Staking My Claim: Swimming in Happy

If you’re not getting happier as you’re getting older… then you’re fucking up.
– Ani Difranco, If Yr Not

Randomly, one afternoon last week, I experienced that heart-swollen feeling of looking at the image of a child that you love so much you have nearly no words for it, not the right ones anyway.  Words are not enough for that kind of love, for the way the sight of them almost hurts, makes you ache with what it is that bursts open inside of you.

I was looking at a lovely picture that my sister-in-law took of her middle son – a simulated superman pose in goofy goggles and cowboy boots, a boy on the ground who appears to be floating above a chalk and asphalt skyline.  I literally felt the pressure of my chest swelling, pushing out.  I almost wanted to cry for how perfect I think he is without missing, ever, all of his peculiar traits and inevitable imperfections.  He is my happiness, incarnate, as are his brothers.

Abstractly, I know they bring me joy – real, pure joy.  But it is these tiny moments that resonate, that ring through my bones, prove to me that love is tangible and real.  And my life is full of these moments.  Of my littlest nephew’s heavy head against my shoulder as his almost-too-long-to-be-on-my-lap body twitches and writhes and fights sleep as we sit in the sun on a gloriously sunny day at the end of January.  The way I feel when his body relaxes and his breathing steadies and he gives in to sleep, right there on my chest and in my arms.  My arms are sore, I am sweating everywhere he is on me, but I can’t move.  I won’t.  Because he will be too long for my lap soon.  And this is heaven, this precise moment, the particular feel of his weight gone fully slack against me.

The way the oldest nephew slumps his shoulders when I say the words he hates to hear me say: I have to go.  His reluctant hug as I squeeze him tighter and tighter until he complains.  The smell of his sweaty hair after he’s been rolling in the grass all day long playing football.  The rock on sign he flashes me as I walk away.

My heart swells.  All of the time.

Toward the end of 2010, I was haunted by the image of me standing on the bank of a river, readying for the kind of leap I feared most – one that meant leaving love behind, making one of life’s most painful choices.  I knew I was making the leap, would have to, but I was planted firmly in the dirt, unable and not ready to jump, for so many reasons.

Throughout 2011 I used the term treading often.  I was treading constantly: no permanent home, no steady work yet, no idea what to do with a love I still have trouble containing that is neither here nor there and all over the place.  I was emotionally stationary while in constant motion in the middle of the deep blue sea, feet kicking, arms circling, neck muscles tense and stiff and elongated, water lapping at my chin.  Every muscle in my body working to keep my mouth and nose above water. I dreamed about floating as though it were a fantastical place only elves and gnomes could find, longed for it with every fiber of my body.

By the opening of 2012 I had crossed over, fully, but I was still gazing back at the other side of that river.  Necessarily.  To feel it all, completely. Then I bid it all farewell.  And I’ve spent the first handful of weeks of 2012 remembering how to float, reacquainting myself with that calm, lovely place that is once again right here with me.

Through it all, I’ve never lost sight of the happy in my life – there are so many happys in my life – but the happy was overwhelmed, overshadowed by the treading, the settling, the mourning.  What I have done in the last year and a half is absolutely right – for me.  Where I am now is exactly where I should be.  And there is so much that makes me smile and laugh and gasp with the best kinds of surprise.  There is so much happy to be had.

Photo Courtesy of Jen Neitzel

A friend of mine, Jen Neitzel, posted a New Year’s project in January to help focus on the happy in your life.  She shared a picture of herself holding her own list of directions for naming thirty things that make you authentically happy.  Such an essentially simple idea.  Such an amazingly powerful idea.

I made a mental card and slipped it into my brain’s card catalog (yes, I am that old).  I saved that idea for a future date. This week something triggered a thought that reminded me of her post, reminded me that I wanted to take her idea and make something out of it – make a board of some sort where I could pin or tape or velcro words or pictures or memories of things that make me happy, that fill my bones, that expand my ribs with love.  Something I could keep up year round, for years to come, something I could edit and adjust and keep as an evolving depiction of all the things that make my heart swell.

So I did.

The same afternoon that I saw my nephew in superhero pose, I also read My Girl Thursday’s post about Sarah Rooftop’s 3 Things February.  She challenges us to end our day with writing down three things that made us smile or laugh that day.  Three happy things.  As MGT says, you don’t have to worry about the pressure and weight of gratitude – you simply remember three things that brought you happiness in a day.  I have started this and am going to continue at least through February.

So far, in only a handful of days, I have been brought to hysterical tears while sitting in a charming new restaurant only blocks from my house and felt the warmth of that first thick, sweet sip of a small batch American whiskey and shared it with my father, comparing notes, toasting to all of this time we now have together.

I have stood outside in the cold after midnight on a ‘school’ night having a serious conversation with a hysterically funny and rambunctious new friend after spending an evening being ridiculous together at an SF dance club.  I have laughed, a deep belly burst of laughter, after seeing a stranger’s face when I told him to take it easy with my friend because I have brass knuckles implanted under my skin.

I have lost my train of thought while my eyes scrunched and I nearly snort laughed as my sister’s nine-months-pregnant-belly jiggled dramatically from a tiny little laugh that escaped her mouth.

I have walked, for hours, in the winter sun, around this island I love to call home and walked out of the hardware store and went across the street to the beach where I could take off my shoes and sink my toes in the sun-warmed sand.  I felt the deep-chest-love of seeing the world seem to disappear on the horizon, water trailing off into nothingness, that feeling of being right at the edge of it all.

And there’s more.  A lot more.  In only the first five days of this month.

I am lucky.  Truly.

Being on this side of the river is returning me to myself.  If 2011 was that river that needed crossing – tumultuous, choppy, crucial – then 2012 is the far bank, the one I was aiming for, the one I needed to get to, come hell or high water.  And I’m here.  I made it through the swim, I survived the climb back up and the view is pretty fucking stunning no matter where I turn, even when the sky splits open and churns the air at a dangerous speed.  I am here.  Where I was going.

Here.  Me.

I finally have the kind of time and energy and focus to do what I do best: Do. Make. Create. Laugh.  Even when life is hard.  Especially when life is hard.  I spent one quiet evening with myself, making this board that brings to life the moments that light through my veins and swell my heart.

Because life isn’t what happens when you’re not looking. Life is what happens in every moment – in all of the good and the bad and all of the in-betweens –  and you best look, best see it and know it and smell it and try to get it down, however you can.  Life is better when more of those moments are remembered for making you smile, for making your eyes sore with laughter, for falling over from the funny of it, for the way your heart will grow, grinch-style, with every beautiful thing surrounding you. For remembering the things that hurt in the best of ways, that make you ache at the sight of them, the beauty that’s always there no matter how much shit life hands you.

Here is my Swollen Heart Board (and here is how I made it, with only things I had in the house).  I will change it out regularly to keep myself focused on the moments we all live for, the ones that get us through, the ones we earn with every hard choice, with every devastating scene or decision or fact of life.  The stuff that is always worth it.  Bliss, micro or otherwise.

A Love Letter to My Mother, as she is ~ Labor Day, Year Five

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever changing view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold 
                                                                -from Tapestry by Carole King

I have often asked myself the reason for the sadness
In a world where tears are just a lullaby
If there’s any answer, maybe love can end the madness
Maybe not, oh, but we can only try  
                                                                -from Beautiful by Carole King

I had lunch this week with a co-worker and my sister (who is also now a co-worker).  This co-worker was in from out of town to help us out with our new venture and he is really more of a co-worker/friend/family-friend/family-member than just someone we work with.  He worked with my father more than thirty years ago and has worked for my family for almost twenty years now.   He has known me since I was a child.  He has known my brother and sister practically since they were born.  He sat across the office from my mother for more than a decade.  Shared stories.  Laughed together.  Drove each other mad at times.  He and his wife have vacationed with my parents and they have discussed more than I will ever know.  He knows my mother and father as well as I do, simply in a different way.  He and I can sit or stand for hours and talk about our lives, even though we are philosophically/religiously/politically on different planets.  He is like the cousin or uncle I don’t have.  More than a co-worker.

When he came up to train us on some procedures and processes, time was wasted with talking, with laughing, with commiserating. We went to lunch, the three of us, and we looked out at the San Leandro marina, at the sunshine, at the boats as they swayed gently on the water. We were talking, as we often do when the three of us are together, about my mother.  This friend has been and is, still to this day, one of the few people she consistently lets into her life, sometimes the only one from before who gets access without severe berating. He brought my mother food week after week when we, the ‘true’ family, were not allowed in, when she didn’t have the energy to get food for herself.  He is the one constant, for my mother, in these years of madness.

He asked my sister if she had visited my mother when she was in town the weekend before.  She had.  To introduce her fiancé.  To spend time with her, again, now that my sister is about to become a mother herself.  My sister has seen my mother a few times in the last couple of months.  I have not.

How is she? he asks.  He hasn’t seen her in a while, either.  The same, my sister says.  She and I have discussed this visit already. And so I listen as she tells him – she’s not showering, she’s still not leaving that room, she’s not angry, she’s happy to see my sister, her fiancé expected worse.  It’s different, we all agree, when you knew her before, when you can see the difference.  When you love her.  It stings differently when she is your mother, your friend, your family.  When the change is so glaring that it sucks every molecule of air from the room if you don’t walk in with reserves, with a lung full of gasped outside air to protect you.

She made a joke, my sister says.  This I hadn’t heard yet.  My sister’s fiancé mentioned being afraid of sharks.  My mother said, you just have to listen for the song.  And then she hummed the Jaws theme.  A small joke.  My mother.  In there still.  We laugh, as my sister and her fiancé and my mother did.  I feel lighter thinking about that, a glimmer of the woman we know.  It cracks in my heart, though, too.  Such a small thing to be so happy about.  A sign of what we’ve lost when the tiniest bit of humor is reassuring.  And, maybe, hopefully not, but probably, a sign of what might be brewing.

My mother always ramps up in the fall.  Her manias and depressions working in contrast with the seasons.  As the days grow colder and darker, my mother’s energy level rises and rises.  Until six years ago, that was just how she was.  Now it is a full-speed acceleration into mania.  As the days grow longer, as the blooms bud on branches, my mother slows down, falls deeper into inertia.  If we’re lucky, the mania lasts one season.  If it doesn’t, as with the last one, we have to wait a full cycle of seasons for the earth to pull her back down.  Fall used to be my favorite season (and still is in all of those old ways: cooler air, new beginnings, pulling out sweaters and socks and jeans) but now it is a time full of anxiety, of anticipation, of bracing for the storm, of detecting signs and reading into things.  So we can be prepared.  So we are not caught off guard ever again.

As my laughter waned, in that small pocket of time it takes to laugh, I had travelled all of this in my mind.  Relief and the smallest anxiety over a simple joke.  There was the shortest of silences as, I imagine, we all remembered something hilarious my mother had said, the way her blue blue eyes would squint and glow with just the right joke.

Then this family-friend/co-worker said: So this weekend is the anniversary.  You remember?  When it happened.  

Oh.  Yes.  I guess it is.  I actually said: Thanks, I hadn’t yet made the connection this year and then raised my eyebrows in mock irritation.

I would have remembered.  No doubt.  But I froze for the briefest of instants and traveled back in my mind.  Yes.  Labor Day Weekend.  My mother’s behavior rose to an unbearable level of irrationality over that long weekend five years ago, my sister and I more than 700  miles away and completely oblivious until it all came to a head on the Tuesday morning after Labor Day.

Right.  The anniversary.  The holiday that came crashing down in a flurry of rushed flights and handcuffs and stretchers wheeled into mental health units.  Into the kind of panic that builds in your body like a dark grey hurricane just spinning and spinning until you aren’t sure skin and viscera is enough to hold it in. Into the kind of shock that is still causing tide-like ripples in our family.  In our hearts. In our minds. I am not giving up personal responsibility for my own life when I say that I am only now, so many years later, starting to be able to fully face and stare down the ways that this event has altered who I am, who I will be, how I act when I feel the hole of this event come open in me, even to this day.  Only now.  Only barely.

I don’t really remember how I spent that Labor Day.  I am almost sure I would have been off of work Monday.  Or I would have at least worked a short day.  I came back to work early Tuesday – in the dark hour of 5am – to open the cafe.  I would have spent the first half-hour backflushing the espresso machine, testing shots, filling the pastry case, grinding coffee, swinging chairs off of table tops and pushing them under, neatly. I would have finally sat down in the back room at some point after 6am, after we opened.  I would have held my tiny double Americano in my hand and turned on my computer.  I would have logged onto the world wide web and opened my email, opened facebook, opened my eyes as wide as possible to try to stretch the sleep out of them.  I would surely have thought about crawling back into bed, pulling the covers up over my shoulders, feeling the warmth of my dogs’ small bodies – one nestled up against my stomach, one up against the backs of my knees.

I may have even had to stand up and serve someone coffee before I made my way back to my computer and saw the early morning email from my mother.  An oddity.  Unexpected.  I would have opened that email and read the handful of sentences once, twice, at least three times before the words sunk in.  They made little sense.  Some sort of amazing plan.  We would be set.  Oprah would even want to talk to us.  We wouldn’t have to live so far apart and work so hard and us kids wouldn’t have so little.  We would be set.

My brain churned it, quickly and between customers.  My mind tried to make sense of what it could realistically be.  A contest?  The lottery?  Some other improbable landfall that would make this all real.  My gut and my heart twisted.  Something was wrong.  But what.  She was so excited.  She sounded so energized, even electronically, even pulled apart pixel by pixel and sent sailing through the invisible air.  Something was wrong.

Before I could wrap my mind around it, the phone rang.  At work at 6-something in the morning.  That could only mean my second shift barista was sick or late or generally not going to make it on time.  It was my mother.  Talking fast.  Not making total sense, but not sounding ridiculous either. At least not at first.  Don’t tell your dad, he won’t understand. He’s really being such an asshole about it all. But it’s gonna change everything.  You can do whatever you want.  We can all live together, wherever we want.  There was more.  Oprah.  Custom scrapbooking as a multimillion dollar venture.  Big houses and lovely locales.  So easy.  So sure.

I felt my stomach curl around itself and settle deep into my abdomen.  I felt my heart wrench itself into a tight little knot and start beating against itself, the echo of a heartbeat taking what felt like seconds to reach my ribcage.  I could feel my feet anchor to the painted concrete floor and my hand grip the cordless handset until my knuckles ached.  Something was very wrong.

But Mom, how can that be?  But Mom, those books cost us hundreds of dollars in supplies and tens of hours of work.  But Mom, what is the actual plan?  But Mom.

And then she hung up.  After telling me I was always so fucking negative.  I could never be positive and just supportive.  I was always so god damned difficult.  And then just the dial tone.  And my finger on the talk button and my arm reaching to set the phone back on top of the microwave.  And then work.  Take money.  Fill cup.  Take money.  Pull shots.  Smile. Think.  What to do.  Who to call.  What in the crazy fucking world is going on?  Am I here?  Is this real?

I worked.  Until 6:30 when my barista sidekick came in.  And then I emailed my aunt.  I knew she would be awake and at work.  I knew she would just tell me everything was fine and something truly amazing was in the works because why would my mom lie about that, why would she be so excited over something not real?  She emailed me back.  Said she was going to call.  And she did.

There’s something very wrong.

Much of that conversation is a blur.  My aunt was in Texas.  My sister and I were in Portland.  The rest of the family was in California.  The triangle closed in on me.  I could feel it like a too-tight scarf wrapping around my neck, pressing against my throat. My mother and father and a few longtime family friends had spent the holiday weekend at the cabin.  Where my mother spiralled and spiralled out of control (after a slow upslope that my dad hoped was going to level out and so hadn’t mentioned).  Where she didn’t sleep.  Where she made almost no sense and showed no reason.  Where she demanded that everyone sing karaoke at whatever hour she decided.  Where she tried to direct the entire weekend, snapping between jovial and angry and incredibly irritated.  In my mind I saw – and still see – my mother standing on the coffee table, microphone in hand, singing, yelling, in any number of familiar loose, floral-print dresses she would have had on, with eyes I only actually saw later that Tuesday, eyes only made real while visiting in a mental ward of the public hospital that is only a half-block from my high school, crazy eyes.

I don’t understand.

Call your dad.

My mother had been depressed for several months from the beginning of the year into summer.  My dad had done what she asked and had not told us until he was so worried he just couldn’t keep it to himself anymore.  He had finally, finally, finally convinced her to see a doctor and she had started taking an antidepressant.  When the family came to visit Portland in August, she seemed close to herself.  Almost there.  We were so relieved, so hopeful.  It had been her first clinical depression and we didn’t see this coming – at least not in advance.

I don’t understand.

By the time I got my dad on the phone, he was at the house with my brother and this family-friend/co-worker and they had to do the unthinkable (what she may always see as unforgivable): call 911.  She was off the edge.  She was telling workers at the house that she was going to kill herself.  She was writing notes that made little or no sense, scurrying around the house, ranting and raving.  She was refusing to get help.  She was refusing.  No way.  No fucking way.  They thought she would die.

By the time I could get my sister on the phone, by the time we could hurriedly book flights home, by the time I could secure work coverage and a plan – my mother was face down on the walkway in front of her house, was wrestled to the ground after telling the officers that she had a gun in her pocket, was put into a squad car and taken in for a 5150 hold, as my father watched, as my brother watched, as this family(friend) watched, as their hearts and muscles and eyes and hands did things I can only imagine – contractions and twitches and aches that the body remembers always, even when we try to forget, even when our brains succeed at forgetting.

I drove to my girlfriend’s work to tell her in person.  Called her on the phone to come out to the parking lot so I could sob and try to push words out through hysteria in some sort of illusion of privacy.  I picked up my sister and we went to the airport.  We went through security and sat in chairs and waited and then boarded and then flew.  Somehow.

I’ve come to think that shock is not so much what happens in the moment, but the way that time warps around us during and after and squeezes the memories of life’s most shocking events until only the sparest of details are left.  We live the details.  We do.  Not numb, really, just wobbly and lost.  And then shock comes in, like the cleaner and erases whole chunks of what happened from our minds, helps us forget the facts of every aching second.  But those details are stored – in our muscles, in our organs, in our skin, in our nostrils.  And so it comes back, in (mostly) manageable pieces in the most unexpected of times.  All other times, though, we are left with the outline, with a foggy train of events, with A led to D led to K led to Y (but where do G and F go, I can’t remember, and what is this X and where does it fit in?).  A skeleton of pain that is much lighter to carry than the bodybag of grief we can’t possibly drag around with us day to day.

What came next is a lot of things.  Hours of things.  Days of things.  Years of things.

We visited my mother in the ‘hospital’.  She said I’m fine when I asked how she was.  She looked at me with the widest, most electrically charged eyes I had ever seen in her sockets and tried to convince me nothing was wrong.  I saw my father cry – loudly, violently, so tragically – for the first time ever in my life and I was nearly knocked to the ground by the sight of it, by the sheer pain that sparked in my body. We stood and waited and talked to doctors and watched as they put her on a stretcher and into an ambulance to transfer her late at night to an in-patient facility that would hold her for whatever part of the 72 hour hold she would complete.  She made a joke, a characteristically disparaging one, about my dad’s inability to do anything right as he handed her a fountain soda while she was being wheeled on the stretcher.  He had bought a too-large drink – a bucket of soda, as we called it in the family – and he really should have known better.  We laughed.  Even my dad.  Because it was her – for the briefest of moments, she was there, however mean, however callous.  It was her.

More happened.  Even in just the few days that followed.  More than I have space and time to say here, now.  An argument at a yard sale where my mother tried to buy everything, tried to buy a used leopard thong, a broken sink, a whole porcelain tub.  Me talking through the woman’s daughter as she translated into Spanish that my mother was sick, that we wouldn’t be back, that she hadn’t just hit the yardsale jackpot. A fight at my brother’s house where she nearly stormed off.  Babysitting her, essentially, and thinking of the segment from the Twilight Zone Movie where all of the adults are tiptoeing around that demanding boy lest he hurt them, all of us dancing around my mother so as to not set her off, so as to not send her running, so as to not hear her say something so hurtful that we might cry and unleash a string of actions we had no way of anticipating.  So as to try to coax her into taking medication.

So much more happened.

Those things are for a much bigger space, for something I am not yet ready to really write.  They are right here, in my cells, in my pores, waiting to surface and be named.  So much more in such a long (and short) time.

For now, I am left with what is here, in all of its disconnected detail (still, maybe always).  And this odd anniversary.  That has become enmeshed with a holiday with a ridiculously ironic and maternal name.  Labor Day.  Really.  I couldn’t have made that up.  And even though the crash came immediately after the holiday, it is Labor Day itself that rings for me, that holds the weight of what has happened.  The last day I had without this reality.  A lazy, quiet Monday spent in the world I had known, before everything twirled and twirled and twirled like a toy ballerina whose rough edged plastic turnkey knob was wound too tight, whose batteries were charged too long, whose tutu spun around and lifted and lifted and lifted until she was hovering above us, a pink tulle helicopter of a woman.  The true quiet before the wail.  My life as I had come to know it.  As it would not be again.

This holiday has snuck up on me most years.  Last year it whispered past me while my own daily world was catapulted to the forefront, while the constant hum of missing my mother sang through Labor day and the day after, as I acknowledged it briefly, quietly, barely able to make room for that pain in the contracted muscle of my upturned present and my uncertain future as it was last year.

But here I am, at year five, reminded.  While eating ricotta stuffed tortellini laced with what felt to my burning mouth like a million tiny red chili flakes.  While my sister nodded her head, slowly.  While I wondered what ran through her mind.  As this family(friend) lowered his chin slightly and was, I am sure, lost in a memory of my mother, as she was, as he knew her before.  He loves her, too, and so feels what we do, in waves, in stories, in dates none of us can forget.

And the reminder is begrudgingly welcome.  I am trying, in earnest these days, to not be surprised by these things, by the feelings that rise, by the actions that follow the rising.  Just recently, in the briefest of moments, in the littlest of possible ways, I crossed over a self-imposed stricture immediately after having a heartfelt discussion with a long, long time childhood friend about my mother.  After feeling that dark deep hole start to sway, start to puddle, start to reach its edges out and out and out.  I was surprised (and not at all shocked) by the way I tiptoed, consciously and soberly and beguilingly, over that line.  I knew immediately that A had followed B.  I didn’t know in time.  Not in enough time to remember that the emptiness talking about my mother can create is never filled by attention and desire and smiles – that none of that feels like love and comfort for more than a moment.  I am trying.  So hard.

So I am relieved to be putting my feet in this water early.  To meet this weekend with the kind of direct eye contact that will not send me sailing into unsafe waters before I even know I’ve taken off my shoes and rolled up my pant legs.  Mother, I love you.  I always always will.  I love who you were.  Even the parts I really didn’t like.  Even the parts that were hardest to hold.

And.  I love you now.  Even when I am not seeing you.  Even when I can’t bear it.  Even when I think maybe I can’t bear the guilt of not bearing it.  I love you.  Even as you are.

I am surprised to find, at this age, that the biggest task of my thirties and maybe my forties and (hopefully not) my fifties (maybe beyond), isn’t going to be whatever I might have imagined or dreamed or predicted for myself as a child or a teen or as a twenty-something.  Whatever I had imagined or guessed would be this time in my life when I was only just beginning to be able to realistically imagine life beyond blind, bold, frustrated and comical youth – where I thought I might be is a distant trip away from where I have landed.

The task will be this:  reconciling the mother I have with the mother I had, reckoning my own behavior with the tangled roots that feed the organs and the muscles and the brain that do those things (that continue to do those things), finding a peace with the no-sense and mystery of what I can’t possibly ever fully know or understand, loving something that seems impossible to love and yet is just that: my first and most primal love.  Mother is no joke, no small word.  I am of her flesh.  I was assembled, made from what was essentially nothing, washed in water and grown to breathe in the stretched out cavity of her torso.  Whether by nature or nurture – or, as I find virtually undeniable: by both – I am my mother’s daughter.  I am of her and by her and, even when I wish I weren’t, a haunting replica of her in so many ways.

So, Mom, I love all of these things about you.  As you are and were and have always been, layer by layer, mood by mood, loving hug by distant silence.

I am you when I fight, when I am hurt.  Less so now.  But it took all thirteen years of my marriage to climb out of the ways I knew how to be, to have the help of someone who loved me deeply that could say: look, here, you’re doing it again.  It took work to not be trapped in that.  And to see you change, little bit by little bit, in similar ways so that I could know that I could, for sure, unbutton that way to be and stretch out my arms.  Because the inside of that coat is the lining we will always wear, you and I, the certainty that we are often right, even if only about how we feel, about how it feels, about what we know.  We are often certain of so much, sure in so many ways. We are women who are not quiet.  We do not defer.  We do not pretend to not know.  We do not ask permission to be ourselves or to say what we think (and, for me, feel).

I can cut with words.  Intentionally and not.  I can wound with sarcasm that doesn’t always realize it has six different serrated edges. I know those edges because I was raised by you.  And you cut.  But no one in the family can make us laugh in quite the same way (although we are all funny, if I do say so myself, because we are your children).  There are no family gatherings that have the exact same comedic edge I came to expect, came to feel was really our birthright, our way of living in the moment, now that you are absent from them.  We laugh, lots, but it is missing something, always.  I learned to joke through everything – even the wrong times – but especially the right times, the most necessary times, the times that keep me from collapsing to the floor with the horror of it all.  Because you are funny, Mom.  And witty.  And able to cut through a dull moment with the sharpest of stings, through the tensest of moments with the pointiest clip, the bitingest line.  We are women who laugh, loud.  Even when maybe we shouldn’t.

I care for people, I want to help them, treat them well.  Because you do.  Inside that snarky, almost-mean exterior is a bleeding heart mama-bear who wants to take care of everyone.  I ache when I can’t fix a friend or lover or sibling’s problem because you would ache, too.  I care about people I don’t know because you always did – quietly and faithfully.  I was a full-grown adult before I got even the tiniest inkling of the money you gave away, loaned, sailed off to family and friends in need even when it might not have been fiscally wise.  But especially when you could.  I am fierce for my friends, for my family, for the people I gather around me because we both are – you and I.  We will stare down anyone if it is for those we love.  Even when we won’t do it for ourselves.  We are women to be reckoned with when crossed.  We will not shy away.  I know that is still you, even when misdirected. Because even in your craziest moments, you were trying to make life better for us all, your delusions were full of ease and comfort for us – the people you love.

I have learned to grasp on to those I love even if I have lost them before because I was there when you left me (when you will say I left you)  and I was there when you reached out, however tentatively, years later and then didn’t let go until it was out of your control.  I know that broken things can be fixed.  That love is the kind of river that dredges up mud and still it feeds you.  I learned everything I know, in that deep below-the-dermis sense,  about moving beyond and getting past from you, from your willingness to, if not actually apologize and accept your role in things, show up time after time after time even though our worlds had been seemingly irrevocably severed.  I know how to suck it up and keep on loving because you did it, with me, and you let me do it, with you.  However many biting comments and time-tested, well-worn barbs you threw – you were there, my mother, loving and fierce. And you still will open that door, when I can knock on it, because we will love each other in the most intense ways, forever.  It’s who we are.

I know I am smart.  Because you are.  And you never pretended you were not.  I know that my smarts are not from books because yours were not.  And you are brilliant and bright. I know I am smart even without the drive to understand, to read, to know big words and big concepts, even without my too-many-years of education. Because you always told me I was, no matter what other faults you laid on my head.  I was smart.  Too smart – to behave that way, to throw opportunities away, to drink or drug myself into oblivion.  You fought for me, held me tight, when other mothers didn’t know how.  In ways I hated.  In ways that saved me.  You pushed me to go to college, made it possible, you believed in me even when you also felt I was putting on airs, thinking I was smarter than everyone else.  I do think that, Mom.  Sometimes I do.  Because you think it, too, about yourself.  Because you are smart.  And you raised me to own my intelligence. To know that about myself.

I know how to survive.  This.  Other things.  Because you have survived.  This.  But so many other things, too.  Because, early on, you survived me.  My father.  A trashed dream of the happy teenage family, of escaping your own home to build a more beautiful, stable one. Of what looked to any outsider like what it was: the ridiculous fantasy of a girl who found herself in love and accidentally pregnant. The humiliation of being loudly reprimanded for being late to school because you couldn’t get a ride and you had to put me on the bicycle and get me to a sitter and then pedal your way to class.  Because you made it through dropping out and barely being able to feed me while working and working and working to make of your life what you had wanted, without the help of the man who helped to make me.  Made it through to work hard.  To expect nothing but what you can make.  To soldier through.  To be tough.  To love, but also to stand stiff and rigid if a swaying walk will only make you trip.  We are women who know how to be stubborn, really stubborn.  And how to live.  To keep on living.  Even now, when you cling to the ill-conceived ways of no medication, when you lack the will to do much of anything.  You eat.  Just enough to survive.  You wake.  You breathe.  You keep going.  And that gives me hope.  However small.  Hope.

As Labor day arrives and with it my fears that this current depression is gearing up into another unmedicated mania, as I think of the ways I am you (in so many ways), as I face this life I have for living – I think of you, mother, and what I owe you.  The now you.  The you you have become.

As I take this extra day off in the week.  As I plan too many projects.  As I sleep too late and stay up too late.  As I push down that spiral of panic that churns in my gut as fall approaches, as the days shorten and your energy level undoubtedly rises.  As I hear the Jaws theme in that particular tone of your voice, as I smile and cringe at that sound.  As I brace for what might come.  As I look at your picture, at any given age, on any given shelf in any given room of the house, I will send you love.  And gratitude.  For what I never wanted to learn.  What I never needed to know, but do.  For all the ways I am, or am not.   All the things I say and think and feel.

You have shaped me, from the first moment I was simply a mass of whirling cells until this moment that I am muddling through.  On into the rest of my life.  My love for you – as you were, as you are, as (hope willing) you will be – is a substance inside my blood, coursing through every bit of me, pulsing and fragile and necessary.  You are as much me as I am myself.  From before I needed breath until after.  On this day, on this weekend, on this eve of what another year into this will bring – all of my love, to you, in the broken ways I know how to give it, in the hobbled ways you know how to receive it.  Love.

Salvage Act, Epilogue: What Was Left, What Was Made of It

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed



the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

-from Diving into the Wreck, by Adrienne Rich

There are moments in one’s life that feel so very unique and singular, so devastatingly heartbreaking and absurd, that it seems as though no one else has ever gone through something quite like this.  Addiction, madness, death, divorce, cancer, terminal illness.  Any one of these is so much bigger and crueler and corrosive than the small cluster of letters that constitutes its name can possibly convey.  In the midst of any of these (and so many other of life’s tragedies) it is easy to feel alone.  The only one to know this pain.

Sure, everyone’s particular experience of anything is singular and unique, but the truth that has hit me over and over in the last five or so years is that everyone you know has waded through the deep deep emotional wasteland of at least one of these – probably more than one – and felt every piercing layer of it.  Over and over, house after house, person after person after person.  Making their way through days that feel unbelievable and wearing, shocking and numbing all at once, the kind of days you never imagined in your own life.  Hard.  Hard, hard, hard.

When we hear that so-and-so’s mother is dying or your coworker’s son has gone into rehab or your neighbor is battling mental illness, we hear it, we do – we feel bad and if we are close to them, we hurt for them, too.  What we feel, though, when we hear that stuff is like a small pebble in our shoe compared to the compressed pain and surviving that those living these things endure. We can imagine the depth of the pain, of the uncertainty, of the sadness.  But we can never, ever get close to the actual smothering feeling of waking up and walking through a day that feels utterly impossible, through doubts and fears that soak into every pore, every waking moment, through the reality of these so very common things that threaten, each time and with each person, to hobble you, to change you for the worse, to break who it is you think you are. There is both comfort and tragedy in the common-ness of these pains.  I am not alone.  Oh, world – why am I not alone in this?

This idea was floating in my head while making my way through the process of cleaning the murder aftermath out of my childhood home that was abandoned to strangers by the woman who birthed me, by the woman who allowed these people in, by the woman so soaked in delusion that normal becomes a snow-globe world where people and things are afloat, constantly, spun and spun and drifting, settling momentarily just to be turned, abruptly or slightly, and so sent swirling again.  Small bits of trash and plaster and blood and sweat and stuff circling around the fixed position of home, of this plot of land that is so familiar.  As I’ve waded through this process – physically, emotionally, psychologically – I have been aware that I am in one of those situations that is as close to singular as you can get.  So particular.  So bizarre.  So rife with situations you can’t possible be prepared for.  So alone.

Even though all of us in the family were dealing with this, it often seemed as though each of us were orbiting around the situation.  Brushing up against each other, but each in our own world, our own reality.  The way it touched each of us, the way it shifted or pushed each of us, the way it felt to any one of us in any given moment – singular, particular, personal. We were there for each other at every step, in whatever ways we could be, in whatever ways were needed.  What we needed, though, was mostly unspoken, not understood even by ourselves, completely buried under the movements required to finish the task at hand.  I knew I could call my Dad, could talk with my sister, could go to my brother for anything – but knowing what that anything was, that was the tricky part.  What am I feeling?  What am I thinking?  What am I doing beyond moving limb by limb to clear this space that I have known so deeply and so personally?

What I do know so far is very little, really, for how much time has already passed since those few long weeks this spring.  I am still discovering ways that my life has been affected by my time inside.  I know that I wrecked some things in my life that would have fallen apart anyway – but I did it in ways that I would never have done before, I did it in careless and lazy ways that felt anything but in the middle of them. It’s true that my mother’s madness, overall, has had that effect several times in my life – turned me into a rote machine at the same time that I am a fistful of raw nerves swung at the air, each tingle and molecule a sharp pain that I refuse to feel too deeply, as though I can let the pain roll right over those electrically charged receptors that are shouting, shouting, shouting into my cotton-filled ears.

The build up to the clean-up – my upturned life, my state of dispossession, my impending move, on top of the constant churn of our family turmoil and its weeble-wobble effect on my equilibrium – certainly contributed to the intensity of my time in that house.  It wasn’t just the dirt and the dust and the spots marked for blood and the random odd nakedness of the house that did me in.  It was everything.  All at once.  Piling in on me like the dank foam ‘mattress’ that leaned over and covered my head as I tried to shift it out of the way in what was once my sister’s childhood room.  That sticky, crumbly yellow foam that some stranger had brought into the house that was now mine to touch, to raise, to slide and shift out of that room, whether I wanted to put my hands on it or not.

It was the image of my mother trapped, by her own will, in a hotel room miles and miles away from this house while we, the children, the ones left to piece it all back together, while we muddle through, minute by minute, hour by hour, dusty tear by heavy sigh. It was having given up everything I had come to know as home and then finding myself nearly drowning in a Bizarro version of the place I think of as home. It was my body having railed against me, my mind having spun itself in too many directions to find north, my heart having been split for far too long in trying to love someone I hoped I could, and for a good while, did, while trying not to love someone I just couldn’t quit loving no matter how hard I railed against it.  I was unmoored before ever walking into that house and there I was: trying to swim when even treading was more than my limp, muscle-eaten legs could pull off with any great success.

Even in the middle of the clean-up, though, I knew that this is what I needed to be doing.  Every bit of grime.  Every unexpectedly jarring image.  Every accidental photo of a stranger that felt way too personal for my eyes.  Every dirty piece of clothing.  Every stinky corner full of broken things.  These were mine to deal with.  To process.  To see.  To make new or throw away.  To box up or push aside.  To put my hands on and feel what it is my family had become.  What my childhood had grown up to be.  Whatever the cost.  Whatever ended up broken in my own life.  Mine.  Not just my mother’s.  Not just those people she surrounded herself with.  Mine.  This.  All of it.

Even as we met with one of the women who had been in the house, a walking, talking representation of the mess that built the chaos we found.  Even as I lost the control I had hoped to keep, even as my heart raced with my own failure to stay calm, collected, even if only for my family.  Even as I obsessed over my own big mouth and worried it would, finally, bring real harm to my family by way of an angry, violent friend or son defending his mother. Even then, I believed we were doing what had to be done, what we shouldn’t have anyone else do.  We were making something new out of what was there.  We were getting our hands dirty, in even the most literal sense, and we were doing it as a family – a shell-shocked, heart-broken, life-weary family. We were dealing with it, for better or for worse.

Early on in the process, my brother expressed that he wanted his family to move into the house.  My first reaction – as my ruptured ear drum rang and my feverish brain spun against the news of the murder – was relief.  Strangers would not be living in our house. And then, coming quickly and building slowly, were the reservations.  Could that house ever be happy again?  Could it ever again feel like a home?  Did I want my nephews, those bundles of energy and smiles that I love more than anything else – did I want them in that house?  Could we gather for dinners and barbecues and cakes and tamales and not see the ghost of what had happened there?  Could my dad spend time in that house ever again after so much of his life that had been formed and created in that house had broken, fallen apart, been erased? My brother’s house had become the central hub of the family for all holidays and visits not only since those three boys exploded into our lives, but also since the disintegration of my parent’s marriage. Could we transplant the new center into the very one we all missed without constantly seeing the ghost of what had happened there – in the house, but also to our family?  Without always remembering the sadness, the violence, the destruction?

I deferred much of that to my father.  I could learn to live with a lot.  My mother, however hapless and difficult and lost she may be at any given point, will always be my mother.  I will always love her as madly as I will mourn her.  I will see the ghost of who she was to me in my oldest nephew’s smile in the most unexpected of moments and will see her face stare back at me in the mirror in some of my sleepiest glances.  I can, however long it might take and however many new memories must be made and old memories remembered, make that house bearable even if not happy.

But my father.  That house was not his childhood.  It was his children.  It was his wife, who decorated every square inch of that house too many times to count. Who had to have that house.  Who moved furniture and scraped wallpaper and loved him for years before literally trying to kill him within those same walls during one of her darkest manic moments.  It was his marriage.  His whole life.  His future.  Everything he had made of his life, by choice – not because he was born into it or moved there as a child, but because he was with a woman he loved and who he believed would always be able to love him back.

I worried, beyond worry, that coming to that house time after time, no matter how melodic a nephew’s laugh, no matter how gut-wrenchingly beautiful a smile, how elating a run through the hall by all three boys would be – it would always be to him the life that he lost, not for lack of trying, but for lack of sanity in the world, for lack of any kind of fairness in this gorgeous and fucked up world we all live in.  Against every ounce of his instinct and every ounce of his heart, he had to walk away from that life after trying beyond any reasonable point to save it, to save her, to stand by her despite her swinging arms and venomous mouth.  I worried.  And worried.

But we all talked.  Through the process.  The pros.  The cons.  Emotional, but also clear, concise and to the point.  Can we all do this?  Do we want to? Can we get past all of these fears?  And the answer was yes.  Ultimately, for my dad, I think it was just easier.  He was tired.  Of this, of it all being another thing to deal with, to contend with.  But he was also stressed to the limit in other areas and so, I think, it seemed too steep a mountain to think of the alternatives: try to sell (with such a recent and publicized murder), try to rent (invest in fixing it up so another stranger could live there), leave it alone (for vandals and to cost him more money, every day, as it sits there empty, as it weighs heavier and heavier on our minds). It was worth it to him to get past all of the darkness and reclaim that house as our own, even if only because to not try was too exhausting a prospect.

So yes.  They would move in.  As soon as it was clean. As soon as the barest of repairs could be made and it was safe for them.  Through my anxiety about it all, it helped to be cleaning and sorting and pushing through so that my brother and his family could live there.  It felt right even as I reluctantly changed glove after filthy glove. As I literally shoveled up what was covering the laundry room floor and tossed it into the trash. As I refused to wipe the sweat from my brow because everything, everything, was dirty. As I showered after every clean-up shift before falling onto the couch, wiped, at only four or five in the evening.  It was for them.

When I left Fresno to return to the bay and the things that still needed to be done up there, the house was still dirty.  We had returned the unknown stuff to one designated representative of all those unknown people.  We had boxed up what we knew was my mother’s – two sad, small rows of boxes that took up less than one half of a garage stall.  We had filtered and pilfered and tossed and boxed and sorted.  And we were done, my sister and I.  Now it was for others to clean, to paint, to repair drywall and moldings and doors, to decide what of the few pieces of furniture were salvageable, to take the clear space we had made and try to rebuild at least a semblance of a home.  Others.  Not me.  A relief, but also a return to vagueness and uncertainty.  What will it be like when I return to it?  How will I feel?  What will I see?

I came back only weeks later for my youngest nephew’s first birthday.  It would be at the house.  My brother’s whole family had ambitiously moved in a few days before the party and had pieced together what was vital on the inside so that the party could happen on the outside. I was excited to be able to be at the party – I realized on my drive down to Fresno that morning that this was the first first-birthday party I had been able to attend (another reminder of why I made the move I did, why I left so much else that I love behind).  I was excited to give my nephew his present and see him in the shirt I made him at the request of his mother.  I couldn’t wait to see and hear the two oldest boys run up to me and squeal and then throw their arms around me before disappearing into the much more alluring, much more exciting cluster of small children to play with.  Throughout the drive, just below all of that excitement was the unsettled feeling of returning to that house, that place, after all I’d seen and touched in what was really only a short string of days before.

As I pulled into the driveway, I took in the green of the front yard. It has always been true that the house has beautiful yards.  That was still true even when the inside was in disarray.  You pull into the driveway and see the park-like front yard, shielded from the road by thick shrubs.  You follow the drive to the back and pass the pool and trees and the carriage-house feel of the garage to see the back yard, where I ran with my siblings, where I ran out late at night to meet friends, where I sat as a young adult before leaving to a whole other state and a whole new life.  It’s green and lush and open and wide.

As I walked into the house, entering just like always through the laundry room door that leads into the kitchen, this time beautifully whole and unbroken, I could smell only food.  Delicious, warm food.  My brother’s wife was cooking Wanda Beans, one of my grandmother’s old recipes, and preparing rice pilaf, a recipe my mother handed down to us all.  The kitchen was clean and painted and repaired and smelled nothing like the broken-down thing it was or even the fixing of that.  It smelled like home – aromatic, edible home. I could feel my shoulders roll back and my breath slowly release.  The change was incredible.  So much the same as I remembered it, from before.  So much of the last couple of months gone, wiped away, sheet-rocked over, painted and then inhabited, lived in, however briefly, by people I love.

There were still signs to be found.  The living room entry was covered in a sheet of plastic, waiting to be finished.  The basement door was closed and blocked and I didn’t even peek to see how far that room had come.  Will I ever return to that room? I thought, almost certain the answer was no.  I don’t want to and I won’t need to.  I have seen enough of that room to last a lifetime, I thought.  But despite the unfinished stuff and the empty shelves not yet filled with what was in boxes in the house – it felt right.  In a way I was not prepared for, in a way I didn’t think was possible so soon after.

My pre-party task was to watch the birthday boy so my brother and his wife could get ready for the party – definitely the best of chores I could have been assigned. At one point, the three boys and I ended up in the sun room toward the back of the house. I held my youngest nephew while the other two played a cacophonous improvised song on the player piano that appeared sometime during my mother’s mad reign of the house.  They pretended to read sheet music and hammered away at the keys while the little one arched up and over, trying to get away from me to play along with them and so I set him on the bench, the three of them playing what sounded like everything that had happened in that house up until then. The song was loud and full of wrong notes and jumbled up, make-believe chords.

And yet it also sounded like a promise of what could be made of it all: three tiny humans who can’t possibly understand what that house has been, is and will be to the rest of us, are making messy, messy music of what they’ve been given by all of us.  I wanted to cry for the noise they made and the way that I could stand in that room that had nearly brought me to tears so few days before as I had looked at the last of the what in the hell do I do with this stuff, wanted to cry for the simple fact that I could stand in there with them and feel content, at home, lucky. I touched each of their backs and kissed each of their heads and was happy that they would know that house as I did, in all of the intimate ways we know that place we grow up in.

Hours later, the party started.  More and more family filtered into the yard, into the kitchen, into my arms as we hugged hello.  My sister-in-law’s family arrived and we all chipped in to make a Dr. Seuss fruit skewer display and prepare the meat for the barbecue and finish the pilaf and place the cake, just so, on the table outside.  We all watched the rambunctious bulldog so that he didn’t topple the artfully imbalanced cake and pulled drinks from the ice chest as small groups of children ran by, back and forth, across the giant yard.  I watched my nephew take in his first birthday song and reach into his first birthday cake and saw the smile on my brother’s face as he watched him, I heard his mother’s laugh as he made a face – my little old man with perfect hair and a bewitching grin.

I stayed until dusk, watching the boys, catching up with family.  And then I drove home.  It was a long day.  It was rough for a variety of other reasons having to do with still trying to settle my life in California, still trying to navigate keeping one half of my heart in Oregon, but I felt calm, calmer than I had in weeks.  We were on the other side of it.  We were making it.  We were surviving.  On the drive home, I held this image in my head: my littlest man, in his black tee with a red and white Dr. Seuss applique and his too-adorable shrunken grown-up jeans and his black converse looking up at me from the wood floor and reaching his arms up and out, coaxing me to hold him, smiling his old man grin – so full of knowledge, definitely hiding a man who knows so much more than we think he does.  His furrowed brow smirk that bursts open in a grin wide enough to hold my entire broken heart should I need it to keep me afloat.

I couldn’t know then, as I relived the ritual of the little one’s birthday, as I made the already again-familiar drive between my two California places, that I would return a couple of weeks later and walk into the basement where my oldest nephew, who had just been hit in the eye with a bat while playing baseball in the front yard, was nursing his injury in front of the big screen TV my brother had moved down there since my last visit.  I couldn’t know that after dinner and dessert I would hesitantly cross that threshold to go down the stairs, wishing my nephew had stayed upstairs so I could continue to avoid that room even when no one else seemed to need to – I went down each step and turned the corner to see his sleepy, hurting, crest-fallen face as he said, don’t say you have to go.  

I couldn’t possibly know yet that in that moment he would steal that room back from everything bad, from everything it had turned into in my mind.  I will always remember what happened there.  I will always be affected by it, changed in ways I am still figuring out by what culminated from the storm my mother had allowed inside.  That will never leave me –  but neither will the way I melted when he said that to me, the way his hair smelled (like boy sweat and tears) as I kissed the top of his head and then his eye, so tenderly, and then his cheeks.  He will never really know that most simple of ways that he put me at ease, that he changed – in the time it takes to look at me that way, with that love – everything within those four subterranean walls.

I couldn’t possibly see ahead two months when I would celebrate my birthday in that house, by that pool, in that sun.  When I would teach my nephews how to make cupcakes from scratch even though they are too young to remember all of the lessons.  I could have no idea how content I will be watching my blonde-haired nephew smirk and grin as he pushes his hands into a bowl of sugar and lemon zest, the joy of having his hands coated in that fragrant, sticky mess.  Or the attentiveness the oldest boy would give to my explanations of why you sift or how to level a measuring cup of flour. By that time, so few months later really, I will feel so at home in that place, so distracted from its past by those boys and their parents and the rest of the family to even remember, in any physical way, the difficulty of this last spring. I will hardly recall, while in the house, while in each moment, how tentative I was during that first visit, how unsure I was about our capacity for re-envisioning, reclaiming, recreating. 

When I think of the fear I had before that first birthday visit, the snapshot in my mind is this: I see all three brothers at that piano, me standing behind them, trying to reach through them and recall something, anything, that I learned in those nine short months that I took lessons.  I tried to play part of Yesterday by the Beatles, the only song I ever taught myself, and I failed to remember even five consecutive notes. I didn’t care, though, and neither did they.  We were trapped in a moment in a room in a house that I had spent so much of my life in and had worried was lost now to memories not fully mine and tragically blood-stained.

But there we were. In a perfectly mundane and lovely moment.

We were simply four people who are bound to each other and love each other and who were trying to make music with the only tool we had.  And it sounded loud and decidedly non-melodic and would never be a song you would request, but it was ours, that day, as the sun filtered in through all of those french doors, creating a hazy kind of afternoon light against their backs.  Our song.  Ours.  And there was nowhere else I wanted to be except in that room, hovering with them in that most perfect of moments, so unique and yet so gloriously common.

Salvage Act, Scene 3: Inside and Out, Dealing with More Than the Mess

I am standing in a consignment store in Alameda, the place I have decided I want to live, surveying the furniture – some I like, some I don’t – daydreaming about having a real home to put any of this stuff in while I wait to look at one more property that just won’t be right, isn’t the one, when my phone rings.  Innocent enough.  Just the normal ring.  But it is a coworker of my dad calling to tell me that a neighbor can see someone in the house.  An intruder.  For the second time that week.  A break-in.  Into a place with almost nothing unbroken or of value.  But here they are – again.  One more violation to a place I still love, despite the trash, despite the ugliness.  My home.  My architectural center.

Call the police I say.  Now, please.  And tell my brother.  Please.  My dad was out of the country and I was what felt like eons away – hours north and busy and even if I left that exact moment, it would be too late – too, too late.  So he did.  And my brother met the police there.  And another report was added to the ones that already exist for that address – more in the last year than could have possibly been generated in the seventy-plus years preceding. I fought the urge to collapse to the floor.  I stiffened up against the need to land on my knees and bury my head in my hands and curl up in a ball – like a cross between praying and going fetal – in order to keep from exploding into thousands of worn out pieces.  Again.  No.  Not again.  Stop it. 

Just two days before I had walked up to do at least a couple of hours of sorting on a Sunday, feeling slightly guilty for having taken Saturday off from the task.  I was alone.  For the first time, I was going to go in there alone. We’d been there almost a week and nothing suspicious had happened.  I would be fine, I told my sister and my dad (who was in Mexico for business).  I would call and check in when I got there and when I left, I said to my sister.  I’ll leave before dark.  I’ll lock the gate behind me – trap myself behind iron and thick chain link and a padlock.  Safe.  Fine.

As I pulled the gate closed behind my car and popped the padlock around the double loop of chain link, I felt enclosed.  I pulled around to the back and parked and took a few pictures of the yard, of the ‘pot man’ my mother made decades ago who still sits watch near the tool shed.  I looked at the sky which was so very blue and the way the trees of that neighborhood reached up and out to frame that lovely, clouded sky.  I was stalling, I guess.  But I was also taking in what I loved about that place in the world.  What I’ve always loved about it.

I walked through the pool gate and toward the back door. I stopped almost as soon as I could see the door.  There was a laundry basket full of wires and speakers and a lamp shade and other miscellaneous electronics on the step just outside the door.  There were books strewn in a meandering path out the door.  I stared at these things.  Trying to convince myself they had been there when we left.  I knew they had not been.  My stomach knotted up and my head felt full of cotton and I held my breath.  I let my breath out. I backed away, as though I were staring down a snarling dog and couldn’t turn my back.  I walked out to the driveway and paced, looking up at the house constantly, while I tried to call my sister to ask if she had left that stuff there when we left Friday and I just hadn’t seen her do it.  Voicemail.  I paced and paced.  I felt trapped.  I texted her and waited for an answer.

I paced the driveway and stared at the gate.  I was suddenly aware that I had not only locked everyone out –  I had locked myself in and should someone come running out of that house, I better be ready to scale the fence, to run and jump and throw myself over it.  I imagined old Bionic Woman and old Wonder Woman episodes to envision how I would do it.  I tried to imagine my car, my tiny little hybrid, could bust through the gate, but knew I needed to rely on my own tired body if escape were actually needed.  I would need to muster more than I thought I had – pray that the magic of adrenaline would make all the difference – and run and jump and pull and make my way over and out to safety. 

My sister called me back.  Nope.  I didn’t do that.  I definitely did not do that.  I unlocked the gate and got in my car and drove just outside the gate and then closed it and locked it again.  I sat in my car, right there, aimed at the road, my hood almost in the street and tried to think.  I hadn’t heard any sounds the whole time I was pacing.  No one was in the house, I was sure.  Right?  I could be sure, right?

I called my dad. Yes, call the police.  So I called the non-emergency line.  I’m sure there’s no one in there, but I didn’t go in.  No, I’m outside.  It’s not an emergency.  But if you look up the address you’ll see why we want to know for sure. She says she will send the police out.  To check. Just so we know.  If you see anyone come out of there, call 9-1-1, she says.  I will, I say.  Oh I will, I say to myself.

I wait.  More than an hour.  My tension building with every moment.  The opposite of what I expect.  The more time that passes, the more on edge I am, keeping a watchful eye behind me, trying to distract myself with my phone, texting friends, checking facebook, anything to not just sit there. I wish desperately for someone there with me, someone to talk to, to distract me.  I make plans for later that night as the second best thing.  Entertain me, I think.  Distract me, please.

One car arrived.  Two officers.  One female, one male.  The female officer had been to the house numerous times.  Her face visibly altered, only slightly, when she realizes who might be in the house if it were one of the people who had been staying there.  They called for back-up. The house is too big for just two of us to clear they said.  But then she also said they shouldn’t go in alone based on who my mother’s former associates had been.  My heart collapsed inward.  This is what we have become.  This is who we are, where we live, the stories we have.  Even the police need help.

The second car arrived.  Two more men, all four officers armed with the childish, non-scale schematic I made of the house at their request – including all closets and crawl spaces for maximum safety.  We’re going to wait for a K-9 unit they said.  It was some pretty unsavory characters they said.  Six officers and a dog.  Six guns and countless sharp teeth.  Just for the all clear.

Waiting for the second and third cars, I spent a good deal of time talking to the first two officers.  It was heartbreaking to answer their questions and try to explain what is only understandable (and even then, only marginally so) to the people living these things.  I’m not sure.  I haven’t seen her in months.  We were afraid to come by (a both horrifying and validating nod from the female officer, her expression the first non-family member to bear the signs of really getting why we were scared). She wouldn’t let us help. We tried. We could only do so much.

A small hole opened up inside of me and started to slowly reach out, like watching water spread slowly on a table after spilling it.  What words are there for what the last year and a half have been, let alone the last six?  How can I convey concisely what they need to know so that it feels true (to me, to my family, to the woman that is my mother and so deserves to be more than a shadow in this story)? I felt naked and helpless and teetered on the edge of worthless – we did nothing to keep all of this from happening. At least it can look that way.  It looks that way when you’re peering in, when all you read is the news, when all you hear are my answers to those questions.  But their faces showed none of that.  They looked at me and listened.  They weren’t killing time, they wanted to know.  The female officer had been to the house many times but had never been in – the reason for the call always retracted by my mother when the police got there and they were left without any reason to enter. All they could bear witness to was a woman saying, no, it’s nothing, I was wrong.

I could see in her face the same frustration I have felt, although more muted and detached.  She had been called out several times, told me my mother would say she was hiding in a crawl space in the master bedroom closet, that she needed help.  But when the officer would arrive, my mother would be present, out front, denying any trouble. I can already sense the haunting of that image, the way the picture of my mother hiding, huddled, scared will come back to me again and again. I could see in the officer’s face that she had wanted any reason to go in and make it all stop.  I wish for her, and for me and my family and my mother and the person whose blood was spilled in that house, that she had been able to go in, even once.  I can see her frustration in her eyes and it is not an angry one – it is a wide open kind of sympathy and I wonder, momentarily, what she has seen in her life – at work, at home, with friends.  Both officers are looking at me with their full eyes and it feels like a small stick to steady myself on, to keep this seeping hole from growing too fast.

I found myself grateful for the Fresno police – truly, truly grateful – for the first time in my life.  Both of the first responding officers were patient and caring and understanding (so different from a wide variety of experiences I have had with the Fresno Police Department).  These were the officers I would hope would respond when my mother called.  They both nodded their heads, their faces betraying no judgment or weariness, and asked questions – often prefacing with if you don’t mind me asking.  I felt tender toward them and fought the urge to hug them.  Instead I thought this, sensing the words without hearing it in my head so clearly: Thank you for this – thank you for being just how you are right now when I am wound tighter than a spring about to burst while also floating at the edge of present, struggling to stand right here in front of you without bursting apart into tiny pieces – I don’t know if you know how much difference your compassion is making, that what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, matters.

When the K9 unit arrived, I stood outside, near my car, unless I needed to answer questions.  One of the last questions they had for me before going in was whether the stolen stuff was ours or theirs.  I had no idea.  I had not gone in and couldn’t even be sure that it had been one of the people who had stayed there.  That had been my hope – that at least someone was trying to take what was theirs as opposed to a whole other group of people rummaging through my history.  This detail matters, though, because one scenario is a misdemeanor and the other a felony.  A dog can only attack the suspect if it’s a felony.  Otherwise, they have to hold him back.  A tidbit of information learned in the midst of this scene – oddly, for me, a redeeming element in what was going to turn out to be another lost day of work, another day of no progress, of only regress. Just the kind of fascinating detail that I can spin my mind around and store for later, a trinket, if you will, of this day spent waiting and worrying.

I watched them all enter the house – following my route through the gate, past the pool, up to the broken-paned laundry room door.  I waited outside – anxious, listening for any sort of sound, hoping not to hear gunfire, my feet appearing to be flat on the ground but already poised to leap into my car or run, a shadow of myself already bent at the starting line.  It took a while.  I looked at my phone for the time constantly, but each time I forgot what it had said before, my mind spinning so fast as to seem at a standstill, my inability to hold even that simplest of facts the only tell that my mind was not working on a normal plane. 

When they came out, they talked amongst themselves for a while and then the K9 unit left.  One of the officers from the second car came up to me and asked if I could go in and see what was missing.  The first two officers said goodbye and left. And there I was: left with another officer to explain things to, another person that had questions, another session of I don’t knows and I was out-of-state and she wouldn’t let us help.  I felt that same puddle begin to grow, the same tired feeling of having to explain but measure what words, what tone, how much or how little I give.  The seeping out of what is he thinking? and what does this seem like to him? and who are we to this man? We walked up to the back and entered the house and I saw it, anew, as they must have.  What had looked like less chaos to us after a few days inside would just be chaos to them.  Not the worst they’ve seen, I’m sure, but not on the middle of the scale either.  A mess.  How could they possibly tell if anything had been done to this house that day.  A mess.  A big, big mess.

Two lamps.  One that matched the shade on the porch step.  Gone.  The only matching set of anything we had found in the house undamaged.  I didn’t even know if any of us wanted them – but they were ours.  And they were undamaged, one last unbroken piece of the before.  Stolen.  Every box we had filled in the upstairs bedroom was turned over, scattered, searched through.  Even a garbage bag full of broken things in the master bedroom had been ripped open and scattered in case there was anything of value in there.  Three long days of work, undone.  Three long long difficult heartbreaking days.  Undone.  I fought the urge to even need to fight tears.  My vocabulary boiled down to only a few words – the one thing I have aplenty, diminished to a teenager’s rage.  Fuckers.  Motherfucking fuckers.  Really?  

Anything else you notice? The officer.  I was not alone.  I needed to remember that.  The fit I so desperately needed to have, could feel tugging at my muscles, would have to come later, because, believe me, I knew it was coming.  But he’s here now and he wants to leave.  He was nice, but business-like and he deserved to be able to do his job and go.  A few things were gone – namely the ipod dock and phone charger I had accidentally left there Friday.  I almost drove back for them the moment that I realized I had left them, but it was only the dock, not the ipod – only the charger, not the phone.  So I didn’t.  Still, they were the two most valuable things in the house.

He offered to make a full report but we settled for an incident report.  I had already kept six officers tied up for what, it turned out, was an empty, if devastated, house.  I had no impulse to add unnecessary paperwork to the mix.  We are a mess, officer.  This is a mess.  No one will be found or charged or arrested, so please go.  Leave me to deal with this alone, again.  

He left and I walked back upstairs for a moment.  It had been three hours since I arrived and I was ready to go.  The day was shot, but I had to look up there one more time before leaving – mostly so I could report back, but I think, also, because I hoped I could muster the motivation to not be shot down by this.  Instead, I felt every muscle in my body twitch and I just wanted to scream.  I wanted to throw myself on the floor and kick and scream and throw the type of tantrum that doesn’t end until you are too exhausted to move anymore.  I wanted to go toddler and flail and cry and wail.

I would have, I’m sure, but the floor was disgusting.  In addition to the fingerprint dust everywhere and the general filth of the place after so much neglect and time left vacant, the room reeked of urine.  The odor was thick.  We believe my mother, for months, had lived up there in that room with her dogs and that the entire carpet was their yard.  I was held together, maintained my composure, because the thought of putting my body on the carpet repulsed me into compliance.  I will cry – later.  I will not fling myself on the ground.  I will walk out of here and I will get in my car and try not to fall apart.

I drove back to my sister’s with only a few tears.  I told her, in an exasperated, breathy tone, what had happened and what to expect when we showed up there the next day.  I could see her face fall slack and we changed the subject.  I got ready to see friends and tried to bury the echo of the day that was floating in my skull.  I was out of state.  There’s only so much we could do.  She wouldn’t speak to us.  

So  much of this drama – most of it really, for me, at least – has been played out among family and friends and friends of the family.  It is hard enough to navigate conversations about it with those you love, those that love you, those who love my mother.  Strangers, that’s something else.  For the hours it took to deal with the police, I felt like I was standing outside of myself and seeing a shadow version of myself who had changed nothing, stopped nothing.  And I didn’t like it at all.  It was like an itchy patch of skin that can’t be scratched anymore, small spots of blood bursting forth to the surface as layer after layer is slowly rubbed off. And even knowing I was lucky, even knowing that the interaction with the police could have been all kinds of shades of worse, I was bruised emotionally.  I felt black and blue and green everywhere that I felt anything.  

A few days later, as I am packing up more boxes, stuffing more bags with trash, hefting them the long, long way out to the giant dumpster we’ve placed just outside of the fence – a detective shows up.  Looking for my mother.  I walk up to the gate but do not open it. He shows me his badge, my suspicious eyes apparent even from ten feet away. No I don’t know where she’s at.  I’ve been out of state and came back to help clean up.  Her lawyer should know.  I think a hotel.  No.  Sorry.

And so I tell him a somewhat truth.  I knew where she was weeks ago when we all went to see her, us three kids, for the first time in many many months, over a year for me.  Where we ended up, momentarily, in a group hug huddle with everyone crying and the words love and always and even when.  Perhaps the first time we have all four been like that, hugging, holding.  A moment in the midst of the nausea we all felt driving there and the silences that crept in every few minutes for the hour after the hug.  A perfectly fucked-up Norman Rockwell painting called Early Evening at the Hotel, an unexpectedly tender moment where we expected none.  

So I knew where she was, but couldn’t be sure it’s where she is at the moment that he arrives.  As I walk away from the gate, I try to figure out why I didn’t just tell him that and I start to understand, beyond intellectually, why family members lie for and hide their loved ones.  In that split second that I realized who he was and who he wanted, I felt the most instant and overwhelming of protective urges.  She has had enough.  We all have.  Let her be.  Let us all be.  I knew he would find her and question her, but I needed to not be the one to send him to her. Not so soon after seeing her again, after all of us huddled in that room. Not me.

Weeks later, my brother and sister and father and I will gather to hand off the stuff that has cluttered up our lives since February.  The woman will show up, without help and in a sedan, despite my father’s very clear instructions that she will need a truck, will need help, will need to tow this car out of our driveway on this very day that we have arranged or we will toss it all.  He is done.  We are done.  She will act as though she had no idea.  She will say But I thought we were just meeting to talk about it and I will see my father begin to dismantle from the inside, something she can’t possibly have noticed because she does not love him and know him like we do.

My siblings and I stand by as they are face to face – she in her Sunday best and all made up – as she pushes him, softly, subtly.  She addresses him with Mr. and his last name and we watch, let him handle it, as I can feel my blood rise into my neck and words are forming right inside of my throat that I am trying so hard to swallow.  If there’s one thing my father is – it’s direct and clear.  We have no doubt that she understood and is trying to buy more time.

She can’t know because her life is different, what brings her here is so very different than what brings us, even though we are all orbiting around, hovering above the same horrific incident – she can’t possibly know that we have been waiting for her for nearly an hour by now and we are tense.  Accidental gun trigger pulling tense.  Hatched an escape plan tense.  I have my phone with 9 and 1 already dialed tense.  Because we are trapped in this driveway if she shows up with her sons and his friends and they are angry with us.  Because we have been cleaning up the debris of what can happen when situations become complicated and emotional and violent.

And she is pushing at my dad, with her words, with her tardiness, with the soul crushing prospect that we will have to gather another day, wait again for her, live with these things in the house one more day.  On the proverbial rope, we are holding on to the last piece that has frayed from the end.  We are done.  And yet maybe we aren’t.  

The three of us are standing there.  And my dad is staying calm but his voice is getting louder and I can see in his arms and his hands the wear of her voice.  I don’t know why you’re treating me like this she says and I never stayed a night in your house she says.  Not true.  From our perspective we are treating her well, kindly returning things, meeting her, not tossing these things.  And as she goes on, starting to step away from my dad and then stepping back in to face him, time after time, as he just keeps repeating that she needs to get a van, get help and she has an hour, I step forward.

I aim to cut through, to stop the loop, to say none of that matters, just go get what you need and come back and get this stuff.  What I actually start with is You have no idea what this has been like for our family – no idea and then I move into trying to usher her away in order for her to come back and for this to be done.  What happens next, though, is that she starts saying to me what she has been saying to my father.  She tries to make her case and I just am not going to hear it, none of us are and she doesn’t see that.  My own intentions make a sharp right turn and I end up telling her to shut the fuck up and then when she says she saved my mother’s life, as she turns away and waves me off,  I tell her she’ll get a gold fucking star in heaven for that.

Instantly, before she is in her car even, I feel deflated.  I am hot and I am mad – at myself.  I intended to be the calming force.  I trusted a mouth I should never have trusted after the afternoon spent waiting, after the morning spent dreading, after the weeks spent immersed in the thing our lives had become.  I know myself better.  I can only arbitrate in the calmest of moods, in the most centered of places – two things I hadn’t had the luxury of in months. I apologize to my family, for losing control.  I can feel the wheels of obsession start to turn in my head and spin around and around my own failure to diffuse the situation.  I tell myself to let go, to not obsess.  To not worry that I will have set off some sort of reaction that will only make this all much, much worse.

As we pile everything in the empty lot next door, refusing to wait around for her anymore in the ninety degree weather, none of us dressed for labor since we were wishing and hoping to be on the other side of that with these boxes – as we pile them over I curse my own protective nature, my own mother-bear self, my own inability to back away when it involves someone I love.  I could have let her go on and on, I’m sure, if she had only been talking to me. I could have told that detective where I had last seen my mother.  I could have told those officers as little or as much as was necessary, without aching, without emptiness and helplessness. If only I hadn’t felt the fragility of those I love in such piercing waves.

I can not pick up my mother like a baby bird and bandage her wings and keep her in a box and feed her day and night.  I can not lift her in my arms and take her somewhere different, somewhere safer and saner and secure.  I can not step between my father and this life, shield him from the basest parts of what his marriage has become, what the life he had worked so hard to build has turned into.  I can not fight those battles for him without fumbling myself, without losing my words to the most base of my emotions.  I can not lift a blanket between both of them to shield them from one another – two people who loved each other deeply and sincerely for so long, now on two sides of a divide, trying desperately to navigate each side full of ruts and ravines and twisted, upturned roots.

I will regret failing at what I intended at the same time that I will recognize how good it was to tell that woman to shut up, recognize the tossed up knot of emotions that one sentence birthed in me.  I will forgive myself for it, but I will turn it over and over in my head.  I will allow myself this wide open wound when bridging this gap between what is so personal and all of the people that are pulled into the scene.  I will try hard to give myself the berth I give all others in my family – to be, to mess up, to be loud and mouthy and without filter often at the moments I need to filter most, to be angry with myself and also to shield myself.

And I will know, even if that woman will never believe it, that when I wished her a gold star in heaven, I meant it. Where my voice betrayed my anger and my sarcasm, the words themselves were achingly and so painfully sincere. Where I could not be, where I was never called, where I was locked out of – she was allowed.  When my mother needed urgent medical care, it was not me or my sister or my brother who were called.  It was this devil woman who scares dogs and frightens my father’s coworkers that dialed those three numbers to get my mother in an ambulance and to the doctors who could save her neglected life.  I sincerely wish her that shiny symbol of a good achievement, of humanity in the middle of a tableau so disfigured, and send her my silent, broken thanks at the same time that I wish her out of my face, wish her silent and mute, wish her and her whole family out of my house and my history.

And this is what it is about those that I have encountered along the way – you are a reminder.  Of how we’ve failed.  Of what we can not do alone.  Of what we wish we could be left alone to do.  Of how the system that fails us, has failed us over and over, is also the same system we need, claw at over and over and over.  Living, breathing, inquiring reminders that we can not be left alone to deal with this, that the world never ever affords any of us that freedom.  We simply try to gather enough towels to stay the spread of the puddle that spills out every time I have to explain to you what this helplessness looks like, what it has caused, who it has hurt.  A reminder that I am accountable to you at the same time that I am not.  You can never know.  And yet we try, all the time, to explain.  To understand each other.  To save each other from the worst of it all.  Even failing, we still try.

Salvage Act, Scene 2: Snapshots from Inside

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

  -from Diving Into the Wreck

             by Adrienne Rich

Two months after my initial visit to our family home, my sister and I returned for the first stage of the clean-up.    When my father asked me to help with it I immediately said yes. I had offered, more than once, to help.  It’s not anything any of us wanted to do, but it seemed an impossible task for someone outside of the family to do correctly.  We cared about some of the stuff that might still be in the house and telling that from the masses and masses of other stuff could only be done by people who knew that house as their own.  So I returned. I spent almost three weeks in Fresno, tending almost entirely to sorting through the mess that was left behind. I camped out in my sister’s spare room and lived in Fresno for what was really only a short span of time, but stretched out at what was often a painfully slow and uncomfortably warm pace.

We went to the house the first day and, each silently lost in our own doubts and fears and uneasiness, stood looking at the rooms on the first floor wondering where in the hell to start.  How to even begin.  What to do, at all, that would even make a dent.  We tried to start in the kitchen – thinking: we can just throw out the garbage, at least, and it will make a difference.  Within twenty minutes we were both standing still, feet planted, heads turning to take in the room, hands on our hips and heavy sighs escaping our mouths.  Dead in the water.  Lost.  This room is impossible.  Too much stuff.  Too much filth.  No running water.  Too many fragile things to pack or separate or throw away.  Too many decisions to be made so early in the process.

We were perilously close to running out and never coming back.  The task at hand, which seemed doable when not in the house, seemed so far beyond impossible when we had to start getting our hands dirty that I nearly broke down and cried, right there, less than a half of an hour into the process. That was not an option, of course, so we rethought our strategy and went upstairs.  Contrary to what we originally thought we would want to do first, we found a sort of comfort (such an odd and misplaced word at the same time that it is absolutely the right word for that moment) in entering the rooms with the least amount of familiar stuff, of letting ourselves begin with simply boxing up things – random, weird things that were not ours and did not belong in this house. It seemed easier somehow, even if only in that cliched way of the lesser of two (or more) evils, easier at least physically and mentally, if not at all emotionally.

So we began.  Sifting.  Touching things we’d never seen before.  Carefully, but not too gingerly, boxing up the stuff of those others. We had decided to return these things to the one woman who had shown up at my father’s business twice asking about the stuff left in the house.  The woman, current legend had it, sent my father’s dog whimpering and hiding just at her presence in the office.  We decided to box these things in order to try to do what was right in the middle of a situation built completely on wrongs. So we looked at this stuff. We touched it.  We set it in boxes and we dismantled it for moving.  We began to know things about people we’d only had shadow images for up until that day.  With this sort of sharp focus and tunnel vision, we made our way through the house – over a span of more than two weeks – and began to make headway even in times we were sure the whole rest of our lives were going to be lost in time, trapped in this task, this seemingly never ending, energy-sucking, body-numbing task.

As I try to make sense, even so many months later, of all of the things we found in that house, I find myself unable to make a cohesive, linear narrative. The days blur.  The images swirl and mingle.  What was broken versus what was shattered versus what was missing is obscured.  What was ours and what was theirs becomes a whirlwind of moments and boxes and minutes.  

It’s impossible to describe yet, even still, the way that each day felt.  Much the same as each other and yet each distinct.  What is true of each one is this: motivation moved like waves, emotions roiled like boiling water just below the surface, paralysis happened, for each of us, at least once every day, often three, four or five times a day – the numb stand-still of what the hell are we doing and why does it feel like it makes no difference?  Silence reigned as we made motion after motion in the name of progress and yet, jokes were made, laughter rang out occasionally (even if in the darkest, most morbid ways) through the dirty, dank, cold and tainted rooms of our childhood home.

Each day we returned to my sister’s house and we would peel off the one outfit we wore into the house and we would each shower – what I called my Silkwood shower.  I would run hot water at full force and let it run over me – my body, my hair, my face – for a long time before even moving, before even really washing the grime and soil and energy of that place off of me. What was always true is that after we left we felt filthy, we felt half asleep and we felt worn down.  It didn’t matter if we spent two hours or six.  Anything more than five hours felt impossible and each extra minute felt like rolling a large lead weight in front of you just to step forward. We were beat: emotionally, mentally and physically.  Beyond what seemed reasonable. Beyond what seemed possible.

Each day, a conversation went like this, verbatim:

What the hell?

Who knows.
Who said which line alternated, varied, shifted – who was confused and who could say, reasonably, in just those two words – we can never know, we can never make sense of this, there is no sense to be made, only these things to do, only these motions to make, over and over and over.

What is most true of the time we spent in that house is that making sense of things is a fool’s game.  I can’t help but try, it is what I do, but I had to let go, early on, of trying to understand.  Most things were senseless, without rhyme or reason, none that could be discerned outside of the moments that created them.  So we moved through the house and observed, acted like anthropologists, trying to profile a culture we were mostly unfamiliar with.  In the moments that one of us would forget that sense could hardly be made, we would say What the hell?  And the other one of us, not so delusional in that moment, would say Who knows. It became short hand, comic relief, a big exhale in the held breath of that house.  Who knows. Probably not even the people responsible really. Who cares.  We do.  Too much.

The whole process felt like two steps forward and one step back.  What was inexplicably true is that the one step back always felt insurmountable and devastating.  The house was broken into twice in those two weeks and the first time much of our first three days of work was undone.  I felt immensely and suddenly terrified, exposed, vulnerable in a way I had not yet felt. I felt terror and anger – a mix that made me fear my own reactions in that house. Trash was emptied out of bags all across the floor.  Boxes we had carefully packed up for the former tenants of my siblings’ rooms were scattered.  The few unbroken things were stolen.   Each of these break-ins, every one of the back steps, felt insurmountable to me – the end of my ability to function. And yet we did, function.  Barely.  We sustained our energy for that process – hid out in my sister’s house otherwise, took precious breaks to see our family, to wrestle with my nephews and make them laugh, make them dance, make myself remember there is more to this earth than that one plot of disheveled land.

It is no coincidence, I believe, that I have been obsessed with piecing together elaborate jigsaw puzzles over the last few months.  When my mind is worn but racing, when I have too many thoughts, too many images to read a book or even stay focused on a movie or TV show – I can scan a box of jumbled up bits and pull a few out, study the shape and color and image on the box and try to match things up, fit things together.  What I could not do in that house, what I can not untangle in my mind – I can do with an image on cardboard that’s been cut up and tossed around.

The images from my time in the house have begun to feel much like the ritual I’ve noticed I have when I am too lazy (or don’t have enough table space) to pour the contents of the box out and sort the pieces.  I hold the bottom of the box and shake it, somewhat like tossing something around in a frying pan – a forward and back motion with a gentle up-toss to shift everything around.  The motion I make to overturn the pieces, see ones that were hidden from sight, the shake-up before I reach in to separate the pieces I need now from the ones I will need later. My brain is making a similar sort of toss and slide to process what was in that house, constantly shuffling and searching, shifting and piecing.

As I continue to shake the box of those weeks inside, images surface and rise to face me. And while none of it makes the kind of sense we long to make of any situation in our lives, there are words that come to mind, over and over, when I think of those weeks: broken, shattered, disconnected, indescribable, stifling, scattered.

In the name of broken and disconnected, here are some of those moments from my time in the house that rise to the top, for whatever reasons, in the random way they surface and in the unexpected way that sometimes the smallest things stand out the most.  Some day, perhaps, they will forge in my mind, morph into something that can be told as a story, with transitions and connections and an overarching meaning.  For now, there just is what happened, what we endured, what we saw, in all of its bizarre, horrific and surreal glory. There are only these things and so many more.

When we step into the rooms that housed my little brother and sister as they were growing up, all you can see is scattered pictures, random electronics and Raiders memorabilia everywhere.  Old beer cans still full, unopened, adorned with the Raiders logo.  A retail box of candy, liquor store style, some gummy candies that had a special Raiders edition. Plates, cups, banners, trading card wrappers.  I instantly think that as I  make my new home in the East Bay,  I will always remember this place and this time when I see that familiar black and silver.  Destruction, disorder.  Reminded by billboards constantly.

Amidst this chaos, there is a sewing machine.  And a stereo, fully connected with speakers mounted on the wall, all around the room, surround-sound style.  I had to find a step stool and a screw driver and climb up and dismantle each speaker before I could even get to the mounting hardware to pull them down from the wall.  Some of them were screwed directly into the crown molding, the original woodwork that has survived decade after decade in this house – mauled for better sound quality.

My sister and I pile everything into bags, into boxes, into a few empty duffel bags that were in the closet, into empty hampers.  As we fill each of these and dismantle the wiring of each speaker, I am reminded that our lives are so much different than the way these people live – nomadic, temporary, armed with empty things to throw their belongings in, but carefully choosing what parts to finish, to make more permanent.  We live differently.  We just do.  So we continue to dismantle, move, fill, sort, stop to look at a photo of money spanned out on a Raiders blanket – perhaps the most cash this person ever had in their life and so they memorialized it.  And I, in a frame within a frame within a frame moment, photograph the photograph and can feel the world accordion in and out around me.  I am laughing at and sad for and irritated with these people.

My sister reads a section from the woman’s journal and we learn about the amazing tops she found at the dollar store that are too big, but she bought the shirt in yellow and orange and red and blue and green and lavender and if she washes them in really hot water, they should fit just right.  We read that she has serious health problems, her legs failing her with a debilitating disease.  We read that she spent the whole afternoon at DDs Discounts shopping and we read about her son in jail, her son on drugs.  We find a small wooden box that slides open to reveal a  memorial DVD for her.  We see the date, while she lived in the house.  We stop, for a moment.  I can not really know what ran through my sister’s mind in that partial minute that we were silent and unmoving, but I know I saw this woman sewing and ironing and worrying and adapting and so close to how I can see myself and I wonder how she died, where, and how could her children have left all of this stuff, here, scattered, like a diorama of her life, for so many months even before the house was abandoned.  I am lost, however briefly, in the whole universe that has lived in this house in the short time it was floating away from us.

In the master bedroom, it is hard to tell how many people lived in there once my mother abandoned it. There is stuff with so many names and so many faces scattered all about. From my mother: broken things, scattered things, the overwhelming stench of dog urine – the carpet, even through shoes, feels thick and is the kind of dry sticky that happens when nothing is ever washed out of it. From others: bail bonds, stolen mail, immigration and deportation papers, photo negatives, broken board games, scattered toys and clothes.

I start from one corner and begin to radiate out.  I lift a pair of very small white denim shorts up and balled up inside are two bloody pairs of underwear.  I pick up a film negative from the ground and nestled in between pictures of a Christmas tree and presents is a woman posing topless, her face completely unrecognizable to me.  I find letters and pictures and names I’ve never seen in my life. I find a very small hypodermic needle lodged in the carpet. I stop several times to shake my head, take in a deep breath and let it out of my mouth, gather myself to keep from screaming or stopping.

As I move up from ground level to sort out and clear out the built in cabinet in the room, I find two broken telephones and an old TV that used to be in our kitchen in the 1980s.  None of these things work and did not use to be in the master bedroom.  Sitting on the edge of the cabinet, partially hidden behind the TV, is a half-full bottle of Febreeze.  I start to laugh, the sound breaking out of the smile that crept up on me the second I saw that bottle.  I take one glove half off my hand and dig my phone out of my pocket and unlock it.  I stop to take a picture of the bottle, just as I found it, and I am laughing – a soft, stuttering kind of laugh – when I call out to my sister in the next room.


There are some things even Febreeze can’t fix, I say and we both laugh, if only there were enough Febreeze in the world.


Really? she says. Really? Febreeze?  Wow. 

For a brief moment, the world is ludicrous and hilarious and the job in front of us the kind of futile that becomes laughable.  We joke about buying enough Febreeze to coat the whole house and then walk away.  I picture the commercial where the Febreeze attracts and then devours, consumes, eats up the odor.  I imagine a Febreeze bubble large enough to take this all in without bursting.  We wish past the impossibility of such a thing. We laugh, though, in the middle of the stench and scattered mess. A brief reprieve from the more disturbing parts of this process and, however little, it helps.

Downstairs, mixed in a pile of random papers and photos is an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet issued by the Fresno Police Department.  My mother’s wild-eyed face stares up at me.  She looks old and tired and is almost smirking.  A mug shot. Her second mug shot.  I don’t even know until that moment that they give you these in this day and age.  I know now.  I look at my mother’s face and can’t look away even though I think I should.  I put it in the keep pile.  A pin-prick artifact.  A fact.  I can’t burn this or toss it or recycle it anymore than I can make any of this go away or not exist.  Her messy hair.  Her familiar but strange face. This is my mother as much as the picture of her baby-faced seventeen year old self putting me to sleep as she holds me to her chest, my face laying against her shoulder, her eyes tired but bright with hope and love.

I am carrying a box of mostly Raiders memorabilia from upstairs out into the garage in anticipation of our meet-up to hand off the stuff that is not ours.  We have boxed and then reboxed this stuff after two break-ins and I am ready to be done with it, to stop seeing it, to stop touching it.  My sister and I have already
made at least a dozen treks downstairs and through the house and outside and then into the garage with box after bag after box.  I begin down the stairs ahead of my sister and I look back at her as she says, sarcastically,  be careful with that – you’ve got all the Raiders stuff and I say, as I turn to face forward, Yeah, I’m glad we took such care with all of this. I make the ninety degree turn in the stair case mid-sentence and I can feel the box slip out of my hands and it topples head over foot over head all the way down the stairs just as I say the last word.  The contents land on the stairs, on the floor, scattered across the wood floor at the foot of the stairs.

It falls slowly, really slowly, slow enough for me to look at my sister and then back at the box, still tumbling and then back at her before we burst into uncontrollable laughter.  I bend over and put my hands on my knees to steady myself as my body heaves.  The timing of it all ridiculous and perfect and hilarious.  My sister makes a slow motion yell: Nooooooo, not the Raiders bowl, noooooooo.   I stand up and walk down the steps, stooping to gather things as I go.  The Raiders bowl is broken. It is plastic, of course, but a whole piece has broken off of it.  I hold it up and make the saddest face I can.  We get lost in laughter again.  I hold my side as it begins to hurt.

We are laughing at the irony of the drop that happens just as we are making fun of our own care with this stuff, but I am also laughing because how can I not?  This is how this whole event feels.  We take care, over and over, with everything and still it all breaks.  Still it will fall.  Still we will drop it.  What can we do but still try to lift it?  Still try to carry it, carefully?  And then laugh – at ourselves, at our own inability to do all of this without breaking anything, at our own catty attitudes toward people we also sincerely feel compassion for?  I boxed that plastic Raiders cereal bowl at least three times.  And yet I can only cry laughing as I hold the broken bowl and the broken-off piece and try to shove them together and then let the piece fall again as I look at my sister with a confused look, over and over. And for the longest spell so far and the deepest gut moving way, we laugh and laugh.  We recall and reenact it all night and the next day – the timing so perfect and accidental.  A brief moment of sheer klutzy humanity to hold on to.

Inside a desk positioned awkwardly in the sun room, wedged between a broken player piano and a stack of magazines and a broken glass table top and a bashed in wall cabinet, I find letters and a journal and court papers for both my mother and a man who was her boyfriend, who was in jail for much of the time they were together, who was the son of a woman who is my mother’s age who is the same person we will be meeting to hand off all of this stuff to in just a few days.  Leaned against the desk is a broken off armoire door that used to be my sister’s and there are still magazine pages taped to what was the inside of the door.  Gavin Rossdale and a young Drew Barrymore stare out at me.

I read some of the journal before boxing it up to keep and read later. I take things into my brain that can’t be unlearned.  I know better than this and yet I still have to read.  To not know, somehow, is worse, but . . . . Even beyond the images, the exact scenes that the entries draw – there is the frenetic pacing, the tone, the voice I can hear behind the words that is not well, not the version of my mother I try to hold onto.  I read things she has told this inmate about me and my cheeks begin to heat, I begin to form tears in my eyes.

I know the feelings behind what she has written.  I am aware of our tense and broken history, of how she thinks of me – in any given state, the shades slightly different, but the core a fixed thing.  To read it spelled out, without the opportunity to counter it, told to this other person, this man I feel has no place in my mother’s life, this man she said she would marry, the letters from him to her labelled with her first name followed by his last – to read this in ink on paper opens up a scab in me that I try to ignore.  Words are my currency and what I read here burns a hole in my pocket, like coins torched until red.  But they are words and so I will still hold them – in my pocket, in my hand, in a trunk while they are too hot to touch – I will save them in the safety deposit box in my brain and hope that the metal drawer I have locked them in doesn’t open too often. I will bury them like poison treasure and occasionally run my thumb around the edge of each one, feeling for the sharp spots.

Among the random clutter on one small counter in the kitchen, a space that is lost in the mass of shit everywhere if you are trying to survey the whole room, is a somewhat older shelf stereo. It is smeared with the residue of the search for fingerprints in the house.  Written with black marker on the top is SLEAZY I and I am not sure if it is Sleazy the first or a statement – Sleazy, I.  I don’t know if it’s like writing your name on your underwear before camp or if it was written as a slur against the owner.  I stare at it for a brief spell before I notice that I am puzzling all of this.  I imagine this is something I would have done to make my friends laugh – scribble that on my stereo and see how long it takes anyone to notice and then throw an intentionally ridiculous faux gang sign and look obviously falsely tough and say yeah, I’m sleazy one, what? I try to infuse it with humor, make it harmless, diffuse the feeling that is creeping up, constantly, in this house – the feeling that every space has been co-opted, every corner, every surface, every single square inch has been owned by, touched by, written on, violated by any number of people whose faces I will never see.

Nestled in the breakfast room cupboards, where food used to live, is the kind of journal that prompts you on each page – like something you buy your teenager or friend to get to know each other.  Favorites, memories, wishes, dreams – like an adult baby-book.  My sister is thumbing through it and finds most pages empty.  What is written, though, is clearly in my mother’s handwriting.  Who knows if she bought it for herself or if it was a gift from one of her new best friends – any one of the three or four of those that cycled through the house in the last year she was there.  My sister makes a slightly muffled sound – somewhere between a gasp and a laugh – as she opens it to the place where you are supposed to ‘list the top attractions in the city you live in’.

My mother’s list is topped with jail and court.  She rounds out the list to include Winco and Rite Aid and Walgreens.  I can hear the humor in my mother’s voice in this list, but I can also hear the biting sarcasm and the hope she would have that we would see this one day and feel responsible for this being the world she lives in . . . I don’t at all believe it is paranoid to assume that.  My mother, love her as much as I do, is a master at the passive aggressive guilt trip and this is one, right here, on the page, waiting for us.  Despite knowing this, reading that list, even laughing about it in that way we laugh when things are so absurd as to be devastating, I am weighted by a sadness that I feel I am struggling to stay even half of a step ahead of during this process.  Jail.  Court.  More than once each.  After fifty years old.  After a life without even a single parking ticket.  Alone and crazy.  Alone.

And I know, I do really know, that there wasn’t anything we could have done – given what we knew then, given what the resources are, given what each of our individual freedoms are – there was nothing we could do to keep that from happening.  There still is nothing we can do to keep it from happening again unless she lets us.  And here we are, sorting through the debris of those years spent frantically trying to fix it, to stop it, to mend it, to bandage it.  I joke, often, about Fresno.  I disparage it.  It would be a joke I might make, surely have made, that the top attraction in Fresno is jail and the most popular activity is teen pregnancy. With love, I point out the worst parts of my hometown.  In reality, I know much of who I am is because I lived in that place.   Given the past six years, given the reality of my mother’s rap sheet, of the reason we are in this house reading this at all – seeing those four letters at the top of that list in my mother’s rounded handwriting breaks my heart.  I am laughing, but I am not laughing.

I have learned a lot about a lot of things in the last six years – things having to do with brain chemistry, with legal processes, with navigating the severely underfunded and highly complicated mental health system in California.  What I learned early on in my time in the house is what LMG + stands for and why there were small sharpie squares all over the basement, all over the wall in the stairway leading up and out of the basement, in the kitchen just outside of the basement door.  I guessed, thought I knew.  And I was right.  Positive for blood.  

I watch a lot of morbid television. I know, in the detached way of crime procedurals, how crime scenes are handled. What caught me off guard was not that there were markings for where they tested for blood.  What surprised me were the post-its.  Post-its.  I have a friend who loves post-its and so, for a moment, I imagined her walking around the house and labeling all of the squares. It made a more Mary Poppins version of reality to imagine her sing-dancing around the house and ‘decorating’ it with Post-Its.  Like a morbid fairy godmother creating a macabre connect-the-dots.

Many of them were on the ground, had fallen away who knows how long ago, had been stuck to a shoe and carried into another room.  I found those post-its everywhere, even when I thought I was far away from the blood squares.  I knew what happened in that house, had prepared myself for blood and destruction.  But there was something so innocuous, so hauntingly mundane, about a small ink square and a small pink piece of paper stuck to it just like a reminder at work or a quick note on top of a stack of papers.  A, B, C, D, E, F, G and on.  Splatter, drip, spray.  Blood.  From a person.  Who died.  At first I noticed the squares everywhere and eventually, thankfully and frighteningly, I learned to not see them.  To survive.  To make it through. 

On the center shelves of the hutch in the breakfast room, there is a mix of holiday decorations mixed in with the ceramic pitchers and dried or silk flower arrangements.  A Thanksgiving harvest figure made out of that straw-like paper that makes a distinct crunching sound if you handle it too roughly.  A Santa figurine that looks like frosted glass but is actually thick plastic.  All of it is surrounded by random papers and odd, half broken knickknacks. It all has the appearance of the most half-ass decorating.  Here – it’s November.  Oh look, now it’s December.  Things added and nothing removed.  A more-the-merrier attitude or an inattention to what was already there – who knows. The one that has stayed with me and stared me right in the face from the first instant I laid eyes on it was the jumbled up letters sitting on the shelf.  There is a P and an E and an A and a C and another E.  What is laid out is out of order and spells nothing.  But the letters are distinctive enough that what it spells is easily discerned.

And the symbolism of it was immediately obvious.  So obvious that it seems ridiculously cliche to even mention it.  But I can’t help spell it out, even to myself.  Where there should be peace, there is only this: all the pieces – a lot of extra pieces, too, actually – but all the parts of home, of place, of calm and love and comfort, except everything is tossed about, jumbled up, laid out all wrong, crowded and forgotten about and left out too long.

So this is our task.  What I thought was sorting, was gathering, was eventually going to be cleaning is really the act of setting things right.  I didn’t think that was an option before entering the house.  I didn’t even think it was possible while in the house, most days, but looking at those five silver-plated letters I could detect the way that a mind reads a wrong word and makes it right.  My brain didn’t read ecepa – it only saw Peace and the way that it was all fucked up and confused and shifted. And it, in the most imperceptible of seconds, set about to correct it, to order it, to make sense out of it.

Our minds have an amazing capacity to sort through things that seem knotted up and jacked around beyond repair, even when we feel that there’s no way they can see through it.  Staring at those letters, I began to imagine the possibility of setting things right, back in order, finding what was supposed to be in the middle of what was, right then.  I did not believe in that possibility fully yet – I was like a reluctant convert to religion, teetering on the edge of faith, going through the motions, praying empty prayers – but the possibility of it was enough that day (and most that followed) to carry me through the blood spots and dirty underwear and needles found wedged in carpet or fabric.  The possibility was enough to get through. The promise of full-fledged faith, of a place of belief, of home, as it were. 

Salvage Act, Scene 1: Digging Through the Wreckage, Finding Who We Were

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
. . . This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.

  – from Diving Into the Wreck

      by Adrienne Rich

_______________________________________________________________

What struck me first – what stopped me in my tracks and pulled my eyes from surface to surface, turned my stomach inside out and had my brain searching for a way to make sense – was the black smeared on everything in sight.  Everything. Every counter, every wall, every toilet, every sink, every door and the floor – all covered in black black smears.

You probably know what it is already.  I should have.  But I had prepped myself for destruction, for decay, for abuse.  I had prepped myself so well for those things that I forgot all about the realities of crime scene investigating.  So my mind sailed on a quick voyage around the world of crazy and all I could envision, all I could see, was that this was the epitome of Crazy (that alternate planet that deserves a proper name).  I thought: They (those nebulous unknown people who had inhabited my childhood home along with my mother, the enigmatic woman she is now) had written on the walls, with charcoal or something similar and then had tried to wipe it off, but were unable to or gave up on it. In the quickest of moments, my eyes were trying to look for patterns beneath the smears, where words or symbols had been.  I was getting nauseous.  This is the cuckoo’s nest, I thought.  I can’t handle this.

I looked at my father and said, What is that?  He looked at me, his brow ever-so-slightly furrowed and said, From the fingerprinting.

Ahhhh, I thought.  See, stop, don’t do that.  Don’t see everything as crazy.  See what’s right in front of you for whatever it is.  Plenty of that will still turn out to be crazy.  A lot of the rest will just be criminal, just be awful, just be devastating and shocking and what you have for reality now.  This is the same home you’ve known, but certainly, undeniably, changed.  Turn off the part of you that tries to make sense. Surely, little of that can be found here, little of it will be made of this mess.

 

The thing that was immediately true (and turned out, over the next two months, to never cease to be true) was that, literally, physically, breathing was taxing in that house.  The first signs of that were sighs – deep and loud and chest-heaving.  Over and over.  My father and I.  Sigh, sigh, sigh.  Look around.  Hands on the back of my hips and then a scan of the room and then arms crossed around the chest.  And then – sigh.  The kind that makes your lower lip jut out and move with the force of your exhale – your teeth slightly apart, allowing the air to leave easily – that sound I often think of as part of trying not to cry.  But there were no tears.  Just the air from my body trying to push out and away, perhaps to move the air that was sitting in that house – heavy and dirty and wrought with still-born chaos – to move that air away from me, to create a small cocoon of my own world, my own chemistry, my own biology, to protect me for however long this was to take.

We stood in the kitchen, a lengthy remodel finished only months before my mother took over the house, and looked at the hand selected granite counters cluttered with dirty dishes, with trash, with random electronics and stuff.  The custom island and stove covered in stuff. The sink full of dishes left for at least weeks, probably months.  The faucet missing the end, the place where water should come out, so that if there were still running water in the house, it would shoot up and out, like a geyser, like one of those fountains you find at parks where children run around and through and giggle on sunny days.  There was a hole in the wall on one side of the room and notes written in sharpie across another wall.  Clothes strewn on the floor. Papers scattered everywhere.  Brown paint sloppily smeared on the black farmhouse sink my dad had picked out – my mother’s mad attempt to erase him from that room, cover up his only direct contribution to the design.

Sigh.

Where to start?  What to do?  The threat of overwhelmed, the very serious threat of collapse, hovered just inches around my whole body.  Focus. Today: pictures.  Nothing else.

So here it is, I thought.  Here it is. We began to open drawers.  Almost without speaking, we started to search in the kitchen, ignoring the mess, trying to work past it, trying to convince our eyes to see only what we needed to see today, right now, nothing else.  My father went out to his truck and came back in with the boxes we had gathered for what we hoped to find. I tried not to give pause to my grandmother’s apron, saved for nearly three decades by my mother, in the same drawer as someone else’s mail, someone else’s court papers, someone’s overstuffed keyring. Open another drawer. And another. I reached past someone else’s dollar store hair balm to pick up a snapshot of my brother as an infant – patchwork cotton overalls and sun bleached hair and two new teeth intruding into his smile.  At least this, I thought.  At least this one.

My father quickly moved into the breakfast room and started searching through the built in hutch and pantry that first made me fall in love with the architecture from the 1920’s and 30’s – a love I still have that shapes not only what home I choose, but what town, what city, what places also value these old buildings with their nooks and moldings, their turn knobs and latches.  He rifled through a side cabinet that used to hold our cereal and cookies and Rice-a-Roni boxes trying to sort out the piles of paper that were in there now, mixed in with junk mail and random items.  He was pulling out anything that might be important as the divorce chugs along, slowly, slowly, so slowly.  Any bills my mother may have neglected that need to be paid.  Any correspondence with lawyers or courts or bail bondsmen that might need attention. We each sifted, armed with our own missions and a push to get in and get out.

I moved into the den. When we bought this house, in the late 80’s, it still bore the wallpaper and decor from a 70’s ‘update’.  Foil wallpaper was in nearly every room.  But not the den.  It had the original wood paneling – not 70’s wood, the real stuff, stained a mahogany color – and a bay window and rattan furniture with cushions made of some tan and brown and deep red African-inspired fabric.  When we wandered through the house before we made on offer, when I was only fourteen, we were struck by the wall of smell we hit upon entering that room – a smell I could only describe at the time as burnt bacon.  The sunroom had the same smell and had the same cushions and rattan furniture, so we guessed it was some sort of finish on the wood or the fabric.  The room was haunted by that odor when we first moved in.  I find it hard to think of that room without a very visceral memory of that particular smell and found myself lost in that memory when I walked in – despite the mishmash of chairs and a table my mother had taken and cut the legs down so that it sat far too low to be of any real use for dining and way too high to be a coffee table.  I could still smell that older version as I surveyed the half burnt papers in the fireplace, the graffiti on both the mantle and the brick near the hearth, the sheets hanging over windows, nailed at the top and sagging.

I stepped over the broken glass on the floor and the burnt styrofoam packing material and stood looking out the bay window – able, if I blurred my periphery, to look again at the view of the front yard as it was for me back then and think of the mallard duck phone we had in the den that quacked instead of ringing and remember that my phone number, a 14th birthday present, rang into this room as well as my bedroom and so I had held the head of that duck against my ear until it ached, until my hand cramped from holding such an awkward shape in my hand for hours on end.  For the briefest of moments, this house was what it had been, while looking out from it, while standing very still.

 

I turned around and was shocked back into time, into what was really before me.  At least you can’t see the fingerprint dust as well in here, I thought.  At least.  I found my first pile of photos in this room, scattered among random papers, my mother’s most recent booking sheet complete with mugshot – the kind of image I can’t erase in my mind, but I also can’t look away from – intermingled in this stuff, among other people’s mail, other people’s documents, in random piles and baskets and strewn on the floor.  Photos.  Pictures.  A couple of pages from an old photo album.  A few of me as a baby, as an infant. Sitting on a plantation wall in Charleston.  Being held by my biological father, smiling, pointing, golden haired and dimply.

I was a mix of gratefulness and disgust, of compassion and anger, of relief and reserve.  If nothing else, there are these.  A few photos of each of us.  A few we wouldn’t have.  At least these few that my mother did not burn or toss or that the others did not trash.

I moved on to the hall closet, making my clockwise motion around the main floor – aiming to make the full circle and then move upstairs, a plan of attack, with inventory precision, mentally checking off each space, each shelf, each corner.  I lived in that house for years so it does not always seem particularly large and, at just over 2400 square feet, it is not huge compared to real mansions.  But it is certainly spacious and you can walk a full circle on the main floor, orbiting around the stair case and walls that hide closets.  My friends used to get lost the first time they would sleep over – they would ask how I ever got around that mansion and I would laugh, tell them it’s just a circle so how in the hell are you gonna get lost when you’ll always end up where you started.  Moving so slowly through every nook and cranny, though, I felt the space of the house, felt the nearly endless places stuff was piled or tossed or strewn.  Places for anything to hide. A house that went on and on and on.

I was managing to move quickly even while feeling on the verge of being overwhelmed by the process.  One shelf at a time, one pile at a time, watch for glass, watch for needles, watch for things you can’t possibly imagine.  Ignore clothes.  Ignore mail.  Ignore broken picture frames and chotchkies and ceramic shard everywhere. Ignore board games and gift wrap and books.  Pictures.  Focus.  Remember.  I was soldiering through – that metaphor active in my mind.  You are here to salvage, not sink.  Stay under as long as your air tank allows and then exit.  Do not examine.  Do not reminisce.  Later for all of that.  Focus focus focus.  Move move move.  Do not stand in one place too long, as though slow moving quick sand were just underfoot, as though a shark would smell my blood and find me here, frozen, immobilized.

 

In that first hall closet, loose on a mid-level shelf, was a collection of stuff from my sister’s childhood.  My mother, years and years ago, had labeled a cardboard archive box for each of us three children and would throw anything in there that she wanted to keep. I didn’t know about these boxes until I was in my late twenties and I remember being touched, shocked a little, at how sentimental my mom really was.  The mere existence of those boxes and my learning about them had opened up and shifted how I saw my mother, almost instantly, on that first day she pulled them out to show me.  It was one of those adult moments where you realize how two dimensional our images of our parents often are – still so naive and childlike despite our years, caught unaware by the complexity and dimension of these humans who raised us.

I recognized these pictures and papers as being from my sister’s box.  I rummaged in the closet – the box was not in there.  But here it was: a few baby pictures, gift cards from the baby shower for my sister, an old report card, a letter from my sister when she ran away from home, a letter from my sister when she came back home, mother’s day and birthday cards from her, more and more, almost a box full. And there it was: the burning behind my eyelids, the fullness in my throat, the welling in my eyes and the chills that come right before you really start to cry, before your body convulses with sobs.

I was beginning to lose it not because I found this stuff, not because of that adorable face looking up at me (my sister was truly a beautiful baby, even as a newborn, even now) and not because here was a little of the real stuff,  the stuff I had hoped still existed after such neglect. I was about to fall apart, really fall apart, because the mother who saved this stuff – even cards with nothing personal except my sister’s name in loopy, curvy juvenile script – was suddenly filling the space.  The woman who lifted the lid on that box, after pulling it down from the high shelf in her closet, and dropped this card in, this letter, this field day ribbon – that woman is a stranger to me now.  I was nearly struck down by the difference, the juxtaposition, the glaring contrast between who she was and who she is. The gap between those two women began to close in around me like a plastic bag over my head.  Breathe.  Breathe. Breathe.

Tears started to run out of the corner of my eyes even though I was refusing to sob, refusing to let any crying sounds happen.  Pull it together.  Hold it together.  You can’t lose the day to this.  Focus.

What really made me stop crying – the practical always the best in these cases – was that my hands were coated in black dust, my whole body felt contaminated (not just by the black, but by the dirt and dust and grime) and I did not want to touch my face or my eyes or my nose.  And there was no running water.  And the only tissue I had seen so far was a roll of toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom that was sitting on the edge of the tub.  Since everything was coated in black dust, it was ringed with black dust along the whole edge where it touched the tub, every sheet contaminated with that dark smear of graphite.  So sobbing, crying, heaving and needing to wipe my face, blow my nose, over and over and over was not an option.  I carefully tore off the bottom edge of a length of toilet paper and wiped my eyes, blew my nose and sucked it all in.  Later.  Not now.

The search went on.  My father and I moved in parallel missions, filling box after box after box.  It was mostly, even if not all, here.  Each room yielded its own treasures and while all of the picture frames had broken or missing glass – the photos were there and undamaged.  I found what had been in my box.  I found what had been in my brother’s box.  I found what had been my baby photo album, empty, in one room and the pictures that had been in it strewn around several rooms. I became machine like – file through a stack, move it over, toss it aside or set it in the box.  Decide about everything else later. Be glad this is here.  Be glad you are here. I found my brother’s baby stuff.  I found old, old black and white pictures.  I stopped between almost every room to grab another empty box to fill.  I ignored the black walls and the black floors and my black hands and my sinuses that were slowly swelling shut and the tightness in my chest and the sighing that was still happening, at lower volume, with less air. I kept moving in that clockwise motion until I found where I began. I had found a pace, a space in my mind to push through.

And then I went upstairs.

The chaos of downstairs was mostly identifiable even if shocking and demolished – it was mostly our stuff.  Upstairs was a whole other world.  There are three bedrooms upstairs – the master and two smaller rooms with what we always called the Brady Bunch bathroom.  My brother and sister lived in those rooms until I moved out and my sister moved downstairs.  I had recently discovered old VHS videos from the early 90’s and in one, my brother and sister took the video camera and gave tours of their bedrooms, so I had a very clear picture in my mind of my sister’s green and pink room and her white wrought iron bed and my brother’s striped comforter, his dark wood dresser and his clothes laid out neatly on the floor for school, just as they would be on his body, shirt tucked into pants and shoes tucked into pant legs.  In later years, I stayed in what had been my sister’s room when I visited Fresno and the room that had been my brother’s had a crib for when one of my nephews would stay with grandma and grandpa. These were rooms that had housed generations and had lulled each one of us children and grandchildren to sleep.

Now – these rooms contained nothing recognizable. I felt a disorienting sensation that I had walked through a portal into someone else’s home, but one where all the walls and the windows were the same, like I had spiraled down into a reflection of our house that lived in another dimension, in another time. There was Raiders memorabilia and foam instead of mattresses and speakers mounted on the wall and crates of cell phones and digital cameras and electrical wires.  There was mail for other people – very specific names that are etched in my mind – and their toiletries and figurines and CDs and clothes.  I rifled through the piles, to make sure there wasn’t anything I needed to gather and found nothing.  The last place I looked was in the closet of the second room and in the back corner I caught, out of the corner of my eye, the archive box with my name on it.  My mother’s writing was instantly familiar – I spotted the way she curved out my D, the way she dotted the i, that very particular way she wrote the name she gave me.  I had seen it forever – on cards, on post-its, on the top of boxes that first year I lived away from home – it is as familiar to me as my own handwriting.

 

I reached for the box and had to use both hands.  It was full.  With what looked like mail.  And I had already found what I was sure had been in that box, but still I hoped.  I hoped it was more.  I hoped it was my baby book, which I had not found, which had a lock of my hair from my first haircut, from when I was blonde, a small lock with scotch tape at the end to hold it together. The log of all those firsts, all those statistics that new mothers keep.  I longed for that dusty-rose book with a tattered binding.  Even though I had found so much already.

What I found in that box was a lot of mail.  For that woman.  The one who had been living in that room.  A whole archive box of it, unopened.  Her name in Times New Roman and whatever other fonts bill companies and courts use. I could feel my muscles tightening and my teeth clenching and my own held breath.  I’m getting angry, I thought. I really had that exact thought.  Why?  You know this woman lived in this room, you just looked through her drawers and rummaged through the piles strewn on the floor.  Hers.  Not yours. But I was pissed.  I felt violated.  And ridiculous at the same time.  It’s a box.  It shouldn’t matter.  But for a blood roiling moment it did.  For twenty-something years, my memories had lived in that box.  My box.  Mine.  Here I was – nearly undone again.  So close to finished with this task.  And not by tears, by rage. By what was really a toddler-like sense of ownership, tantrum-like in its single mindedness.

This feeling would return.  Several times, weeks and weeks later, when we went back to the house for the real work – the clearing out, the sorting, the cleaning up of the mess that had been made of our house.  But in that room, on that sunny afternoon in February, I pushed past it, I shoved it over to be dealt with later.  Reason prevailed.  It is a box.  It is.  So familiar, but really nothing now.  And this woman, who you will discover died while living here, who kept a journal with some of the most mundane and trivial details, who had serious medical problems and an addict son and another son in and out of prison – this woman did not know you, did not know what this box was, did not do anything except gather her mail into a box marked for someone else whose name she may or may not have known.  It is the smallest of things, really.  The smallest.

There will be bigger things, odder things, sadder things, more disgusting things.  When you return.  There will be harder work than this.  I knew that.  And it was true.  Do not fall apart so close to the end of this day.

I ventured into the master and made the quickest run of it I could.  I had nearly reached my limit.  And that room reeked of dog urine.  Breathing became more difficult.  I had to step over dog shit – not the first room I had to do that in, but certainly the worst.  I looked through the piles of stuff tossed on the box springs (the mattress, like almost all of the other mattresses in the house, was gone) and looked in the drawers and the closet.  I found very little that was ours that was not broken or shattered and went back downstairs.

 

Only one more room to check.  The last room.  The one I didn’t want to see at all.

I went down into the basement – the room where it had happened.  I looked around at the chrome and black and mess that included drug paraphernalia that was all unfamiliar.  I looked at the wall of mirror that was familiar – from when this room had gym equipment – and studied the star shapes, the sun shapes, the radiating lines of the shattered glass.  Not a single portion was pristine.  I could tell, without touching anything, that nothing of value to me was in there and so I walked back up the stairs, stepping on the carpet pad, the carpet had disappeared to who knows where – to a dumpster or fire pit immediately after the murder or perhaps it was sitting in some evidence room, tested and tested and tested for blood or any other incriminating tidbit.

Each step up those stairs was toward the light, literally, of the ground floor.  I had considered moving down into that room as a teen.  My room was hot and that room would be deliciously cool during the horrid Fresno summers.  But I always found the basement a little creepy.  It was finished and had electricity, but it also had windows that looked up out of a window well and had the door to the water heater and furnace room and a closet that had a tiny door to a crawl space under the house and I had grown up on way too many horror movies to not be afraid of what might come out of that space on some dark night while I was sleeping.  It was now a whole other brand of creepy – not funny, not silly, not I-shouldn’t-be-afraid-of-that creepy.  It was black sharpie on the wall labeling blood spots creepy.  It was that same bat that probably shattered the mirror also ended someone’s life creepy.  It was silent screams echoing against the walls creepy.  It was I-don’t-know-how-to-air-this-room-out-enough creepy.  I was happy to be climbing up and out of that room.

When I got up the stairs to the kitchen, my dad had already started loading the truck with the boxes we had filled.  We talked very little as we filled the bed of his truck and discovered that we had so many boxes we even had to put a box at my feet.  As we climbed into his truck and looked at our filthy hands, we said little except how happy we were to have found so much.  I said little except thank you for going with me, it means a lot.  We drove back to my dad’s work and washed our hands and scrubbed our faces and took in deep breaths and exhaled through our mouths.  We were relieved.  We were thankful.  We were trying not to think of all the rest: the work still to be done, what was lost, what was gone, how to know what to do with that house, what to do with all the other people’s stuff. We didn’t quite know what to do next, so we just stood outside his office and talked of other things and then hugged goodbye.

Here’s what we knew:  my dad would drive to my brother’s house to stack the boxes in his garage until we could go through them, sort them, organize them.  I would drive back to Oakland and resume the hunt for a place to live.  I would come back soon and, with the permission of my brother and sister, take possession of those pictures and take on the task of archiving them and getting copies to everyone.  I would preserve our history and multiply it to save it from future destruction. I would be a wash of mixed emotions as I drove up Highway 99 and then headed west to my temporary home.  I would be sad and grateful and relieved and tense and worried and through it all I would measure my breaths so as to stay afloat, carefully choose songs and playlists to be able to hold it all together.

 

Weeks later I will drive down to Fresno for a nephew’s hockey game.  The night I get there, we will meet at my brother’s house and have dinner and I will see, immediately, a picture of him at about age six that he has dug out of one of the boxes and set on a shelf in the kitchen – he has a slightly impish grin and the bowl cut that defined that age for him, his hair a sandy blonde, the in-between color of fall, the summer sun no longer bleaching it out but not yet grown into the dark hair of winter. I will know that for him to have that picture is enough reason to have walked into that house, to have seen things I could have lived my whole life without seeing.

My sister and my sister-in-law and I will stand in the garage randomly pulling out pictures and laughing until my dad comes out for the third time to tell us that it’s time to eat.  We will sit around the dining table after dinner is done and sort through a few of the boxes, starting the first phase of my archiving.  We – my brother, my sister, me – along with the help of my sister-in-law, my aunt and my nephew – will separate out the photos from our childhoods, leaving for later the black and whites, unless they are our parents or grandparents, and save those that are unrecognizable until later. We will only make a slight dent in the couple of hours we do this since the boxes are numerous and full out in the garage.

We will lose hours laughing at our hair, at our clothes – the ridiculous red, white and blue coordinates that I remember Mom buying for me at Mervyn’s just prior to a big Disneyland family vacation – at things we loved so much then but are comical now.  We will say: What were we thinking? We will say: Why did we do that? We will make fun of my dad’s facial hair – is that a hipster mustache or a porn-star mustache? – and he will just shrug and leave early, leave us to reminisce some more.  We will lose ourselves in amusement at each other’s facial expressions caught on film, on how young our parent’s look, at how fat our baby faces are. We will tell stories that only one or two of us remember and here is the magic of these old photos – the way they make us remember things, the way we can gather around those dusty images and find one detail that brings back a whole scene, a whole story, a forgotten memory.  The way we can sit together and laugh, push down the obvious sadness in seeing what we once were to say Oh shit, look at this one or look at mom’s perm here, was that really stylish? or tease my aunt about her 80’s hair and her black and white monokini in that shot from Pismo Beach in 1987.

For the smallest moment of time (but what feels large enough to get lost in that night, gloriously large enough) and for the narrowest pocket in space, we just are: smiling, reminiscing, sorting, sharing, nudging each other, telling my oldest nephew stories, seeing his face light up as he sees his dad at his age, him giggling at the ludicrousness of any of us having been that small.  We are hovering in a gap, a lovely forgiving gap between who we were and where we are now.  Afloat – buoyant, lightweight and wiping happy tears from our eyes. There is no house to clean up.  There is no death to think about.  There is no time to linger on the one person missing from all of this laughter [we all feel the invisible seat, can probably all hear my mother’s sarcastic comments, can see her eyes as she starts to laugh at a ridiculous story about one of us, but we can sit outside of that (or perhaps just next to it), for just this moment, to be].  There is only this: a family and its history (what might have been lost, what might have never come back to us) – in full Kodachrome and curved edged photography, in faded Polaroids, in textured eight-by-tens, in scallop-edged black and white.  Who we were.

 

Salvage Act, Prologue: Thrown into Plot, Scene Fully Set

Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in.  It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters.

                                                                                                                        Elizabeth George 

It started with a phone call from my dad. I expected it to be routine – the new routine.  I had been sick quite a bit and was in the middle of a move and my ear drum had ruptured the day before . . . . This must be a call to check in on me.  Again.

He was.  Checking in.  But he also had news.  The kind you can tell is coming within the first four words of the sentence that transitions into it.  A tone.  A pacing of the words.  A very specific volume that we must detect at the most basic, animal level.  Danger.  Pain.  Hurt.  Brace yourself.

The next sentence out of his mouth was, Your mother’s fine and they don’t think she was involved, but . . . .

But.  But and then a ringing in my ear.  My ear had been ringing already.  I had a bad enough ear infection that within twenty-four hours of the initial pain, my ear drum had given way and opened up my skull to the threats of the outside world.  My ear had been thrumming and pulsing and leaking and ringing and giving me the sensation of being in a tunnel at all times.  This ringing was on top of that.  The ringing that happens when you can feel the earth move and shift beneath you.  Pretty literally.  Yes – it’s your body and your nerves and your misfiring senses, but it feels like the earth slides a little to the side and leaves you teetering on your own feet.

 

But. That sensation could also be the first signs of the allergic reaction I was about to have to my antibiotic.  Less than an hour after getting off the phone with my father, I was so dizzy that looking, slowly, to one side made me vomit.  I had to hold the arm of the couch and then the mantle and then the door frame and then lean against the wall as I went down the hall to make it to the bathroom.  I made that trek several times that afternoon because, for some reason, staying in the bathroom made me feel dizzier – as though tile and porcelain are less steady than wood and plaster.

But.  There’s been a murder at the house.

I both heard and unheard every word that came after.

We knew very little at that point.  The police had been there that morning.  My brother had driven by and seen what he said were at least ten police cars at our house – what I think of as our childhood home, even though I was fourteen when we moved in, because my brother and sister grew up there and my parents both lived there until a couple of years ago and it was the center of our family.  It was a home my mother had wanted for years – had driven by and dreamed about – and when it went up for sale, they bought it.  It didn’t matter that we had just moved three years before or that even complex calculations showed a mortgage that size was a risk for them then, with a fairly new business and three children to care for . . . she had to have that house.

 

It was (and is) a beautiful home on a good sized lot in what used to be an orchard – the kind of home that was once in a very old edition of Better Homes and Gardens. A lovely old home that has had every inch – every inch – touched by one of us.  I have stripped more wall paper in that house than I hope to ever have to do again. I snuck out of and into several rooms of that house.  I fell in love and fell out of love and had my heart broken and nursed those broken hearts in that house.  I packed up my room and loaded up my Civic and moved away from home while crying that that house would no longer be my home. I came back to that home for refuge in my early twenties. I held my first nephew, years and years later, for the first time, in that living room.

A murder. How and why we didn’t know.  What we did know, the little tiny bits of information we did have, were because my brother happened to drive by the house that day. Because my brother stopped when he saw all those cars, because he pushed through the worst fears that suddenly burst open inside of you the second you see those lights and he asked for information – because of that we knew it wasn’t my mother and we knew that the police didn’t think she was involved.  But not much more.

There was conflicting information in the news those first days and then, eventually, the full picture – as full as it gets when you only have access to what you can find online or on t.v.  Because even if the police spend four whole days tearing your house up and CSI-ing it, even if they fingerprint what seems like every square inch –  even if all of that – if you are not charged with anything or you are not the victim’s family, you get what everyone else does: the news. Those awful visual sound-bites, those quotes by neighbors and the small paragraph in the local paper, those this kind of thing never and police will only divulge.

That first day, in the middle of and after the dizziness, I was emotionally numb.  I had been through a lot that week already.  I couldn’t believe that one more thing could come at me like that.  I mostly didn’t know what to feel.  Someone was killed in our house.  I didn’t even know how – but what murder isn’t violent?  I tried not to imagine, not to visualize, not to speculate.  It wasn’t her.  That’s what I needed to know. Right?

The one thing I felt was a hard lump in my gut, like a giant steel ball bearing,  because this is a version of what I had come to expect.  My mother had been lost to us – on what we assumed was still a full blown manic delusion – complete with people surrounding her she had met in jail (that itself a mind blowing concept for me to understand – my fifty year old mother, in jail) and others those people had met in jail and it was, rumor had it, a hub of the kind of activity I had trouble fathoming at all – not my mother, not in our house, not at all. But it was a house on the police radar.  They knew our house.  Unimaginable to us all only six or seven years ago.

That same week, only days after the incident, my father received a form letter from the Chief of Police – the timing merely a coincidence – stating how many calls had been made out to that house for various disturbances in the last year.  It actually said that was unacceptable.  The blatant obviousness of that word a sharp sting.  Really?  Not acceptable? Thank you Fresno Chief of Police for making that clear to me.

I was spared the news coverage, but not the rest of the family.  The news was all the more titillating for the fact that it was an ‘upscale’ neighborhood.  My brother watched the neighborhood watch leader talk about what a surprise it was, how nothing like that happens in that area.  Well, my brother thought, you aren’t a very good  neighborhood watchman then, are you? The facts of that letter from the police a clear sign that yes, indeed, that kind of stuff did happen there, had been brewing, had caused enough noise and ruckus to warrant a reprimand.

But now here it was: the hideousness of our family situation on the news, eliciting comments from strangers, slumming up the neighborhood. The letter and the neighbor quotes on the news had my sarcasm sprouting like shark teeth in my mouth – row after row after row of biting sharp comments in response.  It is my way, so I knew it would come, but I could also feel those teeth cutting through my gums and threatening to fall loose into my throat.  It was not his fault.  It was not the police chief’s fault.  If blame were anywhere – and believe me, it was nowhere and everywhere all at once in my mind – it was with us all.  And I forgave us, understood our powerlessness, our tied hands and aching hearts – so I tried hard to swallow that sarcasm and hold it back.  Yes, neighborhood watch man, it is shocking and awful and scary.  No argument here.  It is all of those things and more.

A  murder.  Our house.  The details are ugly.  They include a baseball bat and boiling water and a body burned up in an SUV.  These details hover around me, tighten the air, make wisps of ghosts filter through my mind.  In our house.  But they are not her, I tell myself.  She is not involved.  Still I wondered – was she involved, was she there, what in god’s green earth could my mother have been subjected to by the people she allowed in that house.  I tried, desperately, to shut down these trains of thought as each one approached, as each loud ear-piercing engine throttled its way onto the track.  Stop.  Don’t.  La la la la la la.

Within days of arriving in California, I trekked down to Fresno and saw my family.  That’s when I saw the letter from the police.  That’s when my father and I talked about getting into the house.  I had wanted, needed really, to get into that house for months and months and months now.  For the last year, I had plotted to break in, to saunter in, to watch for when it was empty – so that I could try to rescue all of our photos and childhood memorabilia. When my father left that house almost two years ago with little more than what he could carry, none of us were thinking of anything but the shock of those divorce papers, served so unexpectedly, and the revving up of mania that we could all feel buzzing in the air.  None of us could think ahead far enough so that we might have gathered that stuff more immediately, so that we might have saved our history before it became ash or refuse or just some shit in someone’s way. Knowing that every tangible piece of my family’s history was in that house haunted me.

Those photos and old baby clothes and childhood drawings rested so far back in the triage folder at the onset of this mania that by the time we thought to save them, we didn’t know how to do it. As time went on and I heard more and more stories of the kind of people who were living at that house with my mother, I wanted many things, but what I wanted that was tangible, maybe even doable, was to rescue our history. It was a thick urge that tugged at my muscles.  If I allowed the thought to blossom midday, it would consume me. Our history.  Maybe gone.

Perhaps I felt the need for our memorabilia more acutely than anyone else because I am the memory-keeper, the writer, the story-teller.  Perhaps it’s partly because only my mother has photos of me before I was four years old.  Those first four years of my life don’t exist, physically, anywhere but where my mother has kept evidence of them. Perhaps it’s because I hang so much meaning on the details, on the images.  Perhaps I didn’t feel it more acutely – maybe I am just more gung-ho-move-ahead-forward and went past wanting to plotting and voicing. Maybe I am just the one who will say it, even when nothing can be done about it. Whatever the reason, anytime I thought it might be able to happen, I tried to find ways.

The truth was, though, that it was unsafe.  We knew that without even knowing exactly how unsafe.  I had already promised my father I would never go there alone and I thought,  who can I possibly ask to go with me, who can I pull into that kind of situation? And how in the world am I, the most transparent of faces, going to mask my disgust and rage enough to keep from being assaulted, keep from practically daring someone to come at me?  What this awful tragedy meant was that my dad suddenly had legal custody of the house and it meant the police had scared off everyone who had been in that house.  It meant it was empty and waiting – for me, for my family, for the excavation. It was time.  Want to or not, this was the moment.  The house should be empty. It should be safe.

I needed to do this.  I didn’t actually want to – not really.  I would have to see that house in a state I couldn’t even imagine.  I had heard from friends and family members what it was like in there last year – so to think of it now, not only after so much more time and neglect and mistreatment, but after such a heinous death, was to force myself to confront the real ugliness of this all, to face the details of this thing my family had become, to see the scars of madness and idle time on a place I knew so well.  I didn’t want to do that.  I don’t want to do that. And yet there’s the need, with a very real outcome to look forward to, a very tangible reason to go inside of that house and look at it – really look at it.

I had one day to do this if I was going to do it – a small window in which to chicken out or follow through.  I had to be back up in the bay the next day and my brother, who wanted to help, was unable to go on the one day I was in town.  I asked my sister not to go – I worried she was in too precarious a place, home only a few days now, to see that all and not have it trigger emotions that would be too big to know what to do with them. I felt she was too fragile, newly back out into the world, to bear the state of the house very well – but also, I knew it would make it that much harder for me to make it through without falling apart, to worry about how this all felt to her, how it would sink into her flesh.  I needed to focus.  I needed to drive through that house with a plan and a mission and as little lingering as possible.  I could not worry about her heart, about her head, about her pain.  I was afraid that her presence would tilt the scale just enough to keep me from making it through.  Still unwilling to let me go alone, my father went with me.

We gathered boxes, we steeled ourselves and we drove.  The short drive was not nearly long enough to give me time to breathe deep enough or long enough to still my nerves.  I’m not sure it could have been long enough if it had taken ten times as long to get there, if there was even a road long enough to steady me.  There might be nothing, I thought.  It might all be gone, destroyed, missing. I talked to myself, silently and through finger taps and toe wiggles inside my shoe: We are all more than those pictures.  If they are gone, we will be fine.  I knew this, I did.  But those kinds of things mean a lot to me.  A lot.  And so I readied myself for nothing.  In case.  I readied myself for the kind of destruction that leaves doors hanging off of hinges and walls sagging.  I prepared myself for the worst I could imagine so that I could bear to walk in.  So that I might not be shocked, startled, destroyed.

Are you ready for this? my dad asked.  It’s really unimaginable in there, he said.  I braced myself and counted my breaths.

When we pulled up to the gate that closed off our house from the street, added only a few years ago, I could see the heavy chain and brass colored padlock ensuring that it stay closed, trying to guarantee that no one unexpected or uninvited returned to that house.  It seemed ominous – dark and strong and still – but also a bit silly.  If four days of intense police activity hadn’t scared someone away, would a wrought iron fence do the trick?  I tried to usher these thoughts out of my head – so as to not envision squatters or, worse, the people who had been staying there still nestled in beds in rooms that had once held my baby brother and sister, had held my nephews and their toys and their cribs, had been warm and clean and safe, once upon a time.

I watched him take the heavy chain and padlock off the front gate.  We pulled in and then he got out to close and padlock the gate again.  I had never before been so aware of how open and available that front yard is, how easy for someone to just walk in if it weren’t for that gate and that heavy metal lock.  We drove around to the side of the house and entered by the pool.  I could see small signs of neglect – moldy, disheveled lounger cushions, piles of trash in the breezeway, a smashed in garage door – these were startling and off and wrong, but I knew the real jar would be stepping inside.

 

When we walked up to the door, I could see screens hanging off the windows, some bent by hands yanking them down, and I could see that a pane of glass was broken out of the door, near the handle. I reached  my hand into the spot where glass used to be, careful not to scrape against the shattered edges, and turned the deadbolt from the inside. Here we go, I thought, don’t be shocked.

Deep breath in, held. I looked at the black smears near the knob, the evidence of evidence, the kind of stuff I had seen on the television, hoping only to ever know it in that way.  Exhale, breathe out, slowly.  I could see the metal panel someone had placed over that broken pane was swung wide open, failing to keep anyone out, not even me.  Breathe in, again, slowly, intentionally.  Slow your brain.  Stop reading every detail, in split seconds, in loud colors.  Breathe out, slowly, feel your chest sink lower and relax. And then turn the knob. You will walk in and see it all – in graphite smeared glory, in piles of who-knows-what land-mines, in echoing cold sound.  This was your house.  It still is.  Even if you don’t recognize it, even if you do, but wish you did not.  Home.

Another Year, Another Foggy Forecast

All photos in this post by Jolie Griffin

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity . . .
 
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
                         – T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding I & II)

Here it is: 2011.  2010 is gone . . . even though everything that happened in that upturned year of my life is still holding me afloat in this new one.  Whether afloat is a sign of surviving or a sign of still being kicked around by the tide is a matter of moment by moment opinion.  I am half gone from this city I love, half done with things I should have lined up or finished weeks ago, half submerged in a whole new unknown job, foot half out the door of the one here in Portland, half-insane for allowing myself to fall in love in a time marked only by departure and distance, half-cocked in this half-packed house that is driving one of my dogs into full-blown anxiety. I have half a dozen half-finished blog posts because I can’t seem to sit long enough to finish any given one – my mind a half-blown tool scattered too wide.  I am more than half happy and more than half sad and am unable to figure out how both of those things can be true – but find I am mostly unwilling to try too hard to unpack that puzzle. I am both. I just am. In nearly overwhelming amounts.

But I am here: standing, living, falling when I thought maybe I could no longer find that place, grieving so many things that might not even deserve to be grieved but that gently break my heart nonetheless.  My sister is alive and learning how to live.  My family is, mostly, in tact and pulling together, readying for a geography that feels a lot like love. I have so many, many friends who are each such crazy, loving, reachable people that I sometimes dizzy with the thought of all of them – swaying closer, swaying further, but always orbiting and circling and checking in.  I have so many people that I don’t know what to do with my love for them – but even if nearly overcome by it, will not bear the giving up of them in any way except the most necessary – a move away from a handful of people who have been my most tapped touchstones, my sturdiest anchors when I was seasick and green.  The ones who help me through even when they don’t lend an ear, even when I don’t ask them to, even when they have no idea that they are helping – by being, by caring, by existing.  I am the most broke I have been in a long, long time and yet I don’t, in the most cliche of ways, feel poor.

Maybe because there is too much going on, too much in my brain, too much loss and love (new and old and vanishing) in my heart . . . maybe because of all this, I let midnight on the 31st pass without my usual thoughtful reflection of the year that came before and the intentional framing of how I would face the next one. A tried and true ritual where I pause to orient myself, to understand, to make sense and then turn to face the new year. Probably because this is all I have done in the last year I didn’t even think to stop, to pause and reflect, during those last few days of December.  Perhaps I have done so much of that thinking and crying and wishing and planning and mourning so that all I have left to do is step into this year. Walk into it. As bravely and as fearlessly and as boldly as I can.  I have never been one for lukewarm emotions or lukewarm intentions – so here I am 2011.  Don’t do me wrong.  I will wear you out with fun if you let me. I will love you like mad if you just treat me right.  Listen to Pat Benatar.  She is wiser than you might know.

Last week, I drove past the patch of land that was my cafe and was taken back, physically and emotionally, to last January.  To holding the drill in my hand and setting it on counter-clockwise and reversing every 2″ wood screw out of the back wall, pulling apart the intricately puzzled pieces of doors. To climbing up on the step ladder to reach the pieces from the top of the dividing wall whose screws were stripped.  To taking the claw end of the hammer and leveraging myself, carefully, balanced precariously on a thin strip of flimsy metal, slowly ripping each wooden piece from the frame.  I could feel the weighing out of each item – to keep, to sell, to give away.  Each thing a specific memory – not simply a pale green demitasse, but the exact one I chose, bought and unpacked and washed and placed beneath a portafilter spout to watch for the perfect wobbly stream of espresso and crema – a cream tinged deep amber dancing against the heat and water and air. I could feel the exact pounds of each table as my last trusty barista and I carried them out to the sidewalk and set up to sell it all off – this place I had made and was only a little sad to leave.

I remembered feeling the weight of it, even then.  The significance of that change – pulling apart what I had made and what had failed – had failed to succeed, to thrive, to make me happy, to give me the freedom I wanted.  I knew, in every dismantling moment, that I was in the middle of an enormous shift in my life.  I was making decisions, I was making changes, I was crafting a whole new life.  I knew what I was doing and thought I knew, mostly, what was to come.  

But I didn’t.  I had no idea. Not a clue.  Events unfolded, moments happened, that flipped everything upside down and sent me sailing through the kind of choices that leave nothing unturned.  I thought of that woman, poised to change her life, and almost laughed at how little she imagined she was about to change.  I laugh at how half-ass that kind of change would have been compared to the actual tumbling of 2010 as it wore away the outer layer of pretty much everything I thought I knew. The skin rashing slide against the pavement of last year’s circumstances. The turmoil about to push that woman through months and months of gut wrenching choices.

She was ready.  For what she didn’t even know was coming.  

So I give up, this year, on guessing what will be next year. I feel much the same this January as I did last.  A lot of the very same motions as I pack up my house and my memories and my stuff – touching it all and remembering so much more than I may want to in any given moment. I stop myself when I start to imagine – as I did exactly one year ago – that the beginning of this year will be rough, will mean changes and sadness and loss, but also gain and intention and love. Yes – the beginning will surely mean all of those things.  But as to what else?  I can’t know.  And I can’t bear to think it will be a repeat of 2010 in any significant way, but I will sail forward into that possibility, unlocked.  I will walk forward – toward it – and trust that 2011 will at least be quieter.  Will at least be simpler, even if only slightly.  Will at least be as much laughing as I somehow fit into that treacherous year of my life that has finally ended. I am a weather vane without direction, but I can sway and point and shift.  I am ready.  For whatever.  

 

So here’s a toast to this new year:

May you laugh with me or at me or next to me.  May we cry only when it’s really necessary and then, as often as possible, together – whether in print or in spirit or holding each other through sobs.  May we drink until our toes hurt but never ever have to hold each other’s hair back – because we are, really, way too old for that.  But may we never feel so old that we forget who we were and who we can always be – those girls, those boys, those children who railed against the world, but trusted each other implicitly – with our lives, with our hearts and with our bodies.  May we close the gaps time has created and help each other stitch the cuts that appear this year, suture them for each other when it can’t be done ourselves, gently press the skin together and hold it there to make the smallest, faintest scar possible.  May we love – long and hard and fast – with all of the weight we can give it.  May we live – another year, another ring beneath our bark, another line on our face, our flesh another inch closer to the ground.  

Raise a glass to yourself – raise it to your people – raise it to the world that can not stop spinning.  Raise it to the difference you have made for me – last year and probably many before. To the difference you will surely make for me this year and so, so many more to come. Here we are, 2011. Salud. 

Día de Esperanzas Muertas: Tales of an On-Again / Off-Again Motherless Child, vol. 2

Photo and skulls by Beth Ramsey

The feeling hit me like an industrial bag of flour tossed off of the back of a pick-up when I wasn’t paying attention.  I definitely wasn’t looking.  I didn’t even hear it coming.  I was busy feeling bad for all sorts of other reasons and then whap.  I wanted my mother.  I wanted to be able to dial the phone and talk to her. Not the mom I could actually call.  The mom I used to have – as imperfect and human as she was. I needed her – in what felt like a very physical way and for no clear reason I could discern.  The need was just there – large and wanting – and I began to break down.

I woke up that morning feeling a little off.  Nowadays, I am more apt to ascribe that to some sort of emotional cause than to a flu or cold or allergy overload.  I assume that as I get going, as I start to work or to play or whatever I have planned for that day, that the off feeling will dissipate as long as I don’t allow it to take over.  But by the time I got to work and logged in to my computer, opened the required programs and settled in to get some shit done, my stomach was cramping.  I still could not be sure it was something real – something not stress related – and so I tried to ignore it.  I play the symptomatic chicken or egg game a lot lately – am I really physically ill or am I letting myself get so tired and stressed out that I just think I’m getting sick?

Within about three hours of being at work, I was feeling worse and all I could think about was going home, going upstairs, taking off my shoes, peeling off my work clothes and then climbing into bed, pulling my down comforter loose from the foot of the bed and swaddling it around me to create a cozy little pocket to fall asleep in.   As I pushed through the wrenching of my stomach and the questioning in my brain and the nearly overwhelming desire to magically transport myself to my bed, I was overcome by the need for my mom.  Inexplicable. Unexpected.  Overpowering.

My arm actually ached to reach for the phone on my desk.  It hurt to not allow my hand to move to pick up the handset. So I cried.  At my desk.  Alone.  I am the only one at my work on Mondays and it is simultaneously lonely, lovely, and very productive to be the only person on all three floors. For the most part, I show up when I want, do what I decide needs to be done, play whatever music at whatever volume and don’t have to deal with a lot of unexpected shit.  Until the ghost of my mother past shows up.

When my eyes filled up, I realized someone had used the last tissue out of the box of Kleenex on my desk.  And just left the empty box.  Don’t they know I cry? Don’t they know that’s rude? I had to get up and grab a tissue from the lobby.  But I didn’t go upstairs and get another box. I was not going to keep crying.  I was entering checks into our insurance billing system and I opened my eyes very wide to try to read the detailed information.  I blinked several times to look at the corresponding information on my monitor.  I got up and got one more tissue. If I could just really dry my eyes out, I’d be fine.  I tried to focus again.  I started to cry.  Again.

Dammit. What is this about?  I was busy being sad about plenty of other things and then  . . . this sadness.  It’s not like I don’t miss her all the time.  Not like I don’t think about her all the time.  Even when having fun, even though I’m having fun – the void of her is like a low volume hum underneath all of the other sounds of my life.  Even though she’s alive.  Even though she’s not dead.  There’s still the void.

I think, as I’m trying to stop crying, that it must be because I was sad about other stuff. Because my stomach was hurting.  Because I didn’t feel well.  That the void grew arms and smacked me upside the head.  I was too distracted, my guard was too low, to see it coming before it was too late.  Mom.  I need you.  Even though whatever I have to tell you right now, you wouldn’t really approve of.  Even though you really would not sympathize, not really. Well, except for the sick part. You would give me that.

But you would love me.  You would listen.  And you would be the only person I know who has known me since before I was born.  Who held me to you when I wouldn’t sleep.  Who drove me around the block, over and over, even though you could not afford the gas it took to lull me to sleep.  Who distracted me when my father didn’t come home – and years later when he didn’t ever show to pick me up like he was supposed to.  Who drove me to the hospital to see him when he broke both of his legs in a car accident.  The one who dressed me every month during that first year of my life in the best outfit I had and redeemed the free 8×10 from Olan Mills even though you couldn’t afford to buy any of the other pictures.

The one who left my dad because he was no good for either of us.  Who worked and worked and worked to pay our bills and took me to work with you when I was sick because you couldn’t afford not to. Who sat rapt and anxious waiting for the final scene of Carrie during my 10th birthday slumber party.  Who reeled back in her chair doubling over with laughter at how far our young bodies jumped when that hand appeared out of the ground. Who married the man that I call Dad, the one who would have taken my call that day had the need been for him, who would have certainly been there to listen.  I don’t miss a perfect mom.  I don’t miss a mom I did not have.  I miss the one I no longer have – in all of her distant, difficult, stubbornly loving ways.

Three years ago, when I thought my relationship was at an end (and maybe it should have been, but I am a stick-with-it gal, a real work-through-it lady – or became one, anyway, in my old age) – when I was devastated and could hardly breathe through the gasping tears, I called my mom.  I shocked even myself.  If you had asked me before that moment, I would have listed at least two or three friends I would have called first.  But what happened, what I truly needed in that moment, was to tell my mom and my dad.  I cried to her and told her what was going on.   She said whatever she knew how to say – nothing too sappy or Hallmark-y or after-school-special-y.  I don’t remember what she said because it doesn’t matter.  She was there.  At the other end.  For me.  And she’d already gone crazy, but was medicated, so we were all hopeful that things could go back to close to normal, to more like they had been. I remember even worrying that the stress of my situation might be too much for her, but I needed her and hoped that, for her, being there for me would balance out any ill effects to her mental health.  And it helped. I felt better.

This time, there wasn’t one thing.  And I haven’t been able to call her for a long time.  But that Monday, I had some sense that just hearing her voice, just telling her how sad I was about having to take the steps to act on a  really hard decision, that just doing that would make me feel better, would lift a weight. As I sat at work crying, trying not to cry, even turning my Pandora station to something so unsentimental, so uncheesy that surely I would stop crying (but did not), I was terrified that I just wouldn’t stop.  The phone rang and I tried to swallow my tears, clear my throat, sound normal.

Seriously – what the hell? I had at least a few things that had to be done and I really wanted to stop crying and finish them quickly so I could go home.  I also wanted to eat, finally, four hours into my shift, but was afraid to – I am very much not a fan of throwing up at work.  Being sick like that in a ‘public’ toilet is a lot like the pie eating contest scene in Stand By Me – it just makes it all much, much worse.  So I tried to swallow my tears.  I took deep breaths.  I opened my eyes wide and let the last of the tears air dry.  Damn it – it’s not like she disappeared from my life yesterday.

As I’ve gotten older, as I’ve gathered more and more loss around me, I’ve thought about it – a lot.  Even my writerly obsession in fiction has always centered around the hole that missing a person leaves in one’s life. I don’t really believe the time heals all wounds line.  I think wounds heal.  Mostly.  And loss isn’t even a wound outside of the fact that it cuts us open and we have to figure out how to close it, even if only a little. But all time does is give us enough, well, time, to try different ways of dealing with it. We learn to live with the hum, to hear it and feel the vibration of it and still function. We figure out how to stand back up, quit collapsing to the floor, and work or eat or sleep or live.  But loss and grief are always there. Occasionally, they sneak up on you and take your breath away.

Time doesn’t make us stop missing people – we just figure out how to live with that missing.  How to not be knocked down by the weight of it.  How to think of that person without gasping and sobbing in aisle three at the grocery store.  How to see someone who reminds you of that person and be sad, but not devastated.  How to start to see the world around you again.  I don’t even know that the wound scars so much as it scabs over and stays like that – enough cover that a small gust of wind doesn’t sting, that a drop of lemon juice as you squeeze it into your glass doesn’t burn, enough that stepping into a hot shower doesn’t make you cringe – but not so much that you don’t still have to be careful if you scrape up against something rough, if you find yourself scratching at it, making it bleed.

Part of what was so disorienting about this recent experience is how unexpected it was.  That I couldn’t make sense of it in the moment.  When I see someone who reminds me of my mom, I know instantly why I miss her.  When I see her looking back at me in a picture of myself, it’s clear why I am jarred. When I find out something I know my mom would think is hilarious or wish I could call her for a very specific recipe or memory – it makes sense that I feel that void opening up inside of me. But in the middle of this blindside, I began to feel a cloud of fear growing inside of me.

I was starting to envision all the voids – all the losses, all the things I have given up and am trying to force myself to give up – as black holes, individual holes inside of me to be dealt with.  This is not a new image for me – in some ways it helps me contain these losses, these voids, so that they feel manageable.  What made me start to lose my breath was the thought that having too many of these holes, letting one or two take up too much space that morning, was allowing the walls between them all to become thinner, so thin that they were all merging and opening up into one giant nothing, one deep emptiness.  Like all the other voids got too close to the black hole in my heart that used to be my mother and opened up into one dark, sad universe.

As I fought off that feeling, as I tried to convince myself that I was not losing that battle, I remembered that it was Día de los Muertos.  I was aware of the date on the way to work and I had been reminded of the holiday about an hour into work, but it had filtered through my brain and moved on.  Trying again to stop the tears, to dry my eyes out enough to finish – I realized that I have begun to imagine a sugar skull lately when I think of my mother, when I think of her face.  I see a beautiful, grotesque fragile skull painted in bright colors – so lovely and garish.  A striking face without flesh but full of color, susceptible to collapse if dropped, if handled too roughly, if soaked in water. My mother, the one I used to have.

Months ago, I had pondered making an altar for my mom, for the old mom that I needed to mourn, needed to let go of.  I decided against it for many reasons.  One of which is that I would feel like I was co-opting another tradition too blatantly – not only taking it for myself, but turning it on its side.  Another of which was that I, superstitiously, didn’t want to make an altar for a person who is, after all, still alive.  Since my mother has become more fragile, more volatile, more dangerously straddling the line between the living and the dead, I find myself more and more superstitious about anything that might tempt fate.  If I see a crack and if the step on a crack game pops into my head, I don’t step on the crack.  I suck certain jokes or sarcastic comments right back into my mouth before they fully leave my brain, as though I can reverse even the thought with enough air intake. I’m not going to mourn her on a day for the dead until she is not alive.

But here I was.  Doing that whether I wanted to or not.  I wasn’t mourning the mother that is still here, alive, reachable (if not really reachable). I was mourning the woman who kept me alive against so many reckless odds. The woman who asked me once, as a teen, as a girl running wild who said she didn’t care about living, if I needed a hug or something but said it with the stiffest of arms at her side, the grimmest of faces, the flattest of tones.  The woman who called me every week when I moved away from home and would send me my favorite snacks with Post-it notes asking if I was OK, if I needed money – love and care in a tidy, practical 3×3 format. The woman who came back into my life when I had given up any real hope of that ever happening and said We’re not going to have to talk about all of that, right?  The woman who didn’t graduate high school and dropped out of college and stood beside me in my cap and gown when I finished college and smiled, really smiled, a proud mama in that moment – proud of me and for me, for what I fought against achieving and then went ahead and did.  The woman who would have died for me a hundred times (or for my brother or my sister) even if she almost never knew how to say that or show it.  My mom.

And that woman is still in there somewhere.  Somewhere. Somehow she can fit in the body that keeps shrinking.  In the eyes that seem to get faster and bigger.  In the mind that keeps swinging and yelling and cursing and railing against level.  For now, though, that mom’s not taking any calls.  Even if I really, really want her to. Even if in a moment of weakness I am overcome by the need for her to tell me that she loves me.  On this day to remember your loved ones who are gone, I do.  I remember her and I need her but she isn’t there.  I remember: all the good things and all the ways that she was imperfect, but still mine. 


 I do take this day to try to let go of the hope that I can call that mother again, that things will ever be quite what they were.  I paint a lovely skull in my mind of the woman I did have for the first twenty-three years of my life and then, almost magically, for a few years in my thirties.  I light a candle in my heart for the woman I miss.  The woman who would hug me, if I really, really needed it – and when you do, when you do really need it, that is enough. For the one person in my life who has created my body – limb by limb – and so much of my heart, so much of my laughter and joy, so much of who I have come to be, whether she intended to or not.  

Photo and skulls by Beth Ramsey

I say a prayer, for her, but mostly for me – for my broken heart and the things I don’t get to have. For the strength to be my own mother – like so many people I know and so I pray for them, too. A prayer that doesn’t ask time to heal or for someone to take away the pain. A prayer that most days the longing does not overwhelm us, that we find ways to miss them without all of the tears, without all of the pain. To be able to remember the good without the missing it winning out. It will be there – the missing – it’s not going to heal. The missing is not a wound – it is a fact – a tangible part of us, like a second viscera, part of what holds us together.  Loss becomes a physical piece of our bodies that will never go away. So I sit with it and try to bury the hope that it will vanish, bury the hope for a different mom, for my old mom, for what does not exist. To stop wanting what is dead. La madre muerta. The remembered mother. I pray for all of us parentless children and child-lost mothers, those who have lost friends and siblings. A sweet, colorful, fragile prayer for all of us who miss. Para nosotros, el corazón fuerte y recuerdos amor.

La la la la la la la la . . . all of it was made for you and me.

I am the passenger
and I ride and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, they’re bright in a hollow sky
You know, it looks so good tonight.
                                      – Iggy Pop & Ricky Gardiner

I am of the opinion that even when life is at its shittiest, it is also beautiful and full of moments that demand our attention, that remind us of all the love around us. Even when everything seems to be at ends, falling apart, maybe disintegrating right in front of you, when you are least sure of anything in your life – if you’ve done things right, if you’ve loved the people around you and not severed all ties, then there is so much around you to be grateful for, so many lovely moments to look at, to be conscious of as they happen.  It is definitely this belief, more than anything else, that has kept me from sliding down that deep slope of sadness that certain times of my life have seemed to push me toward. The people in my life (some gone, some still here, some destined to be in and out of my life over and over) are amazing, caring, loving, hilarious and masterful distractors as well as patient and compassionate listeners.

I have been overwhelmed lately, over and over, by the luck I have in amassing this motley bunch of people around me.  Sometimes it feels like no matter where I turn there is someone who makes my life better – like I have spokes shooting out from all around me connecting me to a large circle of fun and joy and love that is spinning around us all, rotating and turning and turning and turning whether we notice it there or not. It is always the small moments that remind me of this – an unexpected laugh in the middle of a tense moment, a joke shared, a small toast among friends or the head shaking of a friend who can’t believe you will still do that, the undeserved joy of a nephew’s smile for no other reason than you appeared right in front of him.  Here are a few of the recent moments that make me grateful for my people, my family (by blood or by heart) – who bring me joy and break the fall when the world slides out from under me. A series of brief odes to these great folks, big and small.

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Seeing my nephews’ faces peer through the wavy glass of their entry way – their toes stretched to raise their faces high enough to see – and then my name (missing a syllable, vowels shoved together with love) loud and animated as their front door swings open.  Their arms around me, one set around my waist, one set around my legs, making it hard for me to walk.  Having to tell them to wait while I hug the rest of the family.  Sitting on the floor to watch the end of a movie with them, B sprawled out in front of me on his belly while I hold his ankles and wiggle his legs around.  His giggle.  The look backward when I stop and the scoot, scoot back so his feet are resting on my leg, skin to skin, heaven. Filling my plate with homemade tri-tip and pilaf, knowing that the whole family was waiting there for me, post-work, surely tired, but ready for a late dinner and the chaos of three or four conversations going all at once, intertwining and overlapping and loud.

Picking up B and taking him to pick up N from Kindergarten.  Hearing N yell, there’s my auntie as we walk up, hand in hand.  Ice cream with my boys, their faces a horrid mess, N slamming his cup up into his face and reeling backward with laughter. Dancing spastically in the car, N slowing his moves to a slow robot to make me laugh. Spending the afternoon with my brother and his wife.  Holding little N while we all talk about big stuff and little stuff.  Knowing this will happen more and more often as the miles between us shrink.

An evening spent with an old friend, her son and my dogs.  Seeing her son bounce around the house, excited to see me even though I am so new to him, looking at his contagious smile – so wide and energetic.  Watching old videos we haven’t seen in fifteen years (if ever at all) and remembering that then, like now, was beautiful and awful and hysterical in almost all senses of that word. Talking and talking until you realize it’s almost five in the morning, like we are not almost forty, but maybe almost twenty, all things so much like they ever were despite ages and ages of life happening for each of us during the lost years of our friendship.  Feeling content, knowing that some people just are your friends, for no good reason, for no thing you’ve done, maybe just because the universe keeps you connected and you can fuck it up, but you can keep making it work, too.

Starting a roller derby class with a far more fierce friend who  may actually join a team someday.  Falling and lagging and trying and trying until we are so sore even talking seems to hurt.  Being aware amidst all the pain that these are moments we will always be able to laugh about, to relive, time spent together before we live so far apart, before it gets even harder to find time together.  Her split chin and my sweaty, sweaty face.  Our energized voices talking rapidly as we exit, the messages back and forth the next week about the pain, the pain, ohmygawd the pain. Joking about the teacher and her topless rollerskating banjo playing dreams.  Stories we could not have made up but will retell over and over.

Watching N miss a soccer goal because he sees me walk up and he waves, a smile spreading across his face and even though his dad and his coach tell him to watch the ball, he watches me.  Knowing I should feel a little bad about that, but only feeling the love, the certainty that what I am doing with my life is right, right there in that wide grin.  Kicking a soccer ball on the edge of the field with B, the sound of his giggle, both deep and high pitched all at once, when he kicks it at me and I miss it. Getting to go to the pumpkin patch with everyone, watching B fearlessly climb up the bounce slide steps – slipping more than once the first time, but never hesitating, just going and going and pushing forward – his bravado even at such a young age so inspiring.  Watching him adjust his second climb up to avoid any slips, seeing the little boy who chickened out watch him and then make it up himself, with N cheering them both on from above. Their stretched out, laughing, smiling faces flying down the slide.

A happy hour event with one of my closest friends, refusing to miss her even though soon we will not live in the same city, or even the same state.  Commiserating over work and bosses and other friends. Laughing at each other that we need pictures of our drinks before we can drink them, admiring her skills at staging the photograph and enjoying even that lag in time between getting the drink and drinking it. Losing track of time, the windows darkening and a candle lit while we talk over the arm that reaches in, ignoring the insanely loud atmosphere of the bar to tell stories and make plans and relax in a small pocket of time set aside for nothing else but hanging out, nothing else but this.

An insane evening on a school bus with this friend and her husband, meeting another friend of theirs for the first time, wearing plastic viking hats and clip-on mustaches and laughing until my eyelids hurt.  Knowing that there’s nowhere else I would rather be in that moment and with no one else.  Dancing and shit-talking and trying to think through the fun to come up with trivia answers.  Wowing them with the speed and efficiency I can create a Snookie bump, without a mirror, without a brush, on a moving bus at midnight – such skills to impress them with.  Seeing the startled shock on their faces when I quickly stand up at one bar, take off my shoes and threaten to beat them all with my shoes after being called a killjoy. Falling into such deep, hysterical laughter by the end of the night that I can’t do anything but form short sentences.  Causing one friend to repeatedly fall apart with just one simple gesture acted out over and over.  It never getting old, for either of us.

Deciding to attend a concert, at the last minute, with friends who used to be employees, but from the beginning were much more than that.  Feeling giddy from the moment they get in the car, knowing that dorking out is always the goal, but so is catching up and talking about the real stuff.  Talking so fast, over each other, because we all have so much to say and never enough time.  Shared glances that require no words when we see way too many pairs of shiny spandex leggings and braided headbands worn across the forehead.  The facial-expression-shorthand of women who had to communicate about customers without saying a word.  Plotting with the only other women in the world, that I know, who are excited about dressing up like Chuck Finley in all of his 70’s mustached glory.  Feeling alive and independent and capable of creating this whole new life I have set up for myself to invent.

Making a rollerskating date with a college friend who has always been there, to pick me up or help me through, and then unexpectedly finding a few extra hours to meet for breakfast the day before we were to skate.  Lounging through breakfast, talking and talking about roller derby and writing and family without feeling time rushing by, without feeling like I need to run off to the next place.  Commiserating over being almost forty and entertaining the notion of roller derby, of realizing that we are not old, neither of us, and we will not act old. Enjoying eggs and potatoes and coffee and the company that feels so easy and comfortable and peaceful.

An unexpected visit, a short amount of stolen hours with someone I didn’t expect to see anytime soon.  Relishing the time trapped between two days, trapped between being with and being without, knowing that soon I will not see this person very much if at all and refusing to be sad about that in the moment.  Both of us laughing at my dog chasing her own tail, startled by her own butt, spinning and spinning and spinning.  Both of us enamored of my littlest dog, her fraggle face and monkey belly, her wide eyes lit up and her ears back. Locking out the sadness that will come from missing this person even the next day to just be there, laughing and smiling and submerged in the minutes that are passing, refusing to be sad before it is time, refusing to think too much about that right then. Allowing myself these moments when they happen, without reserve and without overthinking.

Photo by Cesy Mitchell

An elaborate performance by N and I while visiting my sister at her ‘camp’, where she is ‘camping’ for a very long time.  A ridiculously costumed, unrehearsed free-style rap performance to brighten my sister’s birthday. Helping N into the costume in my sister’s room as he can hardly talk for the giggling.  Blowing up the inflatable ring for his Rap is Phat rapper costume.  His pursed lip smile, when he tries not to smile, his dimples coming out full force when he does this.  This dimpled, pursed lip face as we walk out of her room and down to where the family is barbecuing. The instant change in his stature as he approaches them, the character taking over his body, a swagger falling into step.  My heart swelling when some strangers walk by and look, but he keeps on rapping, keeps on beatboxxing, keeps on dorking out.  His hug and B’s hug when I have to say goodbye only a couple of hours later.  That was awesome, Dann-a, as we wave goodbye. My sister’s smile in the middle of all this other stuff. Wrapping my arms around her because I can.  Holding her that extra minute – so grateful for her and my brother, my left and right side, the family that is meant to last with you into old age

Spending an evening out with other friends, celebrating a birthday, so much laughing that my voice begins to give. Friends who know me as the girl who will do almost anything for a laugh, without fear of looking the fool, who don’t seem at all surprised that I still act like this at almost forty, even with a camera toting friend in tow, even in the age of Facebook and instant mass humiliation (but you have to be embarrassed to be humiliated, right?).  Who don’t seem at all surprised when I climb on a dumpster or pull wigs out of my trunk or climb on top of my car. Who know I’m not drunk, know that I don’t need to be drunk to do these things.  I only need an opportunity and an audience.  I only need to know you will laugh – and that so will I.

Photo by Jennifer Majarian

Driving home way too late, way past when I should have been too tired to function but was propelled forward by the rare moment in time of us all together.  Driving home and consciously aware (for what might be the hundredth time in the last few months) that I am a lucky, lucky girl to know so many people who know me, really know me, and still they love me.  Still they join in and participate and revel in the hours we can find to be together.  Who will also be there when I need them, show up for the shit, too, be there to hand me a tissue to dry my eyes or open their doors even if I am carrying a suitcase and a devastated look. Countless faces and eyes and arms to hug me, to push me into a silly situation, to smile at me and make me laugh even when, especially when, there seems little to laugh at.  Amazement at finding myself standing here, in the middle of this circle, of people who don’t even all know each other, but still circle around me, magically present, appreciated and so valuable, so needed and so loved. They are all certainly my bright in a hollow sky and they all look so good to me tonight, and every night.