Weekly Featured Essay
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When a family disagreement over where to spread their mother’s ashes threatens sibling bonds, one daughter finds her own way of remembering…and of coming to terms with their relationship.
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.
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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.
Stigmata
by Angela Lam
1981
I’m ten years old, home alone with my sisters.
Five-year-old Elizabeth grabs seven-year-old Cynthia’s ballerina doll.
“Give her back!” Cynthia yells.
Elizabeth tugs so hard, she twists off the doll’s arm.
Cynthia screams. “You’re trying to kill her!”
I burst into the bedroom.
Elizabeth drops the doll and scales the shelves of the corner bookcase. Her eyes peer over the ledge like a cat ready to pounce.
“Make her get down,” Cynthia says, cradling her broken doll.
I’m not about to climb. But my mom is still working at the bank for another half hour. Fifteen minutes ago, my father left for work at the grocery store. I tell Cynthia to wait until Mom gets home. “She’s not going anywhere,” I say, tilting my chin toward the towering bookcase.
Thirty-five minutes later, the door between the kitchen and the garage opens.
Cynthia scuttles down the hallway. “Mom-mee! Elizabeth broke my ballerina.”
My mom hustles back to the bedroom and glances around. “I don’t see her,” she says.
I point. “Up there.”
My mom’s gaze travels up the length of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase. “My word, Lizzy, how did you get up there?”
“I’m not coming down,” she says.
My mom shrugs. “Go ahead. Stay up there.” She leaves to change out of her power suit and heels. But instead of making dinner, my mom calls my father at the grocery store. “Elizabeth climbed the bookcase. She won’t get down. I’m telling you something’s wrong with her. She doesn’t think like the other girls. We need to get her help.” My mom listens. She purses her lips and curls her free hand into a fist. “No, you don’t understand. She’s troubled. She needs to see a psychologist.” She slams down the phone. A moment later, it rings. She picks it up. “I’ll take her. You don’t have to go. It’s not a shame on the family. She needs help. We’re her parents. We need to help her.”
The Pugilists
by Sharman Ober-Reynolds
My husband and I attend a boxing class in Mill Creek, Utah, three times a week. My husband has Parkinson’s Disease, and the class is designed to make us “rock steady” to fight against it. Our coaches are mostly young and enthusiastic. To keep us motivated and help us get acquainted, they ask silly questions at the beginning of each class. Some of our answers have included: “What would you be if you lived in the ocean?” Dory and Marlon. “What historical figure would you be?” Fred and Wilma. My husband, a retired philosophy professor, loves questions and comics. He has large compilations of Pogo and Krazy Kat, which hereads almost daily alongside philosophers Quine and Putnam.
The boxing class is more practical than philosophical. It reminds me of kindergarten for seniors in slow motion. There are lockers and mats, and the gym is festively decorated for the holidays. Strings of colored lights hang between punching bags in the winter, brightening up the gym, which is tucked away in an ice-encrusted strip mall. On Valentine’s Day, we saran-wrapped pictures and words of things we want to fight against onto our punching bags; political tyrants, various exes, insomnia are popular targets. Ours is Parkinson’s.
Gone Missing
by Mark Cyzyk
Long ago, a high school classmate of mine disappeared.
There was no reason to believe he had run away or committed suicide. No apparent connection with illegal activities. He just disappeared.
As the years passed, our County Police came to investigate his disappearance as a homicide. They had a suspect but not much evidence, nor did they have a body.
They did not find the body for eight years.
I’ve often thought, then and now, how excruciating those eight years must have been for my classmate’s parents. Your son has disappeared from your lives. There is no body to indicate that he’s dead. He’s simply gone missing. The terrible abyss of loss yawns open, right to the tips of your toes. And this is something you stare into, day after day after day.
Slipstreamed
by Leanne Phillips
We enter the Salinas Valley from the south. As we drive into King City, California, it feels as if we are passing through a heavy curtain—the air feels old somehow, the way nostalgia might if it had an odor. It smells of mild onion and sweet dry grass and freshly-turned soil. John Ernst Steinbeck Sr. helped settle this town in 1890, and his son and namesake set his novel East of Eden here in 1952. He felt it, too, what I am feeling now. “I remember … what trees and seasons smelled like,” Steinbeck wrote. “The memory of odors is very rich.” This is the place where I was born, the place I reluctantly came home to when I had nowhere else to go.
King City is a small town at the southernmost end of Monterey County, population a little over twelve thousand. Not much has changed here since my mother graduated from King City High School in 1959. Many of the buildings on the south end of downtown are the same buildings that stood over a century ago—squat, square structures painted off-white, beige, red-brown. There are taller buildings with false ceilings and high, arched facades to make them look more majestic. The Reel Joy Theater, a movie house built before 1922, now accommodates a market; the marquee still towers over the entrance, but today it is a blank slate, and the theater’s poster cases act as community bulletin boards. The newspaper, The King City Rustler, was founded in 1901, its name drawn from a hat in the local barbershop. Fast food restaurants, gas stations, and a shopping center are exiled to the west side of town. My three grandchildren and I are passing through on our way to northern California for spring break.
