loss

In the last few weeks, I’ve pilgrimaged back to my book. Sitting down and showing up, morning after morning. Forcing my fingers along the familiar keys, like beads on a rosary, like a prayer, making my meditations, tapping out my thoughts — meager though they are — and willing the deeper ones to surface. They’ve been buried since November. Buried with my father.

It’s slow going. My mind aches from the labor of it all. Still, I’m keeping at it. Which is progress in and of itself.

I wrote 300 pages in the six months of quarantine. It was the one clear blessing that came out of Covid for me.

But then, quick as a heart attack — all was lost. Mourning after mourning. I would stare at the screen. I would falter. I would fail. And I couldn’t really say I even cared.

I wanted to. To care. To fight for the writing. To wrestle with the words. But they’d withered all when my father died.

To be a writer, Stephen King says, you must do two things: read a lot and write a lot. And since my words died with my dad, I’ve really only done the first. I’ve read. I wouldn’t say voraciously because with twin boys and a teaching schedule and a coaching husband and the settling of the will and the buying and remodeling of a new house and the selling of the old one… well, voracious was not on the menu.

But I could read in small handfuls. Snack size sittings. So I picked the heartiest fair I could find, and I assembled a charcuterie board of books and nibbled at them whenever I found a smidgeon of a second. The Goldfinch. The Year of Magical Thinking. Priest Daddy.

And I grazed. And I gained sustenance. Slowly. Steadily. And in the last few weeks, I’ve found the strength to go to the altar again and search for a sliver… a finger or toe hold of the book that was buried six feet under six months ago.

And this week, the hard work began to produce. Words, gummed up and clay-clogged though they may be, have emerged. They are far from hardy. They are sluggish, sallow sorts, most decidedly disinterred, blinking and dazed in the hot summer sun. But they are words. And I am feeling hopeful again.

And so I am back at it again this morning. Back on my back porch till my battery fades, then into my library, backed by those who’ve come before, cheering me on from my shelves of inspiration. Among them, those who helped me find the strength to mine for the gold in a year where all the magic died and so did my preacher dad: The Goldfinch, The Year of Magical Thinking, Priest Daddy.

She’d come to Oak Ridge to welcome me. Me… the rebel teen and recent cult outcast. She smelled of cigarettes and metallic fizz. (No doubt there was a 2 liter bottle of Tab between her knees.) We were sitting on my grandmother’s concrete stoop, a kitten named Pony between us. The sun warmed our shoulders as she poured her heart into mine.

This woman smelling of tobacco and Tab soda was my Aunt Ann, and this was the most time I’d ever spent with her. How had I lived so long without truly knowing her?

She was a wizard of warmth and wisdom. It rose from her being in whispers, soothing and soft and slowly sifting into you, until you also felt wise and warm just from being near her.

We talked for hours that early May day, pink primroses nodding their heads as whipped cream clouds floated overhead, and my love for her and the entire Peters clan settled like seeds in my soul.

I’d always been a part of them, but now I was deep in the midst of them. Transplanted, grafted to their stalk by coming to live with their matriarch — our matriarch — my grandmother. And I was all in.

It was the best, most glorious thing that ever happened to me. I think that’s why my core aches so when I lose one.

When my grandmother died, a sore rose on my chest, directly above where my heart sits. It wept and ached, a simmering wound that lasted for months. Eventually, it faded, but the pruning scar still shimmers silver in the right light.

And then when my father died — before we knew he’d passed — my heart bled into a backache that bloomed the night it happened and didn’t subside until we found him the next day.

And now Ann. My precious, beloved, my dearest Aunt Ann.

Yesterday morning out of nowhere, while baking up banana bread for my boys, that familiar bruised heartache unfolded itself beneath my left shoulder and I knew it was the day. The day I would lose her.

And it was. And my body suffered with hers until she breathed her labored last. The ache in my shoulder subsided, but the ache in my heart will go on forever.

My grafting was so complete on that early May day in the twilight of my 16th year, that I am destined to feel every growing pain, from new blossom to withered vine, on our family’s tree. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My heart is a nesting doll. There is an ee cummings poem that holds special import in my life and speaks to the love I have for this family I’ve been so firmly grafted to.

i carry your heart

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)