curios

When my daughter died, I kept all the cards. There is a manila folder that says "Lucia" on the tab. Every card and note that came to my house, I tucked into the folder. I didn't look at them again in the months or years since. I know they are there. That is enough. The condolences were never lost on me. They were there, the words meaningless and important. What it did was made me love, feel love, feel loved, because of that, they did the most important job ever. Things change, some of those people are gone. But those condolences were the possibility of them staying, and it meant something.

There are so many things about the time of early grief that I want to study. The way I reacted to normal life, for example, or the feeling of being skinned alive and sent on my way. "Your baby was born dead. Then we removed all your skin. You are now free to leave the hospital. Watch for sharp corners, lemons, and salted foods."

I soak the photographs of the girl I once was in formaldehyde. I add in the compassion I had before, and the belief in me and my body. I have another jar entirely with luck, fortune, and giggly spirits. And one for good behavior and doing what I am told. I have a jar filled with the callouses that protected me from holding grudges. They fell off after she died. I put all those little fancy parts of my grief in jars, and keep them on the internet.

I tuck that grief away in yellow liquid, because it feels so unnatural, like a disease. It feels like it needs to be extracted, even though I know my baby died and I am supposed to feel this way, even three years later. I want to study my grief. To float it in liquid. I want to dissect it, pull the blackness out of the moldy chambers of me, weigh it, examine it, pluck out the lungs of it. I want to find the source of our fevers and weeping. I want to find ourselves in the lostness of our lives. I want to lose ourselves in the finding. "We are animals," this strange Victorian curio cabinet of my grief seems to say. "There is a natural connection between us all in this grief, even as it feels lonely and strange." I admit that there is a strong desire in me to make this grief feel natural and beautiful and at the same time, wrong. I wrap it in beautiful, curious words, nature scenes, very tiny spores even. It makes me invent scenes involving organic matter in formaldehyde and science labs. But the truth of it, something in me is dead and floating in dirty liquid.

There is a curio cabinet inside of me. I collect things in it. Symbols and full moon names, like tattoos on me. Strawberry Moon, Harvest Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Hunter's Moon...Lucia's Moon. I see them in script across my back. In the cabinet, there are the jars of who I was, and all these bits of grief. The grief looks like animal fetuses, unformed yet sleeping. They are the emotions I stopped and replaced with anger. There are also bones of animals. Any animal. The ones I crossed in the woods and saved, just because they were some other animal's child. And I would want a wolf to pick up Lucia's bones and keep her somewhere, gnaw on her and think of all we missed. There is a raven feather, because death birds surround me. And there are locusts dipped in gold. They are for Jess and the plagues that seemed to come to my home. There is a deer antler found in a bed of moss by a hippie girl who makes necklaces. She says they are naturally collected by her. I want to believe a caftan-wearing urbanite with Frye boots and a beaded headband tramps through the forest foraging for deer horns, rubbed off in spring, then strings them for grieving mothers. That seems like part of this mythic world I created on the internet after she died. We are magic here.

I am leaving for the weekend. It is a retreat with nuns and prayer and artwork and meditation. It is nestled in the woods. I might have a cigarette, even though I haven't smoked in a seven years. But I might. I always think that when I am around smokers, but I probably won't. I am not grieving this miscarriage. Not a right and proper grief like Lucia's death. My friend said there is a space in this community for not-grief too. The space to just be with a death. It just makes me think about all these years of grieving, collecting jars of the more curious parts of me. I still don't quite understand what happened to me in the last three years. I am different. Not better or worse, just different. Since I began bleeding a month ago, I have been expecting to wake up and be in early grief again, keening and uncomfortable, but it hasn't happened. I remember reading Monica saying that first miscarriage was harder than her son's stillbirth, because she wasn't expecting it. Or maybe I got that wrong, but what I said makes sense to me.

I drink down those jars of the old me, some days, expecting to be that person again who looks welcoming and smells good. I know it would work the same way as if my severed finger were in a jar and I tried to drink it back on. And maybe I don't even want to be that person, it's just sometimes this person's head is too loud, too morbid, too dark. And so I write in jars and put them on the internet.

little birds

What is that, Mama?

I look down at a featherless little bird. Without formed eyes. A swollen bird fetus on our front step.

It is a dead baby bird, my love.
How did it die?
I don't know, my love.
Maybe it was an eagle.
I don't think it was an eagle. 
Or a hawk.
Perhaps. It probably just fell out of a nest, shell broken, and was dragged here by some animal, like the neighbor cat Tae-bo.
Or an eagle.
Or an eagle.
Why do birds die, Mama?
Because everything dies, baby.
But it's little.
Yes. Sometimes little things die.
Is the baby going to die?
I hope not, baby. 
Mama?
Yes, baby?
I think I saw an eagle.

woodpecker

Awake settles on me, covering me in dew. I sit still and listen, half-lidded. I sit still and stare at the wall. It doesn't move. I sit still and turn off my brain. It turns itself back on like some haunted kitchen, roaring a blender and percolating some imaginary coffee.

Thinking.

I meditate with my hot coffee next to me. It smells like home and comfort. I revel in the smell without having to drink. I hear a woodpecker in the distance, drilling into an old tree. I close my eyes and see him. I see his red head drilling into the dead tree behind my house. He is trying to find bugs in a dead thing. It reaches up, the tree, pretending to be healthy, but the woodpecker gives it away. 

Thinking.

The garbage truck roars down the street, and Thor screams truck and scrambles to the window. The birds descend on my backyard and eat my seeds. The squirrels run from Jack. 

A few weeks ago, a pounding noise woke us all. Beezus whispered, frightened, "What is that? Our house is falling, Mama."

It was a woodpecker on the outside wall behind our bedroom. He found the wood shingles. If he pecks long enough, a bug might emerge. He might eat. We banged on the wall. 

GO AWAY, WOODPECKER! WE ARE NOT A TREE!

And it stopped, moments after it began. I already missed being mistaken for a tree, part of the landscape, the natural world of suburbia. Beezus told me a few days later that she felt a drop of water on her head. I turned my head to the ceiling, afraid of leaking roofs and burst pipes, and she said she was certain she got wet from the hole the woodpecker made through our wood siding, the plaster, the lathe, the ceiling. "It is impossible, my angel. He could not have made a hole that big in so short amount of time." Rain is coming in! Get umbrellas! Get a rainjacket! Hurry!

Thinking.

A man shot himself on Saturday night. He stared me in the eyes on Saturday morning and said, "Don't worry about me, Angie. I am fine. I feel good. I feel strong. I am fine. I am better." But I was worried, he looked tired and sad and could never say he was anything but fine.

There is a woodpecker burying its beak in my skull. It is incessant. Knock. Knock. Knock. It is exposing the writhing thoughts that turn over themselves. I shoo them away. 

Thinking.

We all wrestle with wondering what we could have done. Knock. Knock. Knock. How could we have saved him? Knock. Knock. Knock. What words would have saved his life? Knock. Knock. Knock. How much more love could we have given him? Knock. Knock. Knock.  How much more compassion? Knock. Knock. Knock. I think about their questions last night, the night before, the community reeling from the after effects of the suicide of someone who only said he was fine.

I stand. I wipe the morning off my face, scratch the sand out of the corner of my eyes. I make breakfast and finish the coffee, and dress the children, thinking about the moment between fine and not fine.

labyrinth

I keep seeing labyrinths, or rather I am just noticing them. They have always been there. There is a sticker labyrinth on the stop sign near the funeral home four blocks from my house. One on the cashier's necklace. One in the bricks in front of my Monday night meeting. To walk a labyrinth is a meditation, perhaps even a prayer, so says The Wise Wiki. There are things I have forgotten, and this is one. My memory of labyrinths involve minotaurs, and Daedalus, and Ariadne. There wasn't a meditation there except do not let the bull-man eat your head.

When you go into a labyrinth, though it looks a tangle of confusing pathways, you always come out. I remember my natural birthing coach telling us this as she taught us to draw a labyrinth on cardstock. It was an exercise. Drag your finger around the path. You can't make a wrong turn. You can't get stuck in corners. You aren't in a maze. I like that there are no tricks. No cleverness here You are on one long path, spiraling to a center that turns around and spits you back out. She coached me to think of labor this way. I forgot, for obvious reasons, anything involving natural child birthing. It just was zapped out of my skull, like Attica Greek and the minutes before I found out she was dead. Wikipedia says the labyrinth is a symbol of our path to God, or the path to something else entirely. The beauty of that analogy sits in my brain for a moment. That is more comforting than minotaurs in the middle.

I dream of the dead. My grandfather and alcohol. They both smile and remind me of what I no longer have. I miss them both, separately, for their own reasons. And yet their absence is okay, they lived their lives.

My grandfather died in the same way that my grandmother died. She harbored an invisible and undetected cancer in her lungs, but still, they both died from pneumonia in hospital, eleven years apart. After my grandfather died, I found a notebook in his belongings. It was from the last days of my grandmother's life as the disease took residence in her lungs, ravaged her. She had a breathing tube in her throat and could not speak, so all their conversations were on this stenographer's tablet.

I can only read a page here and there. It is too overwhelming to read. Sometimes I wonder why I keep it, yet it seems too sacred to throw away. She writes, "It hurts, Michael. So much more than I can bear." And the next line, she asks if he found her socks. To read her suffering in her own handwriting on the page...I have often wondered if in his last days, he thought about that notebook. If he knew the pain that he would experience, the desperation that would be coming. I wonder if that death was something he feared, or more like the devil he knew. Pain I expect is always less than the pain of the unexpected.

The grief changed with the notebook. She suffered. I put that out of my mind, I suppose. I washed the death, because I was not there. It was a beautiful death in my mind's eye. She waited for my grandfather to come to the hospital. Then she let go in his arms. But this notebook reminds me that it hurt her. The illness wrenched the life out of her, squeezing her lung. This strong woman wept and begged for her life.

I never asked myself before if Lucy's death hurt her. Did she suffer? It is so easy to fall right into a maze of torturous grief thoughts. So easy, I didn't even realize I walked into the huge hedge maze with the sign in front that reads:

MAZE WITHOUT AN EXIT!

DO NOT ENTER!

BEASTS ABOUND!

The other day, we sat at the traffic light in front of Harleigh Cemetery, the one behind Dunkin Donuts, where Walt Whitman is buried. It is a few miles from my house. "A famous poet is buried there," I said to Beezus. I don't know why I mentioned it to a four-year old. In the moment, I suppose I thought if you bury me, bury me next to Walt Whitman.

Beezus didn't miss a beat. "Is Lucy with him?"
"What do you mean?"
"Is Lucy buried there?"
"No, honey. Lucy was not buried. She was cremated. Do you know what that means?"
"No."
"It means that after you die, when your soul leaves the body and that person no longer feels any pain and all the tests are done, they burn the body and make sacred ashes. We have her ashes in our house."
"WE DO?!?!"
"Yes."
"WHERE?!?!"
"In the living room."
"LUCY IS IN THE LIVING ROOM?!?!"
"I suppose in some ways she is, but in many others, the important ways, she is not."

But is she in the living room? It feels like a puzzle I cannot solve. And I felt like I had to say over and over, but she is not hurting. It didn't hurt her to be burned to ash and fit into the smallest jar in the world.

I saw this sign the other day and I can't shake it.

I do not have a soul, it read. I am a soul and I have a body. 

Maybe the body is a labyrinth, our soul climbs in and travels about, like a corporeal pilgrimage. We think we are our thoughts. We think we are the body. We forget that there is a way out again. Like Icarus, the way out can be wax wings rising above the whole mess, or the way out is to go back the way we came, but the way of wisdom is to follow the path, wherever it goes, no matter how pointless it feels, because we know we get out somehow.

Grief, however, is a fucking maze. And there is a minotaur in it. The minotaur wants to eat your heart, and then have sex with your corpse. I know it is disgusting, but I am only telling you the truth of the matter. It's a goddamned minotaur. Awful oversexed beast. The maze is designed to catch you up. It looks straight forward, like a hedge path at times, but then it ends, abruptly. Straight up there is a green, dense bush. It can't even be called a bush, it is a wall of hedge. You turn and take another path, and there is another fucking minotaur. Except this minotaur has a concerned look and is asking you why you aren't over her death yet. She was so little, he says, and she hadn't even breathed yet. Maybe it was God's plan, and who are you, really, to question God's plan. You stammer. You  scream at the minotaur, "THERE IS NOTHING TO 'GET OVER'! I JUST MISS HER, ASSHOLE!" The minotaur feels sorry for you, tries to eat your head, and you tell him you taste bitter and salty. Later, after walking for a few more years, it becomes something else, the maze, I mean, not the minotaur. You realize you are walking out of it. You no longer give a flying fuck what minotaurs say about grief. Maybe the maze is an illusion so convincing, it should just be called real. You get out of it, but you must find your own way out. You create the turns. You create the exits. You must believe this path has a way out, even when you don't believe it. It is a riddle. After you walk out of it, you realize grief was a labyrinth, not a maze.

Except maybe that is an illusion too. There is never a way out, but there is always a way in.

I am trying to figure out what I want to say about death and grief, but it is right there, stuck in this puzzle.

Walk forward. You already are in the maze. Walk deeper into the rocky maze to walk out. Trust that you will come out. Or don't. But you will.

taxes and death

Stretches pass between us this morning like a contagious yawn. I pull my arms upward, move towards the right. The girl follows, then the boy, then the dog. It is morning. We stretch. Fart. Yawn. Rub eyes. Sigh.

I am coming off a busy streak, then into another one. Today we craft. We paint. We walk in the rain.

So busy, I glance back at things lost in the wake. Paintings. Phone calls. Emails. Children. More peppermint tea for the kiddies. But I have done paintings, and cleaning, and shopping, and returning, and taxes. The bloody taxes.



When I started doing my taxes, I was listening to Japanese flute with monks chanting. It was peaceful. I lit incense, and took the excuse as quiet time. Taxes as meditation. Why not? There is a number at the end. The answer to your year. No questions answering questions. No children on top of me. No one asking me for anything. No death.

I organized all my medical expenses, my yearly donations, Etsy sales, and tax documentation that comes in this time of the year. I had color-coded tabs, highlighters, staples. Then I started.

Social security number.
Name.
Donation to campaign fund?

I can answer these questions. The children ran in circles from the bathroom to the dining room, giggling. Just outside the door of the office. I watched them from my computer desk. It was lovely. Then they began to circle into the office, small steps at first, just as the Schedule C and Form 8889 began taunting me.

You have no idea what you are doing with this calculator, Artist.


My Etsy shop needs a tax form. For the love of everything holy. I made a profit of $116 dollars after hundreds of hours of work. And now taxes on top of the insult.

CAN'T YOU SEE I'M DOING THE BLOODY TAXES?!?!

grunt. snuffle. is that right? None of our medical expenses count?
Harumph. Capitalism sucks. How can we make too much and not have enough?


OUT OF THE OFFICE!

Scurrying like pecking hens, they chant in discordant shrieking, "One marker, Mama? One piece of paper? One sticker? One thing that is so important I can't live without it."

YOUR CIRCULAR RUNNING IS INTERRUPTING MY CIRCULAR THINKING! Have a Lollipop! Go run! Join a gypsy caravan! OUT!

By the time I was itemizing, Jello Biafra was screaming California Uber Alles from my computer speakers.  And I was screaming at the children, they giggled. My knees folded up under my body, stiff neck, and buzzing from too much wheatgrass juice. Maybe I should meditate. I'm angry, or restless, or anxious. Turn off the punk.

Oooooommmmmmmm.
Oooooommmmmmmm.
Oooooommmmmmmm.
OooooommmmmmygodIcan'tbelievewecan'tclaimourmedicalexpenses.

I am thirty-eight years old. I am surprised at my life. It is a normal life. Taxes and Dead Kennedys. Little people who giggle and wrestle and ask me for paint.


What are you up to these days? Where the hell is everyone? Who does your taxes?