We feature new essays every Wednesday; make it a weekly habit to stop by and be enchanted by our eclectic content.
This week: confronting loss.
Weekly Featured Essay
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night: West Meath, February 1976
by T.S.Ollerhead
I caught up with her beyond the fallow field, hoar frost glistening blackened elms, ryegrass stems rustling to her listless tread, and in the corner of the next field, seeking the comfort of an overhanging blackthorn, a small group of heifers nuzzled closely for warmth, their condensing breath heavy in the chill morning air. As we walked in silence towards the stand of skeletal oaks, a solitary raven, late to catch the flock, flapped clumsily away from a high branch.
She had been this way for nearly eight weeks, fifty-something days of self-imposed silence, a deliberate personal catharsis. We headed for the gap between the dying hawthorns and the fallen gate, twisted and neglected, decaying into the land itself. I held her arm as she cautiously picked her way over its mud-slickened crossbeams, her eyes glazed, fixed now on the derelict cottage. It was silent as we approached, quiet in its heavy winter stillness, a chapel-like reverence. She held the blackened roof beam, twisted and weathered from generations of neglect, steady in her watery gaze.
MORE ESSAYS
Poor Josie
by Maria Hetherton
I met Noreen in Cork, the year after my mother died. She welcomed me around a table crowded with cousins I’d never met, all of us drinking tea and eating cake and the men sipping whiskey. Everyone laughed when my husband confused a salt cellar with a sugar bowl and put salt in his tea. A few well-placed f-bombs made our discourse pop. We discovered a shared failure as children to keep our mouths shut during school. It all added up: these were my people.
My mother rarely mentioned these cousins in Cork, and was mostly mum on the subject of her childhood in Ireland. She told me her family were among the poor given baskets from the grocers on Boxing Day, and that pregnancy made her mother very cross. The eldest daughter, she was often charged with the care of younger siblings. Sundays, she’d earn a penny escorting her blind aunt to Mass, a penny she refused to relinquish when nuns at school asked alms for children in Africa. A few of her memories bordered on the political, like the rhyme she and her friends enjoyed as children: Colman’s Mustard, Colman’s Starch, tell Mr. Colman to stick it in his arse, Colman’s, of course, a British brand.
Noreen and I still correspond. We exchange cards at Christmas, our families’ latest traumas scribbled into the white space, and emails at random times of year. She’ll share memories of growing up alongside a river in a mill town near Cork. Sometimes we exchange insights from ancestry profiles. Did you know our grandmothers share DNA with the Somerset Cheddar Man? And sometimes, Noreen reveals stories about poor Josie, my mother’s mother, a woman I never knew.
When the World Shakes
by Joanell Serra
When the magnitude seven earthquake hit Northern California in December, I was at home, chatting on the phone with my oldest son in New York. My phone spit out a high pitch blaring alarm with an announcement: EARTHQUAKE NEAR YOU, SEEK COVER.
I dropped the phone and ran to check on my husband, Harry, who is fighting a tough cancer battle and had just headed out with the dog for a backyard rest.
I’m fine. He called out. I’m staying out here. I looked around—a wide grassy area, no trees above him. Good call. I squatted down as well and waited, but other than the slight shudder of an aftershock, we didn’t feel it. I called my son back, but within minutes the screaming sound from my phone started again: TSUNAMI WARNING IN EFFECT. STAY AT LEAST ONE BLOCK INLAND.
This was not a problem for us—we live high on a hill nowhere close to shore. Because we travel back and forth from San Francisco for my husband’s cancer treatments, my phone is set for alerts in both counties.
I scrambled to reach our two other adult children, both in San Francisco that day. My daughter lives about a mile from the ocean. I urged her to stay inside for the next hour just in case. My youngest had just arrived downtown for his shift at a retail store on Market Street. Our messages went from: I’m at work. Can’t talk, to They are closing the store and sending us home. That meant crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. I jumped on the phone and implored him not to cross the bay in the next hour. He sighed.
My buddies are at the beach and they say it isn’t anything yet.
I almost suggested he say goodbye to his surfing buddies, but I held back.
Just promise me you won’t go near the beach. In the two years since my husband’s diagnosis, we have faced chemo, radiation, emergency brain surgery, and more treatments. He is doing fairly well, but we carry a constant sense of waiting for the next crisis.
Gabriel Faure’s Requiem
(In seven gentle movements)
by Gerald Kamens
Introït et Kyrie (Lord, Have Mercy)
This Friday summer night, the work starts slowly. The orchestra begins, playing alone for just one measure, before the large choir, behind the musicians, softly enters the drama, requesting, in Church Latin, eternal rest and lasting light for the soul of the departed one—possibly a deceased parent or other family member, or, maybe, some long-ago king or other potentate.
I sit alone, crouched down in an end chair, in the last row of that ancient cathedral, far back from the performers. I’m not supposed to be there. Just a worn down American, clandestinely absorbing that sublime music rising from these intense, earnest Swiss men and women, mostly young, but some middle-aged or even gray-haired. They’re mostly dressed in jeans and chinos, for this is a rehearsal, called the dress rehearsal in the U.S., despite the casual clothes. The scores of singers and instrumentalists are preparing for the real performance—which will take place on Monday, since rehearsals, I discovered, are not allowed in the cathedral on Saturdays and Sundays. Alas, I can’t be there on Monday, as, my work in Geneva done, I return to Washington, and my family, tomorrow.
This first movement ends with the choir calling to Christ several times, first urgently, then more quietly, until, finally, there is a very soft request for mercy.
My Last Christmas with Mom
by Alexandra Loeb
My mother’s ashes sat on my sister’s mantel in North Carolina, a location of temporary convenience and that in no way fit with my mother’s wishes. I needed to scatter her remains in order to gain closure—or maybe even gain a better understanding of our complicated relationship. With four siblings—all now technically orphans—I figured we could grieve and process together. I envisioned a family gathering where we all actually gathered. My vision bore no resemblance to the loose band of fiercely independent people that we all are—a group of people that seldom gather. Eighteen months after her death, we were still struggling to find the right time and place to scatter her ashes, leaving me untethered.
Sibling conversations had turned frustrating at best, hurtful and full of recriminations at worst.
“Mom moved from the south to San Diego the first chance she had. She was happiest in the Southwest and assumed she’d be scattered there,” my younger sister and I proclaimed.
“Mom should be in North Carolina where most of her kids and grandkids can visit,” the eldest two responded.
“I’ll be back in the states three weeks this entire year, so whatever we do, it has to be then,” the middle sibling, who lives in China, added to the mix.
Our judgements were fierce.
“Did you not know Mom?
“Do you not care about Mom’s wishes?”
“You don’t understand, you don’t have children.”
It devolved from there.
The Collectors
by David Newkirk
There is a box in the basement of my parent’s house that says, “Old Toaster – Doesn’t Work.” It is one of a hundred or more boxes that line rows of shelving or hide in closets, carefully packed for possible future needs. My sister and I have dreaded the eventual day we must meet these boxes in combat, waging a war of (hopefully rapid) attrition as they are reduced by sale, donation, or dumpster.
The dies irae arca, the day of box wrath, drew closer when my father passed away. The boxes now hang on to their tenuous existence in a part of the house that my mobility-limited mother cannot enter, the stairs forming a sort of vertical moat. It is not likely that she will ever bend her now-hunched neck to peer under the lids again. For her, the memory of the boxes has faded, lost in the fog of age, and they have become talismans of the past, of years successfully navigated, of a family successfully raised.
To be clear, my parents were not hoarders. They were children of the Depression, a time when things were much more precious because they were so much harder to acquire. Children of a farmer and a mechanic, they avoided the worst. But the shadow of the dustbowl and the memory of how things had gone so wrong so quickly for so many loomed large. Each item acquired was an upraised middle finger pointed at poverty, a fervent declaration that “I will not go without.” With that came the excitement, or perhaps relief, of a life that became ever so slightly easier with each acquisition.
Pitching Pinch Hitters
by Mark Lucius
I was twenty-five that June of 1977, still in journalism graduate school. I knew not one single thing about public relations. I knew little more about Manpower, which called itself the world’s largest temporary help firm. My new boss there, a couple years older than me and far better dressed, looked past my ignorance of his “profession.” As Director of PR, he liked my writing and hired me part-time.
A little before noon my first day in the company’s Milwaukee headquarters, with my PR experience at three hours and counting, my boss called me into his office. He posed a question that surprised me, because I could answer it with a certain authority.
“Have you ever heard of the Rolaids award for relief pitchers?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I do know about that award.”
He asked for details, perhaps to test me, perhaps to educate himself. It turned out he was not a big baseball fan. I told him that the previous year, 1976, Rolaids had teamed up with Major League Baseball to present the inaugural “Rolaids Relief Man Awards” to the top relievers in the National and American Leagues. I owned up to what I didn’t know, like who actually won the first awards.
Question Marks
by Sydney Lea
Because I crave the dawn, at 5:30 this morning I walked a dirt lane in Vermont, the sun having just breached the eastern ridges. I saw my first butterfly of the year, spotlit by a beam, perched on coyote scat.
The scene didn’t typify what most people think of in conjuring butterflies. Even lacking its marks on either wing, we might label this insect Question Mark. In a season of renewal, the sentimentalist (like me) longs for flowers and nectar, or at least for things non-repulsive; but when it isn’t feeding on feces, the Question Mark likes a carcass or sap oozing from a tree, the ranker the better. I silently challenged it: “You’re an icon of spring! Can’t you act like one?”
I’m Having Sex and I Will Die: On (Nearly) Overcoming Purity Trauma
by Zoe Lambert
I’m sixteen and touching myself. Not even skin to skin. Through pyjamas and cotton knickers. “Masturbation,” Mum says. “All your problems come from that.” She must be right because our book Questions Young People Ask, Answers That Work argues that surely, masturbation is an unclean habit, even though it’s not mentioned in the Bible. Think consequences, I tell myself. Think how you’re hurting Jehovah. Masturbation is mentally and emotionally defiling. It leads to fornication, the book tells me. “Eww!” I write in my diary. “How gross!” But still, I can make myself come through thick fabric. Even though Mum has been in bed for days in the room next to mine. I lie on my back under my duvet, legs squeezed together, and use just one finger. Wipe my hand on the sheet because it’s dirty. Listen, in case anyone can hear my silence.
I’m twenty, I’m having sex, and I will die. All my life, I’ve attended three meetings a week. I learned that we are separate from the world, that I should not yolk with unbelievers. But only three weeks into my student exchange in Paris and I’m in bed with a Worldly man who tastes delicious—of mint and Lipton tea. I made a vow to Jehovah to remain clean, to not engage in fornication, but this hot student I met in French class played melancholic Italian songs on his guitar.
If I give into this temptation, it will feel like dying when I’m forced to confess my sin. Three Elders, indistinguishable from each other with their paunches and receding hair and dull suits, will judge my broken vow to Jehovah of no sex before marriage. I will be dead to my family when I’m disfellowshipped, when they cut me out of their life and home. It will be a living death to lose everyone I know. Shit.
