I can see it, one step in front of the other, a mind willing a body to move – sending the thought through the nervous system, down the spine and to the muscle with an urge for it to fire and fire and fire. And walking is like falling, over and over again, and being caught, over and over again.
On the walk to their death they sing.
Wondering, why. Why are they alive at this moment and in this place and with this birthright. Curious about the question, why not? Why not me? Why would they be spared from all that crushes humanity – an economy, a skin tone, an atmosphere, a virus, ever so tiny, ever so powerful.
On the walk to their death they sing.
Humming the tones that the ancestors breathed into their cells, a collective memory of pain – scaling its way up all the sharp keys and flat keys – all the way to joy.
On the walk to their death they sing.
Wishing for a conduction from here to there, wherever there is. A garden. The jagged mountain top. The bottom of the sea. The stratosphere. The palm of her hand. Their freedom.
My friend Keecha said to me, “comparing your traumas to the world’s traumas is a form of violence. Don’t do it. Stop immediately.” And like I and so many people in this country do to Black women – I don’t believe her. I ignore her. Because my dark passenger, my twin brother, my inner critic, tells me that I’m not anything noteworthy, more milquetoast and oatmeal. I’m a mundane country hayseed who is lily white and highly privileged, my hands are not callused and my lungs are not rotting with disease and my body is not imprisoned for a crime I didn’t commit and my jeans are not stained from the dirt of a field and my electrical bill is not shut off and my pipes are not laden with poison and my house is not molded from receding flood waters and my barn is not blown over like a stack of toothpicks and my land is not a charred ashen mess and my community is not downwind from a refinery and my body is not laying in the street full of holes and surrounded by bright yellow police tape.
I have traumas, intergenerational traumas but not those traumas. Baby traumas. Boring traumas. Nothing to write home about traumas. As in, no trauma at all.
So who am I to take up space on the page, suck the oxygen out of a room, have a seat on the bench, tag into the game, exhale CO2 and kill the planet in the process?
I hear my faultfinder louder than I hear my own voice some days. Like a journalist, he reports out the facts, just the facts ma’am. You make no contributions to the world. You do and do and you miss the whole point. Your quote “friends” humor you. Your colleagues just smile and nod politely because you manage the budget. Your writing is too flowery, it has no point. Your defensiveness is beyond. Your compassion fake. Your well-wishers actually wishing you had died instead of living through those zero trauma traumas.
And I sit, starting at this page, wondering about how much white space is too much white space, I wonder how my critic’s voice matches my breathe, the up and down, mirrors my heart beat, no no, no no, yes yes, yes yes.
Pick five time periods, ages, or moments from your life—they can be spread out or all clustered together. Don’t think too hard about your choices, just write down the first one that comes to mind and move to the next. Next pick a song to pair with each moment. Again, try not to think too hard. Let it be a gut thing. Now write a quick and dirty paragraph about each one. Then take the one that feels most interesting to you and expand it.
“Material Girl” – Madonna (age 5). We are cruising in the station wagon, windows down. Coming from church, it’s spring. It might even be Easter, and I’m squeezed into black patent leather shoes and opaque white tights. We were stopping at the red caboose to get ice cream, pink bubble gum ice cream for me. The radio ricocheted Casey Kesam’s Top 40. Madonna was next up on the Billboard chart and I sing the bell, “Living in a Cheerio world – Cheerio! Living in a Cheerio world! And I’m a Cheerio girl!” And the next moment of memory is clear as the day, when my older brothers roll out of their seats laughing and correct me. “It’s material girl, not cheerio girl, Meaghan!!!”
“I Wanna Sex You Up” – Color Me Badd (age 8). We rarely drove to the big city of St. Louis, just west across the river valley. Maybe only a few times a year. So it was always thrilling to be piled in a big yellow school bus as a grade schooler, off to the city for the annual symphony matinee and running through the shops at the old train depot Union Station. I had $6 in my blue nylon purse. I was sporting a new Fido Dido t-shirt, Keds and doubled up neon socks. And there it was, on a stand in Camelot Music. I had heard the song on the radio – “I Wanna Sex You Up” and knew it was bad, like so bad it was good. “I wanna touch you in all the right places baby.” I mean, that sounds good, right? With the money burning a hole in my pocket, I grabbed the single cassette – a black and white graphic design just screaming censored content inside! – and paid and ran out. On the bus home, we took turns listening in my headphones. The tape was hot after an hour on repeat. I effectively hid that cassette for two weeks until my mom confiscated it. But I got it back, you bet I did.
“Island in the Sun” – Weezer (age 21). Drunk in a state park in the panhandle of Oklahoma. A secret rendezvous. Splashing in the river. Beers in a koozie. Bikini top and cut off jeanshorts. The angle of the sun leaning into the golden hour. “We’ll run away together. We’ll spend some time forever…” The last summer of love between us – he and I destined for a meteoric flash of light and heat hurtling through the dark sky, disintegrating into oblivion. But for now, “on an island in the sun we’ll be playing and having fun.”
“Lovin’ In My Baby’s Eyes” – Taj Mahal (age 31). The simple strum of the guitar, blues harmonica, soulful tones. We step step spin, step step dip. All while we’re enveloped in a circle of love, family and friends from every chapter of our storybooks looking on, emanating warmth towards us. I was the one who didn’t want to get married. Complained about how it’s a fake institution created to transfer wealth and property, including women. And it’s made of a church I didn’t trust and in the suggestion of a god I didn’t believe in. I didn’t need a ring or certificate to show my commitment. So why was I standing here with my new husband in a white dress with flowers tucked in my hair? “Give me that magic in my baby’s eyes.”
“Paper Doll” – The Mills Brothers (age 36). “He’s gone,” she said. “Now no one knows my story.” I stood in the dimly lit hallway, that cold December afternoon, trying to navigate these new waters, a role reversal in giving comfort to a grieving parent. My grandpa Pop waited until after Christmas to die, he gifted us that one last holiday together. He had been telling us for years now that he was ready to be back with my grandma GG, his Doll Babe. A twinkle in his blind eyes still when he talked about her. I could write every day for the rest of my life, and I still couldn’t write enough words to describe how much my grandpa and grandma loved each other. In most of my childhood memories of time after school each day at their house, Pop would whistle to the big bands, their harmonies and horns, in his work jeans and white tank top, dusty from a day of laying brick. And when GG walked into the room, he would sing about her “Flirty flirty eyes.” They were blue. And how he would count her freckles to pass the time, but really, just to have an excuse to look at and love her.
Prompt: Write a letter to your younger self. Thank them, praise them, scold them, comfort them—engage in whatever way you feel led with one or many versions of your younger self. Whatever comes to mind.
Now, let’s shift to exploring your older self. What would you want to say? To ask? To request? Tell your older self what you are doing now in service of them. Tell them what the ideal situation might look like when you finally meet—where might you be living, what type of work might you be doing, who you might be spending time and space with.
Your snowglobe is your small town, mom and dad and brothers under one roof, all grandparents and cousins a bikeride away. I see you, on the tricycle, climbing a tree, chasing butterflies and laying eye to eye with beetles, swinging on the monkey bars, jumping off the deck into layers of fluffy snow. While you will run into the boundaries of place and get frustrated with an urge to get out and fly away, I want you to think about what having community is, being in community is.
And when the adults talk in quiet murmurs in the next room, and you’re confused when you walk in and they shift in their seats and upspeak in quick idle chatter, I can explain that too. They think they’re doing the right thing, protecting you. They went through so much hardship, sacrifice, working their fingertips numb and juggling so many side hustles, through aneurisms and cancer and house fires and wars and heart attacks and the lesser traumas of life laced between. But, you don’t know about any of that. Maybe only heard about it in a bedtime storybook about heroes or in your social studies class or a passing prayer in church. They deem that it is best to shield you from their lived experiences and wounds, because life is getting better for you and your generation, the middle class is rising, we have privilege, women can be astronauts. Maybe you will be spared – Yes, yes, that is what their hard work and dedication and intention will do. Or maybe life and its expansive messiness will come soon enough. And it will. And the shock that you’ll feel, because this wasn’t to be your life, you were somehow going to make it through bobbing and weaving your way around trauma and hardship and barriers to be fine, just fine because that only happens to other people. And that loss of innocence to come might be hardest of all, require more grit than the trauma itself. You, unequipped to handle grief as a foreign object slamming into your life, alone and crying in a dark room. My whisper to you through this bend in time is to know hardship will come no matter what, no matter how, no matter who, no matter why. Breathe in child, and delight in what you have now.
It is what I am doing for you too, my dear future self. I hope I get there.
Prompt: Okay, close your eyes. Maybe lie down so you’re cozy? A blanket is nice. Okay. What do you see? At first, it’s dark in there. But if you really look, you will start to see pictures. Maybe it’s a bear with claws, or an ice cream cone, or a memory. Like, cuddling your mom. Maybe it’s words, like LOVE or DANCING. Sometimes it’s just tickly lights. Whatever you see, write about it. Really explain it until it becomes a story. I like to draw what I see, too.
I sit here, eyes closed, legs outstretched under the perfectly-weighted bamboo blanket, a gift from Mike when I was in chemo. So cozy it is the only blanket our cat Whiz likes to make muffins on, kneading and loving and purring until he zonks out. He is next to me, his light breathing a balm, a reminder of the simple, complex fact of being alive.
It’s early here on the west coast. I lay awake for much of the night, wondering why I was awake, going through the list of possible reasons – was it that matcha mochi too late in the day, its grassy caffeine notes overstimulating my receptors? The transformative hardships overcome by the people featured in the movie we watched, Crip Camp? The vitamin B pill that I took maybe got lodged in my throat, tempting heartburn? A facetime call with my parents, where my dad was in so much pain he couldn’t open his eyes to look at the phone screen? Was it reading a book about enslaved people narrating their lives before I clicked off my bedside lamp? The gravitational pull of a waxing moon, nearly full tomorrow?
With my eyelids heavy and still closed, I strain to see something other than what is in my mind’s eye. Because what’s in it is a spinning rolodex of work and worry. Or ping pong balls of concern floating and bouncing while riding the air just waiting to have their turn in the bingo draw. Kernals of corn popping, expanding in the hot oil.
I wish the images of ice cream cones and cuddling with my mom would stay, but they appear and dissolve into the distance.
I breathe in, try to count to five before exhaling, but make it to two.
That’s what I thought to myself as I hung up the phone.
The conversation was light. Focused on the mundane – the length of my commute today, the number of phone calls I was on at work, what I ate for dinner, what they ate for dinner, what one can enjoy in a low sodium diet, how I want to invent a robot who folds the laundry. When we exhausted those topics on the speakerphone, my dad broached another. Casually. And I followed.
What was he going to tell the girls? The four granddaughters. Four reasons why he has lived so many of these last few, long, terribly difficult years. How would he tell them?
I sat in the sight of light at the window, swaying back and forth as I listened to him think this through.
I suggested, softly, that maybe he should check with my brothers, see what they have been explaining all along to their daughters about my dad’s illness, decline, what we know is coming of his death. That it’s not all on him to explain. It’s maybe not on him at all.
No, it has to be me to tell them. The strength of his voice picks up, while he takes us down different cul-de-sacs of thoughts. His frustrated that I’m not understanding him, or the depth of him, or the meaning behind what he is working through.
What will they think of me? How can I put into words all that they mean to me? That I will be there with them. They can always talk to me, visit with me, ask me for help and comfort. That they won’t forget me.
They will, Dad, they will.
I try to provide comfort from 3000 miles away.
And if you say it like that, they will listen. And maybe you can write it down too so that they have it, something to hold in their hands forever.
How can I even try and write what I just said? My words, I can’t do it, it’s so hard.
When my mom interjected, I’ve been asking you to write a letter for the last 9 years to your wife, your children, your grandchildren. He paused. Reminded. When she spoke, something opened that I didn’t know was shut.
I told him: If you feel tired, rest, Dad.
And then silence.
Conversations about death. I think of death like it’s the sun.
We know it’s there, we wake up to it, go to sleep by its absence. It’s a necessary part of life, one stop in the circle. If we look at it too long or too close, we lose our sight, ourselves. If we get too close we burn, disintegrate in the heat.
My mom disrupts the silence to say, I think we’re done with this conversation.
I ask, for clarification, are you done? Or is Dad done?
No one dies in the spring, with or without the rain. That’s what I think when I come onto our porch and notice the puddles of plum blossoms, white, faint pink petals nestled into the corners of the stairs. Like living confetti.
I catch one in my palm, as it glides down to the ground.
The petals are open like outstretched arms that say, “catch me, hold me, hold on.”
This reminds me to call the florist in my hometown and send my parents some flowers, scented ones like star aster or lily to fill up the house, stand in for me, take up the space between the ticks and tocks of the grandfather clock. The long afternoons. The even longer nights. So silent we can hear the 120-year-old house sigh, as she tries still to settle in and get comfortable. While the rest of us hold our breaths.
How can someone die in the spring? The riot of rebirth, newness, promise all around.
The long dark winter would have been better. Black ice, folding within, brittle broken grass, the loose thread of the worn-down bedsheets, if he pulls it, it keeps unraveling, leaving its cradled exposed, open, submitting to exhale the last time.
Easter is in the spring. If I believed in Jesus and were young again, we would be getting our picture taken in front of the white blossoming crab apple tree at the end of the drive, all the apples nestled in rows, draped over each other, with the blossom bursting out their bottoms, the tiny trumpet of a pestle punching through to say, I made it. I’m still here. We would be sandwiched together in our dresses, shirts and ties, black patent shoes and tights, smiling. Appreciating the moment but not understanding the significance that it would never be the same. That this was the good time. To see it takes time.
I walk around to the backyard and kick at the clumps of camellia blossoms, scattered along the path. They are pink like the baby’s flushed cheeks, the blood underneath that skin finding its way for the first time, moving, passing through the heart that is learning what love is. The camellia tree is the same tree that he trimmed high up on a ladder that he shouldn’t have ascended, against doctor’s orders. The blossoms are in all stages of their lives. Dreaming of opening, opening, open, closing, closed, gone.
Do they know that no one should die in the spring?
It was one of those three-day weekend kind of Mondays. A Monday dressed up as a Sunday. I read quietly in the backyard, 2pm sun just so, moving its angle a few minutes away from a solstice and a few minutes closer to a solstice. A book about productive disagreements was open on my lap, my legs stretched out in my house slippers, a tangle of backyard cob webs streaming from the worn toes, and my mind kept doing its thing – the bob and weave. Reading sentence and paragraph only to read both again to try and make meaning of it this time.
My mind was not here. My mind was with my dad in his hospital bed. And wondering where my brother was, absent, magically disappeared.
What was he thinking?
But I really needed the answers this book was supposed to give me.
I kept hearing a low buzzing noise. It’s city living, so sometimes it’s a low flying plane, circling to sight-see the city’s seven hills. Other times it’s the big yellow jackets that lazily float their heavy bodies from bloom to bloom on the Thai basil. Sometimes it’s a motorcycle in the distance that doesn’t have to mask its ripping sound for anyone or anything. I’d heard the noise strongly and then it would get faint, back and forth like this. Finally I saw the source.
A ruby-throated humming bird, no bigger than my palm. It’s long beak a guide, orienting it in the direction it wanted to go, it’s tiny head turning on its tiny neck, feet tucked deeply into its body where the emerald green fades to moss.
And I realize this whole time it was circling above me, just two feet away. I could outstretch my arm to it if it would let me.
My heartrate picked up.
What was he thinking?
Was I wearing a brightly colored shirt? Did I smell like jasmine? Was I sitting so still he thought I was lawn furniture upon which to perch and chirp? Was he going to dive bomb me? Am I that citified that I’m now afraid of a 1-ounce creature? Strong, faint, strong, faint, close, away, back, forth.
I took some deep breaths, trying to really notice this creature. They say that at the end of my life, I will be what I have noticed.
I scoot to the edge of my chair, feet now firmly planted on the ground, and he zig zags closer. I think we are in a dance, sharing communication without understanding how.
What I noticed is that he is not letting go. That is what I’m thinking actually.
My dad is not letting go.
And my brother has let go.
At what point does that mean we are in a productive disagreement?
The sun is now fully in my eyes and I shift to the left.
And there I see it – the light streaming through the giant pine tree just so. A swarm of the tiniest gnats I’ve ever seen, a kinetic mass of wings and bodies forming a safety circle, a survival strategy. And, obviously, the hummingbird was taking his pleasure at this feast, zipping back and forth and back and forth through their cocoon.
keeping abreast | keeping a breast 