes sense in this loss that makes none. Nothing else. Not anger or rage. Not resentment or shame. Not jealousy or fear. Just me and Harvey. Like when I look at my daughter when she’s not looking and I might die from pride and love. Like I love her like no other love in the known universe. Like there is no other love like Vesta’s and mine. Just like that. There is no squishy newborn body or sturdy now body or a body in between but there is grief for its endless absence. And there is love for its coming into being. For it being here. For this day and the next day. For Saturday and Sunday. For first and six and forever.