Category Archives: grief

Prettier than me

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When I met Tara she was prettier than me, younger than me, and in most ways far more disenfranchised than me.  In fact there was just one area of our briefly conjoined Venn diagram connectedness where the power was ostensibly hers and definitely not mine: she was the real mom to a baby I loved very much.  In that (I had been told by at least 2 lawyers) she had the legal edge.  She should have been able to designate a capable guardian for her children.  The law favored the biological mother.  And at that time, at the end of 1998, it gave no credence to the foster mother.

A fact I can accept now, after most of the unbearable losing of Tara’s beautiful child has scarred over.

What I can’t accept is losing Tara 

because…

Pretend 

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pretend you are a stranger and I am one of those uneven folk you meet at a coffee shop almost from the moment you sit down I have begun to tell this unraveling story about children left alone in a locked room for hours and a fire and a crooked judge, a baby filled with light and her mother, a figure unfairly edited out of all the relevant fairy tales who then ends up dying, not “poison apple” but poison nonetheless and when they come for her with all the accoutrements of salvation there is none left for her, no magic, no fairy godmother, no antidote as the EMTs say oh, it’s (only) Badamo…which is why I, this intrusive stranger, ramble on and on in the coffee shop jamming words into the dam of unrequited 

Grief

Preaching to the dead

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First, pick my chasuble with care: war paint, cowgirl boots, stretched-out pale-pink tutu from the racks upon racks at the resale store, brand-new for the girls who did not need them anymore,  all donated to science or the graveyard where I go to pace and splutter out some fractured  litany about a beat-up pickup truck, iterations of a lost father, lawn furniture strewn  above the tree line, the same forgotten first name of both Sikorsky and Stravinsky, and this jittery alter-ego who swings wild, shouts loud, raises hell as though bones and memory and words could be as easily strung together as that-to breath life into the dead as they fit their joints and hinges back together, back to life, the way an ordinary man rises from his bed, rubs his eyes, dons his pants and his shirt, walks out into 

Light

Children of heaven

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at dusk I take the bits of fortune cookies, crumbs still scattered across the messy kitchen table and…write to you, about the disposable styrofoam containers, syrupy orange sauce, tendency I have to eat my way through grief (of losing you) when…I admit you…do not need me, better that way, my trenchant sentenceless phrasing, my desert-wandering inertia, my messy house and muted grief all pressed into this vanilla-y cookie folded around words written by a stranger somewhere, perhaps one day there will be an algorithm for these things equal parts admonition and prophecy.  Oh, prophecy, the old clothes of mortality, cast-off, superfluous from the beginning to

the children of heaven.

Leaves in water

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for so long now I have seen Ophelia’s clothes each time I scoop leaves from the bottom of the pool, of the well, of the teacup of memory she comes back to me with a plaintive song about the boy whose soliloquies broke into a thousand words over water, hovering over the surface of the deep, almost a song until you cannot swim, touch the bottom and feel only tangled leaves, no solid ground to stand on if only she could get herself…well-to a nunnery, of course…high walls, soft voices sorting who or what is safe if not the boy, the beautiful boy with all his talk of infinitives of being….being, just a leaf in water, weightless until it begins to rise over her incendiary last infinitive thought-to be or not to be.

J. crashes the party

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If you asked me how I knew it was you I would touch your face and say aardvarks!! Anteaters!! Warthogs!! Your humor as unmistakable as your wit, odd they all refuse to see you, you in the over-sized retro flippers, ducky float ring and wild Hawaiian print crashing the party, the holiday, the cozy churchy potluck making almost everyone supremely uncomfortable.  Everyone except the children who delight in your flamboyant honesty, your failure to adhere in any way to our sheepy ways, shorn and alone

You hand off the flowery shirt, the float, the flippers (none of which you ever needed)

seamless garment to sunblind guards

World go dark, pain and love

Set free

Rocket Girl

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you float for a time in the “even so,” casually, miraculously, inexorably growing limbs and features and organs, that all-important beating heart.  No one tells you meanwhile in “Houston…we have a problem” or that the problem is something you  cannot (would not)

unmake you

/girlness /not boyness, your binary /identification /of /gender 

Will be enough to terminate the mission

… when all along you have done your best in the beautiful floating weeks of the “even so”

You matchless irreplaceable girl-in-the-now, girl-for-a-moment

Until mission control

Aborts, aborts

Letting you

tiny dancer, rocket girl

Go.

The Countries I Have Lost

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A country, just like a single old-left-foot-house-slipper can be metonymous.  This-for that, quid-pro-quo, how-did-I-ever-lose-you?-metonymous. Hit me at 2 am, sharp intake of breath too hard to connect it all with proper punctuation metonymous.  I once accidentally cut your hand in a car window metonymous.  When I met you I thought you were the crazy one metonymous. Lost in Pittsburgh a million years ago metonymous.  With you the reason for years of silence had to be different metonymous.  

The countries I have lost all have proper names, stable addresses, no missing slippers.  Us-and-them, before-and-after countries cheerfully conventional, intentionally respectful, naturally leery of the once-familiar mendicant whose metonymic wholes have been for good or ill

Irrevocably set free.

Mum’s Day 1998

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they will say focus on the positive they will say at least you gave her a good beginning they will say we have 25 families waiting, better than you like this is some kind of beauty pageant for adoptive families? 

…which was a weird lie of sorts…maybe there were 25 families …maybe 5000…in the end it was only necessary to know that it was never about the hypothetical 25, always about the avaricious pair, or pairs, -on-the-ark-come-two-by-two pairs of caseworkers, pairs of administrators, pairs of lawyers, pairs of accountants, coupling, uncoupling back and forth around a central lie, a few broken laws, and Entropy, the Mother-god, chained to the loss chained to the chaos of the loss…of her babies.

What was it 

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what was it, mute, inanimate object perched on the counter in the messy late-night kitchen as she finally sweeps up the spilled beans, tosses them out into the night, contemplates both what usually lurks there and if they will grow, sprout, tangle up into vines, vines to block the sun, spin to the clouds where the approximate-rhythmic giant dwells, mocking science, mocking long-dead Darwin, Glutton-clubbing, maggot-and-squirrel devouring Darwin whose mortal life has coiled to dust but whose immortal one is hot, vivid, fierce

Survival of the fittest…