ISSUE 16 - FALL 2023

Creative Nonfiction

{}Nesting

A week before she left for college, my daughter and I got matching bracelets marketed as “permanent” jewelry. We made appointments at a small, white-washed store in lower Manhattan, where a jeweler measured our wrists, unspooled delicate gold chains, and soldered them onto us. No clasps, just continuous slips of gold. On the sidewalk outside, we twisted our wrists in the sunlight. A shiny ribbon around the gift of our connection.

When my grandmother died, I inherited a box of ribbons. Ribbons she unknotted and plucked from gifts given to her. She would wrap them into tight spirals and tuck them away for reuse. I inherited her habit of saving ribbons; I can’t bring myself to throw them out. Grosgrain, satin, velvet. I curl them around four fingers to make a neat spool and leave them around my office. Coiled on my desk. Pinned to my bulletin board. Tucked like delicate nests between books.

“This doesn’t seem normal,” I tell the girl who washes my hair at the salon, imagining the amount of my hair she must have wrapped around her fingers at this very moment. She just complimented my thick hair. I told her I feel like my hair is thinning, that it’s falling out at an alarming rate.

She smiles and reassures me. “It’s totally normal.” Though her lustrous hair and her shiny, plump lips make me think that her normal and my normal are different.

I google words like perimenopause and hair loss. I read that it is normal to lose up to 100-250 strands of hair with each wash. In the shower, I try to guess what normal looks like, as I untangle hair from my rings, pull it from the folds of my skin, twist it into tidy swirls, and set the pile on the shelf next to the shampoo.

To mark the nearing end of my childbearing years, I am literally forming empty nests out of hair.

Nesting is a figurative term, assigned to pregnant women in their third trimester–not to perimenopausal women in their late forties. It alludes to the urge to prepare for the baby’s arrival. Preparing is a futile effort, but no one should tell an expectant mother that. 

To prepare a nest, birds will use whatever objects they find. Natural materials like snapped twigs, molted feathers, and grass clippings. But also ribbons, string, and human hair.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, we received all sorts of gifts intended to make motherhood easier and babyhood gentler. At my shower, I opened a box of tiny mittens meant to keep the baby from scratching her face with her own fingernails.

One of the first lessons of parenthood: you will worry about things you could have never conceived of. Also, another lesson: mittens get unpaired easily, one is always missing. Object impermanence.

Object impermanence is not a real concept. But it’s one that makes the most sense to me.

The actual name of the concept is object permanence. It is a developmental step–a marker of normal growth. Around ten months, babies realize that even when an object is out of sight it still exists. Before that, if their toy rolls under the couch, say, they think it’s gone. That’s why peek-a-boo makes some kids cry.

My daughter is 21 now. Everytime she leaves, I re-grasp the concept of object permanence.

“Permanent” jewelry is, of course, a marketing ploy for the young. A thin strand of gold can break. Still, I was disappointed when a few months after getting my bracelet soldered on, it fell off. I was swimming laps. My cupped hand cut into the water and I noticed my wrist was bare. I stopped swimming and floated face-down, scanning the pool floor. I found it, a shimmering strand on the black line. At the pool’s edge, next to my water bottle, I curled the chain into a small nest.

What is a nest, anyway, but found objects we wrap around ourselves. A way of holding onto what is beautiful. A perch of identity we spend our lives collecting.

When I got out of the pool, I called my daughter to lament the broken bracelet. But also, to make sure she was okay. To try to stop the tiny fingernails of worry, make sure that the meaning I assigned to a filament of gold was just a figment of a mother’s imagination.

What is an empty nest, anyway, but an offering. A cupped hand, palm up, in prayer.

Jennifer Gallo Gaites is a writer from Fair Haven, NJ where she lives with her husband and three children. She writes mostly about family life and is working on a memoir in essays about the ever-shifting identity of motherhood. Her work has been featured in Hippocampus and Literary Mama. She is a writing instructor at Project Write Now in Red Bank, NJ.

Evergreen

The summer I am eight we go to visit Babi and Grandpa in Los Angeles. Dad drives the beige panel truck he’s named the Fleshmobile, Mom next to him in front. The four of us kids in the row of brown vinyl seats or sprawled in the back on the wooden platform, a foam pad covered in Indian print bedspread Dad has put in. We sing songs as we go, “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” with verses with everyone’s names. We play 20 questions and look for license plates from different states. At a rest area Dad folds open his swiss army knife, slices bread Mom baked before we left, opens a can of sardines to make us sandwiches. Smushes them down with the flat of the blade. Wipes the knife clean on his jeans and folds the sharp steel in on itself. When we're done with our sandwiches, the tiny bones crunched down and the apples from a fruit stand stop nibbled to the center he reaches out his square hand for the cores and pops the seeds and bits of fruit flesh into his mouth, chews, and swallows amazing us every time.

We pass oil pumps that bob up and down like drinking birds, rows of fruit trees, leafed out green, the space between their even lines making patterns that shift as we pass. When we finally get off the freeway, onto the streets of Los Angeles the four of us take turns brushing our hair so we will look nice when we see Babi and Grandpa. Mom licks her thumb, cranes around to the back seat and wipes the smudges off our cheeks.

Their street has a liquor store on the corner with red neon arrows going around the letters LIQUOR and that’s where we turn left. At their house with its green bushes, white stucco, rounded front window, square rooms, we unload the car and unfold our stiff legs. Babi hugs us hard. She has a big bosom but her arms are strong and her hugs are tight, forceful, not pillowy. Grandpa has large, soft hands that tremble and are covered in dark spots. He holds mine gently and speaks softly, in his Polish accent, are you hungry? They have food we never have. Store bought cereal in small boxes, Apple Jacks, Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms. The Frigidaire hisses open holds Seven-Up and chicken. Vanilla ice cream in the freezer and candy in cut glass candy dishes on side tables. For lunch Babi serves us cottage cheese with sour cream and chives, rye bread with caraway seeds, and pickled herring. Grandpa says he’ll have a glass tea, skipping the word of, and drinks it from a delicate clear cup, a lump of sugar melting in his mouth as he sips.

The walls are covered in the paintings Grandpa makes in the garage. A blue cityscape, a snow scene with a child pulling a sled to a red barn, flowers in vases, and others growing. I know his job is being a diamond dealer and I imagine the tiny sparkling stones he must touch with his shaking hands when he takes the bus downtown.

That night we take turns bathing in Babi’s tub. I scrape my nails along my ankle and I show Gabi how my skin comes off in satisfying dark rolls, wash my hair with Babi’s shampoo until it squeaks, rinse out gray suds. At home we take a bath once a week in the winter, less than that in the summer, and there is not this endless hot water, this warm room, this strong soap. I unwrap out of my towel into my nightgown, glowing. Sleep between tucked tight sheets.

Babi takes us shopping for socks and underwear. Wraps the sock around our fists toe to heel to check the size. Gets us the things we need, not toys, not pretty clothes.

Babi and Grandpa try to convince Mom and Dad to send us to school. I am reading chapter books on my own and they say, you see how smart she is, it’s a shame she doesn’t go to school. Then turn to each other, speak in fast, harsh Polish. When Mom and Dad aren’t around they say to me, Don’t you want to go to school like other children, learn new things? Babi shakes her head and clucks her tongue, It’s a shame. Grandpa looks sad. To Gabi, they say, don’t you want to learn to read, like your sister? I realize that Karen is gone from the claim by now. Who will teach Gabi to read?

A few weeks after we get back to Sunnyridge from this trip I tell everyone I want to go to school. I am half worried about not learning and half bored of being home all the time. Gabi agrees with me and we tell the grown-ups that school is where we want to be. I want to go to school, I say.

Why?

I’m bored.

School is boring, sitting in desks, doing what you’re told, boring.

I don’t care. I want to go. I want to learn.

They don’t teach you anything in school. Look at all these books. You can learn everything you need to know here.

Eventually, they give in. I was sure they would.

It is late September and school has already started by the time we are signed up. Every morning Dad has to drive us over the gravel bumps of Browntown Road to sit on the porch of the long-closed Holland store. The shut down gas pumps hunch like frozen figures and inside the dark windows you can see piles of discarded furniture and empty shelves. There Gabi and I wait for the school bus to Evergreen Elementary. Some days we arrive just as the bus is pulling out and Dad chases it in the truck, flashing the lights until the bus stops, the door hisses open, and we climb on, past the blank-faced driver, to the hoots and jeers of the kids already on the bus. The thing to do is not sit too near the back where most of the kids sit but too near the front is not great either because then you are so visible. The side, near the middle, but closer to the front is a good spot. The tormentors might get distracted by a friend before they see you and forget to say anything. Usually, they don’t forget and say, dirty hippy, are you wearing the same clothes again? Hey hippy girl, when’s the last time you took a bath? During the ride I pretend to be invisible, somewhere else. I suck on my two middle fingers and cover that hand with my other hand so no one will notice. GILLIG is written above the bus windshield with two small red lights that alternate flashing when the bus stops. I say the word GILLIG over and over in rhythm with the lights. I focus on this mantra, GILLIG, GILLIG, GILLIG, reads the same front to back back to front. Hey hippy are you a baby sucking on your fingers? GILLIG, GILLIG, GILLIG,  Press my face against the window and look out at the misty fields and silent dark trees.  

There are four classes in a big room called a quad. There are four entrances each with a door with windows and hooks in a small hallway that opens into the giant space, bright with fluorescent lights reflecting off linoleum floors and no windows. Each class has one corner of the big room. First thing in the morning we all face the center, where the flag stands, say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing songs. I learn the words to the songs America the Beautiful, My Country Tis of Thee, A Grand Old Flag. The words are stirring and strong as stomping. Emblem of the land I love, home of the free and the brave.

When Dad first brings me to school to sign up, the teacher has me read for her and right away puts me in the highest reading group. But I don’t know math and I have to go in the lowest group until I learn how to add and subtract. Then I must memorize my times tables. I whisper them to myself on the bus three times three is nine three times four is twelve. By December I am in the highest math group and learning long division. It makes my head hurt to do it, shoving the small number into the big one.

One day walking to the bus, in the crowd of kids leaving school, someone pushes past me, saying something I don’t hear. Dirty hippy? A hand claps my head hard. When I get on the bus I poke my fingers and there is a chewed up clump of gum stuck inside my hair.  I pull my jacket hood over my head. Whisper to Gabi on the seat beside me, there’s gum in my hair. Reach my fingers back under my hood to feel the shape. Can I pull it out? I can’t.  When we get home Gabi helps me cut the gum out with scissors. I hold the almost alive looking off-white gum, brown haired lump in my hand for a moment before throwing it away.

Every day going home as the road turns from paved to gravel we pass the split tree. There it is a Gemini like me. Geminis are twins, one person made of two parts. One part is the Sunnyridge kid, who runs around naked and says fuck and the other is the quiet kid at school, who follows every rule. I wonder, what if, like in Alice In Wonderland, Sunnyridge turns out to be a dream? What if I wake up and I am back in Newport Beach?  Rub my eyes, stretch out and find I am under my sheets and blankets in my twin bed in my old bedroom with the car lot spotlight curving into the night sky. Will I still know how to read?

Grown-ups are sitting around after dinner smoking pot. I take the joint that Mom passes to me and stub it out in an ashtray among the cigarette butts. You need to stop smoking that, I say to her. All of you stop it. I stomp around chanting, No more smoking pot, no more smoking pot! The grown-ups laugh and tell me not to be so uptight.

We are never moving back to a neighborhood with sidewalks and going over to kids’ houses to play, learning to ride a bike, eating dinner around a table with just our family. We are here in the dim kerosene light, wood stove heat, eating brown rice, as the rain clatters on the tin roof.

 Christmas comes and all the kids in my class have to bring in a gift for a girl if you are a girl and for a boy if you are a boy. We should not spend more than five dollars. I know a homemade gift of a god’s eye or a beaded necklace is not right. No one mentions Hanukkah and neither do I. We are learning Christmas carols, Away in a Manger, Silent Night, We Three Kings. I memorize every word field and fountain, moor and mountain, following yonder star. Kids are excused from school during the day to go to religion class at a local church. One of my classmates asks me why I don’t go and I explain that I’m Jewish. The Jews killed Jesus, she says as if it is something everyone knows. Is this true? I’m not sure but I insist no, no they didn’t. She tells me I should come to the religion class and I get a note from my dad, his signature scrawled on lined paper, that says I can go. They sing Jesus loves me this I know, cuz the bible tells me so and the teacher puts a yellow felt cross and a white felt dove on a felt-covered easel while telling a story. It is babyish and most of the kids are goofing around through the story. At the end of the class they give everyone a dry cookie. I won’t go back but I know that I better not mention being Jewish again.

I tell my mom about the Christmas gift exchange. She says we can make something but I beg her it needs to be a store-bought present. When the weekend comes I remind her to take me on the town run so we can go to the drugstore to buy something. Together we pick out a silvery plastic hairbrush, comb, and mirror all packaged as if it’s for a princess. When I get home I carefully wrap it in yellow and purple construction paper and multi-colored yarn bows and we put the package in a brown paper bag as the teacher requested. The next day I hand in the bag along with everyone else. I have gotten it in on time and in their bags, all the presents look the same, lined up in two rows, one for boys and one for girls. Later in the day, the teacher motions me into the doorway of her glass-enclosed office and secretly shows me that she has rewrapped my present in red and green Christmas paper. We don’t want one of them looking so…different, she says. I look down, say nothing. I know she is right and has done me a kindness, protected me, but something still aches like a yellow, purple bruise. I had not thought about wrapping paper.

The teacher collects kids’ coins and punches a hole in the pale blue cardboard lunch ticket, one hole per day. Some of us don’t pay. We get the free lunch. Lunch handed to us on heavy beige plastic trays. One section for sloppy joe’s one for square green jello topped with a dollop of cool whip one for sweet cooked carrots one for the house shaped milk carton. I eat every bite of every delicious lunch every day. At recess there is extra milk, which costs a nickel, so I don’t get the milk. Dad says milk is for baby cows, not people.

At recess most girls play on the monkey bars. Your hand holds the first bar and then you push your body into empty air, reach out and grab the next one, flinging yourself from one shiny bar to another all the way across. If you do it often enough you get blisters on your palms that turn to hard yellow calluses. I always drop, my arms pulled taut, not even halfway, my sneakers hit the asphalt. One day as I start to try to go across the bars I realize I don’t have on any underwear under my tights. I let my hands loosen and drop to the ground and go to the swings before anyone looks up my dress. Anyway, my favorite is the swings. I sing to myself and see the world tilt away, the hills behind the school appear, the voices of the kids fade, the rhythm of pumping my legs, back, back, and forth.

A girl in my class asks me to come over. She says, come over to my house today after school. When Dad picks me up at the bus stop I say, we need to go to Laura’s house. She invited me. Today!

Are you sure? he asks.

Yes, we have to go now!

He drives back along the bus route and I point out the house. We turn down the driveway. Park the truck. My legs feel shaky as I knock on the door and her dad comes out. He’s short haired, clean shaven. Laura peeks out from behind him and says hi but doesn’t invite me in to play. The four of us step off the porch and our dads discuss their trucks and my dad admires the new fence hers has built, while Laura and I stay silent. Then we get back in our truck and drive home. I don’t understand what happened. I blur it in my mind. Years later, when I return to Evergreen in 7th grade Laura will say to me remember that time you just showed up at my house?

No, I will lie. I don’t.

Leah Korican is a writer, visual artist, and teacher who lives and works in Oakland, CA. Her poetry has been published in "Canary- a literary journal of the Environmental Crisis" and "Literary Mama" among others. Her visual art has been shown nationally. She is working on a memoir about growing up on a hippie commune in rural Oregon.

Subsequent to Our Passing

I read in the Book that the dead gather in a Roman amphitheater and applaud us. They dwell in a cloud and watch us run in circles. Cheer. You asked if we’ll meet after death. Will we recognize the scars and wrinkles alight on our bodies? Still be married? Still be us? I don’t want to answer when only silence will do. Who’s to say the dead don’t have a future?

This essay wants to mean something. It doesn’t want to remain mere random hatch marks adrift on an ocean of white. It wants a direction. When you live on an island, all directions are geomantic. Down towards the sea or skyward up the mountain. Whichever way you go is ever lasting.

In my tin-roofed rancher, the dead inhabit photographs. They reside on my dresser next to the electric candles and cross and coral necklace. On the lanai floorboards, desiccated moths, their wings singed brown. The field mouse, bloody gash in its neck, that the cat lays beside my chair. I sweep the poor creature’s curled body back into the earth and bless the gift I was given. On this island, four volcanoes sleep, ooze, rumble, and rise. A fifth one, the grass-covered cone closest to my home, expired a million years ago. In my kitchen, behind the pantry door, containers of applesauce, almond milk, and ahi all bear a shelf life. My expiration date is written with invisible ink. Can’t figure why a part of me feels forever.

Like the writer, this essay wants its life to mean more than just what happened, but why. Next to the rusted fence, five cats and a dog play dead beneath the grass, underground. All foundlings. How many years and I’m still seeing them roll on their backs in the driveway? Energy doesn’t disappear, I tell you under a slip of dying stars. We’ll just convert into something else. My bones creak with unknowing. In other words, God.

When we bought the house, it came with its own dead spirit. The previous owner was killed in a motorcycle crash and you swear you can hear him rev his engine in the driveway. Our land once was the site of a settlement where Filipino plantation workers washed their laundry at an outdoor concrete tub. I veer away from its broken cement when I park my car on the front lawn. Sugar died in the 1970’s though the remnant cane grass now fattens the cows in the back pasture.

My friend Pua says the Night Marchers, those dead Hawaiian warriors, wind through the eucalyptus trees when the moon refuses to shine. I don’t say, but think, Superstition. Why stick around and menace? Aren’t there better things to do on the other side? I mean no disrespect. But this essay doesn’t want to believe in the other side, if it’s meanancing, punitive. This essay doesn’t want to fear specters haunting the hallways. Vengeance against the living or the dead is not what this essay wants.

Mother’s ectopic pregnancy nearly killed her. The doctor told her she would never have children. So she made a promise. Swore that if God granted her children, she would raise them to make a contribution. Three babies came into the world by her whispered oath. Despite this, I suppose I will weigh light atop the scales of Anubis.

*

And once where I live on Old Camp 17 Road, out in the pasture, a white calf died and the spotted heifers huddled around its limp body like a coven and cried all night.

And once, my friend Diane texted me that she and her husband Paul had contacted The Neptune Society. Stand-in mourners will scatter their ashes at a place of their choosing and spare their only child the logistical trauma. And I think Diane asked who I thought would bury us, since we had no children. And I didn’t have an answer. And I felt slightly dead having failed to birth another generation. I swear this essay wants a purpose. A reason to be.

And once, along the road where I walk in the mornings, I saw that someone had laid out the skeleton of a boar, its skull bearing a bullet hole between its eyes. And once, along the Akoni Pule Highway, I saw an Ironman cyclist remove her helmet and kneel beside a ghost bike, weeping. And once, I found a flattened toad next to the house and I picked it up by the leg and flung it over the barbed wire fence, making it hop across the sky.

*

My outside is the vaulted sky. A blue dome that arches and aches ad infinitum. A woman stretched into a backbend, her body an umbrella made out of air. In other words, God.

After all, this is Hawaii. A place where the divine cradles the sun and rainbows slide between ether shoulders. Here, the color wheel spins a wave that travels too fast for the naked eye. In its heart, this essay wants to be some thing. Incarnate. Formed. Occupying space and time. To be.

A sign of grace, perhaps. The things the sky forbids us to see. Like the future. And how the sky is outside everywhere. Still, invisible. High. Beyond me. Still, pressing close upon me with its breath, a quilt of infinity. This essay longs for the logos. Longs to bring worlds into being. Demands a resonant ending. L’chaim, I clink my glass against yours as the sun spools into darkness.

This essay wants you to know it is holy. It wants to find its second life in you. In other words, a God of my own making.

Linda Petrucelli’s essays have been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her story, “Figure Eight on the Waves,” won first place in the WOW! Women on Writing Fall 2018 Flash Fiction Contest. She’s lived and worked in Hawaii for the last twenty years. Read her at https://lindapetrucelli.com.

Expectation

It’s late afternoon, and I’m home from the hospital, where my brother has been for the past six weeks. I’ve been trying to find a moment to open the folder my mother gave me yesterday, and now, papers, some thin and fragile like a pressed flower, some thick and washed out like a piece of old construction paper, lay strewn across the table. I should be taking better care, I think, attempting to gather them into orderly piles. I clear a larger space, adjust the light, and slide a piece of paper toward me. The typewriter ink faded: ‘Adoption Summary’, followed by my brother’s Korean name. I lean closer: ‘abandoned’, ‘infant’, ‘orphanage’. Before me are the opening lines to a story both familiar and new, profound and incomprehensible: a documented record of my brother’s first two years of life in a Korean orphanage and his adoption by our family. Papers I have never seen before. My childhood floods in on a surging tide of memory: I step into the moment, where a child-sized puffy red parka hangs on a coat hanger.

“It’ll be too big for him,” my six-year-old self declared.

“He’ll grow into it,” said my mother, her hand resting on my shoulder.

Below the parka, blue rubber boots stood next to a pair of leather shoes. I looked again around the room. On the wall, a framed poster shows tiny sailboats circling a pond while willow trees weep at the water’s edge.

“He might like a picture of a spaceship,” I said, wishing I had a picture of a spaceship.

“We’ll see,” said my mother. She opened a drawer, pulled out a pair of pyjamas covered in dinosaurs, refolded them, and tucked them back next to another perfectly folded pair. 

I had been expecting my little brother’s arrival for months. It wasn’t the usual anticipation that happens in growing families. My mother wasn’t pregnant; there was no crib, no stack of diapers. But there was an adoption agency. 

Sometimes, after coming home from my friend’s house, I would lie on the floor and wonder what it would be like to have a brother. My friend’s older brother terrorized us, chasing us up the stairs and pretending to throw our dolls out the window. Would my brother be like that? And why was it so hard to get a brother? It didn’t seem complicated for my friends, some of whom had several younger and older brothers and sisters. Had their fathers and mothers spent evenings at the dining room table filling out forms and swearing over mistakes while their cups of tea grew cold?

Part of the expecting came in the form of visits by ladies with clipboards and strong perfume.

“Do your parents ever speak to each other in loud voices?” they asked me.

“No,” I shook my head. Not my British parents.

“Are there ever people in the house you don’t like?” said one of the ladies.

“No.” Why would my parents bring people they didn’t like into our house, I wondered, staring at her. She looked away. Later, my parents sat at the dining room table nursing more tea, whispering. My dad scooped me up onto his lap.

“What do you think it will be like to have a brother?” he said.

“Fun,” I said, wondering how my mum would still have time to read to me at bedtime.

One day not long after, my dad came bursting into the kitchen waving an envelope:

“We’ve got it!”

Got what? Our small family sat at the kitchen table and opened the letter together. Inside was a sheet of paper with a small photograph attached to the top with a paper clip.

“Look!” said my dad. “He’s three years old. Look at the picture. Isn’t he lovely? Look, this is going to be your new brother!”

I looked at the photograph. A tiny boy with a large head, skinny arms and legs, and a big belly stood, arms at his side, in front of a grey wall. He wore a red quilted jacket that buttoned up and a look of resigned bewilderment on his face. I felt a rush of sadness, happiness, excitement, and worry. I wanted a sibling, or at least I thought I did, but now, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Would I be able to ride on my dad’s shoulders as much? What if he was mean to me? Would I love him? I grew quiet and looked at my mum. I had never seen her cry before.

“Don’t you worry,” said my dad. “It’s all going to be alright.”

We sat for a long time at the table, looking at the photograph.

A few months later, we made the trip to the Vancouver airport, where we met the representative from the adoption agency. She stood beside us, long grey hair caught back in a ponytail that disappeared into the folds of her long grey raincoat, ready to meet my new brother as he arrived off the plane. I peered through legs, expectation radiating out of me like rays from the sun as streams of people flowed through the arrivals gate, trying so hard to catch the first glimpse of the little face I knew from the photograph, but he didn’t come. The lady from the adoption agency disappeared and then returned with a long look.

“I called Korea. He’s too ill to travel, so they kept him off the plane,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice, like this sort of thing always happens. The trip home was silent, streetlights flashing past my face as I stared out the window. 

Back at our house, expectation resumed, and soon, another letter came, this one informing us he would arrive on Christmas Day.

“I’m getting a little brother for Christmas,” I told my friend’s mum.

“Oh, how unusual,” she said. 

Back in Vancouver on Christmas Day, another stream of arrivals floods through the doors. Then, finally, there he was, my new brother, wearing the little red quilted jacket from his photograph. He was tiny. Held in the arms of the caregiver who had accompanied him, he looked lost. His face, pale and drawn, was covered in a rash, and one little hand grasped the sleeve of his caregiver. This I remember like it was yesterday.

On the car ride back to the ferry, in our red Ford Cortina, I sat in my usual spot in the back, and my new brother sat on a booster seat beside me. He had barely anything with him except a tiny pair of red leather shoes that my mother has kept to this day. There were also a few gifts for his new family: a fan, a paper cut-out of some Korean characters with little red tassels hanging off the corners, and a sheet of Korean phrases with their English translations. I stared at my new brother. After waiting for this moment for so long, I felt like I was watching myself from above. Everything I had known shifted slightly and made room to fit this new little person into our lives.

“Why don’t you try asking him a question?” said my mother, handing me the sheet of phrases.

I struggled through the pronunciation of several words and phrases, but I must have made some sense as each time I asked a question, my brother would shake his head. No, he wasn’t hungry; no, he wasn’t tired. Those questions were wholly inadequate for our needs and far from what I wanted to ask him: Where did you come from? Why were you left on a street corner? Did you have toys? What did you leave behind? Do you remember your mother?

 A poverty of language left us both unsatisfied. I held his hand instead, his little fingers curled around mine, and we sat in silence. 

Someone abandoned my brother as a baby on the streets of Seoul, Korea, in 1972. He had nothing. The orphanage gave him a name, a birthday, and a home. No one could tell us his family history or what his life had been like before he was found. I have spent a lifetime conjuring up possible scenarios to explain his abandonment: death of his parents, extreme poverty, an impossible situation. I like to think it was an act of love, but I have no way of knowing.

I do know that I loved him instantly. I spent hours reading to him as he learned English, and we played games of Monopoly that lasted days. He grew out of all his new clothes. We built epic forts together.

At our small rural school, however, he endured the humiliation of racism from the mouths of little boys on the playground:

“Hey Sony, Sony, Sony!” they called him.

“Idiots!” I yelled at them, my face growing hot. “You’re too stupid to get your name-calling right!”

For a time, there was peace as a normal childhood took centre stage: In the garden, my brother and a friend, saucepans on their heads and sticks in hand charging at invisible enemies; my brother and I arguing over who cheated at Monopoly.  But the ravages of infant rejection played out deep within his mind as he grew up. His capacity for affection, attachment, and belonging disappeared, while speculation and worry took their seats at the table. When our parents separated in middle school, my brother sunk back even further, pulling the curtains tight, only letting in enough light to see his way through his days. In high school, death by a thousand tiny cuts at the best of times, those little boys from the playground grew into teenagers with their inherited opinions and underdeveloped capacities for compassion, capable of a special kind of cruelty reserved for those who don’t fit the mould. Some of his teachers tried, and he excelled in school, but it wasn’t enough.

At his Grade 12 Graduation ceremony, he walked across the stage to receive his diploma.

“Woohoo! Way to go!” I yelled. A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd, but a look of pure mortification pass over my brother’s face. I instantly regretted my yell, but a part of me wanted to keep yelling, to draw attention to him as if a collective awareness could somehow bring him out of himself. Instead, my brother retreated even further, rarely emerging despite our attempts.

“It’s the rejection as an infant,” said one psychiatrist. “Creates emotional scar tissue. He might grow out of it.”

“Does he do drugs?” said another.

“Here, try this,” said yet another, handing over a handful of prescriptions. “Call me in six months.”

The years between high school and now are a series of postcard stories with long gaps between the dates: my brother at university, my brother dropping out of university, my brother getting a flashy new car and a job in Vancouver, my brother losing the car, and ending up on the downtown east side of Vancouver doing who knows what. My brother in front of a computer playing games, gambling, coding. What was he doing?  My brother back in Victoria working at a casino. My brother not working at a casino. My mum calling me, her voice cracking at the seams:

“I’m at the Doctor’s office. They say they can’t be sure he won’t hurt himself. He’s to go to the hospital. Now.”

I get in the car. At the Doctor’s office I meet my brother as he walks out. I reach out for his hand, and he holds it tight as we walk to the car. I feel like I never want to let it go.

Another psychiatrist, another prescription. A family meeting:

“Well don’t look at me!” my father says to my mother. “It can’t all be my fault!”

“And how is your arguing helping my brother?” I say. I get up and storm out.

Another postcard memory, another psychiatrist. This one names a personality disorder and asks me if I’ve heard of it. No, I haven’t. It sounds very vague anyway. What does it do? Does it mask memories? Does it inhibit relationships? Does it look like shyness? My brother has a gift for writing. He is a math whiz, a computer geek of the highest order. He belonged to MENSA as a child. He could probably outsmart ten psychiatrists at once. Oh wait, he has.

Then one day my mother called me. “Your brother is sick, but he won’t let me in to his apartment to check on him.” She sounds worried.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I say. But he isn’t fine. My mother calls me again the next day.

“I think something’s terribly wrong,” she says.

At his apartment, he is barely strong enough to let us in. I call 911 within a minute of seeing him. At the ER, the doctor tells me it is touch and go. My brother vomits blood on the floor. The doctor again with a long list of medical terms. My mother and I hug each other and cry. Emergency surgery. I go to see him every day for seven weeks. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t. I wrestle with the system for more mental health and physical supports. The system wins. My brother recovers his physical health, but soon, he won’t let us back into his apartment. I go home instead.

In a moment, the flood tide begins its ebb, and I, 52 years old, am back at my desk looking at the papers in front of me, wondering what happened.  

There is an address for the orphanage; a fifty-year-old description describes a street corner nearby. On my laptop, I zoom in on Google Maps as my stomach flips over. Expectation again runs high. I’m unsure what I think I might see: a little boy sitting alone in the corner? A young mother leaving her baby? If only I could go back in time. Instead, there is a concrete expanse with a few trees. Parked cars line the side of the road. A few people, their faces blurred, frozen in the act of walking by. I am seconds away from calling my brother:

“Do you want to go back to Seoul? I was thinking we could go together?” I would say. “Maybe visit the orphanage or find out more about your family?” I would probably sound excited and nervous. 

There would be silence.

My brother has never talked of going back to Korea. He doesn’t bother with expectation the way I do. What am I hoping for anyway, his family waiting at the airport with signs? Coffee with a long-lost sister-in-law? I seem to have made this about me. I text him instead.

Wanna go for coffee?

He won’t answer right away, and he’ll probably say no until I complain, and then he’ll grudgingly agree. I’ll look forward to it. I can’t expect more than that for now.

Jane Potter is a writer, researcher, and podcaster with Vancouver Opera. She received her MA in Creative and Critical Writing from The University of Gloucestershire and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Most recently, ‘Expectation’, was longlisted for the 2023 CBC Non-Fiction Prize. She also runs a business with her husband, has several writing projects on the go, and two grown children off living their best lives. 

A Neighborhood of Guns

My next-door neighbor has an AR-15. I haven’t seen it. He told me that he owned one, and I believed him. He told me when we were outside, near his garage, near his grill, near his back deck. Our houses are small, under 1000 square feet, and with yards to match. Everything is near.

We had been talking about the latest mass murder. The grass had been green. Maybe it was early fall 2016, or spring 2017. In the months that followed I began to picture the gun within his house, a free-floating image, a long, dark shape, vague, because I didn’t know the details of its body.

In my mind, the gun floats in the air of a room. It moves like a remote control model airplane, or a ghost. It is easy to make the gun big in proportion to the size of my neighbor’s bed or his corridor; the gun is an idea. Like I said, I haven’t seen it or any of my neighbor’s other guns. I haven’t seen his gun case either, not when I’ve been over playing cards, or borrowing his high-speed internet for file transfers, or having Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, it’s possible that I have seen the case, without knowing, my eyes brushing over a piece of furniture. Out of politeness, I don’t examine people’s belongings that carefully as a guest. I avoid the out-of-the-way. Instead I look at what’s on the walls. I concentrate on what’s on the table in front of me.

I trust him with the AR-15—mostly. Concerning his ownership, there’s a small percentage of my thoughts, let’s say 5% out of 100, that doesn’t trust, that’s a question mark. That 5% knows what happens to some people as they get older; their fears can increase as their physical abilities diminish, their despair kicks in as life gets harder.

For many years, I saw him get angry when people drove over his lawn. The anger bordered on rage in the earlier days. He’d shout after cars, striding towards them as they left.

Our part of the street doesn’t have sidewalks, and so cars can park in our front yards, leaving tire grooves and flattened grass. My neighbor is what I would call obsessed with turf. He mows at least twice a week, sometimes three times. While I leave my yard to clover, he puts on fertilizer and weed killer. The differences between our yards are stark, like the time when we were talking at the fence, and there were bees and delicate flies and butterflies on my side, and no insects on his side. You’d think the insects would have crossed over, but that late afternoon, they didn’t. And when twilight came, the lightning bugs lit up my yard, and not his.

Eventually, my neighbor put a series of long 4 x 4s where grass met asphalt. No parking is possible there now. I haven’t heard him yell at cars for a while, only mutter under his breath if they speed by too fast. Because he owns an AR-15, I monitor his emotions more closely than I would otherwise. I also think of him as a possible defense, for when I’m threatened and the police are too far away. I don’t picture him using the AR-15 on my behalf except in an extreme circumstance, but where I live, in Charlottesville, Virginia, there has been more than one extreme circumstance.

On August 12, 2017, I stayed in my home, taking care of a sick pet and also avoiding the human storm, the Nazis and far-right militia gathering downtown for a day of protest. Earlier that year, in March, I had been in London when a driver had killed four people on Westminster Bridge. My friend and I, on the bridge that very day, had missed the attack by a mere hour or two. The reminder of what could happen was fresh in my mind; I woke on August 12 certain that it would attract the mentally unstable, the emotionally sick.

If the militia came to our neighborhood, if they shot into my house, I had someone to call. Our City Manager had already gone to the courts; he had asked for the location of the protest to be moved, despite their permit. He didn’t get what he wanted, but now we knew: The police didn’t believe that they could handle the event where it was.

My neighbor was my back-up plan. He could shoot to scare, to miss. He used to go to a shooting range north of town, hitting targets with the AR-15, improving his aim. At one point, he complained to me that an NRA membership was required at the range. He had come to think that the requirement impinged on his freedom of choice. He had problems with the NRA; he didn’t want to be forced to support them, just to shoot at targets. Hitting targets, however, was what he enjoyed about the AR-15. “It’s fun,” he said. “It’s a great gun for that.” I didn’t ask if they were bull’s eye or human-shaped. He had a bull’s eye for his axe throwing—a wooden stand—that has since disappeared.

Would I rather my neighbor kill someone who was attacking me, rather than for me to die? Yes. I can say this and still lobby for stricter gun laws.

My neighbor usually votes Democratic, maybe always, but he doesn’t identify with any political party. He is anti-racist; he tells me about confronting racism when slurs arise within his friends and his colleagues. He has criticized me for trying to preserve a statue of Lewis and Clark, whose families were both slave-holders.

He is one man, single, 50, with an AR-15.

Who else on my street has an AR-15? I assume that there is another one, maybe many more, and definitely other guns.

It is daunting, the question of where else the guns live. In particular, I want to know the mental state of each person on my street who owns a semi-automatic weapon. I can monitor my neighbor, but not the unknown. In general, the owners of war-grade guns are a disordered militia, the opposite of what the Constitution protects.

My neighbor just began mowing as I write. I am getting up to shut the window, to reduce the sound to a muted roar. The grass had already been perfect, so thick it was difficult to walk in, but not taller than the ankle.

I can walk from the outer wall of my house to the outer wall of his house in five strides; from my bedroom I can sometimes hear his roommate’s TV. His roommate suffers from hearing loss, though he is not that old, also around fifty.

My street is demographically varied. There are modest, though over-priced, houses, like the ones on my end of the street. There is subsidized housing at the other end, with houses of millionaires scattered within the mix.

The month before the Nazi invasion, in July 2017, a gang murder happened at that other end, on the river, a ten to fifteen-minute walk from my house. A young man was killed by machete and knife. Like the AR-15, the gang was identified by two letters, a slash, and two numbers. I’m afraid of that gang. I don’t want to invoke them by forming those letters and numbers.

As a girl, I knew from an early age, like most girls knew, that one bad encounter could turn me into prey. In the decades that followed, I’ve had someone break into my house and wake me in my bed, pressing me down. I’ve had a handgun pulled on me at a tourist spot; I’ve had a stranger beat on my door drunk past midnight, yelling, shaking the walls.

On the subway in New York, I once saw the outline of a machine gun in a straw bag; the man holding the bag was seated directly across from me, his hand resting on the gun. Is it legal? I think it’s legal, I thought. When the train stopped, I got off, a few stops early.

In Charlottesville, a long, long time ago, outside a community center, the police motioned for me to hide behind their car. Their long guns came out. They pointed them at suspected drug dealers, across a long field. Then the police burst from behind the car, running towards the suspects, rifles in hand.

I navigate the world of guns without a gun, but I am capable of calling for one to arrive. The police are a delivery service of guns.

Still, they have never saved me, they’ve only taken down the details. I fought the intruder off me and then he ran, jumping out the window. I lunged at the guy trying to get my money, my hands going for the gun grip; he wrenched the pistol away and opened the bullet chamber. There were no bullets, only places for bullets. “Joke,” he said.

I received self-defense training from the police, twice, and they told me that, when threatened, most people freeze, some run, and a very few fight. I am in the minority--Immediate rage, immediate action, few, if any, words in my head.

In March 2018, I participated in the March for Our Lives protest, in support of gun control laws and ending school shootings.

I am an experimental filmmaker. In December 2018, I finished a short film called “The Etiquette of American Massacres,” which showed at the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 2019, and at 516 Arts in Albuquerque in 2020. The film used a painted bridge in Charlottesville as a metaphor. Decade after decade, the bridge keeps getting repainted with messages. It is thick with multi-colored layers of paint, layer after layer of tributes, some of them about gun violence and loss. The layers, like gun massacres, like our collective grief and trauma, keep coming.

The bridge is located a ten-minute drive from my neighborhood, near the University of Virginia’s Art Department on Culbreth Road.

I had hoped that my film would cause a positive change, that the metaphor would bring a few people a deeper understanding of the day-to-day impact of massacres. The bridge would influence those people to help eliminate gun violence. Through the film, the bridge would counter school shootings, erase them, stop the layers.

The opposite happened. A school shooting came to the bridge.

On November 13, 2022, a student shot and killed three of his fellow students: Devin Chandler, D'Sean Perry, and Lavel Davis Jr. Two others were wounded and hospitalized. The killings happened on Culbreth Road, on a bus at night, a bus parked a minute or so from the bridge, the end of a school trip to Washington to see a play about Emmett Till. Chandler, Perry, and Davis were members of the UVA football team, handsome Black men with genuine smiles and an obvious love of life and of people. Their faces remain beacons in photographs, shining light on the three voids of their absence.

I did not help to erase future massacres; massacres stalked my path, followed in my footsteps, as they stalk and follow every American now.

The bridge was painted with the men’s names and the numbers of their football jerseys. So far, no one has painted over their layer.

I ask the same questions as ever: Should I go to the school? Should I go to the movie theatre? Should I walk down the street or stay inside?

Is that person crazy? Does that person have a semi-automatic gun?

The machine gun had weight in the straw bag; but is it possible that it was a water gun?

I imagine the United States as a house on my street. The head of that house, the President, is on his way to lecture Great Britain about Northern Ireland. He has to step over the dead bodies of children to get to the front door. Their murderers, the ones who are still alive, are locked in the basement; AR-15s are everywhere else, and some can be found in the basement as well, with guards. “Follow our example of freedom and democracy,” the President tells the House of Great Britain, as he tells the world. Back in his house, more children are shot.

I’m lying to myself if I say I live across the street. I live in that house. I just haven’t accepted the truth.

Alexandria Searls is an experimental filmmaker whose work on gun violence has shown at the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival and 516 Arts (an art gallery) in New Mexico. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia, and she has recently been published in Progenitor, Cagibi, and Assignment Literary Magazine.  

Talking to Death

I hit a car in the Whole Foods parking lot while my father lay dying at a residential hospice, and now the bills have come due: the work of grief still owed, and an actual bill on paper for a lot of money.

Four days into my father’s vigil I was beyond tired and went out to pick up a few groceries. I backed out of my space in the crowded lot, looked over my shoulder and saw a woman driving a white Honda down my aisle. I pulled back in to let her pass, pulled out again and heard the sickening crunch of metal on metal. Mysteriously, the white car was now behind me. I got out to face the driver.

“You hit my car!” the woman declared in high-pitched agitation.

I stared at her, dazed with exhaustion.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “it was an accident. I thought you passed me.”

“You hit my car!” she echoed, even more shrill.

It’s a miracle I haven’t hit more cars. My brain is mud. I probably shouldn’t even be driving.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, ever-present tears rising.  

She scribbled down my insurance information and copied every letter of print on my driver’s license down to the color of my eyes. She demanded I hold my cell phone up as she called to assure I wasn’t giving her a false number.

Who has lied to you? Will someone yell at you, demanding to know why you weren’t more careful?  I studied the stress lines in her face.

This is taking way too long.

Her driver’s side door was perpendicular to the rear of my car, the point of impact. There was only a small dent and no apparent damage to my rental, a red box like car whose name I could never remember. I liked the red car because I could find it. In the previous month when Dad was in intensive care, I seemed to always have a silver or white car that was immediately swallowed into anonymity by the massive hospital parking structures.

 I guessed $300 to hammer the dent out, knowing the cost is usually double the obvious. Certainly under my $1,000 deductible; there would be no point in reporting to insurance.

Deeming my dad to have no chance of meaningful recovery, the doctors had released him from all the medications that kept him alive. It was predicted his heart would last 2-3 days at most. The watch had now stretched to four long days and nights and I wasn’t about to miss his sacred moment of passage.

“I’m sorry, I really need to go,” I told her. “You have all my information.”

The woman scanned my car for anything else to write down. She was wiry, shorter than me, her narrow face set with determination. It dawned on me she didn’t intend to let me out.

“My dad is dying,” I finally admitted, tears spilling freely. “He will probably die today. I promise you, I’m good for the expenses. Please let me out.”

 “OK, you can go,” she said warily. “We’ll settle it between us.” She got back in her car and unblocked me. “Bless you,” she muttered. My shoulders dropped in relief.

And so I left her, “As I have left all my lovers.” The phrase came unbidden, stuck in a deep groove in my head since the sleepless night before.

It was a haunting line from an epic poem, A Woman is Talking to Death, by Judy Grahn, first published in the seventies. More than a poem it was a manifesto, read aloud at gatherings or between lesbian couples. “My lover’s teeth are white geese flying above me,” we would recite, “My lover’s muscles are rope ladders under my hands, we are the river of life, and the fat of the land.” It was art that spoke the word lesbian many times, helped define a new culture.

In the center of the poem the narrator leaves the scene of an accident because she’s “A queer, unemployed woman,” sees herself invisible, without credibility. The driver in the accident was a black man. It was not his fault. After the narrator left, she learned he was severely beaten by the police. She is sorry, full of regret.

I’d no premonition about an accident when the poem first whispered to me on the hospice cot at 3am. I was the one who stayed the night because Dad didn’t want to be alone, because I’d come to the east coast from California, because I could. I was happy for the time with just us two. I could summon the stamina because I knew it wouldn’t be long. Death was already holding Dad’s hand, hanging on each labored breath.

At three a.m. he had called me softly from my cot, “Sarah, help.”

“What help do you need?” His head was covered by the cloth he now kept over his face all the time.

“I’m alone,” he said. Tears rolled out from under the edges of the cloth.

“Yes,” I said. “You are. And I’m here too.” I took his hand.

“Hey Death, Ho Death,” I chanted silently, as Grahn’s poem unwound back to me its many verses. It was still loaded in my long-term memory, along with “Charge of the Light Brigade,” from seventh grade English.

In the morning I googled the poem, read it for the first time in decades, letting the intensity of Lesbian nation resonate back through me. Beyond the title, the text had nothing to do with my father. I’d never shared that poem with him. He didn’t want to know anything about lesbian culture back then, wanted it to all go away. For the mistakes of those years, I’d forgiven him.  Aside from the title, While Talking to Death, it was Judy Grahn’s story alone.

I sensed, rather than remembered the route back to hospice, driving with utmost caution. Back at hospice, my two sisters were still sitting quietly at their posts.

“How did it go?” my middle sister, Emily, asked.

“OK,” I said, setting down the grocery bag and collapsing on the bedside cot. “I’m tired.”

Emily nodded in affirmation. We all knew the word ‘tired’ was just a placeholder for an alert state of exhaustion so profound it begged new vocabulary.

“How’s Dad?”

“The same.”

I pulled two pillows over my head and tried to sleep. Maybe if I’d told my sister about the accident, she might have helped me think more rationally. I didn’t want to give my family one more thing to worry about. I wanted to be a rock, stay up night after night, do what was needed. I didn’t want anyone to suspect I was coming unglued.

My cell phone rang several times. I ignored it.

After a restless ten minutes I abandoned sleep and checked the messages. Both a police officer and my rental car company had been calling. The other driver had reported me to everyone she could think of.  

Oy.

The police officer had a British accent, unusual anywhere for an American cop, even stranger in North Carolina. My dad lay breathing heavily in what we assumed was the beginnings of the death rattle.

“What is your local address, mum?”  

Had he really said ‘mum’?

“I’m from California, sir. I’m living here in the local hospice facility with my dad. He’s dying.”

“Ah, so sorry to hear that,” his words clipped, yet his tone belied sympathy.

“It’s important that you come back here, Mrs. Young, so we can get your statement for a full report.”

 “I can’t. It’s a small amount of damage,” I assured him. “I’m not worried. You can handle it between the two of you.”

“Well, I’m not so sure it’s a small amount of damage.”

  His words made no sense, but the melody of his accent was soothing, as if he were reading me a story. He took my information over the phone as I rocked in the wooden, old-style rocker on the hospice porch.

The day after the accident an orderly, an older African-American man, noticed I was spent beyond the edge. He opened a little used room, wheeled in an extra bed and encouraged me to sleep. It was the bath-room, the room where they bring the dying who want a bath. He said the staff often slept there when working extra shifts.

I slept for hours and when I woke I had surrendered. It was not for me to claim front row seating at Death’s passage, to think I was needed for my dad to let go. I started sleeping at my mom’s house. My brother-in-law, a better non-sleeper than I, took over the night shift at hospice.

A couple of days later I asked another orderly about opening up the bath-room for one of us to sleep there again. She said no, quite sure no one had ever unlocked that room for family members before.

After eight nights it was clear that Dad was not going to leave with the cymbal’s clash of another heart attack, but the slow, mournful chant of his organs gradually closing down, his body wasting from no food or water. On the ninth day it seemed certain that Death was only inches away and I spent the night at hospice again. I woke suddenly as a loud croak burst from Dad’s throat. Maybe it’s the Death frog, not the Death rattle we’re waiting for. I was less reverent now, impatient, bone weary of my young daughter’s daily plea, “When are you coming home?”

I sat one hand holding his and the other hand on his chest. In between long breath apneas I felt the slowing of his heart, like a stream formed after a flash rain dwindling to a trickle over the rocks. I breathed with him. This is why I’m here. His body was coming to rest gently, as if landing on a feather bed. Suddenly a loud wrenching cough twisted through him, and his breathing returned fast and rough as if he were saying, “No. I see where this is headed, and I’m not going there, yet.”

By the tenth day Dad had burrowed so deeply into himself we decided to leave him alone at night, certain now our constant presence was hindering the process. Death needed alone time with Dad.

The morning after his first solo night, my youngest sister, Liz, texted: Just talked to the nurse. Dad is alive, had a “pretty good night.”

Me: Ah, that’s sad

My sister: Yes. Life is ineffably weird.

I had to look up ineffably.

“Ho and ho, poor Death, only the arrogant invent a quick and meaningful end for themselves, of their own choosing.”  

I plumbed Grahn’s poem looking for hidden wisdom. On night fifteen I slept at hospice again, but not because I believed anymore “this was it.” While I knew Dad couldn’t live indefinitely without food and water, I had stopped expecting Death. I stayed because my middle sister believed we should, and she wanted my company.

We sat as the animal-rasp pant of the last stage began. We ate Doritos from the vending machine at 1am, threw them at each other, laughed hilariously at our attempts to cover the smell of my father’s decay with air freshener, strew rose petals over his bed, embraced the not quite human sound that arced from Dad’s throat. I stroked his hair, watched his face change from young to middle-aged to old and back again. My sister and I fell asleep.

At 4:30 am I bolted up, jarred awake by the absence of harsh breathing. I woke my sister and we draped ourselves over either side of Dad’s shrunken body as the breath finally left him with a gentle sigh. The sacred moment arrived as Death kissed Dad’s warm brow.

At that moment it seemed this had always been the plan. Maybe it was Death who had laid the cloth over dad’s face, so they could have the long private chat needed to let go of 87 years well lived. Death, who needed fifteen days to make the point his business with my dad was none of ours. Death, who likes attention, waiting for the carpet of red rose petals we laid out for him.  Death, who likes to slip in un-noticed, waiting until we were relaxed, laughing, no longer poised grim and sorrowful.

That same night, Obama would be elected president for the second time. After the polls closed, my sister’s Rabbi, her friends and mom’s friends would gather at her house for the first of many circles of remembrance.

After the ceremony I finally bought a ticket home.

I returned home full of grief and body pain. We sat Shiva for seven days, a beautiful ritual, and Dad’s spirit stayed with us. But work and parenting and the rest of life revved back up with no sentimentality and I had to steal time to remember. After having sat for fifteen days with such exquisite attention to Dad’s death, I found myself bereft and bewildered that he was gone.

Three months later, a packet arrived from Avis with ten black and white photos of a severely damaged white Honda, for which I was being billed $5,000.00. The photos showed a buckled front hood and smashed right headlight suggesting a full-on front-end collision.

Clearly the parking lot woman was trying to pin another accident on me. I was being scammed! Friends echoed my outrage. I emailed my insurance company investigator detailed diagrams depicting the event. She agreed I couldn’t have caused the damage.

What kind of person would take advantage of such a vulnerable time to cheat someone?

“You’ll defend me, right?  When do you tell the rental company I’m a victim of insurance fraud?”

“We’re done once we deny the claim. You have no witnesses. You didn’t confirm damages or return for the police report.”

Because I was busy, talking to Death.

“What did the woman say when you interviewed her?”

“She was vague, didn’t want to talk.”

“Doesn’t that prove she’s covering something up?” It dawned on me the investigator might believe I was the one not telling the truth. My aching neck muscles tightened. Like in the poem, “There is no witness,” not even me.

“We can pay the claim and it goes on your record as your fault, or we can deny it. It’s up to you.”

A small kernel of doubt started to form under my skin, followed me in my business of the day. What if I was wrong? What if I were so deep in conversation with Death I missed a significant accident?

I sent for the accident report from the North Carolina DMV. I pulled my children’s matchbox cars out of the closet to practice all the potential accident permutations, the cars solid in my hands. A new possibility emerged. If after passing me the woman wanted my spot she might have quickly backed up behind me. At high speed I could have backed directly into the front of her car and caused that damage. Yet what about the dent I saw on her front left fender? Or did I?

All I knew for sure was my dad might die any moment and I had to get back to his room. I had dashed across the country, left a workshop I was leading, left my children for an indeterminate amount of time to be at his side.

Maybe it was Death who sent the anxious woman to block me in at Whole Foods to keep me from driving recklessly into a much more serious accident ahead.

“Hey Death, ho Death, We left as we left all our lovers, much too soon to get the real loving done.”

Four months later my dad’s altar is now cluttered with kid’s unfinished homework and other ordinary stuff. I flip through the accident report finally arrived from the North Carolina DMV, stare at the diagrams the anxious woman had drawn for the British police officer. The pictures depict how I swerved out of my spot into the front of her car and returned to my parking lot space where she blocked me in. Just like the matchbox cars.

Tears streaked the accident repot as I stared into the altar photos of Dad with his childhood dog, as a young father, holding the one fish he ever caught, celebrating his last, 87th birthday.

Dad, why are you still so gone?

I’m not a person capable of missing an accident. So many things I’ve been so sure I knew. And about grief, I’ve known least of all.

There’s been nothing in my well organized and planned life to prepare me for this series of events: intensive care, the Death watch, missing an accident, death itself. I’ve tried to be a dutiful griever, scheduling time for feelings and tears. Yet I am still pinned to the floor by the brutal shock of loss.

 My father is dying… I say to the woman in the lot. Did you block me in so you could hold me while I sob about how hard it is to watch him waste away, how ready I am for him to be done, how unprepared I am for him to be gone?

“Yes,” she says lovingly, no longer my villain.

I didn’t like that woman, let alone want her to touch me. Death has been slowly turning my heart inside out, as painful a stretch as the tiny opening of the cervix widening for a baby’s head.

I hit a car and left. Not only do I feel bad about it but the bill has come due and I have to pay a lot of money. My shoulder, back, and neck still hurt and it’s not just a metaphor. There’s no list to bring any of this to a close. My father’s death is my first deep loss and I’m adrift. It is time to stop talking to Death and listen. Just listen.

Sarah Young is a California based, Queer writer, who writes regularly for education-based journals on her work in culturally responsive and anti-racist education. This is her first published piece of personal memoir. “Talking to Death,” interweaves themes of her father’s death in hospice, a mysterious car accident, and reflections on Judy Grahn’s seminal poem on Lesbian experience, “While Talking to Death.”