August 2009

Before I Sleep

August 27, 2009

Yeah. I’ve gone dark. Turtled up, stuck my head in the sand, shut out the noise. My dad’s dead, there’s work to do, so much work to do, and meanwhile, there’s a forest fire raging just over the hill, spilling ash and burnt pine needles on our doorstep and we don’t know if it will cross the highway and chase us out of here and the sense that life needs my attention more urgently than any impulse to narration is overwhelming me and yeah.

I have to focus on just coping.

Maybe just for another few days, I don’t know. As long as it takes me to stop feeling overwhelmed.

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The Long Goodbye

August 22, 2009

My children crashed back into my life last night like a pair of drunken sailors on shore leave and after an evening and morning of angry carousing (hugging Mommy, yelling at Mommy, demanding candy, ignoring Mommy, hugging Mommy again) things have started to settle down and I am finally moving into a space where I will be [...]

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Smudge

August 20, 2009

Here’s the thing: there’s a smudge. There’s a smudge on the floor where my father died. The smudge is him, or what’s left of him. What was left of him, after the coroner took his remains away. The circumstances of his death – or rather, the circumstances of the recovery of his body – were [...]

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Haunted, As The Minutes Drag

August 17, 2009

I’m tired. So tired. This process is so long and so hard and so taxing on the heart and soul (although, I know, I know, so necessary and in some ways so good, because this is his last gift to me, this opportunity to take one last journey with him, and to grow up, to [...]

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Time Enough For Telling

August 14, 2009

I haven’t been able to narrate, but not for want of stories. It’s just that, the story right now is so overwhelming. And what passages in the story are not so overwhelming (the moment when, for example, I laughed out loud at my mother and the funeral home assistant for dithering over whether to quantify [...]

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Here Be Monsters

August 11, 2009

Today, I went into my father’s home, a thing that I was afraid to do. I don’t have words yet to explain that fear, nor do I have words to explain – to narrate – the experience of overcoming that fear. This is such a complicated story. Or, perhaps, it’s not. A father, well-loved, dies, [...]

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Miles To Go

August 9, 2009

Yesterday, we drove – my mother, my sister and I – through the hot, dusty valley toward my father’s home, and we fought. A wrong word here, a raised eyebrow there, a tinder box of raw, snapping nerves and the flicker of a hint of a suggestion of an accusation, a tiny lick of angry [...]

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Voices In The Dark

August 7, 2009

The writer in me wants to narrate my grief. The writer in me wants to remove myself from the muck and mire and pain of navigating this dark valley and rise above it and float, weightless, a disembodied voice that just describes the action, that is removed from the action, that just describes the woman [...]

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Into The Dark

August 7, 2009

My dad died. My dad died, and I can’t even say, he died yesterday, or he died on Wednesday, because I don’t know, I don’t know, nobody knows, I only know that I have to fly home, now, right now, and talk to police – police – about when and where and how they found [...]

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It’s My Motherhood, And I’ll Celebrate It If I Want To

August 6, 2009

When I saw the headline, I rolled my eyes. “The Case Against Having Kids.” WHATEVER. Haven’t we heard this all before? That children are overrated, that parents have superiority complexes, that motherhood is an epic social scam, that children are more environmentally destructive than SUVs and air travel and Crocs combined, that life is just [...]

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