Posts Tagged: karen berry portland oregon
Listening to Joni Mitchell in the car – Part One
I’m aware that there are women in this world who don’t care for Joni Mitchell. They’re wrong, to be clear, but today–or perhaps eventually–I’ll address those of us who love Joni. The key word here is “eventually.” First, let’s go on a few road trips.
Port Townsend, Washington
I just wrapped up six weeks of various travels. First, I went to Port Townsend with two friends, Shannon and Katrina, for a writing retreat. In case you’re wondering, they are both writers, and in need of retreat. I drove up the Kitsap Peninsula with Katrina in my old car that still has a CD player. I’d grabbed a stack of options for listening, and asked Katrina to choose what we’d listen to. In there was one of my favorite car-trip CDs, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. I assumed that at some point, my friend would choose Hejira, but she passed it by in favor of Bluegrass, and then of course the best car trip CD of them all, which is Paul Simon’s Graceland.
I allowed a small doubt to percolate in my psyche. Was it possible that Katrina didn’t like Joni Mitchell? I knew such women existed, but had never thought I’d harbor such an individual in my cadre of friends. To be on the safe side, I cautiously sidestepped the entire topic of Joni. I didn’t want to stir the smooth waters of the writing retreat, which was a peaceful, restorative experience that produced progress on the short story to which I have devoted my entire retired life so far.
And there were deer.
Florence, Oregon
My next trip was to Florence, Oregon, where April and I revisited a VRBO in historic Florence on the Siuslaw River, where we’d stayed at a few years ago. I took a really stressful route to Florence because my phone told me to get off I5 at Halsey. As I hair-pinned and white-knuckled my way through the hinterlands of Oregon, music was not an option. I focused all my attention on the road and my white-hot anger at my iPhone for leading me into this mountainous, rural, stunningly beautiful hellscape. I was going to the COAST, I didn’t need all this NATURAL BEAUTY, I just needed to get to the COAST to enjoy the natural beauty THERE.
At some point, my bladder near to bursting, I stopped at a Chevron and said, “I’ll gladly buy something but can I have your restroom key first?” The young clerk handed me a literal Hula Hoop with a key attached. I bought a Poppi. It was far too sweet but I drank it anyway. Poodle Creek Road finally delivered me to the highway I should have been taking in the first place, which I followed just long enough to be stopped for hours by a terrible (fatality) accident. I was four miles from the VRBO and hopelessly stalled. I turned off the car and listened to The Fine Young Cannibals, an old CD I bought right before the trip. It was still the banger I remembered from the years I’d put it on and my then-husband would groan because “Not again, Karen.” I don’t think The Raw and the Cooked, is responsible for him leaving, but “She Drives Me Crazy” might have been a factor.
The time in Florence was fantastic once I finally got there. April and I had fun of the type we’ve honed over fifty years of friendship. Great meals, some shopping and gallery-going, a ridiculously short hike to the Cape Perpetua Lookout, the Yachats rock shop (if you’ve been you know what a wild place that is). April prods me into moving, which is a good thing, and also a little humbling. At the Port Townsend writing retreat, my more fit companions took daily walks and came home flushed and happy. I just sat there, admiring the deer and writing. In Florence, April made me walk. It’s like she wants to keep me around for a few more years or something. I ate my weight in delicious seafood to circumvent her ambitions for my longevity.
Federal Way, Washington
My next trip was up to Federal Way to see Sue at her charming lakeside cottage for some relaxing days of conversation, aggressive thrifting, and crafts. Sue is an accomplished art quilter who crackles with creative energy and bursts with talent. When I visit her, her artistry feels contagious. So even though I have zero crafting talent, I brought a tiny case with some small craft-type materials in it that I’ve been carrying around for twelve years. I swear one of these days I will finish something.
The weather granted us only one sunny day down by the lake, where I read Sue the one short story to which I have apparently devoted my entire retirement so far, and I found all the places where it needed work.
The other days were cold, almost blustery. We kept ourselves busy with days of thrifting, good food, cocktails, and a Ricky Gervais series to binge watch in the evenings while we crafted (if you’re wondering, I embroidered a small part of a praying mantis on a piece of muslin. Go me!).
One day, Sue laid out material groups for a dozen quilts with my input, which (from me) sounded mostly like, “Do you have a stripe you could put with it?” or “Do you have a check you could put with it?” because I love adding stripes and checks to florals. My suggestions were sometimes greeted with “All wrong!” or “Yuck” or “Hmmmm” or “That might work!” or even “Perfect!” I’d send her into her quilting room to look for a specific color, and at one point she said, “I don’t have a fabric store in here.” Then she came out with a bunch of choices and said, “Okay, I do have a fabric store in here.”
Quilters, get set to drool.
It was glorious fun.
This trip was I5 all the way north and south, so I brought a stack of CDs, and many were Joni. For the Roses, Blue, Hejira, Ladies of the Canyon, Clouds, and Court and Spark. I decided to listen in chronological order, which brings me to the actual point of all this meandering introduction. I’m going to talk about Joni. A lot. Prepare yourselves, because I get personal. But because this got so long, and I intend to talk about these CDs in depth, I’m going to stop here and return to Joni another day.
That’s all.
“Karen, you Have a hint about your mother!” No kidding, Ancestry.
Why does Ancestry send me hints about my mother?
No, seriously. Ancestry is clueless as far as I’m concerned. It shows me as married to my dead high school sweetheart, and I have zero idea how to change any of that. My super-intelligent cousins on my birth father’s side are whizzes at genealogy websites and could straighten me out in five minutes, but how stupid would I feel, asking them? They are all STEM geniuses and I only have a shaky grasp on multiplication at this point (and I still say “times tables” and “take away” and “carry”, which causes my daughter to shake her head in consternation when I try to help my grandson with his math homework, and do they even still call it math?).
Anyway.
Clearly I helped myself liberally to the other side of the gene pool, where calculators were a fact of life, and not those expensive programmable calculators used by my more intelligent classmates in my rare college physics classes. The free calculators you used to get at the bank.
But back to my mother.
I thought of Mom this morning for the funniest reason: a taste in my mouth. My memory is often jogged by tastes and smells, and today when I gulped down the handful of prescriptions (three) and supplements (seven) that I take to keep my heart beating and the like, the flavor of one brought back a spill of sense memory. I accidentally bought the chewable B12. When I add water to swallow down this mass of pills, most of which probably just give me expensive urine, I taste that chewable vitamin taste.
This brought me right back to being five or six years old and finding a brown bottle of chewable vitamins in my mother’s bathroom. I was into everything as a child. In her notes, Mom called me snoopy and I guess that’s fair, though I prefer to think of myself as curious. Anyway, I opened this bottle and started eating these vitamins, which had a flavor close enough to candy to keep me going.
I don’t know what type of vitamins these were, or how many I ate. I also told on myself. I took the bottle to Mom. She didn’t take me to get my stomach pumped or anything of the sort. She had me drink a few glasses of Kool-Aid made her way: one packet of Kool-Aid and half the recommended sugar. We drank this to mask the sulfur flavor of artesian well water. I drank some Kool-Aid and nothing happened and life went on.
That was how it was in South Dakota. We were Midwestern children in the sixties, a hardier breed with great teeth from all the naturally occurring fluoride. We survived.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I also wouldn’t want any other mother. Ancestry might have hints, but I doubt Ancestry quite appreciates the balance of my mother as I do. She could be impossible, but she was my favorite person in the universe until I had children of my own. She was mercurial, curious, fascinating, frustrating. I am baffled by how she let me down in my adolescence, but she always loved me, a big old furnace of love.
So here’s a hint about my mother, Ancestry. Mom had her first child at age seventeen. An emotional, intelligent young woman left college, which she started early because she graduated high school at age fifteen, to become a mother. I understand why she felt ripped off. Her adolescence ended with motherhood. I don’t think she was well-equipped to help me navigate mine. She put me on the pill and put me out at age fifteen to make it on my own, a weird remedy or echo or repetition of what happened to her.
I also understand why she grieved when I had my first child at 22. She saw my young motherhood as a curtain going down on my life. As she watched me, I know she felt sorrow, anger, helplessness. But she was resigned to it. She brushed her hands together, considered me done for, and moved any ambitions she had for me over to my childless siblings. There, hope for a meaningful life remained.
A slight sea change.
Over time, Mom realized that I hadn’t exactly shriveled up and died. I’d just reproduced. She also felt a little defensive. Why was I making motherhood look so easy? Why did I do it without complaint or anguish over what I’d given up? I didn’t explain to her that much of this was a facade. Motherhood is a monumental struggle, and my marriage was a lonely, lonely place. I survived with the help of fierce friends like Jennifer and Karen and Sue and Bob and Debi. These people provided the companionship and emotional support missing from my marriage.
But here’s another hint about my mother, Ancestry. There’s a part of this of which I am not proud. I wanted Mom to think it was easy for me. As children, Mom let us know that motherhood had ruined her life. This was a steady drumbeat throughout my earliest years. “Never have children. They ruin your life.” “Parenthood is pouring from an empty pitcher. It uses you up.” “I could have had a life, if not for you kids. You took everything from me.” I heard this stuff all the time, and felt tremendous guilt until about age eleven.
That’s when it hit me that I hadn’t had any say in the matter. I began to smirk, roll my eyes, and yes, talk back. I actually said, “I didn’t ask to be born.” Which was terrifically snotty, and my brother and sister would look at me like, oh god shuttup Karen, you’re enraging her. But I figured out early that Mom’s truth should not have been spoken to us kids.
My petty revenge.
So when I was a mom, I wanted to shame my mother for how much she railed against motherhood when she was angry. I wanted to show her up. I wanted to glide and adjust and care for and laugh at the hard parts and make it look like a breeze. And I did, until my marriage fell apart. And I fell apart. And I needed help, and let me stress this, as a young woman with a high school diploma and three kids to raise, one of whom needed massive orthopedic surgery during the year a nasty divorce was unspooling, I needed so much help.
My then-husband had taken control of all our bank accounts. When I asked my parents for the funds to retain a divorce lawyer, I apologized. Mom said, “Honey, you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to write this check.” She happily dashed it off and sent it. This is one of the many times my mother helped me. Mom showed UP. Two decades of financial help and encouragement and emails and phone calls and laughter. All my visits up to Bainbridge with my girls, and her delight at seeing them. Each daughter has specific memories of a grandmother they loved, and who loved them with no reservation.
Was she perfect? Is anyone perfect? Of course not.
Perfection is not part of the human condition.
I’ve done a great deal of thinking and writing about my teen years. When we moved to Montana, I was twelve years old. My life went off track when I was sent out into the wide world at age thirteen to navigate a dangerous environment. My sister and I ran with a rough crowd. I’ve examined all that, not to understand Mom, but to understand myself. I asked hard questions to ascertain the damage done, and heal it enough to live a better life. It would have been so easy to find myself trapped in sadness and anger. My mother was supposed to guide me, help me. She didn’t.
But I had this amazing experience while taking a memoir class with my dear friend Katrina. I wrote a piece that still hasn’t found a home called “The Corner of Skidmore and Haight.” It is an unsparing look at beginning of my second marriage and birth of my first child. Because I took this class from the esteemed and brilliant Martha Gies, it’s full of journalist-level reporting on Portland of 1981-82. Martha made me research the details of North Portland, the arrival of gangs, police misbehavior. But that’s a backdrop for the real struggle, which was two young people, aged 22 and 24, trying to figure out how to be married parents.
In this piece of writing, I played much of it for laughs, because that’s how I handle pain. But the pain is there. Whenever things at the corner of Skidmore and Haight felt hopeless, we survived. How? It wasn’t clear to me until Katrina critiqued the piece. Ever-so-gently, she said, “What impresses me is how over and over again, your mom and dad showed up and helped.”
The proof is right there on the page. My parents might have foundered in my teens, but from my twenties on, they were right there, helping. Over and over again. And they continued to do that until they both finally died.
I don’t think I thanked them nearly enough.
I was in my early sixties when I took this class. I’d been doing quite a bit of examination of my history, trying to understand exactly who I am before I leave this world. Katrina’s words showed me that I had a choice to make. I could focus my attention on the chaotic decade of my young life when Mom had no idea what to do with me, and whatever I needed was lost in the turmoil of her own unhappy life. Or I could shift my focus and appreciate what she did for me after I left adolescence.
You know, it’s like I finally grew the hell up.
So here’s another hint about my mother, Ancestry. There’s no good, no bad, no right, no wrong. There’s just Mom. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I miss you every single day. And thank you for all the days and ways you were there. There are no words for how much I love you.
Poem: Our Book of Delights by Arielle Hebert
This poem arrived in email like a gift, and I love every speck of it, the rain on the flora, that tiny bow on the end of a thin silver braid, the idea that “kindness is the only weapon worth wielding,” love on its wild zigzagging path, all of it. So I thought I’d share it.
All our windows open, steady drizzle on the kudzu’s
broad backs, birds making their music like this isn’t North
Carolina, but a tropical rainforest, and we’re somewhere
deep in the palms and vines. But it’s our own ferns and fiddleheads,
evergreens and sugar maples, trillium blooming, or on the verge,
for no one in particular, for everyone in particular, as if to say,
Go on, enjoy it. Rain, flowers, time on earth. The apple I
hand-picked at the market. Braiding my friend’s hair, silver
in my fingers, how I tie a tiny bow gently at the end
just as the sun comes out. I want to believe this is true power, that
kindness is the only weapon worth wielding, and I wield it,
land blow after blow to my enemies, without mercy.
Mercy. Bring the wine. Set the table for surprise guests.
No matter the plates don’t match and we’ve run out of chairs,
only that there is bread and laughter, enough to go around.
Parades, in spite of—Pride, in spite of—Please, someone answer all my
questions about hummingbirds and the little futures we are
reaching for, the ones rising above the horizon right before our eyes,
such intoxicating visions, our truest selves, with nothing to hide. Go on.
Trust the child standing barefoot in the rain, her face turned
up to the sky. Trust that crescendo building in your chest is your
voice, singing what you need to hear, the stone-heavy echo
welled from darkest springs. Go ahead. Open the door. No one can
explain how to love the world. It doesn’t happen all at once. But
you can start here. Tonight, with yourself. Someone near you. Let it go
zigzagging town to town. Look, there. It’s already coming back around.
Copyright © 2026 by Arielle Hebert. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 15, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets. https://poets.org/poem/our-book-delights
I Hate Horoscopes at Defenestration
Funny fake horoscopes…
…are live today!
I wrote these from a prompt, part of the TwoSylvias poetry advent calendar. I think they are hilarious, and I’m glad that the anonymous gatekeepers of Internet humor at Defenestration agreed with me.
Here’s a link:
Shopping at the Used Man Store
“A Poet” by Sherwood Anderson, and short story thoughts.
If I could be brave enough and live long enough I could crawl inside the life of every man, woman and child in America. After I had gone within them I could be born out of them. I could become something the like of which has never been seen before. We would see then what America is like.
–Sherwood Anderson
Thank you, Mr. Anderson.
That’s a prose poem in the public domain. I think he tried to do this exact thing with Winesburg, Ohio, often summed up as portraits of Southern Grotesques. It was not hailed when it arrived, but remains in the canon, and I love it, partly because I guess I enjoy grotesquerie, and I love books that challenge what and how we write. This odd book does that so well.
I’m going to write about writing, which I don’t do that often. But first, I need to write about reading, because reading is a crucial aspect of writing, isn’t it?
I’ve been reading so many short stories lately, including the collected Deborah Eisenberg. I’m working on a collection by Katherine Anne Porter, and I’m dipping into the collected short stories of Mavis Gallant. She is wonderful. She makes me laugh right out loud. Her collected stories are the size of a Bible and I look forward to a long, leisurely read of them. Then I might return to Flannery O’Connor. Yes, I know. All women, and some of them seem to have faded into obscurity. Please don’t tell me to read Raymond Carver because I have and he’s good but he’s not doing what I want to be doing. Thanks in advance.
I’m just finishing up a short story collection by Katherine Mansfield, a short story writer of whom Elizabeth Bowen wrote, “Born into the English traditions of prose narrative, she neither revolted against these nor broke with then; she surpassed them.” Bowen also wrote of her, “Her imagination kindled unlikely matter: she was to alter for good and all what goes to make a story.” Italics are mine. I agree.
I’m learning more than how to write a story. I’ve learned more about daily life before cars from her stories than I’ve learned from any history book. Mansfield’s earliest stories involve horse and buggy transport, for goodness sake. This happened in a history class I took from a brilliant professor named Patricia Schechter back in the early 2000s. She lectured on how each American war changed the homefront. Her lectures hewed to the domestic, where war acted as a catalyst for social change. I realized under her tutelage what really matters to me. I don’t care about wars in terms of how they were fought. I care about wars in terms of how they affect how people live.
But back to short stories!
Obviously I’m self-educating because I’m hoping to write more short stories but the form has always felt so confining to me. Like, I only have this much room to tell the tale? And it has to have a beginning, middle and end, and a revelation of some sort? Reading Eisenberg in particular gives me permission to bend all expectations. I would finish one of her stories and think, “Oh you mean I can write like this?” I want to write like that.
I’m also doing this because I thought when I retired that I’d be doing all this new and adventurous stuff, like art and classes and so on. But what I’m really interested in doing is writing, so I am trying hard to learn how to do something new. I have probably written more novels than short stories, so this is a challenge. Also a challenge? Having to send them out to see the light of day, which involves rejection.
I’m terrible at being rejected.
I have some good short stories (some of which have been published) and I have an unpublished short story that I think is my best. Like, my very best. Like I’ll never write another that good, that kind of best.
I sent it to Ploughshares, and received this heartbreaking rejection:
Dear Karen,
Thank you for the opportunity to read your story, “Love Thy Neighbor.” While we didn’t find a place for this piece, we want you to know the story made it to our final round, and our readers and editors thoroughly enjoyed considering and discussing your submission. (I especially admire the gorgeous precision of your prose – “The campfire lighting her hair like spilled gold coins” – so good I’m not even jealous!) We hope that you’ll consider sending us more work during our next reading period, which runs from June 1st – November 15th each year.
All best and in the spirit of common endeavor,
(name redacted) (through my tears)
So close, so close. And I will submit another story, but to do that, I need to make my best stories better, and that involves having them read critically by trusted readers. One of whom is my husband, with whom I had a spirited discussion about the last one I asked him to read. This happened last night. I kept insisting, “Something is wrong with that story. For me.” Back and forth. After kicking it around for a while, I realized that the trouble is…
I don’t like my main character.
I honestly need to cherish my characters, even if it’s in a “love to hate” manner (Rhondalee LaCour, here’s looking at you, you irresistible biddy). This story is about a man having his heart broken by failure. I realized that while this is happening, my heart is not breaking for him. I have another story with a similar type of plot in a completely different situation, and as I read it, my heart breaks and bleeds for my main character (if you’re wondering, that’s the one I’ll probably send to Ploughshares).
But my heart remains unbroken by the first man’s plight, and for this story to work for me as an author, it has to be cracked in half. I need to be wrung dry right along with him. I can’t be mean to him unless I suffer, too.
And this is the end of my TED talk for today, thank you.
Here are my published short stories with characters I love:
Short story at Thin Skin: Wet Rain
Short story at Persimmon Tree: Mysteries of June and August
Receipts.
Do you think I have OCD?
I don’t think I have OCD, but sometimes I wonder. I’m reading a book I bought this weekend at the Goodwill, and as I stopped reading to fuss over some soup, I used the receipt as a book marker. But it was folded wrong. I don’t have to go into details here, you know what a wrongly folded piece of paper looks like, I know what one looks like, and this one was wrong. I used it to mark my place twice, then had to stop and fold it neatly before I could read again. I did this even though once I finish typing this, I’m going to throw it away because I have a stack of bookmarks.
But I’m reminded of another receipt.
While I was waiting in line to pay for this very book, the woman ahead of me was using a self-checkout to pay for her things. Her daughter, who might have been two or three years old, waited silently. This tiny girl had a sweetly serious face with enormous sad eyes, full pouchy cheeks, a somber little mouth, and some snot dried under her button nose. She was a small thing, round of head, thin of neck, with that fine, soft sparse head of hair most often seen on a child that was born bald.
Her mom finished paying, then took the receipt, folded it in half, and handed it to this waiting toddler. She accepted it solemnly. Then she turned to me with it grasped in both hands. She wanted me to see that she had this important piece of paper. There was something ceremonious in her manner, as when a Japanese business partner presented his card to me with both hands and a small bow.
I said something like, “Wow, good job.” Her mother smiled, and off they went, the girl carefully holding the precious paper in both hands.
And now I’m off to select my bookmark, and stir the soup, and wait for my cousin, who will arrive after she gets a rental car and fights her way through Portland traffic.
The Knock
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
In 1979, I was living in a patched-together triplex with my first husband in Missoula, Montana. This crumbling, heat-leaking structure was so badly constructed that it didn’t have a functioning doorbell for any of the units. I was waiting for my state residency to kick in so I could get in-state tuition at the University of Montana. There was only one friend who dropped by regularly. Dan was my sister’s boyfriend, then her ex-boyfriend, and he rarely knocked. He just came on in. That was how close we were. But other people came by, Colleen and her skeevy carny boyfriend Kelly, or friends of my sister’s, hunting her down. So when a knock came, I always opened the door.
One spring, I opened the door to a pair of young men in black slacks and white shirts with ties, fresh-faced Mormon missionaries. They were all over Missoula that year, and I was so lonely that I usually let them come in, sit down, and talk for a while. They were a break from my boredom, and I was a break from having doors shut in their faces. We would spar. Unfortunately, they thought I was a candidate for conversion and stepped up their visits. I began to dread their knocks. I’d ignore them, even though I was sure they could hear my television going from the hallway where they stood.
They got the message and stopped knocking.
Knock Knock. Who’s There.
In 1982, I lived in a patched-together duplex with my second husband and our new baby girl in Portland, Oregon. This duplex, created from an abandoned house, also didn’t have a functioning doorbell. That was fine because no one ever came over to our rough neighborhood without calling first. When an errant knock came, it was Almitra, our drug-dealing neighbor. She didn’t have a phone. I usually let her in because I was home with a new baby, and once again starved for company. After a few long-distance charges showed up on our phone bill, we decided not to let her in anymore.
She got the message and stopped knocking.
The No-Knock Rule
Since 1988, I’ve lived in the same house. It has a functioning doorbell, but most of the six dogs I’ve owned since living here have gone absolutely insane at its chime. Luckily, it’s set off to the side of the door in an odd place. Most people don’t see it. I have a sign up in my window telling everyone to beware of dogs, and that all types of soliciting are unwelcome. The addition of red, white, and blue trim seems to have done the trick. It’s a rare solicitor who taps on my door.
I’ve left up the sign, even though there are no dogs here. Very few people drop by, because apparently people just don’t do that in Oregon. But my grandson’s father is seeing his son over here at this time, so a couple of times a week I hear his tentative knuckle taps on my door. Was that a knock, I wonder, is someone here? I open the door and greet him, the only person who knocks at my door.
A Year Without My Sister
I can’t believe it.
So yes, today it has been a year since Tony and I were leaving a restaurant after lunch, and I looked at my phone, and saw texts from my sister’s best friend telling me to call her. Right then, immediately. And I did, and she said, “I’m so sorry to tell you this. Cat is gone.”
“Gone?” I was so confused. Where could she have gone? And then it hit me. “You mean…she’s dead?”
“Yes. She’s dead.”
I was unable to make words. I handed off the phone to my husband, and we sat in that parking lot, and he finished the call with Steph, and then while I wailed I found the numbers, and he called my nephew, and my brother, and my oldest daughter, who would call her younger sisters.
And then he held me.
When the wailing stopped, we drove downtown to my sister’s apartment building. In the lobby, we sat down and waited. My sister had died alone, so the medical examiner was with her and we couldn’t go in. Steph came down with two volunteer traumatic death counselors or something like that. One was older, the leader. Steph asked if they could talk to us in the lobby, rather than in her studio apartment, which seemed like a good idea. So we sat there while this extremely earnest woman took us through a checklist of one kind or another, pointing to paragraphs in a large printed brochure. It was all I could do to be polite to this person, who meant so well, and who was talking to me in a plodding way about something so unthinkable, so unimaginable, which was the death of my sister. I wanted to push her out the glass doors of the building.
I am always so damn polite.
While we waited, people who lived in the building would walk in on high alert. This is a rent-subsidized building, people there have addictions and health troubles, and the tenants know what it means when the medical examiner’s van is parked outside. And they would come in, and ask, and be told it was Cat, and a hand would sweep over to where I sat with my husband and Steph and these counselors, and eyebrows would go up because everyone in that building knew my sister, my talkative, outspoken, engaging sister, and besides, as we aged the two of us looked enough alike to be mistaken for twins. And I would endure the “I’m sorrys” and so on.
I was waiting for my nephew, who was driving home from the beach with his girlfriend. I was waiting for my brother, who was on his way in from the eastside suburb where he lives. I was waiting to go upstairs and see my sister, who had somehow died without any warning, without telling me she was going to do so, without even saying goodbye. Impossible. And through it all this trauma volunteer counselor talked, as if a word of what she was saying could penetrate the bright, aching shield of my pain.
Finally, the police came down and told me I could go up.
I was met in the hallway by the medical examiner, a young woman holding an enormous baggie full of my sister’s medications. She wanted to talk about all the evidence of self-harm she found on my sister’s body. My sister’s arms, wrists, legs, ankles were extraordinarily marked with scars from years and years of cutting. It took a second for me to understand that the medical examiner was concerned that since she died alone, there was a possibility that my sister had killed herself.
I assured her that she had not. How to explain that despite all these scars, my sister was terrified of dying? That her recent cancer had shocked her with the possibility of actual death? That by my sister’s own admission, her suicide attempts were not meant to end her life, but to illustrate her anguish? How do you stand in the hallway outside a studio apartment that holds the body of your only sister and explain her fragile, volatile nature to a stranger holding a bag full of enough psych meds to kill an elephant?
I tried.
I just wanted to see her. And the examiner didn’t think I should. She’d died sitting on the floor beside her bed, her head hanging forward. This meant that blood had pooled in her face, and the effects of that can be upsetting. I insisted. How could it be real if I didn’t see her? So she went back into the apartment and did some arrangement. And I was finally able to go in and see my sister. It was upsetting. But her hair was arranged, her long, abundant, graying hair of which she was so justifiably vain. I could stroke that. And her hand was out, her right hand, where arthritis and years of coloring with pencils in her treasured coloring books had left a bend at the top joint of her middle finger. I could hold that.
My brother and his wife had arrived, and I went out to the hallway to talk to him. I told him he might not want to see her, but of course he wanted to. I went in with him and watched his reaction, and we agreed that it would be very hard for her son to see her like this. We didn’t know what to do. But the decision was made by the medical examiner, who wanted to take my sister way in the van, to wherever they take a person who is now a body while they decide whether or not an autopsy is needed.
And that’s what they did.
So I sat in my sister’s apartment with my husband, my brother, my sister-in-law, and Steph. My nephew and his girlfriend finally got there, thank god, because he’d had to drive the entire way knowing his mother was gone. I put the remains of her last snack (coffee and jelly toast) in her kitchen sink. My nephew made up her bed. And we all just sat there in my sister’s house, surrounded by the dizzying array of her possessions.
As long as we were all there, in the home she loved so dearly, it felt like she was still with us.
It’s a year later, today.
Yesterday in the garage, while I was getting into the car so we could go to the symphony, I saw two boxes on the floor that had been sitting on a different shelf for twenty years. These were full of Mom’s things that Dad brought to me after Mom’s death. They’ve just sat in the garage collecting dust because I haven’t been able to bear going through them.
I thought, Cat and I should go through those boxes together. And then I shook my head. Because it’s only been a year, and in so many ways, she is still right here with me.
Do you remember my post about the rat mug?
This one (about more than a rat mug):
I was out of control on eBay during the first part of the pandemic. If you read it you might remember the grotesque rat-shaped coffee mug that cured me. AKA THE RAT MUG.
Well, look what I found on eBay today.
No, it’s not exactly the same, but it’s clearly by the same “gifted artisan.” And I’m pretty sure mine went to the Goodwill. I hope someone who needed the money found it and sold it for a ridiculous amount.
Perhaps you want your own… https://www.ebay.com/itm/356476444882
But hurry, I’m sure it’ll sell really soon.
New in “Pasager”
Poem out but not up
I love being published in physical print, but I like being able to share with you, too. This is a print publication of my poem, “Awakened by the Nashville Skyline.” It’s in the winter issue of Pasager Press’s journal.
Passager is a nonprofit, independent publisher whose mission is to publish the work of older writers, encourage the imagination in the later stages of life, and create beautiful and welcoming publications.
If you’d like a copy, you can order it here: Pasager