What my bones know about grief is—
We were made for this
We are made of this
We are rock and we are stream
We are grasping and we are longing
Just as we are allowing and loving.
We are marrow and we are air
These bones and this grief
Bones that seem solid
But are moving
at their core
and at their skin.
Nutrients exchanged despite
the hard outer surface.
Both necessary—
These bones and this grief
This strength and this synergy.
Dear Papa,
Two years yesterday was your last day awake: your feet were too warm so you didn’t want them covered by the thin hospital sheet and blanket but it felt good for someone to rub them. We all sat around your bed, come and went throughout the day. At night, you said Vesta and I didn’t need to stay, you knew how boring it was to sit around with the dying since you’d done that with your mom, not even 5 month before. I said we were happy to be there but, a few minutes later you said it again, so I asked if you wanted us to leave and you said you thought that was best. We kissed you goodnight and I said what I said each night before we left you in the hospital that week two years ago: “I’ll see you tomorrow, if you are still here.” And you gave me your last small smile, your last little nod. The thought that if I never you left you, you’d never leave wafted through my brain in that moment. Our brains, always trying to find the solution, always trying to defy our nature, because they so often can. What a relief, after all these years wrangling with not being able to save my son, that the thought evaporated into nothing and I put my arm around my kid as we walked the hall to the elevators. I took her to eat at Applebees, where we made funny TIkToks and sent you the last picture of us we’d ever send you and you’d never see.
Today, two years ago, you were here but asleep thanks to morphine and Klonopin. I saw you but you didn’t see me. You were all done with words, so I didn’t hear you but you heard me. We felt each other. I touched your foot and moved up your leg until I felt where your body began to warm again: just after the knee. Some kind of imprecise barometer of how much longer you’d be here. Not long. I sat with you and we felt each other’s presence there, for the last time, in the blue light of the midnight hospital room death bed. I felt you and you felt me as I kissed your forehead. I heard me, and you heard me say “Goodbye, Papa. I love you.” I hope I said thank you, too.
Tomorrow, you were gone. I was dropping the ridiculous, giant truck I had rented by mistake at the Binghamton airport when the hospital called me. How stupid is that? At the counter of Hertz or enterprise or something and then you’re dead? The kind clerk said don’t worry about anything, just go, she’d take care of it all and I hoped that would include a discount, but it didn’t, in the end.
Mom pulled up to the long, wide, empty sidewalk that serves as both arrivals and departures at this little regional airport and I got in the front seat and told her you died. She said “Oh hun,”and squeezed my leg, like she always does when the worst thing has happened. She said, “I’m so sorry,” like it was only mine. Like you weren’t once hers, too. It was a gift to have that for a moment: just me and you without each other and Mom there to witness it. A microsecond later, all I could think of was all the phones calls I needed to make. I thought about how I didn’t want to go back to your house and tell my stepmom.
The other day, Vesta said, “It’s so weird that Papa is dead.” As a swung the car into our parking spot. “It’s so weird.” I said back. Because it is. Because what the fuck even is this world without you in it?
As I stepped out of the car and onto the asphalt, I felt my body acutely in this world without the container of you. You were the parenthesis around me. I, an inserted but important phrase in you story. You held me in. You were this: (me). Now what?
A few nights later, my friend Meg and I were at my house playing Scrabble. She said, “Sometimes, I think to myself ‘I should call my dad’ or ‘I haven’t talked to my mom in awhile’. It’s so weird.” And this does not bode well for me because her parents have been dead quite a few more years than you and sometimes she still forgets she’s a complete sentence on her own now. Perhaps you all hold us in forever. That little moment of forgetting is like this: (Meg).
Back in September, Vesta’s new friend from third period American Sign Language was in the back seat when I told her she couldn’t go with them to this or that because she had Dougy. Her friend sat up: “Dougy?” And Vesta said, “Yeah it’s like therapy but for kids who had someone die.” Her new friend said, “I go to Dougy, too.” In the front seat, I smiled and exhaled. Rare kin.
On the way to tennis practice the other day, this same friend and Vesta were talking about grieving someone they never knew and how hard that is. How the groups at Dougy would ask questions like “What’s your person’s favorite color?” or “What’s your favorite memory with your person?” and that neither of them can answer, which creates its own grief for these two hurting, insightful, wisened teens. I told them that it’s not great to compare but that I was going to do it anyway. That, for me, having now lost you after losing Harvey, it felt harder to lose Harvey (maybe because he was my kid? of course because he was but also:) because I didn’t have any memories with him. I never got to know him. And that not very many people understand that. In fact, most think it’s the opposite: we’d miss him less because we never knew him.
Vesta said, “It’s not just cuz he’s your kid, Mom. We have, like, soooo many memories of Papa. Like, all these fun things we did and good times and all these things he told me about. I really miss him but it’s just different…”
So, there’s that: fun things, good times, all the things you told us about. We have that. We got to know you.”Got,” like had-the-privilege. Like we’re so lucky you didn’t die before we could know each other, like your dad did, like her friend’s mom did, like Harvey did. We got to know you. “Got”, like got.
For the last six months or so, I have been driving around, hiking around, looking out at the skyline of my favorite city and falling deeply, deeply in love with it. I have always been in love with Portland since the very first time I drove into town in 2000 from my cross country adventure and got myself an apple juice at some little store on NE Broadway. I knew this was my home. Just the feel of it. My young life, ready and ripe to begin in this new place on this whole other side of the country. I couldn’t get much farther from home. And yet, I had found it.
It’s really different now. Way more people live in tents on the streets, not just run away youth like back then. It’s fentanyl instead of meth, now. Some downtown buildings have stayed boarded up since Covid and the uprisings of 2020. It’s full of high-rise, personality-less apartment buildings where once were cool, old shops and victorian style homes. Roads have been one-wayed and diverted to accommodate the many expats, like me, who have found this place magic and stayed in droves. There’s a sentiment across the country, and even among us Portlanders, that it’s lost its shine. Even the dream of the 90s is dead in Portland and retired people are stretched to retire here, let alone young people.
And yet, I’ve been marveling at myself marveling at my city. Feeling so rooted here. Thinking, I never want to leave here. Planning to live in Portland forever. The beauty of the fogged in firs along the highway this morning, the towering downtown buildings and steel bridges over the quick moving river, the blooms of the magnolia tree and cherry blossoms and the ephemeral trillium in the forests. My people here: grievers and writers, queers and parents, teenagers figuring it out as I drive them back and forth, a city of tender-hearted, weird, resilient people. Where else would I go?
Until you died and I sold your house, to you. You were (always) my back up plan, my ride or die, my safety net. If anything went sideways, I knew I could always go “home” to you.
I remember being beside myself when I learned that you and Mom had agreed in the divorce to sell the house I grew up in when I went to college. I felt betrayed and told you so. You said, “You’ll come to understand that your home is not your house. Your home is where your family is.” And I said, “No I won’t” and stayed mad about it.
Until your next house, the house I sold last year, became just as much my home as the one I grew up in, even though I never lived there for longer than a few months at a time. And (hopefully) I told you as much. Hopefully, I told you you were right and that those words, which I believed with zero parts of me, have become an essential truth for me. A truth that I would tell my own kid, every time she moved (nine times so far between me and her dad) over and over again. A truth that I would have to be sure to embody for her: I am your family. This is our house. We make it a home.
But now what? What happens when you’re dead? For months after you died, I was untethered. I’d think to myself “I knew that was bullshit when he said it, and see? I was right. And now I’ve been telling my kid that lie her whole life, too.”
And then these past months started happening. These weird feelings of being settled and content here. Like my body and the skyline and the fir trees and the trillium flower match. Blend like two voices finding harmony. Like I’ve finally found my place, my home, and it’s been literally under my feet for 25 years.
Driving over the Marquam bridge on a rare sunny winter day, seeing my favorite urban vista (the skyline with the sun reflecting off the Big Pink skyscraper; looking up the Willamette river with its bridges bracketing the city together; Mt. Hood to my right, a perfect beret of clouds along its cap and Mt. St Helen’s to the north, flat topped and majestic; the blue sky with its whisps and wandering clouds opening up to me), I realize I fell at home now, at home here, because you are gone. Without you, I can root down here and finish out my life, in my home, without you. That the tether to you has become the roots to here. That I have become my own back up plan; my friends here are my ride or die; the communities I’ve built, my safety net. I created this whole other life on the whole other side of the country without you and because of you. And, now, I will continue to. But without you, for real this time, this rest of my life.
Thanks to you, this is me:
(Vesta).
And this is me: (Harvey).
And when she’s this: Vesta and I’m with you and we’re with him, she’ll know what to do, too.
Goodbye again, Papa. I love you. And thank you. For all of it.
Love,
(Monica)
Grief is like laughter. It’s triggered by living. Something happens, something is said, a memory flashes and there it is, carbonating up from your belly or toes or throat. A laugh. You can’t help it. It just happens.
Like grief. Like my son’s birthday is the expiration on the carton of milk I recently bought for his sister’s boba teas. Like I saw a funny meme about Wayne’s World and I automatically hit the little arrow “send” button to forward to my dad, who’s been dead almost two years. Like a client tells me about her partner dying suddenly from a heart attack without heart disease at 50 and suddenly my Uncle Kimmy’s 40 year old, fluffy mustache, black Ray Bans and huge smile come into sharp focus in my mind’s eye, because he died like that, too, 30 something years ago. It just bubbles up.
Grief is like a time machine, like laughter. Like when we’d all crack up at my dad’s story of his boyhood hound dog, Question, who was scared of the back steps but would still bark there to be let in before running around to the front door’s not-scary steps. How I might as well have been right there with my teenage dad as he told the story for the hundredth time, getting up off the couch to open the front door, Question excitedly circling us before belonging to the kitchen for his food dish. Like when my baby, small enough to lay vertically on my lap, looked up at me and laughed for the first time, eyes shining, and there was nowhere else in the whole world but right there, right then. Like when “Build Me Up Buttercup” is background music at a kitchy boutique on the Oregon coast and I quietly sing along but I might as well be belting it out with Theresa as we shoved ourselves out the doors of our high school one sunny day, the year before she died driving too fast on a windy country road known for crashes.
Grief has all these different sizes and tenors and other emotions threaded through like laughter does, too. Like when the kids couldn’t go to the movie theatre (or the water park or their favorite restaurant or inside friends’ houses or school) during the pandemic and so we made our bedroom into a movie theatre- complete with tickets, concessions, and their own little chairs at the base of the bed- and we had the best, most fun, laughter filled, normal feeling night in a long continuum of weeks and months of constant uncertainty and disappointments. Like how I got my daughter from her dad once when she was 5 and relatively new to this one-parent-a-time business and she burst into tears the minute we drove away and all I could think to do was tell her how sad what was happening to her was and then roll the windows down, blast her favorite song and drive a little too fast down the highway, showing her that sometimes matching the intensity of the inside to the outside can be potent medicine, at least for a few moments.
Like how we think grief is only big and obvious. Like it’s only for death. As if it’s not the loss we feel after the baby is born or the vows are said or the new house paperwork is signed for the life we lived before all of this and how we’ll never be that person again. As if it’s not when your mission driven company, with your dedicated coworkers, unheard of benefits package and work you love, dissolves and you can’t find that kind of meaning or camaraderie at your job again. As if it’s not how time just keeps going and buildings that have always been there are torn down for standard-issue apartment complexes and your favorite restaurant shutters and you have to move somewhere completely new to you, anyway.
Grief is so natural, it’s like laughter. So woven into our daily lives. Sometimes so acute we can’t fight and sometimes just a little shutter through our bodies. Sometimes, grief is laughter and sometimes, laughting is grieving. The gift of both being complex and nuanced and human. Of just being a consequence of being alive.
She will hate that I am finally writing about her.
But I think she will understand.
That our words are not yet gratitude.
That I have Educated Guess on repeat
Because there are songs for each of us there.
Songs of how I feel and how she might feel and how we both
Feel.
And how I am eating less
and drinking more
Like before.
How I am craving a cigarette
because deep in my grief cells
there is smoke
and Ani Difranco
and this familiar flavor.
Reminiscent,
yet piercingly foreign.
Our loss to each other a fingerprint tattoo.
A “particular loneliness”, I wrote.
A “particular loneliness.” she wrote back to me.
We resonate now,
as I listen for her tone on my phone.
Even when it doesn’t come,
I place my thumb where there was once a button,
as recent as nine years ago.
Walking to my car this morning,
I noticed brilliant red flowers blooming on a barren tree
How had I never noticed them on this same old path?
And at winter’s dawn?
As I drew closer, my eyes shifted to find that they were leaves,
not petals.
Japanese maple, at their brilliant red end,
The few remaining, dangling
As the sun shone at the precise angle to illuminate them into blossoms.
Which fall, too.
She will hate that I’m writing about her now.
Now, at a time like this.
She said once: “Why don’t you write about something happy?”
And I had no answer to that, no words.
It felt like an accusation:
That words come only to me at heartbreak,
at grief.
They come only so that I may find my way to joy
Find my way through and
Along this slippery, morning path
Where things are not what they seem
But still beautiful.
Even now.
At a time like this.
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
Dear Harvey 