frida muerto face

Technically, today is Dia de los Inocentes, or Dia de los Angelitos. The day of the innocents. The day we remember that children and babies that died. So, remembering them all. Honoring them all. It is also All Saint's Day. Tomorrow is All Soul's Day and Dia de los Muertos. I paint my face every year. And in my part of the United States, Halloween was cancelled, or rather postponed until the 5th of November. Tomorrow there is a Halloween parade at school. Anyway, we had been housebound for the last few days because the hurricane ripped through our state, causing devastation and mass destruction. It is really horrible. My thoughts and prayers are with the people down the shore. I'm not complaining about it, but just explaining that we had been in the house, bored, wanting to celebrate Halloween, Samhain, and Day of the Dead.

Yesterday, my sister and her kids came over and I painted everyone's face like a calavera. Then we took pictures. We thought it would be totally creepy to take a family portrait this way. Like one of those fake olde tyme pictures you take on the boardwalk, except my daughter is wearing a Hello Kitty shirt. We posed in front of our Day of the Dead altar. I wish you could see my sister's tattoo. It is very cool Frida calavera.

Okay, yeah, the picture is a little creepy. But also makes me feel blessed to be in this family. If I die young, I hope they keep doing this in my honor and in Lucia's honor.

For the past five years, I have dressed like Frida Kahlo for Halloween, and the last few it has been Frida Muerto. I do this to honor her, commune with her, help channel her energy and power. She is a constant inspiration. We have a children's book called Frida, which is about Frida Kahlo and her life. My kids love that book, and in it, they say that Frida loved her eyebrows because they look like a bird flying. So, I painted my eyebrows like that book, carrying a thorny rose, because my daughter's life and death feel like that to me.

In the spirit of still life everyday, I created a little how-to video on how to create a very easy Frida Kahlo Day of the Dead look from the shoulders up. From the shoulders down, you should wear some kind of peasant dress and large necklace.





Post your calavera faces here. I would love to see your work.

i am stretched on your grave

I am stretched on your grave,
     And will lie there forever.
If your hands were in mine,
    I'd be sure we'd not sever.
My apple tree, my brightness,
    Tis time we were together,
For I smell of the earth
   And I am stained by the weather.

When my family thinks
    That I'm safe in my bed,
From night untill morning,
    I am stretched at your head,
Calling out to the air
    With tears hot and wild,
My grief for the girl
    That I loved as a child.

The priests and the friars
    Approach me in dread
Because I still love you,
    My love, and you're dead.
I still would be your shelter
    Through rain and through storm.
And with you in your cold grave,
    I cannot sleep warm.


Táim sínte ar do thuama, trans. Frank O'Connor

It is a poem I have never sung to my daughter. I took out the stanza about first love and maidenheads. I loved her in a different way. But I still loved her since before I knew I would ever be a mother.But when I hear it, I cannot help but think of Lucia. I imagine myself, fingernails filled with soil and earth, grasping into the brown grass, prostrate over her little body, weeping a brackish mixture of love and blubbering. Grief is nothing like I imagined. I was less cool than I thought I would be, less composed. I was a mess, bloated and drunk in the early weeks, and later, angry and salty.

She had no grave. We buried her in the wind. Fling her ashes to the sea in wild gestures of release, but palm her tiny urn. It is a slight of hand. Now you see her. Now you don't. We cannot let go.

I prop myself on my elbows, aiming at the gravestone. I drove to Boston for the weekend to meet up with Jess and Julia and Niobe. We ask Niobe to take us somewhere morbid and she picks a cemetery.  There is a stone with a carving of a skull with wings. The angel of death. A calavera. It is the first I see, and quite unself-consciously, that I lie on the grave of a young women, snapping a photo with my Android.

I read her name.

Jane a Negro Servant of Andrew Bord, something or other...She was 22 years old and 3 months. I put my forehead on the space above her skull.

You were someone's daughter, Jane. 
And so today, you are my daughter. 
I am stretched on your grave.
I will lie there forever.

+++

There is a hurricane in town. We pack a bag and make candles. My daughter takes a bottle of rose oil, and spills it across the table. The studio smells like the Virgin Mary. The hurricane grabs a window and forces the mechanism open. I lock it shut again. My roses carry on an elaborate dance outside my kitchen window. And I realize suddenly that I cannot save the roses.

Atlantic City looks gone. I don't miss it. I'm worrying about my own ass right now. I see all these pictures of alcohol and parties pop up on Facebook and miss drinking in a storm. I don't miss drinking, as a sport or a lifestyle. I just miss a nice bourbon now and again. It is like that, isn't it? A cigarette never tastes good after years without smoking, though I have imagined it a thousand times. And similarly, a drink would not end well. It would take me somewhere much worse than the hurricane, but I still wish I were able to have just one (even though I never was able to have just one.) And that is the irony of missing drinking. I miss a kind of drink I never did. I grieve a person I never was.

The power went out for an hour or so, then back on again. Sam lit a fire, and we watched a movie about Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren. I drank coffee. It is a full moon tonight, and a hurricane is in town and I stretch on her grave, and create an altar for Dia de los Muertos. The lights flicker again, so I leave you with pictures of my altar.

If you have day of the dead pictures, link them in the comments. I'd love to look.

spoken word blog round-up TWO

Last year, I was just blown away by the pieces submitted in the Spoken Word Blog Round-up, and was very excited to do it again this year. So, without further ado...

Welcome to the Second Annual Spoken Word Blog Round-up! YEEHAW!

Please read one of your blog posts, poems, or written word pieces aloud for a camera, post it, and link up here on the Mister Linky. Leave a comment. It is really extraordinary to hear people's inflections, manner of speaking, and connection to the pieces they publish on the internet. I hope you join me. I have read two pieces this year. One from still life with circles called curios. The other is from Glow in the Woods. It is called questions and answers.

curios.

questions and answers.

becoming

A few years ago, Petra sent me a postcard from New Zealand of two fiddleheads formed into a heart. I always keep the postcard on my desk, tucked into the painting I did of an enso. It is a strange, otherworldly image, like two Shinto embryo bowing to each other.

I honor the sacred in you. In the honoring, we become love.

That feeling of unfolding, or unrolling oneself, branches curled inward, aching from the only position we think we must keep, I know that feeling. Those future leaves like hands praying to soon unfurl, to soak in the shadows of forest. To protect me from garden pests.

I curl up in a fetal leaf position. There is a distinctly different part of me, the part you cannot see, that is mired  in the bog underneath, the dark and cold, moist and uncomfortable. I believe I am depressed, but I don't know. I felt this way when I was pregnant with Thomas. Not the same way, but similarly. My head and body contort into the painful clawing of allergy and celiac attacks. I eat wheat to be definitively tested for celiac and rheumatoid arthritis, but it affects every part of me now. I feel soul sick and body sick. Not with a touch of extra mucus, but a dying kind of sick. My whole body aches. I don't want to walk. I want to sleep all day. It sounds dramatic, but it feels dramatic. So, I trudge on, making breakfast, watching movies, ignoring the pain, grumbling. Always grumbling.

I listened to Comedian Tig Notaro on This American Life the other day do a set three days after she found out she had cancer. I am telling you this because I bought the whole thing for $5 on Louis C.K.'s website and listened to it, and it is profound.*

Deeply, overwhelmingly profound.

It isn't simply that she had been diagnosed with stage two breast cancer, it came on the heels of a devastating intestinal bacterial disease that almost killed her, then her mother died, and her girlfriend broke up with her, then she was diagnosed with cancer. When she speaks of this bad news, you can feel it. And yet there is the feeling that you are listening to her unfurl herself, slowly rolling those branches out, even as she is rooted in swampy darkness. She is changing as she is performing her set. I can't quite explain it. You have to hear it, laugh with her, tear up with her. And there is this point, she keeps talking about a joke she had written before her diagnosis that seems stupid now. And I kept flashing back to this point when I sat in a prenatal yoga class and I said, "All you need to give your baby is love. Everything is going to be okay."

Remember that? Remember when you felt like the first thirty some odd years you thought babies lived? You were stupid, but you meant well, Angie.

I barely recognize that woman. I am in this huge unfurling process right now--figuring out who I am, what I want, who I need to be. I like who I am becoming. I can feel her, see her, embrace her. Sit with her. But the becoming is a bitch.

*Ironically, I have been writing this short post all week, and TracyOC wrote about this piece too on her blog.

pomegranate

I am over at Glow in the Woods today writing about Demeter and Persephone and Lucia. And naturally, of  the noble pomegranate.

photo by hurleygurley

tree

Mama, was I wish you once made?

Yes, my baby.

Was I wish on a star or on a dandelion?

You were every wish I ever made on anything I could wish upon.

Was I born a fairy or a girl?

A fairy, my angel, with little invisible wings. Your fairy power is to make everything bright and lovely. You do that by being exactly who you are.

It is?

Yes, my baby.

Mama?

Yes, my love.

Can we pray to the angels?

Yes, my love. What would you like to pray?

I want to pray that I am kind to my friends and my friends are kind to me.

That is a lovely prayer.

Well, can we pray it?

You just did pray it.

She hands me a drawing and runs off with her yoga mat. She giggles with her friends, and finds her shoes. I glance at the paper, and it is a tree. Not just a tree, but a tree with stars and the word "love" written across every branch. It has hearts and a squirrel climbing the tree. It says, "I love you." and then her name. The drawing looks like a heart exploding with love.

"It is a tree growing love." The yoga teacher explains to me.

"That is beautiful." I'm prone to emoting these days. I hide it behind fidgeting, but I get choked up.

"I told them to draw a seed, " the teacher points to a heart drawn at the bottom of the trunk. "Then they were supposed to draw the tree from it. She wanted her tree to grow love."

"Wow."

"Exactly, WOW. She is such a cool little person. She did that all by herself. I did not prompt her to draw love."

I don't know what to say. I am verklempt. I am proud, amazed at how much she has to teach me every day. I have no right to be proud; she does not belong to me, but I'm proud nonetheless. I wonder some days, when hits and kicks are exchanged and toys are begged for and extra candy stolen, if my compassion-nagging works, if my focus on our highest self, on banishing materialism, on other people, on love is sinking in. I wonder if I am doing anything positive here by staying home. I know the children are safe, but am I showing them every possibility a woman has? Or just one traditional role?

My daughter is a heart. A pumping, beating, lovely heart of a girl I am privileged to parent. And this little crayon picture humbles me. My best self wants to grow love. If my yoga teacher asked me to finish the sentence, "My tree grows..."  My seed might look like God, and my tree compassion. Those things are intangible, un-drawable. Unable to be articulated nor drawn, and if pushed further, perhaps I would have drawn a tree sprouting love too. My best self likes to think so.

There are days I feel so alone on the Island of Kid. I woke up this morning, for instance, and watched the Backyardigans before I realized that the kids had left the room. I was thinking about race and little creatures dancing together and what this show teaches kids. I sing songs, and tease them. Sometimes I lose my temper and say things like, "I am incredibly disappointed in this behavior." And then tsk, and wish that shame were not my go-to. I leave the laundry build up too long. I just really want to go to work some days. It's not that they are not lovely. Or that they are naughty children. They are lovely, and very well-behaved children. It is just that I don't always like who I am--my lack of patience, my selfishness, my extreme introversion. Some days, I just want a nap. I don't like what being home alone all day brings out of me--not every day, or every week, even. But when I get stuck in my head, or I feel busy and bored, and I grumble and growl at the kidlets, I wonder if my being home helps anyone. Some days, I just don't want to think in pink and light blue and clean-up songs or read the same book a thousand times or talk about unicorns and fire trucks. I don't want to decide breakfast, lunch, dinner, and three snacks for myself, let alone three other people and a dog. Those days are much fewer than I imagined before babies, but they come. The guilt comes with it. Because I know this is a choice for us that few families get to make, and Lucia's death makes their living so precious and not taken for granted.

But when she brings me a picture of a tree blossoming love, I know she is bringing me this self-portrait we painted together. The picture of what my parenting is about--the principles we want to bestow upon our children. Choose love, I whisper for five years, little niggling pushes toward compassion. She translated those whispers into prayers. She asked for help with the love and friendship. That is a gift I wanted to give my children--knowing her limitations, asking for help, turning control over. It is a skill I am only now learning. I still find it immensely difficult to ask for help, even as I preach it to my children. But the truth is (and I am sharing it sheepishly with you) this picture answered my desperate prayer:

Show me my path, please. Help me understand how to parent these babies in a way that is best for their souls. Help me be the best mother I can be. Help me understand what I am doing right, not just wrong.

Thank you, Daughter.

habits

The muscles tug at my abdomen.

No, wait, it is my ovary, releasing a withered elderly egg, waiting for a derby hat and an old corsage of a sperm to present itself.

Keep waiting, sister.

The eggs are useless. I think. They have been useless since I decided to stop using them. No, wait, it is the new moon coming. Everything shed. We shed tears. We shed lining. We shed emotions. We shed anger.

I feel fat and bloated and look pregnant. I want to punch people. Stop smiling at me in that stupid, hopeful way. I am not carrying twins. I am just menstruating. 

It is a small death, the blood reminds me. The death of possibility this month. And every month hereafter. We are comfortable not having any more children. It is too risky, and besides, we have no more drawer space. I don't mean to be glib, but sometimes we have to be practical about space and money.

The moon woke me for three days in a row. I had a dream the first night that I was hiding in small dark places, and someone with a flashlight kept finding me, but it was just the moon, shining in mine eyes. Last night, I dreamed I found a crystal ball, then a large metal gazing ball, like in certain yards.

I stuff crystals in my pillow case to dream. But nothing comes. Nothing but dreams of the moon finding me in small places and of being a magpie. I like shiny things. Pecking and gazing. Pecking and gazing. I've been going through this magical sabbatical process. I am turned inside out, open and raw, and also open and raw. The first is a state of mind, but the other the welcoming of ideas, the absorption of technique and magic. I am melding with oils and potions and astrological phases. It is all welcoming, yes. And safe, but still the outer world has been raw and hard. I am sensitive and unsure of myself. I lay it all out there, though, even as I withdraw. I whisper and worship. That is my way of being right now. I try things I have never tried.

Last week, we mixed anointing oils. I tried to follow the spirit to guide me into a scent I needed--sandalwood, and ylang ylang, and other things that eventually made it smell like sweet death. I poured it down the drain, caught the little kyanite, pietersite, and smoky quartz I saved for just such an occasion. I felt stupid to not smell in a discriminating, intricate way. It felt like a philistine and a boar.

I become a student. That is an identity and way of being, but still, I am not sure what I am. And that is a painful, strange place to be. Alice--too large for a room one minute, and much too small to accomplish anything the next. I work on trusting myself to discern, to know, to feel, but it is a groundless country. A nation without footing.

The truth is I ask too many stupid questions, and also I am a know-it-all. And so I am both at the same time. Where I grew up, they used to say about people like that, "Now there is the heva hava who thinks he is the farmer." When I talk to my sponsor about someone who upset me, she always tells me that if I "spot it, I got it." In the last six months, I only spotted self-righteousness and know-it-all ism. The self-righteous know-it-all ticks off my self-righteousness, competitive right-ism, and know-it-all-ism. I began trying to change it. To mantra the phrase, "Would you like to be right or happy?" Keeping my mouth shut makes me cry. I feel powerless again. I feel emasculated. I feel impotent.

All these sex terms for feeling frustrated, but that is where I am. Fucking frustrated. It is good place to finally realize something like that before you are insufferable for ninety years, but it is also painful to change that behavior. To always be a student, and not say everything you know when saying what you know is all you know.

I spent my late teens and early twenties saying yes to any experience that came my way. I thought it would make me a better writer later on. I had many conversations with an array of colorful people--junkies, conspiracy theorists, communists, eco-terrorists, criminals, prostitutes, crack addicts, vagabonds, homeless kids, runaways, murderers, heiresses, poets, cops, jazz musicians, laundresses...and now, I feel funny saying, "Yeah, me too. I once cliff dove. I rode in a helicopter to a glacier. I shot an AK-47. I was a rock climber. I smoked Chesterfield Kings." No one really cares. It's not about me. They just want to tell their story, and really, I just want to listen.

Know-it-all storytelling is a habit that I'm finding difficult to break. And being a student that trusts myself.

What habit are you trying to break? 

crutches

This last moon was particularly hard on the earth people. Us, grounded, soil-smelling creatures suddenly uprooted, moving like the tides until our feet dangled inches above the floorboards, swaying into a moody petulance. The moon challenges us to face crisis without our crutches.

TRY YOUR HAND AT LIVING! The moon bellows. TRY YOUR HAND AT BEING YOU!

I am constructed of crutches. Weakness for all things vice. But now, I just drink coffee, cuss to myself, take a handful of candy every few days, shop for antique fortune-telling teacups and old carnival signs. I write on a blog. The crutches of recovery, I suppose. I ask my sister to ground me, to check my chakras, align them with gemstones. But I keep floating up, looking at knots in the tops of trees, waving to a plague of grackles that swoop low like the finger of an ancient god. The last few months, I simply could not keep things straight. There are abandoned kid drawings all over my floor, laundry piling up. I cannot return phone calls. Emails starred and unanswered. My heart races. And the way I used to regard myself, competent and responsible, feels like a house of tarot cards. All my fortunes fall to the floor, and I have to stare at the empty remains of my foundation.

I take a talisman deck from inside an old vase. I pull the card that reads, "protection from your mind turning against your body." And I stare at the sketch of a belt pulled taut against a skeleton.

My mind turns against my body daily. My friend says that given ten minutes alone after an awkward conversation with a co-worker, he can go from fine to quitting his job, moving out of state, and drinking again. Alcoholism makes death by slow, distilled suicide an option some days. I admit that I am prone to that type of thinking, but instead of acting it out, I write about it, construct a story from it, write an unhappier ending, or, even more surreal, a happier one.

I didn't feel depressed until I stopped writing. Maybe it was there in the spaciness, the ungrounding. But it comes to me in a flash as I stare at the card. Even the art couldn't make up for the not-writing, and this is the crisis the moon throws at me. A crumb of doubt about my writing and how it affects my ego. I took a blog break. I thought with my blog break, I should take a break on writing wholesale. No journal notes, no short stories. Just me being a stay-at-home mother. Being present.

Yet, in a matter of days, without writing, I felt defeated and crazy. Within two weeks, I had sent a resume to an anonymous email for a job as a secretary, even though I knew I would have to pay more in childcare than it would pay me. And besides, I have never even been a secretary. It didn't matter. I just wanted an escape from the dialogue in my brain, the constant story without a book.

When I stop writing, I go crazy. I turn inward and feel out of sorts. I plan to become a dairy farmer in Iowa. Other days, when I think no one is looking, I fantasize about walking away with just the clothes on my back, a mystery unsolved. That could be a novel, I think. Actually, I think that already is a novel.

My crutch may be writing, but it is a crutch without liver damage and lung disease. Writing is a scalpel and my brain is the fetal pig dissected, pinned open, a heart lying next to a notebook. Writing puts it into perspective. Instead of hug it out, I write it out. With two weeks of not writing, I saw my life set out in front of me a long series of things never written. Characters taking on lives of their own. The stories in my head are constantly dancing, arguing, fighting, fucking, snapping photographs, remembering, until they turn inward and wage a deep, unrelenting war in there, oozing out of my dreams, and twisted bedtime yarns for the children.

Writing can be a kind of mythical Ancient Greek torture. Write, write, write, no one reads, then I write more. In fact, the less people read, the more I want to write, just to change their mind. Write. Write. Not write. Go crazy. Write again. With more zeal, more mystical shit, more bells, more whistles. But write, dammit. Until there is nothing left to say.

+++

When she withholds love, 
I want to smother her with kisses, 
cover her with flowers and tea 
and read her my writing again and again.

She didn't really love me, I think.
But that was never really the point.

integrity

You are nothing without your integrity, I say to my daughter after the neighbor girl tells me that she lied about something meaningless.

She looks at me, confused. I say nothing but that.

She is five.

It feels brutal after it is out there. I don't want to be brutal to my daughter, nor do I want to be strict or shaming. And I think about the way that my writing has been brutal, strict, and shaming and in that way, perhaps, lacks integrity. I don't think brutal and honesty need to go together, but there is a reason they often do. I strive for honesty without the brutality, but I fail often. Honesty can sound brutal when it isn't your truth. And that is the thing. I believe in honesty, but I don't believe in truth.

It is true in my grief I expected people to be flawless while I tattooed my flaws on my body, or carved them into palo santo, written in sanskrit, burnt them with incense and Buddhist chants then wrote a post about it. I strive not to be brutal anymore, not to be exacting, but alone, I find myself falling into the habit of deep judgment, silently writing scathing biographies of people who hurt me years ago. I no longer write out that judgment in a public forum, true, but I catch myself nonetheless. Big changes happen slowly, I remind myself. Sometimes, it is as though my release of those habits was nothing more than an exercise in who I wish to be, rather than who I am. Other times, it feels permanent and enlightened. And maybe that is the secret of the universe, we must suffer through changing--one step forward, two steps back. We may like who we are becoming, but we cannot force that woman into existence before her time. Now, I turn the anger into a prayer for those people to have everything I want for myself.

+++

It is the full moon. It is the time of releasing old patterns, opening doors to healing, banishing unwanted influences. And so I need to make amends to you, so I can stay sober and write comfortably and look you in the eye.

I have let many people down through my writing.

I think it is part of the reason I want to walk away from here, because it is so exhausting. I cannot make it right, and I cannot make it without writing. I get caught up in a story, I admit. I am prone to exaggerating, and following an analogy to the point of absurdity. I always assumed all my readers liked that about my writing. I have always thought that if I don't write about my truth, my world, my experience, I have nothing to write about. When I wrote of certain friendships where I was hurt and sad and felt absolutely brutalized, I generalized and exaggerated. I do that. I know I do. My feelings of isolation were exaggerated and not entirely true. I mean, it was true about those friendships, but not all my friendships. And that is just it. I wrote about my truth, not THE truth.

For example, when I wrote pieces like Ghost Town, it was not literally true that everyone left, but rather that I felt that way. I felt abandoned. I felt alone. I felt patronized by people. Those people are no longer in my life and hadn't been for a long time. I have friends. Old friends. Some friends I would talk to about that very experience, my sister for example. I talk to my sister at least once a day, more like two or three. So was I isolated? Truly isolated? Of course not. Talking to her is like talking to myself, I say to her. She nods and says she knows. And sometimes old, good friends are like that too. I apologize to S. for that, if she reads here even, and D. And others, all my babylost friends too. There were people there, and the people there felt abandoned when I wrote that I was abandoned. It was a cycle I started, not them. That has always been my fear.

What I fear, I become. I repeat to myself endlessly. I forgive myself, but I know other people's forgiveness is not so easily come by.

I cannot take back the hurt I caused people. I ultimately hurt me, probably more deeply than anyone. Those people could walk away from my brutality, but I can't walk away from me. I have tried through the years to mention it in posts, take responsibility for where I failed my friendships, not where they failed me. Certainly, that was the intention of Ghost Town, but I fear people just heard the latter.

I apologize if you felt beat up in my writing. If you were there, I remembered. If we argued, I know our conflicts were not black or white. That is how I saw the world after Lucia died, but I can see how misguided and unfair that is to everyone. I trusted and assumed that blog writing was given a free pass to explore my dark emotions. That wasn't fair either.

The truth is I felt isolated for a long time before Lucia died. I have mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. Before going into recovery, I thought it was her death that pushed people away. I acted like a victim, because that is what I felt like--a victim of life. It is part of my disease. I no longer live my life that way. I can see now that I victimized people, rather than the other way around.

I wrote publicly about my friendships, and I need to apologize publicly. I didn't feel I could write here again if I didn't write that. I guess it is a pitiful amends to the world of people I hurt. Private apologies clearly are only heard by one people, when all the people judged with me. I appreciate the unconditional support my fellow babylost mothers and fathers have given me here throughout the years, despite how poorly I behaved, but I know it hurt people outside this community to read those comments at times.

I make the vow to first weigh my writing's effect on others, to squelch the tendency towards exaggeration, to talk to people in my life, directly, if their behavior has hurt my feelings, to write in a way that is both honest and with integrity. Public art needs to have a certain ego behind it. We believe in ourselves enough to put it out there regardless of reaction. I am spiritually working on balancing the ego and writing as best I can. Writing publicly has taken its toll on me emotionally, but that suffering is pushing me towards being a better woman, friend, artist, writer, wife, and mother. I have to believe it is.

I am writing here now about more than just grief. I have made that vow for a long time, and never quite followed through with it. My spiritual path has been impossible to ignore, my artwork can no longer live on another blog entirely. Everything is getting integrated into this space. I have been working on this growth and grief publicly for almost four years now. It has been painful and torturous to go through the brutality of writing about things that should have perhaps been kept private. I made those mistakes, and I can only move forward, changing the way I write and protect people in the future.

My daughter is five and she is learning about others through me. What would she learn through my writing in the last four years? What would she learn about how to treat friends and those suffering? That only I can suffer and be human, and make mistakes? That everyone else needs to be perfect, so I can misbehave? I have failed her in that way, and you too. And for that, I am sorry.

I have wrapped my arms around me, and whispered in my ear. It is a delicate kind sentence...If you don't have your integrity, Angie, you don't have anything.

lifesavers

I have no grief to give you anymore.

No, wait, maybe I do. Maybe it hides behind the confusion. It crouches behind the spaciness and flakiness and the general feeling of being overwhelmed with life. Or maybe that is grief itself, dressed up for work.

Lucy died.

I write about it here. There. Everywhere.

After the last baby died, I grieved for a little, then it was over. I cried only once. I didn't name her. And I wondered if this community had space for not-naming, or even not-grieving as much as it has space for grief in whatever form it arrives. I didn't want to exaggerate the experience. It was physically grueling, but I didn't feel sadness over the life she didn't get to lead. Life was over before it began. On the grand scheme of suffering, it was barely a blip. We get behind anger. We get behind indignation. We get behind sadness. But what about no-grief? What if I felt like I grieved the grief I needed to grieve in two weeks?

Grief is something I poured out of me onto the trees, the flowers, the internet, for three point five years. It flowed into every piece of art and writing I did. Grief isn't a controlled essence. It is not a tameable beast. I couldn't control when it was a torrent, and now as a single tear, I cannot will it into a keen. It drips into this post, of course, but it is a different grief. It is the grief of an inevitable ending.

I have replaced my addiction to bourbon for Wint-O-Mint life savers. I eat them like candy. I chomp them, and imagine the blue spark.

CHOMP. Blue Spark.
CHOMP. There is another.
NARFLE...not quite a spark, perhaps a faint ember, or a fizzle of aqua.

I want sparks in me. I want to feel a passion. I have one. It seeps into all the posts I write now. I don't know how to manage it quite yet. I don't even know what to call it. I would basically live in my studio if I didn't have to manage everyone else's life. There was a time I wept here constantly. That was a grief we all know. I cried about the death of my daughter and drank bourbon. I put the bottle on the floor by my feet, and thought about dying. Not suicide, but it was just that grieving and drinking while being me was torture. This room was a dark place.

But now, I would spend all my time here if I could. All this writing about grief and acceptance and living with her death transmuted that sadness and heaviness into something beautiful and healing. My hands are strong and muscled, and in the nooks and crannies of this room, there are letters from babylost friends, thank you cards, artwork about death. There are skeletons, and political poetry, old love letters, and a dictionary. There are milagros, and sins, if you look hard enough. There are baby spider plants in water, growing roots, ready to be put in soil. All my sacred objects are here, except Lucia.

I burn incense constantly. And when I write, I draw it in through my nose. It becomes part of me, part of my writing.  I write because writing is a compulsion. I don't understand why I feel the words in my fingers, and need to get them out. But I do. Words flow out of me like a faucet turned on, until I have to eat or sleep or tend to a child. I write now into a word document and sometimes post something that no one reads. It smells of sandalwood and sage. There is wax dripped on everything in my studio from the candles I burn to light the incense, and the children leave a trail of the sandbox on the floors. Sand and wax. Wax and sand. It all mixes up together with the smell of fresh, clean mint of Lifesavers. This is what I am now. Sand and wax and mint and incense all borne of grief, but not grief.

If this space becomes gypsy, or fortune teller, or recovery, or art, it isn't grief. And if it stays grief, it isn't me. It isn't my truth anymore. I struggle with it constantly, because this space never meant to be forever about grief. I have a post a month in me about grief, but not five, or even two. I want a space for that post, intermixed with all the others. I start to write about other things here, but it morphs somehow back to grief. I used to think it was because every suffering was a form of grief. Now, I think it is because I want so desperately to stay a part of this amazing community. This blog is like this old bourbon room I'm sitting in, it hasn't quite been changed into an art studio.

After six years in this studio, I rescreened my screen door. I open the glass door to hear the chimes, let the wind blow through the space. It changes the dynamic in here. The art hangs like prayer flags. The wind carries out the old bourbon smell, and the incense, and peppermint. And sandalwood. It carries out bits of artwork, and grief. The wind carries joy in too, and music created by the mourning doves, but no mosquitoes, or flies. I need to start writing about the things being blown into my life right now. I don't quite know how to do that yet. I think it involves new paint, and a different flavor of lifesaver. I hope you stay and read. But if not, I understand. Until then.