hello from the depths

dispatch 62

hello friends. It’s been a while. Thank you for bearing with the silence. I don’t know that I’m back or that I will be posting as often as I used to, but I know that I finally felt like I could step back in, if just for a minute. I don’t know the form it will take, only that I am a person who likes to chronicle my journeys and transitions so that I don’t forget them.

I joked to my father recently that I wanted to get a shirt that read “Ask me about my dead mom,” but I wasn’t really joking. There are so few spaces to talk about death and loss beyond the first few weeks. There is no space in our culture for the expansion and contraction of long-term grief, for the way it makes a trickster of time.

And truly, I love to talk about my mother. That was also true when she was alive. She remains the mystery at the center of everything. And so too, maybe this is just me making some space to talk about her. To remember her and keep her with me.

Recently we passed the five month mark without her. Five impossible months. After a few anniversaries marked by avoidance and disbelief, month 4 found me curled around my dog on the floor sobbing to Sinead O’Connor for hours. We’ve closed her apartment, moved her things, held her memorial, started all of the paperwork. We have done the practical, tangible things that temporarily hold grief at bay behind a wall of logistics. Now it is just me and this thing that has been hiding in the dark.

Before it happened to me, I always thought that big loss was worst in its first moments of shock and disbelief. I now know that, at least in my own experience, that is not true. It comes weeks and months later when you still pick up the phone to call someone who can no longer answer. It comes on the day that you close on your house and you have no one to call. It comes when you slip their slippers onto your feet on the first cold morning of the year and they’re just a little bit too big. When you see someone with the exact same standing and haircut at the grocery store and your heart stops. When your playlist hits you with unexpected Brandi Carlile in the car and you have to wait in the parking lot for an extra 10 minutes at your destination, pouring whitening eye drops into your eyes so no one can see that you’ve been crying. It comes with Mother’s Day and it comes with Midsummer. It comes in the little moments when you realize exactly what it means for them to be gone.

You can be walloped at any time, and you will be over and over again.

I can make no promises about if this newsletter will remain centered in explorations of grief. I can make no promises that it won’t.

I also can’t go farther without thanking everyone who reached out, checked in, or sent a care package. Your kindness and its impact are indescribable. I am not very good at keeping up with texts or calls, but know that my gratitude is constant. Thank you for your care.

Some early morning prequinox beauty on the pond.

The books that have helped most:

• A Very Easy Death: A Memoir by Simone de Beauvoir: I read this 15 years ago and still think about it often. It was the first book I needed to read when my mom died and I think it’s de Beauvoir’s best (which is really saying something). The close deep witnessing of her mother’s decline and death echoed all of own feelings of regret, love, and hopelessness.

• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner: The first new book I read and absolutely cried my way through. With my mother’s family in Finland, I related so much to the desire and trials of rooting into culture and build relationships across time and language barrier after loss. All of Zauner’s work has been a lifeline to me these last months.

• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: Another re-read but, hell. There were similarities to some of the accounts of hospitalization and my mother’s final days. I resonated deeply with the ways Didion both wanted to be alone and surrounded, and how the enormity and permanence of death is incomprehensible. You start thinking they will walk through the door and be very annoyed by all the fuss or mad you gave away their books.

• A Grief Observed by CS Lewis: I am not religious and this is a Christian work, but it was one of the best internal accounts of early grief processing that I found. I didn’t lose a belief in god as a result of my mother dying but it did fundamentally change how I see the world and my own life and it was its own crisis of faith.

• Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness by Kathryn Schulz: This book is gorgeous. Purchased alongside Crying in H Mart when I was looking for queer perspectives on parental loss, for some reason I didn’t place Shulz’s name (she won the Pulitzer for a piece on seismic risk on the west coast) and thought from the cover art that this would be a fluffy read. It wasn’t. It was devastating and beautiful, covering the loss of her father as she met as she meets and falls in love with her wife. Max and I moved into our home in the months after my mom’s death and feeling joy and gratitude alongside grief really threw me for a loop. This book captured the way all of these feelings can exist in parallel. Just writing this is making me want to dig it out of my moving boxes and read it again.

• Grief Is Love: Living with Loss by Marisa Renee Lee: A Target cart impulse purchase, this book about multiple kinds of loss, included mother loss and the long arm of grief. I found I really wanted to understand how other people processed and moved through what I was going through and this book felt like having coffee with a wise friend who is further along the path than you are but very generous with their time and care.

Thank you for this space to come back to. Thank you for being here. Now, I hope you’ll go hug a loved one as tight as you can.

with love,

lisa