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"My father’s ashes and I walked north from Washington Square Park. We saw a movie, a play, an improv show. Being back in New York by myself felt like being on another planet. I could do interesting things without feeling sad that my husband didn’t want to do them with me or selfish for wanting to do them anyway. My father’s ashes and I went dancing at a terrible club. We sat in my hotel room and cried over my declining marriage."– “I carried my dad’s ashes around New York for four days – and realized my marriage had to end,” Amanda Avutu, Washington Post.
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Oddly, the very story-ness of my predicament—its singular interiority, its invisible but no less real causes and effects, its want of a dramatic and definitive end—seemed to be what was preventing me from getting the help that a lifetime of absorbing good-guy/bad-guy narratives had taught me to expect. Indeed, there was little more than words and pictures to point to as evidence. Threats arrived cloaked in metaphor, riddles showed up that only I could solve, treasure hunts were offered that only I could follow. On the surface, the clues delineated a run-of-the-mill obsession story, unrequited affection leading to stalking and revenge as a pair of archetypes draws nearer their sadomasochistic tipping point—he a conniving liar at the top of his game and she a wet-eared ingénue who the reader hopes will emerge as a villain, if not as her own hero. “What a terrific novel this would make,” my confidantes said. “You should write it as a fiction. Your very own Gone Girl.”
But, reader, by then I ’d had my fill of fiction.
"– This essay is a long one. (CW: stalking, mental abuse.) But it’s so important, and so well done, and I really just don’t have any words beyond that. You should read “Harm’s Way” by Karen Hays, up now in The Georgia Review.
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A reminder for myself:
It’s great that people like your work, your stuff. It’s wonderful that you have been validated.
But what’s next?
This is what I’ve got to keep reminding myself. It’s okay to slow down when I need to slow down. To shift gears when I need to be in a different headspace. But I’ve got to keep the practice going. To remember – and remind myself – how much I love the work.
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"Instead, we do the things we do for the dead. Except I realize I have no idea how to do any of those things. Death is a direct assault on everything I believe. I’ve been so privileged, moving through the world for so long relatively unscathed, with precise expectations about how things will be handled in times of mortal crisis. There’s very little intuition to go on. My own ignorant expectation was that others would swoop in to help take care of it. To help clean up. To clean out the apartment, to go through the documents, to decide what to keep and what to give away, to find and identify the body, to slog through all the endless, stupid decisions at the funeral home. To bury or to cremate? To host a public or private viewing? To host a memorial or not?"– I have a new essay up at Catapult magazine, one of my dream publications.
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"The day my father died was the day I started falling in love. Love like the wet open love of a newborn. Love outside the body. Love like a metaphor for love. I am trying to understand how that day shook loose all this dangerous insatiable love. I was eighteen, six months from leaving home for good. My father stood at the top of the attic staircase; his body seized and fell and stilled and left behind such stunning grief that for weeks I tottered through the house on autopilot, a pill bottle rattling in my pocket, wide-eyed and gob smacked with love. I hit walls, turned, and shuffled off in the opposite direction until another wall intercepted my path. I was suddenly and irrevocably wracked with love."–
Jessica Hendry Nelson, “Rapture of the Deep,” The Rumpus (via stuffireadandloved)
THE POETICS IN THIS, THOUGH.
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My two valuable lessons are: avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness. Both of these can be dangerous, and in conjunction with sexuality even lethal. The first has plunged innumerable couples into disappointing, sometimes disastrous, marriages, and it is far from uncommon for the second to cause horrors such as a man choosing to murder his wife rather than see her prefer the company of another man. And even well short of such an extreme result, it can and often does cause a great deal of distress and pain.
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It was fairly easy for me to learn both of these lessons because I have a prosaic personality and little natural inclination towards possessiveness, but it is far from easy for many people. Some even consider attitudes which I think poisonous to be necessary or beautiful, and it would be naïve to imagine that argument could change their minds. Probably the best one can hope for is that romanticism and possessiveness should be less often taught by what the young read, sing and see on screens.– Diana Athill, “Lessons,” Granta (via stuffireadandloved)
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Virginia Woolf, from her essay “On Being Ill.” (In honor of her birthday – yesterday, January 25.)
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The day after Christmas, I loaded up a rental car and drove back home, alone. Not Ohio home, but original home: the place that bore me, that contains just over a third of my life’s memories.
I needed to spend the final moments of 2017 being silent and connecting with some filament of the past, but I also wanted to spend that time with my father.
During my trip, I sat there in my childhood room. It’s mostly empty save for a bed, some lamps, a heater and some storage. And while there is sadness here — we live in the kind of world that speeds toward erasure, determined to dissolve the memories we attach to land, the ghosts of my brother and I as children becoming more difficult to conjure — it still is full of light and magic and promise. And love. Of course love.
(Full post on ashleybethard.com)
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A LETTER ON GRIEF TO MY DEAD BROTHER
I had to call our mother
To tell her you died.
She wasn’t responding to my texts or calls
So I had to call the nursing home where she worked
And have the nurse’s desk page her.
What’s going on, she asked immediately.
I told her to sit down.
She said Just tell me.
I said are you sitting down.
She said no, just tell me
As if the refusal to sit
Was some sort of protection
From what was coming.
I told her you were dead.
Our own mother.
I listened to her gasp
And let out a trembling ohhh
Right before the wail that turned my bones to rubber.
