The halls of my junior high were louder the day after my father died, full of audible whispers comprising a cacophony of sympathy I was not ready to accept, not ready to hear echoing off lockers I once looked forward to opening daily.
Strangers looked at me with tears in their eyes. Teachers spoke gently, pulled me aside before and after classes to offer condolences. “Was there anything they could do?” they asked a little too loudly.
I despised their gentleness. I abhorred being special in the way I now was. Every teenager wants to be recognized, to be noticed, to be praised for exceptional test scores, for record-breaking attendance, for unparalleled athletic ability. No one wants to be the girl without a father.
I wondered silently why my mother had made me go so school as the flood of unwelcome well-wishing rushed onward. The notes, the awkward hugs and abundant pats on the back, the hideously designed “While you’re grieving” cards. All of it a cruel, unfunny, pathetically maddening joke.
I wore my grief like a badge I had not earned. I smiled wryly as classmates who once ignored me now looked on, interested. My best friends had little to say. Their mothers had advised them to be calm, to be quiet. I wanted to scream, to slur profanities like sloppy joes across the cafeteria, to kick and fight and flee every wayward glance that sought to canvass my grief.
I was twelve, almost thirteen. No one had taught me how to lose my father.
I would have sooner kicked someone in the shins than cried. I wouldn’t realize I was allowed to feel anything but sorrow until college. Someone kind, a Professional, would tell me anger is normal, to be expected. One of many phases I would be forced to traverse on a rocky road to healing. That Monday I felt mostly nothing. I walked around wrapped snugly in a fog of stoicism rising from somewhere deep inside me I didn’t create and couldn’t find. I wasn’t accustomed to everyone staring. And there were questions. Too many questions to which I had no answers. Not then, not yet.
He is dead. Yes, he died. Drowned. No, he was a good swimmer. I don’t know. No, no funeral yet. Maybe. Mike. His name was Mike. Michael Francis Ladish. He was thirty-nine. Yes, five sisters. Well, four, actually. One of them identified his body. Hypothermia, they said. He was my father, ‘the deceased.’ What does it matter if he’s being cremated? I DON’T KNOW.
Years later I would forge a conversation in my head while my mother and I drove across the river where my father took his last breath.
“Mom, you know you shouldn’t have sent us back to school the day after he died.”
“I know, dear. I thought it would help.”
“You only thought it would help you.”
“I know, dear.”
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...
This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.
Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked → Read more...
They say water changes stone, carving it over time to angles and dimensions in harmony with water’s need to reach the sea; but sometimes, stones change the watercourse instead.
-The lovely and eclectic Shari
I’m collecting my favorite corners, like the one with the stunning oak tree on display for an entire neighborhood to see, its limbs shading a bustling crosswalk shooting confidence into pedestrians like electric currents of white light, fresh graffiti on a nearby curb: an infinity symbol, black and simple.
I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.
I’m collecting the surprisingly → Read more...