I paddle toward the osprey perched on its piling above the docks where it watches over us, watches over me, I like to think, all the times I’ve been here moodily pacing the dock or sneaking off on the boat with my dad. I pass the salt-worn, sun-bleached branches of the submerged tree reaching out over the marsh like witch arms from a haunted house. It’s October and for the first time in my life I find no joy in the monsters and skeletons and bloody gravestones popping up, disconcertingly, everywhere. My eyes linger on the rugged tree, holding its place through high tides and low, until one day pieces of it will wash up on a shore somewhere as driftwood. I kayak past boat lifts and backyards where children play with a golden retriever, unconcerned that somewhere inside their home their father’s heart ticks toward an end date.
I’m wearing my dad’s neon green sun shirt from Steinhatchee, the one I picked for him with the image of a girl snorkeling downward in search of scallops. At the time, I’d asked if he would prefer one of the more macho designs, a speargun or a shark. But he liked the one I chose. My dad was always easy to spot in his neon shirts and I know now, as I kayak past the porch where his widow sits, glaring out over the water from the depth of couch cushions and glasses of wine, that she can see me passing like a flare. His widow. I struggle with what to call her now, whether to say his wife or my stepmother, when the name for our relationship was fraught even before. I fix my eyes on the water ahead as my kayak slices through the canal toward the Intracoastal Waterway.
It has been three days since my dad died and I am in limbo, staying in Jacksonville at my uncle’s condo, just a cluster of docks away from where my dad lived, waiting for something to happen next, though I don’t know what. My aunt has been chain smoking on the porch while I sit with a book in my hands, pretending to read. At thirty-two years old I feel too young to know how to handle any of this, yet know I am too old for anyone to handle it for me. Neighbors stop by and, when they realize who I am, awkwardly hug me. One presses my head into her shoulder so I can barely breathe and begins to pray while I wait to be let up. The kayak is an escape, a chance to stir up the silt of misery settling in around us.
My uncle told me to paddle away from the bridge where the current rips. And he made me take my phone along in case anything happens, my phone on which now two of the people on speed dial are unreachable. For six years I’ve kept the tiny image of my grandma’s face smiling out at me from the screen. Now she and her youngest son sit beside each other in their glowing circles that lead to disconnected phone lines.
I paddle south along the wide stretch of Intracoastal Waterway until I find a quiet entrance into the marsh. I wind my way into its narrowing channels until only wispy needles of marsh grass stand tall beside me and my vision is nothing but grass, mud, sky, and the water reflecting it all back again. It’s hard to find places where only nature hems you in and, in truth, I have to sit at an angle to avoid a building entering the scene. I rest a moment, drifting and trying to settle, to feel a sense of peace, a sense of anything. Only later will I be able to look back and see myself in shock, at a loss, still unaware of the many shapes and forces of grief yet to hit me.
I paddle back to the main waterway and see the fins of dolphins pursuing food, lazily rising up, cruising alongside the marsh. I follow, weaving in and out of muddy islets. I want to believe this is a sign from my dad, but I am not sure yet whether I will be a person who believes in signs. I want to see ghosts and surely believing in signs is a prerequisite to seeing ghosts. I conjure memories of my dad at the wheel of a boat on this same stretch of water, betting me a quarter that he’d see the first dolphin of the day. I remember the chill as my t-shirt blew in the December wind and he pushed down the throttle to catch up to his friend’s tugboat, saying something I couldn’t hear over the sounds of the motor and wind. The memory is like an invisible layer over the water and maybe that’s all a ghost is, another layer, or the echo of my dad’s voice barely audible over wind and motor. But today there is no sound of motor or wind. Or my dad. Today all I hear is the quiet dipping of my paddle into calm water. I watch the dolphins’ sleek gray fins rise and fall and I think my dad will never haunt me.
***
When I was young, maybe 14, my dad, my uncle, their friend Jeff and his son Sam, and I went fishing a few miles off the coast of Jacksonville. I was at the wheel puttering endlessly in the sun as my uncle pointed for me to go one direction and Jeff told me to go the other. My dad and I silently locked eyes, him giving an eye roll and an impish grin as if to say these guys.
I suddenly caught the distinct roll of fins splitting the water near us and I turned the boat to drift in their direction. Though unaware that conservationists would prefer we not approach wild dolphins, I knew enough to quickly kick the engine into neutral to stop the propellers before a pod of dolphins surrounded us, including a baby’s fin surfacing alongside its mother. My dad immediately went for his mask and fins stashed in the back of the boat, fishing instantly forgotten. He told me to get in the water with him. I must have been a little hesitant, miles offshore among wild animals, but I handed the wheel to my uncle and put on my gear, my dad already holding his mask against his face and tipping backwards over the edge of the boat. Sam and I followed.
I was used to diving in places like the Keys, seeing coral, or seagrass, or sandy bottom beneath me. But here, in the depths of the Atlantic, I looked down into deep cobalt blue pierced with rays of sunshine and then dark abyss. We swam toward the dolphins who stayed near the boat, curious. Sam and I glued ourselves to each of my dad’s hips like pilot fish to a whale. My dad, the point of our triangle, swam his little human pod toward the dolphins until the mom turned her body to cut us off from her baby. But they didn’t leave.
My dad shoved his hand into my side, pushing me almost violently away from him. I sprang my head out of the water and looked back at him wide-eyed. He popped his head above the surface and, talking in a garble around the snorkel in his mouth, said, “Liv, swim over there without me. The mom is letting you kids get closer.” He pointed toward the side-by-side fins – one big, one small – yards away.
My dad’s large, bulky body looked like a predator underwater while my gangly body was hardly bigger than the baby dolphin. But the idea of going anywhere without my dad in water thousands of feet deep surrounded by nothing but more water seemed unthinkable. I was only brave based on proximity to my dad. But now he was shoving me from the safety at his side, suggesting that some experience awaited me if only I would leave him behind.
I tentatively swam in the direction of the dolphins, more out of a desire to show my dad I could do it than a need to get closer. The mom and baby, gray faces in the deep blue, watched my masked face approach as I breathed softly through my snorkel. I didn’t look back to find my dad, though surely he watched the whole time. I focused on the dolphins a few yards in front of me, trying to keep my body calm and easy in the water. I stopped, hovering with the sun on my back and cool waves rippling around me, as though the dolphins and I understood this was as close as we should get, gazing into each other’s eyes the way people linger in front of a mirror. I wondered if the younger dolphin, tucked beside its mother, felt curiosity and awe like I did. I realized to the baby dolphin I might be the first human. Then mom and baby swam away, and I hurried back to my dad as if pulled by an elastic band. I never did care for the kinds of experiences that would require leaving him behind.
***
I kayak back to my uncle’s condo and quietly slide the yellow Hobie kayak alongside my uncle’s slip. He must have been watching because he walks down and silently helps me pull the kayak out of the water. I realize he is always watching for the people he cares about. I realize I’ve probably missed many of the silent ways people love each other. I realize he might not know how to handle any of this either.
I tell my uncle that I saw dolphins. It’s a common experience on the water here and one I’ve always met with delight. But today I hear my voice exit my body as something flat and empty. I’m afraid that without my dad in the world I will no longer love everything left in it, even the dolphins. My uncle probably already knows, and I have yet to realize it’s up to me now whether I go out to places where I might be surrounded by dolphins, whether I jump in the water, whether I will be brave enough to do it alone.
We drift like it’s us who have become ghosts, me carrying the paddle back to my uncle’s porch. I feel the cool dampness of grass against my bare feet, perhaps the first sensation to reach me since hearing my dad died. The sun is setting, casting the marsh beyond the docks in a soft shade of purple. I look up at the clouds in this big sky. I wonder if, on the last night of his life, walking from my uncle’s condo back to his own, my dad paused like I have, to admire the sunset. And amidst so much I will never understand, I do know this one thing: my dad always stopped to look at the sky.
In a few weeks, when we scatter my dad’s ashes in the Atlantic Ocean beyond St. Augustine inlet, there will be no dolphins, only hundreds of jellyfish under a bright sky and a rainbow of light that encircles the sun and then is gone. My uncle will mysteriously get a call from my grandma’s phone number, the number I still have on speed dial and I imagine he does too. Only silence on the other end.
Months pass. Shock wears off as if by erosion, waves crashing against and reshaping every day, every experience. Grief, I find, has no ending. Only lines of life meandering onward like the channels I paddle through the marsh, searching for a passage through: through the phone call that changes everything, through the body that becomes ashes, the ashes that mix with the saltwater of St. Augustine inlet on an outgoing tide. Somewhere out there in that ocean is a dolphin that met me when it was a baby and I had a dad who made me go on without him.
Bonus audio of Olivia reading from her essay…
about the author:
Olivia London earned a degree in creative writing from Carnegie Mellon University, where she received the Hilary Masters Creative Nonfiction Award. She also received first place in the fourth-grade Invention Convention, for which she is perhaps most proud. Someday she will have a website, but for now, you can reach her at olivia.e.london@gmail.com. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Sebastian, a bald Colombian with a long white beard, continued to hack at vines and leaves with his machete, stopping every few steps to puff on a joint. His sombrero-shaded head and muck boots faded into the thicket.
Cupping my mouth, I called again, “How much farther is it?”
On the crest of a mud-slicked hill, he and a German couple stopped and turned.
Lazily, Sebastian swung at the branches around his head, the lopped limbs tumbling toward the jungle floor. “Twenty minutes or so,” he said. The cherry of his joint breathed red in the canopy shade. “We aren’t far.”
Pushing under branches, I caught up and was offered the butt of the joint. “I’m alright,” I said, looking around, “this environment is intoxicating enough.”
All around, vines, bamboo, thick-trunked trees, thin-stemmed plants, flowers, and ferns, each a different green, wove walls and a ceiling that closed out all but a shatter of sunlight. Our path, more blazed than followed, traversed dark brown earth inset with stones. Some hours before, rain had come, as it did every day, and left the hot air heavy with a skin-coating humidity. The downpour had awakened the smells of fresh plants, of soil, of decay. High in the canopy, birds announced themselves with throaty, gobbling songs. A low cacophony of whining bugs was so incessant that, after a few days, I associated it with silence. The sense of fertility was incredible, humbling even, as it seemed all the seasons of life had converged into a uniform outpouring of energy.
“A marvel, isn’t it?” Sebastian said, smiling. He sheathed his machete and kicked a rock down the hill.
“Yeah… I mean… I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said.
“I’m so excited for the harvest,” the German woman said.
“There will be much harvest,” her boyfriend added, nodding.
The couple, Lina and Ben, were, like me, staying at Sebastian’s hostel at the edge of the Darién jungle. Lina wore a single dreadlock in her drape of brown hair and had a calming smile surrounded by a face reddened and wrinkled more by cigarettes than time. Ben had the same redness and wrinkling, the same long hair, though he was jittery, and had begun to bald. Together, we’d set out from a dirt road and were headed to a plot of Sebastian’s land.
“Careful of branches and vines,” Sebastian warned, chopping deeper. “Snakes like it there.”
After a mile of walking, we arrived at a clearing set on the incline of a mountain foot. On the slope, rows of sharp pineapple plants grew. Mandarin orange, lime, guava, and avocado trees swelled with fruit. For two hours we harvested, hacking pineapples off of their stems, sowing new pineapple plants with fruitless buds, and plucking what Sebastian deemed ripe from his trees. They produced constantly, he explained, and anything unpicked would rot.
With bags filled, we climbed the clearing and sat in the shade of a tree to eat a late breakfast.
Lighting a cigarette each, the couple exchanged excited German. They pointed to the foliage enclosing us and rolled the harvested fruit in their palms. Sebastian passed out some bread from his bag. He lit another joint.
Below us, where his plot met the jungle weave, an electric blue butterfly with wings like two palms flapped above the splays of pineapple plants. Birdsong, like a robot gargling water, issued from an unseen beak. In the distance, between the shoulders of green mountains and below a slice of white cloud, dark ocean roiled. I sighed, took my shirt off, and laid on it.
***
I’d found Sebastian’s hostel a week before, when I arrived at the coastal village of Capurgana, Colombia. The town is located in the Darién Gap, a region that straddles the Colombia/Panama border. Throughout the year it sees some of the world’s heaviest rainfall, lending its old-growth rainforests a density that only regional gangs, indigenous inhabitants, and small groups of settlers have succeeded in occupying. It is called the ‘Gap’ because from Alaska to Argentina, it is the only place the 19,000-mile Pan-American highway does not connect. Recently, it has become more widely recognized as one of the most trafficked and dangerous migrant routes on earth.
When I came to the region in February of 2023, I was 24, and towards the end of a stint in Colombia which had begun in November of the previous year. I’d traveled to the city of Medellín to learn Spanish and, having achieved fluency, I grew restless. Raised on a horse farm in rural Massachusetts, I am most at home among few people and much greenery. Thus, advised that the Darién was inexpensive to reach and forested by jungle impressive even to Colombians, I arranged an escape. At the time, however, I knew little of the individuals residing in the region – of the history of violence and the evolving reality of migration – and sought only adventure.
I carried the contact of “The Rasta”, a man a friend ensured provided cheap, reliable lodging. Upon arrival, however, he informed me that it was Semana Santa, a week-long holiday, and that all his rooms, and all those in town, were booked. Deeper into the jungle, he claimed, was another hostel. I trudged on.
I came to a hotel where, on the first floor, lounging in hammocks and on chairs, a group of Somalians waited. They were heading to the US for a better life, they explained. Their destination, I replied, was my home. They stared. A few crept closer.
Living in Medellín, I’d seen people hand cash to migrants at stoplights or point to them mockingly. And I’d seen on the news back home hordes of people pushed up against checkpoints, slowly being sorted by border agents. This, however, was the first time I’d spoken with migrants. A few wore black Nike shirts with white swooshes; their bodies were thin, shoulders curled. Silent and wide-eyed, they searched me. I wondered what I was to them – if it was the first time they were seeing blonde hair and blue eyes like mine in the flesh as opposed to on a screen or in a magazine. I sensed something – hunger or reverence, I’m not sure – and shuddered; whatever they saw, it seemed far from what I was.
A heavyset woman stepped out of a back room. She scowled, her brow slicked with sweat.
“Do you have any rooms?” I asked.
“From where do you come?” she asked.
“The US.”
She shook her head. “No. No room. Look in town.”
I nodded to her and turned to the Somalis. I met their stares. The weight of their dreams and the reality of their past – whatever it held – shimmered in the shadows of their eyes. Unsure, I bowed, wishing them a safe journey, and carried on.
Before coming to Capurgana, migrants like these Somalis arrive by bus in a town called Necolcí. They then take a large speed boat, called a ‘lancha’, across the Gulf of Urabá to Capurgana. From there migrants contract guides provided by gangs. What follows is a three-to-five-day trek through some of the world’s most treacherous jungle. Hiking up hills, crossing rivers, and weathering the heavy humidity, a broken leg often spells death. The guides lead migrants for two days, then the groups are left on their own. The threat of kidnappers, rival gangs, and deadly animals are only a few perils that complicate the journey. Rotting bodies and impromptu burial mounds are a common sight. Stopped along the route, starving, exhausted, and injured migrants often beg for help. While mostly men make the crossing, countless women, children, and elderly attempt it as well.
Nearly a mile inland, I passed a crumbling airstrip, on which boys played soccer and women lugged bags of food on their heads. I saw the town dump, piled with bottles and bones, spilling onto the road. At the edge of the jungle, I came to a collection of houses with walls of pressboard and planks, roofs of rusted tin sheets, floors of worn earth. Barefoot and dirt-smudged children ran in the streets.
The barrio was what Colombians call an ‘invasión’: when a group of people, often poor, move onto a piece of land, private or state-owned, and erect homes. While not legal, this act of invading and claiming is difficult to combat as Colombia’s government and legal system lack resources.
Craving a banana, I stopped in a wooden stall that served as the general store. While Colombians are relegated to the ugliest bananas of the bunch, their fruit stay on the vine longer and thus achieve a superior flavor and consistency. When I first ate a Colombian banana, I was convinced I’d never eaten a real banana before. The bananas in this store, however, along with the other fruits, had begun to spoil, and the sweet smell of decomposition assaulted my nostrils. Flies swarmed my head, landing on the blackening fruits and the shop owner. ThoughI’d seen patchwork houses and barefoot children before, the quality of the fruit – normally a national source of pride – indicated a destitution I’d not yet encountered. I turned and left.
I wandered further, the bows of the trees casting shadows across my path as the barrio tapered off into thicker and thicker forest. The shacks disappeared; now I saw bungalows and homesteads set away from the road. Men rumbled over exposed roots and packed earth on motorcycles with flatbeds and on horses pulling wagons. The dust they kicked up shined in bright motes across the path, illuminated by the sun. People sat in lawn chairs and in doorways. I smiled at them and nodded. They stared. A sign painted with a green tree frog appeared. It was the hostel.
When I found him, Sebastian was lying in a chair, shirtless and shoeless, getting high. To my luck, he had vacant beds. I got situated and later, as night fell, chatted with Sebastian and the Germans around a table. Sebastian explained he’d grown up in a place called Envigado, not far from where I’d stayed in Medellín. Envigado, I knew, was the long-standing headquarters of the cartel. Observing Sebastian’s white beard and creasing face, I reasoned he’d been born around the same time as Pablo Escobar. I shared this observation with him. He laughed. The Germans raised their eyebrows; Escobar was a typical fixation for us Westerners and generally a taboo.
“I knew him,” he said, “I used to see him playing football when we were kids.”
“Really?” I said. “Did you ever talk to him?”
“No, but I saw him often. My aunt even dated him in high school. He was just a kid from the barrio. Over time he became something more.”
***
At the top of the clearing, I sat up and turned to Sebastian. It was not yet noon. We were all quiet and tired from the planting and picking. I wanted to know more about Escobar.
“This country was his,” he said. “In some ways, it still is.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Until recently, every powerful politician had direct ties to him. The director of infrastructure was his close friend. He approved many roads for the cartel to move its drugs.”
“Did drugs pass through here?” I asked.
He roared with laughter and stood up. “Saw the airstrip? He put it there to send product to the US.”
“But who runs things now?”
“Narcos. Only they’ve learned killing is inefficient – better to keep things quiet. But many people with ties to Escobar still make decisions.”
“What about local gangs? Have you had any trouble?”
“When I first came here FARC controlled the area. They never bothered me; I barely spoke with them. But fifteen years ago – almost twenty now, I guess – the government began a war against FARC by funding paramilitary groups. There was a cash-for-bodies policy; if you brought back a FARC member dead, you got a reward. Thousands of innocents were killed, dressed as FARC, and turned in for the bounty.
“The paramilitaries woke me one night – scared me half to death. I woke up with a machine gun in my face. They questioned who I was, where my papers were. I thought they were going to kill me. But they left, and the next week I fled to Medellín. They killed a community leader while I was gone. A good man who cared about educating the children of the town and who had nothing to do with FARC. They brought him into the town center and shot him in the head.”
Sebastian’s face was red. He paced back and forth in front of the tree.
“His wife still lives here,” he added. “She’s a good woman.”
***
Before crossing to Capurgana, I arrived by overnight bus in the town of Necoclí. Navigating hazy dirt roads, I found the room I’d rented and slept. At 1:00 pm I awoke, soaking in sweat. Out my window, towards the coast, I observed the corrugated roofs of squat concrete buildings. A low tide smell hung in the air, summoning memories from my youth of summer trips to Cape Cod. This smell, however, was heavier, steeped in the constant dance of birth and death that occurs in the tropics.
On the Colombian coast, to avoid the heat, people wake at 4:00 am, work until 11:00 am, and then rest until sunset, doing small tasks in the evening before bed. I knew this at the time, but still, I went for a walk.
Starting towards the beach, I took in the landscape. Now bathed in daylight, I saw beyond the town borders, leading to the sea, lowland swamps and pastures where emaciated cows huddled under trees. A flock of chickens pecked at trash, and a few skeletal dogs lay heaving in the shade. Townspeople peered from windows and porches. Thinking of Medellín where eye contact and a hello are customary, I tried smiling and waving at the eyes that followed me. Most scowled, averting their faces, with only a few offering nods.
A block from the beach, I began noticing stores and carts selling boots, water jugs, tarps, tents, and other gear. And further, at the beach, I saw hundreds of people in hammocks and tents. They huddled together, lugging gear from the stores to the shore. Backpacks, trash bags, duffel bags, and rolling luggage lay scattered on the ground. Children wove through the crowd, chasing a plastic ball. A woman lay against a palm tree nursing a newborn. The midday heat pounded down. The things I saw waited in my mind, unanalyzed, like bubbles in sludge. Slowly, they rose, bursting into my heat-drunk brain: these were migrants.
A group of cigarette-smoking Asian men wearing sweat-stained Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton t-shirts approached. Thinking they were fellow tourists, I stepped towards them, waving, and asked where they were from. The closest man shot me a look like that of a cornered street dog. “No! No! No!” he bellowed. I backed away.
At the top of a footbridge, I came upon a boy watching his two friends. One was up a tree, lopping coconuts off their stems with a machete. The other stood below catching and piling them in the sand. The boy turned and greeted me. His hair was short and black, his skin caramel. His head came to my waist and his cheeks bulged with baby fat; I figured he was six or seven. He asked where I was from. When I told him the US, his eyes widened and a smile spread into his cheeks. He asked me again, and then again, how it was true, how I’d gotten a passport and a visa. I was born there, I explained. Still, he stared.
After chatting for a while, he offered to show me around, and I accepted, feeling relieved to have found a companion.
He brought me along the beach to a secluded outcropping where two planks connected rocky shore with a small grassy island. He crossed, then I did. When I landed on the other side, he was jumping and spinning around the little island.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, beaming.
I smiled. “It really is.”
Before us, under a now cloud-choked sky, the Gulf of Uraba churned. Some 40 miles away, the Darién mountains poked through a shroud of humid air. To my left and right stretched palm trees and shoreline. I heard the crash of waves, the boy’s squeals as he dodged them, and, in the distance, the whine of a motor, growing closer.
“Over there,” the boy said, pointing to the outline of mountains, “that’s where the people who want to go to the United States go.” “Have you been?” I asked.
“No,” he said, looking down, “but I want to!” He looked up, smiling. “Over there, the water is clearer and the beaches are more beautiful!”
“Here in Necoclí the beaches are nice,” I said. “We don’t have so many beaches like these where I’m from.” “Really?” he said.
I nodded.
The motor grew louder, and a speedboat appeared. It skipped across the waves, slapping the surf. The boat carried passengers, many of them migrants, to Capurgana. The next day I would take the trip myself, and upon arriving would see the crystal waters and white sand beaches the boy spoke of.
As the sun began to set, bringing with it the coolness of evening and the movement of people, we returned to town. We stopped at a corner, and the boy went into a shop. Motorbikes whirred past me, and at food carts men ignited grills, their fires blazing red against the rising night. There was a slowness to everything, to the way people walked and moved. The boy emerged with a small rectangular sack of potable water. He bit into the corner and slurped.
“I have to get back to my room,” I said, “but thanks for the tour.”
“Of course!” he said. He held out 100 pesos in coins, roughly 2 cents. “This is for you!”
I smiled. “It’s okay,” I said, pulling coins from my pocket, “I have enough.”
“No, I want you to have it,” he said, “my parents taught me it’s important we help the people passing through here.”
***
We’d finished our food, but, much to my excitement, Sebastian was still telling stories. It seemed as if something had dislodged within him, his cool demeanor now engulfed by a passion that roared in his eyes and drove his pacing steps.
The Germans were silent, twiddling leaves and smoking cigarettes. I asked him why so many people had worked with Escobar.
“Money,” he said, “we are a poor country with many hungry people.”
“But how would they do it? Recruit people, I mean.”
“Imagine this: two gangsters drive into a poor barrio, one that is high up along the side of the mountain valley. In this barrio there’s no work, nothing to eat, the houses are made of salvaged garbage and whatever can be found.”
He paced in front of the tree, puffing his joint. I thought of the invasión, the dirty and barefoot children, the spoiled fruit.
“Imagine this is your barrio. You’re 14 or 15. You don’t go to school because your parents need you to work, and when you get home from work – as a street cleaner, say, or a fruit vendor – you hear your parents fighting. They yell, getting louder and louder, until you hear the sound of skin smacking skin, the squeals of pain from your mother, the grunts of rage from your father as he beats her. Then you see these two guys drive up in a shiny black SUV. They get out, wearing tracksuits, crisp white tennis shoes, maybe some shiny watches. They walk right up to you and tell you if you come with them and do what they say, they will give you money. You’ve never seen a car so nice, nor people dressed this way in the barrio, and you are hungry, so you go. They bring you to a secluded spot, maybe a farm just outside the city, and have you practice shooting at a bottle with one of their guns. They show you how to hold the gun, how to remove the safety. Then they drive you home, give you some money, and promise they’ll be back. They return after a few days and have you shoot a chicken, then the next time, a cat. Finally, they come back a fourth time and drive you to the same farm, but this time there is a man there on his knees with his hands tied behind his back. One of the men hands you a gun; the other puts his palm on your back and looks you in the eye. He tells you that if you do what they say from now on, your family will never have to worry about food or money again; even if you were to die, he explains, they will be rich.”
Sebastian stopped pacing, and we met eyes. My heart raced. A tree branch swayed in the breeze low over his head. I smelled the faint aroma of oranges and pineapples drifting from an overturned burlap sack.
“What would you do?” he asked.
***
In the days since arriving at the hostel, I’d been waking with the sun and sleeping with its setting. I began walking the dirt paths that led deeper into the Darién, often passing mules driven by grime-streaked masters. On the shores of rivers and in the nooks of tree roots, I saw soiled baby clothes, food wrappers, shoes, disintegrating backpacks – residue of migrants. Once, while walking with tourists I’d met along the paths, I noticed a lizard the size of a small cat perched on the root of a tree. When I approached, it dashed across the surface of a stream.
“Jesus Cristo,” a girl from the region called it – Jesus Christ, as it walked on water. At the end of that day, our group bathed in the ocean. Floating in warm tides, the father of a young girl told me one of his proudest moments was when he brought her to Disney. Sitting on his shoulders as fireworks exploded over the castle and Tinkerbell soared overhead, she leaned down and whispered, “This is a dream come true.”
I thought of this girl some days later when, again, I went walking. From above, howler monkeys bellowed, tossing branches toward me. Through the thicket, I noticed a neon orange color, and when I turned a corner I found several people wearing high-visibility vests. Between them, almost a hundred migrants stood under a makeshift overhang. Around their feet, backpacks were set on a wet layer of trash. I noticed a young girl with a pink backpack standing behind her parents. She was around the age of the tourist girl. I wondered about her and her parents’ dreams of America, how they had come to them, and if, like the tourist girl’s dreams, they would someday be realized. It was strange to be in a place where people were risking their lives for something I was given. I felt guilty – responsible for who I was and where I was from. I wanted to scream at them, “It isn’t what you dream it will be!” I wanted to wish them luck. Instead, I walked on.
***
After Sebastian finished his stories, we returned to the hostel, and I took a nap. When I awoke, my room was bathed in the brown light of dusk. I got up, brushed my bug net aside, and went to the porch. I journaled, taking in the smell of earth, now ripe on the air for it had rained while I slept. The outside lights, past which dove fruit bats, flickered on and off. The power went out consistently, sometimes for six hours or more, only to come on at random. The Colombian grid had never been extended to Capurgana. Instead, a generator run by the local cartel provided the power. However, because of the generator’s limitations, energy was rationed between the two sides of town, hence the coming and going of the lights.
I had set aside my journal and lay down in a hammock when I heard whooping and guitar playing. Lights shone from the third level of Sebastian’s main house. I went up to investigate. At the top were six people: the German couple, a Frenchman, a bald man with a guitar, a woman in her fifties wearing loose clothing, and Sebastian. In a hammock strung between wood beams, the Frenchman limply held a bottle of aguardiente (anise-flavored liquor). The others stood in a circle singing as the bald man strummed and tapped his guitar. Empty beer bottles lay strewn about. Though it was only 8:00 pm, everyone moved as if the floor was shifting and gazed with unseeing eyes. I received a tambourine. The woman began to sing.
“El pescador,” she sang.
“Habla con la Luna,” we responded.
“El pescador.”
“Habla con la playa.”
I tapped the tambourine to the beat. The woman raised her palms.
“El pescador–”
“Habla con la luna.”
“El pescador–”
“Habla con la playa.”
“El pescador–”
“No tiene fortuna, solo su atarraya.”
The Frenchman rose and began hopping from leg to leg, like a jester. The bald man plucked the strings. Sebastian smiled, the steps to his dancing short and arrhythmic. The woman locked eyes with me then, nodding, drawing closer. I felt the heat of her body and smelled her sweat.
She bellowed: “Va subiendo la corriente, con chinchorro y atarraya, la canoa de bareque, para llegar a la playa.”
We cheered.
I took in my impromptu bandmates. Each had arrived here for different reasons. The Frenchman, for example, had lived in Colombia for ten years. He taught at a high school in Bogota and had driven fifteen hours to Necoclí on his motorbike. He’d purchased land adjacent to Sebastian’s. At the moment, his plot was a place to plant things, but in the future he hoped to build a homestead himself. The Frenchman often marveled at leaves and fruits, chatting at length with Sebastian about biodiversity and climate change, much like how Lina and Ben did. Though they had not bought land, they’d come for it – to observe it, consume it, immerse in it. Both were seasonal workers, Ben a carpenter and handyman, Lina a caregiver. They worked half the year and traveled the other half. Then there was the guitar man. He wore dangling earrings, hole-ridden clothes, and generally looked pirate-like. The woman next door, the one with a formidable voice, was allowing him to stay with her given he helped install windows. She, on the other hand, had arrived in the Darién some thirty years ago, had bought her land and built her home, sustained herself, I assume, by some inherited or already made money. And of course there was Sebastian, who, with his long white beard swaying, was dancing, drunkenly, in front of me. The Darién had been his home for forty years. He’d come at 24, my age at the time, to do conservation. Quickly, he grew enamored with the place, the horse riding, the strange, fresh food falling all the time from the trees, the remoteness and simplicity of life in ancient jungle.
The guitar-playing man strummed faster. Everyone was dancing now. The Germans lurching, eyes wide and glazed with drink; the Frenchman hopping from foot to foot, giggling with the bottle in his hand; Sebastian and the singing woman dancing close together, staring into each other’s eyes. I danced as well, swaying from side to side, rolling my hips, and following the rhythm as my Colombian friends had tried to teach me. (“Don’t look at other people–the music, the music!”) Earlier that day, I’d searched through Sebastian’s guest book, flipping through fifteen years of yellowing pages. Out of hundreds of entries, mine was the first from the US. As I danced, I wondered what that meant. Was I a harbinger of change? Or just lost? From across the way, staticky reggaeton music competed with ours. The infinite bugs droned their ceaseless sounds. I heard a woman yelling and a child crying. The man playing the guitar began to howl. The others joined. I followed too, crying out from my depths.
about the author:
Dylan Streb is a writer and teacher from central Massachusetts. He earned degrees in human geography and creative writing from the University of Vermont. Since graduating, he has lived in Colombia, Mexico, and now Spain, where he works in Madrid public schools.
In Dublin, two Dubs this week asked me, “D’ja have a gun on yer?”
“No.”
“Well, d’ja have a gun back home in The States?”
“No. Not yet.”
This week, being an American abroad means having guns. Luigi Mangione captured the imagination as either a modern-day vigilante folk hero, man with a gun and a cause, or as just another thug Dago, depending on who you’re talking to. I hop a cab on O’Connell Street by the GPO. I say, “Take me to The Teacher’s Club, Parnell Square.” The cab driver, muscular arms, a peaked cap, starts giggling in a high-pitched voice: “You sound like you’re in the movies.”
“What movie?”
“Goodfellas.”
“No, I’m the real deal. Where you from?”
“Croatia.” He can’t stop giggling hearing my voice. “I thought that voice was just in the movies.”
“No, I’m real.” I know I sound like a Jimmy Cagney character to people who’ve never met a Bronx Italian in real life. Ayyy whaddywanna live forevah? Many tell me, “You sound like Al Pacino.” I say, “No, he sounds like me.”
The movies travel further than any of us from my Zerega Ave neighborhood.
One day a friend brings me into her local coffee shop in Clonakilty, about an hour’s drive southwest of Cork City. I met eyes with a beautiful blue-eyed baby, sitting way down the oak communal table with her mother and their friends. I speak to babies like an adult. I want them to hear my serious alto comfort. I don’t do baby talk. Babies need to hear real talk. To be grounded. To know where they’re headed. I can summon the feeling of being a baby and wondering why the adults were all acting weird, giddy, talking in high pitched sounds. I remember how it felt when my father tossed me up high over his head and caught me, pretending he was going to drop me. My breathless fear. Why was this so fun for the men? I lost my breath a lot as a kid. Being a baby meant adults controlled my body, tossed me up high and scared me for fun, tickled and wrestled me for their enjoyment, put me in chokeholds long past the point where I was out of breath and unable to beg “Uncle!” for them to stop. I can feel all this in the abstract landscape inside me. Except it’s not abstract at all. It’s just a moment ago. It’s all inside. It’s now.
The Clonakilty baby girl’s name was Saoirse. Her mother taught me that Saoirse means Freedom. That is the most beautiful name I ever heard. In Ireland, freedom is not just a concept, people can taste it, cheers to it, know what it means to die bleeding for it. Many know stories of their parents or grandparents fighting for freedom, a great-aunt or uncle dying for freedom. I don’t know when baby girls began being named freedom, but really, I can think of nothing better. Baby Saoirse of Clonakilty and I were enamored with each other, one of those magic moments when a baby leans in toward you, makes eye connection, locks in, and whatever the goddess power is, I feel it, an all-loving presence of golden light. A shimmer. “Hey Saoirse. Hey, you wanna come to the Bronx?” The more I talk, the more she’s smiling and laughing and voicing. She loves my voice presence. My vibe. And I love her.
A man walks into the café with a dog, and pretty quickly he says to me, “Me dog is sensitive to loud noises, and you’re talking too loud.” He plants himself a couple of feet from my body, squaring off to me as if we are about to duel.
I say, “Oh I’m sorry.”
He says, “Me dog is blind and he’s very sensitive to loud voices.”
I say, “I’m really sorry.” I lower my voice and step closer to Saoirse who is on the other side of the table. I sit down. We continue our conversation.
What was beautiful about that interaction, that man, for me, shocking even, you could say “culture shock,” is that in New York City, at some point, I stopped interacting like that, because you don’t know who is packin’, who is high, who is nuts and liable to shoot you, push you, do who-knows-what to you. At this point I would never dream of telling an American in a coffee shop, “You’re too loud for me dog.” I’d be taking my life in my hands. Oh I’m botherin your dog am I? I’ll show you how I can bother your dog. I’ll give him a good kick. What’s a dog need to be in a café for anyway? Your dog belongs in the street. I belong in this café. Get your dog outside. And you with him. This is the voice I grew up hearing. This is the response I got when I voiced a need, a sensitivity, like asking to open a car window for example, or asking someone to not smoke around me because I was asthmatic. I learned that none of my needs or sensitivities would ever be taken into consideration. I couldn’t breathe around people. After too many asthma attacks and visits to emergency rooms, I learned to remove myself from situations. Preventive action. Stay away.
In New York and in America, I’m extra cautious about mouthing off to people. The ethos I learned as a kid, was say nuttin’ to nobody ’bout nuttin’. Mind your own biz’ness. This is for survival. I learned to think that everybody is crazy in their own special way. I hedge my bets, assessing: “What kind of crazy is this one? That one?” I don’t beep in New York traffic anymore. I don’t look at other drivers. Sometimes on the Major Deegan Expressway, through the Bronx, cars come at you like they’re aiming for you, like they’d just wish you’d get a little closer so they’d have a reason to run you off the ramp. The aggression is maniacal. I err on the side of caution. I say to myself, “Chances are, that person is out of their mind.” And they might be packin’.
The flip side of that coin is that when I walk the streets of New York, I try to assure people that I’m not crazy or packin’. This is harder as I age. Now I walk with a walker. I carry many things: medicine, oxygen machine, extra sweaters because I get cold, a pillow for my sensitive neck. It looks like I’m carrying all my life’s belongings. In the winter I wear a bright blue Irish dry robe, an electric peacock blue, long down to my shins, with a hood, the kind of coat swimmers wear when they get out of the Irish Sea for their daily frigid swim. In New York, very few know what a dry robe is, so I just look like I’m living in the street or from another planet. When I’m walking down a New York sidewalk, wearing a facemask on my way to a doctor’s appointment, I easily appear vagrant, or dangerous, or nuts. Seriously, no one is dressed like me. Vagrant is the archetype I rock. Without trying. The other day in the rain, after a doctor’s appointment, I wheeled my walker into a midtown hotel to get out of the rain and to sit for a cup of tea. I’m wearing the Irish peacock blue dry robe, face mask, pushing the walker full of stuff. Immediately, the concierge eyes me, I pull my facemask down and greet him with a sparkly smile announcing: “I’m okay, I’m just going to the café.”
I know that I can look like the shooter – in America.
It’s on everyone’s mind. Is that person a shooter? What about him? The surveillance images they circulate for manhunts more and more look like lots of people I know, look like me. A person walks in a North Face zip-up, hat, facemask. It could be any of us. The other day I was talking to a friend who is actually quite optimistic and has a lot of joie de vivre. She’s in her seventies. She says, “I rather get shot than stabbed.” The conversation went something like this:
“I rather get shot than stabbed. I dunno, getting stabbed is so––”
“Intimate?”
“Yeah, they have to get right up on you.”
“Yes, I guess if you put it that way, I rather get shot too. Boom. Shoot me twice. Get it over with.”
We agreed. Two Americans. Two women. Two New Yorkers in a fancy restaurant with tablecloths and golden lamps in an expensive part of town, with fresh sprigs of mint in our water glasses, talking matter-of-factly about how we rather get murdered. And this is about random murders. Mass murders that happen every single day in our United States of America.
My months in County Cork were a relief for me as a human, to be in a culture where this man with his dog could trust life, could have confidence in my humanity, to confront me: “You’re too loud for me blind dog.” Music to my soul. He was a local. That was his coffee shop. I was just a visitor learning that little baby girls could be named Freedom. He walks his blind dog there every day and gets his coffee. This is his spot, him and his dog. Maybe I was standing in the spot where his dog is used to laying down. What a beautiful life, to have a local café to be able to bring your dog companion inside, your dog angel, and to have a neighborhood, somewhere to hang out, somewhere where how you feel matters. Up the Republic!
Bonus audio of Annie reading from her essay…
about the author:
Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is an American memoirist, poet, and performance artist whose stage presence has been called riveting and volcanic. She was born in the Bronx. Her books include: Dyke Rubicons (Quelle Press chapbooks), Whaddyacall the Wind? (Bordighera Press), Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light; and Pitch Roll Yaw, (Guernica World Editions), L is for Lion: an italian bronx butch freedom memoir (SUNY Press; finalist for LAMBDA Literary Award), and Schistsong (Bordighera Press.) Podcasts as “Annie’s Story Cave.” For more info visit: AnnieLanzillotto.com.
One Sunday night about a year ago, you were practicing Chopin’s Nocturne in E Major. I can’t usually name the song you’re playing, but this time I could; it was the same melody Mom used to play for me at bedtime. I was five years old; she was sitting on the pink-cushioned bench at your old Yamaha piano in our living room, and I was lying in the bottom bunk in my dark bedroom down the hall. There was a yellow triangle of light on the carpet. The melody lilted through the slightly open door.
On that Sunday night, you didn’t know I was listening. But I was. I was sitting at Mom’s kitchen table, forgetting about the card game I was playing, and I was listening. I heard a few wrong notes here or there, but it didn’t matter. You played those ending trills with such precision, and with such tenderness, that I couldn’t help but close my eyes, exhale, and try to memorize the sound. After the last notes faded, I wondered how many more times I would hear you play.
***
A few weeks after that night, you slept behind the closed door of Mom’s old bedroom, watching whatever was playing on PBS, and I stood near the baggage claim in the Orlando airport with goodbyes on my mind. If you had been there, I’m almost sure you would have been irritated by our group of noisy, disheveled ballroom dancers, goofing around and waiting for our 31 suitcases filled with rhinestone-studded, ostrich-feathered costumes to fall onto the carousel. If you had been there, I’m not sure you would have chuckled at my coach’s quip, “wouldn’t it be terrible if your suitcase got lost right before your swan song?”
Swans aren’t one of our regular conversation topics, but if they ever come up, I’ll complain to you about the fact that swans don’t sing. It’d be nice if the myth were true. The image flatters our anticipatory grief—the graceful long-necked, wide-winged bird giving one last aria before sinking under the water. But, according to ornithologists, the Tundra Swan bellows a noisy high-pitched yodel, Trumpeter Swans sound like an old car horn, and the European Mute Swan is mostly silent. If swans do make a sound before they die, it’s most likely a hiss or a snort—their throat’s last, unmusical, involuntary rush of air.
***
If you knew that I’ve said all the words you think are bad—and said them more than once, if you knew that I’ve watched violent movies, skipped church, voted for people you’d never vote for; if you knew that I’m obsessed with The Beatles, that I believe things you’ve spent your life arguing against, that I’m a lesbian—I don’t know what you’d say.
I don’t feel close to you in the way some granddaughters feel close to their grandfathers, although I’ve seen you almost weekly since you moved in with Mom. Most of what I know about you is what Mom told me. She said that before you lived with her, when you lived in your trailer, you would forget to eat or drink—you would just sit in your chair for days and days. Several times, she found you home alone and unconscious between August and November. Once, you fell and smacked your head on the sidewalk. It was then Mom knew she had to be your full-time caretaker. I wish we had decades to learn to know each other, but if I were in your shoes—living on for seven years after the death of my partner, losing my independence, still paying student loans at 79 years old—my fingertips would be itching for their finale.
***
After I wrangled my suitcase off the carousel and found my hotel room, most of my team headed to the pool. I crashed onto the bed and didn’t get back up for a while. The next day, I stayed horizontal too, half-watching Netflix on my phone, half-thinking about swans. I didn’t get up until two hours before our call time. What are you supposed to do when your last time is only hours away? I ate a granola bar.
***
I’ve never seen a piece of music stump you. If you were a swan, you’d be the most prolific singer in the flock, so much so that ornithologists would believe they’d discovered a new species that really can sing (perhaps they’d call you the first Cygnus Cantare).
One night, during family dinner, you listed your favorite pieces you’ve ever played – songs by Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Prokofiev, Copland, and Debussy. Of Chopin’s “Nocturne in B Major Opus 62 No. 1,” you said, “that one’s a beast to play, by the way. A whole page of trills. But I love it.” I chuckled under my breath, knowing that if you, a master pianist, called it a beast, then I’d never have a hope of playing it. This was the first moment after you moved in with Mom that I almost felt like I knew you. I’ve since made those pieces into a playlist, and as I listen, I hear the echo of notes played by other pianists, but I try to imagine it’s your hands playing those notes on our Yamaha piano with the pink cushioned bench and the chipped middle-C key.
***
Did you feel your shell crack—peeling like a hard-boiled egg before your last recital? Did the pieces of your shell slide from your nervous sweaty hands like mine did on the night I danced for the last time? I looked at my reflection in the dressing room and breathed through my litany of lasts: Zip up this dress. Step into these shoes.Whisper backstage. Listen for my cue.
***
I’ve inherited your short-fingered, piano-playing, exceptionally sweaty hands. Even as I write this, I have to stop and wipe the sweat off my keyboard, and I think your hands are a curse—I really do; they are a curse that causes my fingers to slip off every chord that requires precision. And I think damn it, Grandpa, why couldn’t you let me inherit something less embarrassing?
But then I look down—no, that’s not quite right—I never actually look down at my hands, because I still obey what you taught me when I was a fledgling pianist: “Don’t look down at your hands.” You covered my hands with a book of sheet music so I would have to rely on feel rather than sight. I’ll start again:
I sense my hands in my peripheral vision, typing these words without thinking, stretching across each gap like caterpillars stretching across leaves. And during these times, it’s your hands I bless.
***
Did you know the average swan’s wingspan measures between six or seven feet, but some swans boast wingspans of up to ten feet wide? Imagine having wings as tall as Michael Jordan. Wings taller than a refrigerator, or taller than a Christmas tree. Swans can run up to 30 mph over the water’s surface, beating their gigantic wings before taking off. Imagine running at a two-minute mile pace on top of the water, beating wings longer than a king size bed. Though this feat would be impossible for human bodies, swan bodies are made for flight. They’re the perfect balance of light and heavy: many of their bones are hollow, making them light enough to fly, but they also have huge, dense chest muscles which allow them to operate their enormous wings. They’re covered in 25,000 feathers which repel water and catch air currents. Don’t you wish you could taste what they taste when they’re charging across the water on the cusp of flight, their bodies performing precisely according to their design?
But your body hasn’t performed very well lately. Though you haven’t told me so explicitly, I’ve seen your trembling hands, the slowness of your steps, the wobble of your balance. I have to speak louder and slower for your ears to catch my words. It’s during these moments that I think of you performing in your heyday with all the power and dexterity of a young swan. I imagine you seated at solemn church organs and grand pianos in performance halls. Your elbows stretch out like wings across the keyboard. I wish I could have seen you then.
***
Unlike us, swans don’t need to worry about budgets, day jobs, or the cost of concert attire (okay, I’m torturing the analogy a bit here, but stay with me). You had to fight for tenured faculty positions at a university, make do with living room stages instead of grand concert halls, try to convince reluctant kids to practice, advertise piano lessons on tear-off flyers at Allen’s grocery store, and sell insurance to make up the difference.
I had to work multiple jobs to pay for dance lessons, scour the internet for discount shoes, and haggle for used ballroom gowns. We’ve never said it out loud to each other, but we’ve felt the gap between our dreams and reality—and the bitterness it leaves behind.
***
Do you know that us grandchildren joke that your catchphrase is, oh, for goodness’ sake, said in the most disapproving, cantankerous tone? I play a classic rock cover of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata? Oh, for goodness’ sake. The Beatles are my favorite band? Oh, for goodness’ sake. My sister and I once went skinny dipping? Oh, for goodness’ sake. Sometimes your crabbiness is funny, even endearing.
But how easily you cross the line from curmudgeonly to cruel. How easily you dismiss your daughters, berate your son, criticize your family. I know there’s pain underneath that cruelty; you carry all sorts of burdens and heartaches in addition to your unrealized dreams. But if I were bold enough, I might tell you that I’m depressed too, and yet somehow, I’ve managed to not kick the family cat or crack derogatory jokes about queer people. You act as though we, your progeny, disappoint you. Giving you grace isn’t easy.
But when I catch you sitting alone in the living room while everyone else plays games in the kitchen, I see myself in your face. I’m 53 years younger than you, but I know how it feels to be weary, bitter, and depressed. I’ve had my own prickly, irritable moments—times when I’ve been too much of a storm to be in the same room with. Your hands are just as damp and restless as mine; you, like me, are an unapproachable introvert who looks away when someone tries to meet your eyes.
***
If you asked me what the last time felt like, I’d tell you that even though I tried to memorize every moment, I could only hold on to fragments: three solitary notes, a violin, two long strides, a turn. Heat in my hamstrings. Tight heels, slick hardwood floor. Feathered hem floating behind me. My teammate’s face. My heart folded inside a tango’s drumbeat. A pause, then crescendo into my favorite part. The slight creak of floorboards. Applause.
These are all the fragments I carry, two years after my last performance. You weren’t watching my final steps. And when it’s your turn to go, I might not be there to watch yours. After you’re gone, I will be left trying to hold just a few pieces of you.
***
If I knew I could trust you, I’d tell you I felt hollow the morning after that final performance. I was supposed to return my gown to the team storage closet on my way to work, and though I’ve worn countless costumes over the years, that dress was different. I’d been practicing my goodbyes for months (practice is what you taught me), but I wasn’t prepared to give this raspberry-red gown, stitched for my body, to some other woman on next year’s team.
As I got dressed to leave, my face grew hot and my throat tightened. I sat against the wall of my bedroom in just my underwear and cried. My partner found me there and held me. I think of you and your shaky hands, and I suspect you know what it’s like to careen downward.
***
Two years have passed since my last performance. I’m still practicing and failing at this goodbye; it’s coming as fast as a swan can sprint over water. So I’ll just say one last thing before I go: I’ve been practicing Chopin’s Nocturne in E Major. Most nights after dinner I rest my sweaty, too-short fingers on the keys and play mostly wrong notes. But don’t worry, I’m still practicing. I’m looking at the sheet music (not my hands), and stretching my elbows out wide like you taught me.
Someday I’ll play it well. Maybe, when that day comes, the melody will find you through a slightly open door.
about the author:
Sarah Safsten (she/her) is an essayist, writing teacher, and multimedia artist. She earned her MFA in Utah, where she currently lives and teaches. Her work was a finalist for the 2025 Ninth Letter Literary Awards and has appeared in journals including Apricity, Sky Island Journal, Dialogue, and others.
It was early morning, and the California fog was slowly dancing to the beat of the moonlight. Chris was behind the wheel of our rental car, clutching it with the concentration of a high school student eager to prove he could be trusted to drive. We were the Slow Car, the one that other cars whizzed by on their way to work and, if Californians were anything like our hometown New Yorkers, possibly cussed at under their breath.
It was May 2012 and I was in the back, nestled next to precious cargo: a daughter we’d named Emma, three days old, born on a foreign coast to our surrogate Samantha, who had carried our future for nine months. Who on many nights sat in bed with baby-bump speakers placed against her stomach so our future child could recognize her dads’ voices from our recorded readings of Goodnight Moon and A Fly Went By. Who insisted in the delivery room that Chris and I be the first to hold Emma.
Chris kept his eyes locked on the road.
The winding freeways of that golden state, which darted forward beneath a sprawling system of elevated highways, produced a maze reminiscent of my childhood Hot Wheels sets. It felt at once mammoth and strangely communal, each car filled with people moving along feats of modern engineering like thrill seekers on an amusement ride.
Halfway into our journey, Chris asked me the same question he’d already asked twice since leaving the hospital.
“Is she okay?”
***
I was a senior in high school in 1993, when Pearl Jam released its second album, Vs. While my friends had, by then, sworn allegiance to either Vedder or Cobain or both, I’d not yet found any connection to the grunge rock sounds, three-quarter-length shorts, and long hair coming out of Seattle. To be honest, I felt deserted on Long Island, clinging to the safety and nostalgia of Billy Joel, who once provided the soundtrack for our suburban teenage nights. But by freshman year of college, even as I still played plenty of Billy, something about the change of scenery, about the sudden sense of freedom, produced a shift within me, and the sonic sounds of Pearl Jam came pouring out of my speakers daily.
Though the most popular song on Vs. was “Daughter,” the one that spoke to me like a muse was track eight, “Rearviewmirror.” It began with a repetitive guitar riff, a power chord that carried the promise of an explosive energy to come. After six glorious seconds, a pounding drumbeat and the rest of the band’s guitars propelled the pace into new territory. The rhythm took hold, as if announcing the presence of something sacred.
Then, Vedder, with his longing, mournful, Olympus-like voice, launched the song’s lyrics:
I took a drive today.
Time to emancipate.
***
In the car with Chris and our newborn on the way to the airport for the flight home to New York City, I answered Chris’s question.
“Yes, she’s okay,” I said. That was me pretending to have enough confidence for the two of us.
An hour before, the hospital’s discharge nurse had grown impatient with us as Chris fiddled with the car seat’s installation. Maybe she’d worked the night shift, and our departure was all that stood between her and a break. Maybe she’d expected the two dads would be better at the task. Or maybe she wasn’t much into the idea of two dads. Though all the other nurses had treated us like minor celebrities, jockeying to be in the delivery room, this one, with her furrowed brows and pursed lips, had seemed bothered by everything about us.
When we finally drove away, and there were no more doctors or nurses, we felt the weight of our new and awesome responsibility. Chris’s instinct was to slow down. We’d driven enough on the freeways during previous visits to know that Californians drove fast. We’d also noticed that some drivers took multi-tasking to unusual lengths. Like the woman who propped an open book onto her steering wheel for rush-hour reading at seventy-five miles an hour.
We had seven pounds and two ounces worth of reasons to be cautious.
***
It is said that the riff Vedder played at the beginning of “Rearviewmirror” was among the first guitar parts he’d ever written or played with the band. I didn’t know that then, but it makes perfect sense. There is a majesty to the chords that Vedder strums—they sound innocent and pure and true. Like a first love, or a summer’s night.
Each time I heard the track, whether on my own stereo or someone else’s, I stopped whatever I was doing to let the song’s pulse flow through me. The music felt like breath. It could send me soaring on an imaginary cloud. It could also transport me to the times I watched my high school friends from afar, a distance made greater by the secret of my sexuality I wasn’t yet ready to reckon with. The way my friends would gather around tables filled with red Solo cups overflowing with Pabst or Rolling Rock. The way they sang the lyrics of Pearl Jam’s earliest songs, as though joined by an invisible thread.
It felt good to understand.
***
The signs pointing us to LAX told us we were almost there.
I looked again at the sprawling lanes of the freeway that dwarfed the expressways of my suburban youth, and marveled at the way the overhead exit ramps seemed to tilt on their axes. There was maybe an order to the chaos. I went through my mental checklist for the cross-country flight home. Like a trial lawyer, I had a folder of legal documents testifying to our child’s relationship to us in the event someone questioned what two men were doing with this tiny baby. I had the American Airlines form a doctor had signed to certify Emma’s fitness to fly at under one-week old, my signature acknowledging a series of far-fetched risks. I had the diaper bag packed with the onesies and diapers and tiny bottles of formula.
Emma was still asleep in her car seat. I offered her the pinky of my right hand by placing it against her tiny knuckles. Just as she had in the moments after her birth when the nurse placed her in the warming bed, and Chris and I stood over her in awe, she grasped my finger.
She held on the rest of the way.
***
When I was a law student in New York City, I watched the towers burn from my dorm on Mercer Street. A few weeks later, I set out on a road trip from New York City to Michigan to visit my then-boyfriend, Jeremy. I was too fearful about getting on an airplane in the wake of the tragedy, but I needed to find refuge from the city, refuge in Jeremy’s arms. At the time, I was out to some friends but not out to my mom and dad. Something about the smoldering smoke, the posters of the missing attached to fences and lampposts, and the awful smell that none of us wanted to name made my continued hiding feel ridiculous.
So before the trip, I wrote identical letters to my divorced parents letting them know who I really was, using words I was sure I’d never use—how I was gay and how I didn’t want to keep my life a secret from them any longer. Then, on a morning in late September, I stood beneath sunshine in front of a blue street mailbox, knowing that if I worked up the nerve to drop the letters inside, an unstoppable momentum would take hold.
Finally, after a deep exhale twenty-five years in the making, I let go. The metal on the collection slot handle rattled and squeaked as I closed it, a signal there was no turning back. I walked east a few blocks to pick up my rental car.
In those days, my first order of business when entering a car was to prepare the soundtrack. I laid out the stacks of CDs in their jewel cases on the passenger seat with a plan for a steady rotation of my favorites—Billy, Bruce, Greenday, Magnetic Fields, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam among them—for the nine-and-a-half hour drive. I’d taken at least a dozen discs with me, sounds that covered the seasons of my young life. It was an easy ride out of the city through the Holland Tunnel beneath the Hudson River, a route that could sometimes be filled with traffic that made you anxious for daylight. But things were slower in the city—people had left, routines had gone sideways, and nerves made us think twice about where we were going. Soon enough, I’d crossed the Pennsylvania border from New Jersey on the interstate I’d travel for hundreds of miles.
During the ride, my mind raced with the fear of how my parents might react to my news but also with excitement for a new way of being. It would be at least a day or two until the letters arrived on Long Island. My secret, in a way, was out into the universe though not yet known, creating an in-between that felt both dizzying and intoxicating.
A few hours into the trip, I reached for the Vs. albumwith my right hand and placed the gleaming disc into the player. The frantic energy of “Go” kicked off track after track that invited me to press the gas pedal closer to the floor. When I hit ninety miles an hour, “Rearviewmirror” came roaring through the car’s speakers. I turned the volume all the way up, and the bass caused everything in the car to rattle.
Then, I looked in my rearview mirror. What would I say if a cop pulled me over at this speed? But I didn’t see any police cars behind me. I saw nothing but empty road and the blurring dashed lines of the highway, proof of my speed and a yearning unleashed. I floored it. The timid Dodge Neon shook like it’d been startled awake. Awake like me. For a moment, I wondered if a car could come apart from being pressed too hard, too fast. But the needle on the odometer beckoned. One more push. And then, I hit 100. I kept it floored there for a euphoric minute.
I’d never driven so fast. It felt electric.
***
As Chris took the exit for the airport, he glanced in the rearview mirror to look at our child. Despite her slumber, she puckered her lips around the pacifier, moving them forward and back like a bird pecking for seeds. Chris’s eyes met mine in the glass. He raised his eyebrows and stretched his lips nervously. It was a gaze filled with anticipation and worry, and also with love. It was a look that bore witness to the little miracle of our lives. In the mirror, we could see many things—the road behind us, yes, but also one another, and our child, too, all captured in the same frame.
We could see that though we’d arrived as two, we were heading home as three.
***
In “Rearviewmirror,” Vedder may be singing about an abusive parent or a love gone wrong or even a version of himself he no longer recognizes. Toward the end, the protagonist is “far away” from someone or something, and the hard-earned distance feels euphoric. Whatever the backstory, the heartbeat of the song can be found in its brief chorus, when Vedder sings of seeing things “clearer” because of what’s appeared in the car’s rearview mirror. There are moments, Vedder is suggesting, when the mirror does more than just let you see what’s behind you.
There are moments when it also lets you see what lies ahead.
Bonus audio of Brad reading from his essay…
about the author:
This may sound hokey (and I’m suddenly feeling very Californian as I write it), but I think it’s about being able to cultivate a habit of recognizing the beauty all around us. When I can approach a day with some gratitude for the gifts hiding in plain sight, I feel like I’m living some version of “the good life.”
Brad Snyder’s writing has appeared in HuffPost Personal, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Sweet Lit, Under the Gum Tree, Hippocampus Magazine, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Bay Path University and serves on the board of directors of Short Reads, an online literary magazine of flash nonfiction. Brad lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his husband, daughter, son, and sometimes-warring cat and dogs. You can find him at bradmsnyder.com and on Instagram @bradmsnyderwriting.
I landed in Comiso long after the last bus, my phone missing, my luggage ruptured. I bundled it together and hailed the singular taxi. Dante’s English was better than my phrasebook, and he was a storyteller. He pointed out the passing silhouettes of ancient olive trees, we were further south than Tunis, the sand I would sweep off my balcony tomorrow would be Saharan, try the scacce at the panificio. He spoke of death, of grapes grown on volcanoes, how blood was shed every harvest, and the wine that came of it.
We pulled up to my daughter’s neighborhood, dark and questionable, precisely her taste. Dante glanced in the rearview mirror.
“Is this address?”
I shrugged.
“It’s what I have written,” showing him the note on the napkin.
He shrugged.
“I wait; I too have a daughter.”
He unloaded my luggage and lingered. I rang Chloe’s apartment, she ran down with Cuan, a bulwark of a dog, who barked and bolted towards me for kisses. Chloe, my budding stoic, hesitant about hugs and affection, wrapped me up tight in her arms and didn’t let go. The driver watched, smiled, and left us with a wave.
It was April. I had never heard of Ragusa, did not know much of Sicily. Photos and maps showed me something small and picturesque. A Unesco listing gave it legitimacy for baroque architecture. It had survived one of the world’s most massive earthquakes when Mt. Etna erupted in 1693, killing 60,000, destroying villages and triggering tsunamis. In the U.S., we were hanging witches in Salem.
My sister had died the previous December. I was by her side and Chloe was by mine. With grief bellowing at me, I quit my job, fired my husband, poured wine all over it, and lit a match. So, when my daughter suggested I join her in Italy in April, to create something, or just breathe, it didn’t seem any less prudent.
In six weeks I would adventure drive Chloe and Cuan back to her work in London via Italy, France, and Belgium, in an older Volvo with failing brakes.
That night, my bed felt like a board with sheets on it. The sun came up earlier than planned, and with it the sound of neighbors making love. Really going at it. My hips hurt and I hadn’t seen any Saharan sand yet, but I trusted it would be plentiful, so I got up to forage for coffee and a broom.
Chloe scooped out Lavazza from a foil pouch and fixed me one espresso, then another. She scraped jam onto a small piece of dry toast. Italian breakfast she said, rusks, lunch will be different. We’ll find scacce, a local food of lore. Now, let’s walk to the old town.
I live in Park City, Utah at 7700 ft at the top of 342 steep and splintery steps from Old Town. Steps without much oxygen. Ragusa sits at about 1000 ft with 340 steps down to Ragusa Ibla (their old town) from Ragusa Superior. Slick and shiny marble steps, rounded on the edges.
We half-walked, half-jogged down the steps descending through the Valle dei Ponti. Vistas shifted from storefronts and bridges to Chiesa domes and walls wet with moss and vines. Nine churches in Ragusa Ibla alone. The Church of the Souls of Purgatory to the Church of Santa Maria, founded by the Knights of Malta, and tiled with Caltagirone tiles that glinted and winked their blue. Homes carved into white rock, jasmine pushing out of cracks. Chloe grabbed my arm and pulled me into a stone alcove, small windows peered into an abandoned shop, shards of glass crunched everywhere.
“Our taco stand. We can buy it. They don’t have tacos. Great stopping point down the steps, shaded, little benches, we can serve from the windows.”
She smiled and kept running. We often discuss where to open taco stands to create our generational wealth.
Men on stools sipped espresso in button-down shirts and lace-up loafers, newspapers in hand. A refreshing lack of ball caps and athletic shoes. The lace and shadows of ornamental wrought iron pulled us further down the steps. Women swept as if to stave off famine. Cats struck poses and lorded over the rooftops.
Bells tolled and all our grief and joy felt proper.
My HOA in Utah determined hanging laundry outside to be an eyesore, a code I ignore at my peril. Here in Ragusa, women were ratcheting open shutters to sail sheets against red tiles. Rainbows of head scarves and hijabs, black lace lingerie, button-downs and work pants, wine stains scrubbed out of crisp aprons. The white flags of handkerchiefs men still kept handy for the tears of their women, or to blow their nose.
It was hot at 11am, and my jet lag was storming. The air was dry and then wet and then thick and I could feel my temperature spike.
By the time we were on the piazza, I felt ill.
Chloe looked at me. We spoke in unison.
“You should sit down.”
“I should sit down.”
I sat in front of a small cafe on a wooden bench. The shopkeeper looked at me, walked inside, and returned with an ice-cold beer. He gently pressed it into my hand, and I pressed it onto my forehead, rolling it around to cool my face. We both laughed.
“I think you should drink it.”
“It’s a little early,” I laughed.
“You’re a lot of red, and getting more red,” he stood next to me.
Chloe took the can from me and popped the tab, handing it back.
I took a swig.
The shopkeeper left and returned with an arancini cut in fourths, a bit of gelato in a paper cup, and a hand fan.
“Mangia, mangia, you can’t drink without eat”
Try me. I thought.
“Why for you to Ragusa?”
My sister died, I thought. I tended her, buried her, steadied her children, and I needed to leave. To poke at the chasm, she left while in unfamiliar territory, without reminders in every angle of light and baked good.
“My daughter lives here,” I said.
My daughter.
Chloe is the type that can land on hot lava, kind of did, and still succeed. If she had a tinder, it would read: I like cold beer, dogs, and human remains.
Her love for human remains turned into a highly specialized field of skeletal and dental bioarcheology, tracking disease and migration through bones. It took her to UCLA for her bachelor’s, and University College London for her master’s. UCL ranks fourth in the world. She would walk the same halls as Attenborough, Ghandi, and Ricky Gervais. She would be the first graduate of higher education in our family.
On my annual visit, she met me at the train station, her coat cuff frayed, buttons missing, the sole of one of her boots flapping a bit as we walked, hair almost brushed, and her blue eyes sparkling as she talked about her studies, and if she could sneak me into the lab, would I like to hold the skull of a 900-year-old medieval British woman? Yes. Yes I would. Cradling that smooth, tiny skull, I cried. I was thinking of women, of my daughter, and what we can do with time.
With graduation imminent, my sister Joy stated she would be accompanying me to London and since we all sunburned easily, let’s tack on a heritage trip to Ireland.
A few weeks before wheels up, she called, her voice measured.
“Gig, I have stage 4 ovarian cancer.”
I laughed.
Silence.
“What does that fucking mean Joy?” as if my anger could ward it off.
“It means I’m fucking dying.” Her tone was flat.
Joy did not swear.
“It means not long, Gig.”
There’s a game that children play, or used to. It takes two. On a decent swath of lawn, face each other, cross your arms in front of you in an X and grab your partner’s hands also crossed, then start spinning in a circle as fast as you can, hanging on until you can’t and let go, or fall together on the ground, accepting grass stains and laughter. This was a primary cause of sprained wrists and dislocations. There really wasn’t a winner; it was simple endurance. Joy was letting go.
Joy and I were two of eight children, most of us adopted. She was seven years older than I, two siblings in between us. We became the closest in our family, not in age but in shared secrets, whispered stories. She was a beauty; I was a tomboy. She attempted to pretty me up, plucking my eyebrows, detangling my waist-length red hair, shortening the hem of my Mormon knee-length skirts, desperately trying to teach me poise. She did, just in ways she didn’t expect. I taught her that dirt was fun, and play is good. We swam naked once, and I never saw her happier or more beautiful. She was my first phone call, every time.
We kept to our travel plans and watched Chloe graduate, gown a bit askew, but on. The halls of UCL reminded us of Hogwarts. We sipped champagne at the hosted reception and tried to soften our American accents. We brushed aside our collective imposter syndrome, switched to Pimms Cups, linked arms, and rubbed shoulders with intellectual royalty.
In Ireland, we visited St. Brigid’s Well, known for miracles of healing. In its damp cave, artifacts beg and barter for a different ending. Water dripped lightly on our heads. It smelled like prayer and fear and loss. Joy crossed herself. We were all former Mormons, so crossing oneself wasn’t a thing. I rolled my eyes. She held Chloe’s hand. A Madonna wore 1000 strings of rosaries. I dropped a coin into a dark circle of water. Bartering with God and Brigid.
Back home in Utah, sitting vigil with Joy, news of a job for Chloe in Sicily came through.
“My angels made it so!” said Joy, raising a toast of icy vodka and a hit of her CBD vape. Along with swearing, she had taken up weed and a bit of the drink on her last road.
She died that night and pulled the stars right out of the sky.
Six weeks in Ragusa, my body acclimated to time zones and daily scacce. I embraced the sassy flirtations of Sicilian men and iceless Negronis. I had hiked the granite steps countless times now, explored the Val di Noto and hidden crypts. I had walked home late under full moons down small alleys where bands of roving hooded teenagers hunted for the perfect Nutella crepe. I had sweated my body weight out and put holes in my shoes. The last few days, as we prepared for the drive to London, posters were plastered next to funeral notices and dance contests. A festival. Three days of a religious pilgrimage through the streets of Ragusa in homage to the dragon slayer, Saint Giorgio.
On the final night of the festival, we wandered down the steps and made it to the Basilica, sardines in a tin of people. We found a table near the front and ordered wine and artichokes in anticipation of something humble, reverent, and quiet. Ready to cross ourselves in false worship.
I was sipping wine when the cannons exploded. The table shook. A sound system blasted Italian pop music, then the tale of Saint Giorgio, The Dragon Slayer, was projected with grand imagery onto the cathedral, which appeared to be artfully melting.
The night darkened and the church stopped melting, images of a curved crucifix wrapped the cathedral and the world in its embrace. A procession of men in regalia with a relic-filled arc atop their shoulders snaked up the street. Then fireworks. Explosions screeched into the sky, spirals and bursts of sparkling ecstasy rained down on us. Mt. Etna blushed. It was daylight at 10 pm and it seemed the earth was breaking in two. Dragons were indeed slayed. We were laughing and crying, leaning into each other. “Spirit neutral”, Chloe had said when I was hoping to feel or sense the presence of our lost loved one, “Sicily is spirit neutral”. We did not know about the dragons.
The next day, we packed the car for London and took it to the local garage for a final assessment, maybe a repair if we could manage the cost. On the wall, a dusty framed Madonna perched next to a poster of a voluptuous naked brunette, cigarette dangling from her lips, leaning towards us and winking. Angelo rolled out from under the car, eyebrows furrowed, and asked us how far we planned on driving it.
I think a lot about dubious roads. Ones I’ve taken by choice, or force, or at random. The wild and dusty roads that leave us breathless and in love, or jailed in loss. I think about the roads my daughter and I had traveled, together and apart. Of all the risks that creep out of the cracks, or are simply standing with their thumb out asking for a ride.
“London” I said.
He sat up, crossed himself, raised his eyes to the Madonna and the brunette, pulled a hanky from his pocket, wiped sweat and tears of laughter, then blew his nose.
Stuffing the hanky back in his pocket, “You’ll be lucky to make it to Pisa.”
We loaded the dog and headed north.
A portion of this essay read by the author:
Ginger’s essay was selected as the 2025 Honeybee Short Creative Nonfiction Prize winner by Brenna Womer. Brenna had this to say about the piece…
“With a strong sense of new and unfamiliar place, this essay is a succinct and poignant time capsule of a shifting season in the writer’s life. While relishing in quality time spent with her ambitious, adventurous, eccentric, and accomplished daughter where she’s living for the summer in Sicily, the writer stirs with grief, loss, excitement, ambivalence, longing, love, and so many more emotions. It seems that the trip is a kind of reset for the writer, a recharging and readying of herself—body, mind, and spirit—as she launches into the next of her own life, not knowing exactly what’s to come but, by the end of the essay, seeming open to whatever the Universe has waiting in the wings. This essay, with its beautiful insights—”Bells tolled and all our grief and joy felt proper”—and compelling juxtapositions—”Rainbows of headscarves and hijabs, black lace lingerie, button-downs and work pants, wine stains scrubbed out of crisp aprons”—is smart, rich, vivid, and thoughtfully crafted. I so enjoyed the ride.”
about the author:
Ginger Tolman is a documentary filmmaker and an emerging writer living in the mountains of Utah, just off a ski run, and above the shenanigans of the pubs of Main Street. Her 2020 film, “A Piece of Me,” was an Official Selection for the NGO IFF and Berlin Shorts Film Festival. “Soufra,” a collaborative film, has won numerous awards, notably an Official Selection for NYC DOC. This is her first published piece other than an occasional op-ed. She continues to work in national and international nonprofits in advocacy and development.
It’s impossible not to take the people we love for granted. All that appreciation. How could we live? But there are a few things I would change if I could go back. I would have insisted we stand in line to see where the Constitution was signed when my dad came to visit me in Philadelphia a few months before his death instead of asking, “Do you really wanna wait?” I would have worked harder to loosen up when we went to Iceland on our last trip together. I would have taken more videos. Pictures are great, but videos bring a person to life in a way I never even thought about before I realized I’d never see him in motion again. I only have a few, and I don’t play them often. I don’t want to build up tolerance to his ghost.
The timestamp on this one says it was taken at 9 p.m. on February 8, 2023, one month before he died. My dad, sitting in his red recliner, is the only person in the frame, but I know my mom and our longtime family friend Cathy are there too. Over the months of his illness, the wooden table next to the recliner had slowly filled up with all his little items: incentive spirometer, headlamp, his weed vape in the elegant holder he’d made from a square of 2×4. Mugs and glasses of unknown contents. Drinking was easier than eating by then, and he always had several beverages going at once.
You can hear by my halting breaths that I’ve been crying, or still am. I don’t remember taking the video. I’m sure I’d taken an Ambien, which I was doing a lot. (You can add that to my list of regrets.)
Cathy tells my dad he will continue to live in her memory as long as she’s alive. He doesn’t appear to take much comfort in this, saying that while he may be remembered for her lifetime, by the next generation – “In which we have absolutely no oar in the water” – “I’ll be gone.”
Although my dad has apparently forgotten that we do have an oar, and she is sitting right in front of him, I take his meaning. “Should I have a baby?” I earnestly ask the room at large. I’m roundly ignored. It wasn’t until this year that I ever really thought about the fact that, absent some intervention, I’ll be the last person in our family. I’m a childless only child in my mid-30s without even a single cousin. This thought has become intermittently terrifying. I remember sifting through boxes of family photos as a kid, asking, who’s that? Hearing how my grandfather called my grandmother, Helen, his little hurricane. Who will I tell our stories to?
Several months after my dad’s death, the father of an investigator on the study I work on died. During a meeting a couple of months before, he had told the group he might be less available for a bit. His parents were ill, and he didn’t know how it would all shake out. I had told him I understood. That my dad had recently died after several years of illness. I remember how he’d looked at me sharply, and said, “We’re not there yet.” I’d been trying to empathize but, on some level, he’d taken it as a threat. This is what’s coming for you. And now his father is dead, and when I write him a condolence note I wonder if there’s some part of him that thinks I’m saying, I told you so. And I wonder if there’s some part of me that is. Grief doesn’t make you a good person. It just makes you a different person.
It’s a bright blue day in Iceland, and we’re headed west along a peninsula we refer to as, “Snuffles” because we couldn’t pronounce the Icelandic word and Snuffles is funny. This is our favorite kind of humor. The kind where you just laugh at words. It’s September, the fall before his death, and we’re on what we had enthusiastically declared “our last trip.” This wasn’t because we’d come to a circumspect acceptance of his mortality, but to guilt my mom into turning a blind eye to the exorbitant amount of money we hoped to spend.
That morning, he’d had another neuropathy related foot-slip while driving, and I’d taken over again. It probably would’ve been fine, but I hadn’t wanted to worry the whole time. I was feeling annoyed because he, thinking he’d be doing most of the driving, had insisted we get a manual, even though I hadn’t driven one since high school. I was sad too. He’d always been such an elegant driver: cocking his head just so and raising two fingers from the wheel at a passing acquaintance, turning his palm toward the shifter and pushing rather than pulling it into fourth, decelerating so smoothly you hardly noticed you’d stopped.
He was a terrible backseat driver, but his suggestions were so earnest and idiosyncratic that it was only moderately annoying instead of homicidally so. Still, I had to tell him to seriously stop after he said I wasn’t wiggling the gear shift the right way when checking whether the car was in neutral. The crazy thing was that I was doing it “the right way” – placing my hand loosely over the ball and giving it a rapid jiggle. It was a move I executed flawlessly because I’d watched him do it a thousand times.
It was a small thing, but the fact that he’d missed this detail showed his decline. There’s a possibly apocryphal story about a man throwing a punch over a game of pool and my dad catching the guy’s fist in his hand. Whether or not it’s true, it’s believable because it illustrates one of his most marked characteristics. He was unusually observant. He noticed the moment the guy started to swing.
At his funeral, my mom told me the most frequent thing people said to her after my dad died was that they liked him but never really “got” him. He lived on the same end of the same Pacific Northwest island for 48 years, and going anywhere with him included a stream of nods, hellos, and fingers raised from the steering wheel, but he had only a few close friends. He liked people and loved to chat but could quickly go from affable to far away. At dinner parties you’d look over and see him staring dreamily into the middle distance. “Is your dad okay?” I remember a friend asking one year at Thanksgiving. He wandered, and not just in his mind. You’d be on a trip walking around some foreign city and suddenly he’d be gone. This was very annoying, as was his response to being called on it. “What? I was just over there,” he’d say, gesturing vaguely away.
He was a specific kind of person, but it would be hard to say which kind. He had a dry sense of humor but wasn’t sarcastic. He was mischievous but almost never unkind. He had an easy physicality, probably from the years he spent outdoors chopping wood for a living, but he couldn’t have cared less about sports. He loved animals. Dogs especially. He always gave our late dog Bella the last bite of whatever he was eating. The effect was that he started hurrying through his food, becoming more and more anxious as she stared at him expectantly. Only once she had received that final bite could he relax.
He taught middle school for years, and one of his most strongly held convictions was that children shouldn’t spend all day sitting in a classroom. One of his classes was called Adventure Education and it culminated each semester in a week-long outdoor trip. I went along on one during my junior year of college. It started with a 36-hour train ride from Seattle to Southern California with 16 eighth graders and only got more harrowing from there. I swore I would never do it again, but he loved those trips and could remember them in elaborate detail even years later, always referring to his former students by their last names as he recalled the little quirks of their personalities. He took children seriously, which is probably why so many of his students adored him. A few absolutely hated him, and he got a kick out of that too.
After he died, my mom showed me a piece of worn yellow paper with a list of names written in his distinctive all caps handwriting. He’d told her that these were people who had been especially kind to him during his illness. During his last few weeks, she would frequently see him gazing at it, or sometimes just holding it in his hand with his eyes closed.
❇
Has anyone you loved ever died really slowly? Toward the end of my dad’s life, I told my therapist Roger that I sometimes wished he would just die already. It had been over two years since his diagnosis, which is not even really that long, but I was tired of the false alarms, the dire phone calls and emergency trips home, sobbing in the gynecologist’s office because my mom had just called to tell me he’d decided to take the medication he’d been prescribed for when he was ready to go, but by the time I got to the airport that afternoon, he’d changed his mind.
Roger said this was the kind of thing people usually keep to themselves, but he was smiling because he loves this kind of stuff. He paused, seeming to weigh what he was about to say, and then told me that his first wife had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. A week later at the wake he had caught his son laughing. Or at least his son felt caught. The color drained from his face when he looked up and saw his dad see him, but Roger had told his son what he tells me now, “Don’t ever apologize for living. Life wants to be lived.”
We celebrated what would be my dad’s last birthday on a balcony in Reykjavik. Seventy-four years old, and a plate of fresh bread, apples, Camembert, and a sliced Snickers bar. We toasted with Coke Zero in wine glasses, both of us wrapped in gray blankets against the evening chill. The trip was almost over, and I was feeling bad for how irritable I’d been. Annoyed at his memory loss and then feeling guilty for being annoyed.
I don’t remember what preceded it, but he started talking about how he had become invisible in old age. He said he’d first noticed it when we were visiting New York City 15 years before. The feeling of not being able to get the bartender’s attention. The sudden impossibility of ever getting the bartender’s attention again.
I told him this transition was probably more jarring for women since the difference between the vocal attention of youth and the later invisibility is so stark. He sat for a moment before responding and then said that invisibility is women’s consolation prize for having had to be at least a little bit afraid almost every moment of their lives.
I remember I was taken aback by this clarity from a person who by dinnertime yesterday couldn’t remember where we’d eaten lunch. I realized I’d stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt pretty much the minute we touched down in Iceland. I’d been so intent on cataloging his slips that I had stopped listening. Earlier, I had mistaken a joke for an earnest question and asked if he was being serious.
The way he held my gaze when he said, “No.”
In January, I call my parents and find them still in bed. I picture their wonderful room. The muted colors, the immensely inviting king-size bed, the sun flooding in through the French doors that open to the backyard.
They’re in a light mood. My dad starts talking about the dog, but stops mid-sentence, asking, “What is there really to say about the dog?” He moves on to the plot they’ve just purchased at the cemetery up the road. “It’s right next to Renee Neff,” he says, sounding delighted. Mrs. Neff was my fifth-grade teacher. She and her husband lived behind my parents until she died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago.
I ask my mom if she got a plot next to my dad and she responds with her usual pragmatism that she will be cremated. I suggest her ashes could be buried, but before she can respond her phone rings. I hear her say, “We’re not diabetic bye,” and hang up. Then she texts me a picture of the casket they’re considering.
The Titan Seagrass is a coffin-shaped basket woven from willow branches and decorated with lengths of seagrass. It has two bittersweet reviews, giving it four and five stars. From Bob in Texas: “Beautiful and exactly what my wife of 50 years would have wished for had she been able to choose for herself.”
We were lucky my dad was able to choose for himself because it meant we had time. Two and a half years, and for almost half of that we knew he was dying. It’s surprising how hard that was to admit – even in the face of overwhelming evidence, even for the doctors (maybe especially for them) – but doing so was strangely enlivening.
A year before, my dad was at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle for surgery that would remove the tumor by cutting out a part of his colon. It was supposed to last six hours, so that morning my friend Jamie and I had gone on a long hike as a distraction. The trail was called Mailbox Peak, so named because there’s a mailbox at the top that people leave stuff in. Even after almost five miles of steady climbing, Jamie somehow picked up speed on the final incline. She went straight to the mailbox – lowering the door with the reverence of an archaeologist opening a tomb – and began rummaging around in its assorted “treasures.” After setting aside a half-smoked joint and several troll dolls, she pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and asked if she could read me a letter to the universe. “No,” came my swift reply.
We were almost back to the car when my mom called. By this point, it had been almost 12 hours since he’d gone into surgery. For a moment she didn’t say anything. I heard her ragged intake of breath. I felt dizzy. I remember thinking this is how it happens. “He’s alive,” she said. Then she told me the bad news. When they’d gone in, they’d found the tumor had spilled into the surrounding tissue, the blood stream. They’d spent the entire day removing as much as they could, but that didn’t change the news we got when he woke up. The cancer was terminal. Jamie drove me straight to the hospital. I remember it was a beautiful summer evening.
Because of COVID, only one visitor was allowed at a time. My mom came down and I went up. When I walked in, my dad opened his eyes and smiled weakly. “Boo Boo,” he said without raising himself from the pillows. I pulled the chair up to the bed and sat down. We talked for a bit. He recounted a story a staff member had told him about fleeing Chinese oppression in Tibet by walking across the Himalayas. As he spoke, his eyes filled with tears. I grabbed his hand, and we sat for a while just looking at each other, not saying a thing. I wanted to offer something comforting, and if not comforting then just anything. I wanted to look away. But I didn’t. No platitude could save us now. He wouldn’t get better. This is how it happens. How you go from one thing to the next. How you give comfort by not allowing yourself to get comfortable.
My dad was different after he found out the cancer was terminal. It was like a wall had come down. He was now easily moved to tears. Less witty perhaps, but so tender. He drew people to him. At one point, Cathy came to stay with him so my mom could visit me on the East Coast. She later told me it was the highlight of her year. That’s the thing about visiting the dying. We walk in, nervous we won’t say the right thing. Worried we’ll give up the game, accidentally reveal that they’re dying, but they know they’re dying, and worse (so much worse), they know we are too. We look down with our faces arranged in sympathy, and they look up and see the ignorance of a cow on slaughter day. They know how it goes by in the blink of an eye.
On some level we know this too. It’s why we tend to avoid them. But if my dad’s death taught me anything, it’s that finding out you’re going to die is a good thing. Even if this knowledge is fleeting, which it always is. Like I’ll be looking out the car window watching the trees go by and suddenly think how someday I’ll be dead forever. I’ll never know anything again. Never have any idea how it ends. Usually, these thoughts don’t carry much weight. It’s hard to feel them, but sometimes I’ll get this drop in my stomach and a sense that everything is moving away from me impossibly fast, and for that second, I’ll know.
On a phone call later that summer, my dad told me about the tuck. He’d been taking these long walks through the fields on the outskirts of town. One day he came upon a spot where the tall grass had been tamped down by a deer settling in for a nap, and it being an August afternoon and just about that time, he had decided to follow suit and laid down right there and fallen asleep. Since then, this had become a habit, and he called these places tucks. He said that when he woke up from one of these naps, he felt like he had become a part of the place. Something about the vulnerability of sleep anointing it as his, or rather, him as its. Of course, not all tucks are created equal, and he would sometimes lull himself to sleep in his current tuck by thinking about an even better one. He said the Ur-tuck would be at the base of a Hemlock tree where the branches fan out and sweep the ground like a twirling skirt. You crawl in and curl up with your back against the wide trunk, and after a while you fall asleep.
When he stopped talking, we were quiet. I think we both understood what he was saying. Years before his cancer, he’d told me about how a sick wolf would leave the pack. Find somewhere quiet to die. I think that’s what he was doing – practicing. We never explicitly discussed his feelings about dying, and after his death my mom remarked that she didn’t think he ever truly believed he would die. But this conversation made me think he did, and that he wasn’t overly frightened, and that he was maybe even looking forward to returning to the earth where he had found so much joy and solace.
❇
We’d always talked on the phone a lot, sometimes several times a day. When you speak that much there’s no fear of phone calls, of long catchups, compulsory rundowns of how you’ve been. We picked up and hung up with impunity. We came with little observations, a funny person at the dog park, a petty complaint, a song recommendation. We got off as breezily as we got on, gotta go bye and towards the end, gotta go I love you bye and sometimes, alrighty well, I’ll let you go, a little joke where we tacitly blamed the other person for the goodbye.
Our last phone call was a week and a half before his death. After talking for a few minutes, I suggested we watch an episode of Succession. He hardly watched TV his entire life, but in the last three months he’d fallen in love with this show, a family drama filled with cruelty and twisted love. We got off the phone so my mom could get him into the bedroom where the TV was. She’d set everything up so that when I called back all we had to do was put our phones on speaker and count down 3 2 1 Play.
Immediately it was annoying. I could hear his audio just slightly out of sync with mine and I’m sure he was experiencing the same. We had valiantly endured ten minutes of this when he asked, “Can I hang up now?” He was often pretty muddled at this point, and I realized he’d forgotten why we were even doing this dumb thing. He told me that when I’d suggested we watch together, he’d thought I meant together, like I was in the next room instead of on the other side of the country. I’d come in, and we’d cozy up together in that bed that’s like an ark and watch the Roy siblings battle for their father’s empire. We’d laugh at their foibles, secure in the knowledge that it was a question we’d never have to ponder: no company, no siblings, no problem.
I got there three days before he died. My mom had tried to prepare me, but it’s hard to be prepared. He was lying in his hospital bed in their room, his mouth slightly ajar with the corners pulled down. His eyes were open and rolled up. He looked like a saint in a Renaissance painting, like he was being pulled in two directions. I’d last seen him only a month before, but this was the first time he’d looked like a person who was going to die.
Two days went by in a strange haze. Sometimes he was lucid and other times not. He fretted and picked at invisible bugs. My mom said he was hallucinating. He’d asked her why there was a naked man in the backyard but didn’t seem overly troubled by it. His speech, when he was able to talk, was soft and mumbled, mostly unintelligible. We’d passed the point of last words, so I held his hand. I tried to match my breath to his like I’d read about in a book. My mom gave him water from a green sippy cup, and I lay down next to him and slept.
On the third day, my mom lifted his covers to turn him and saw that his legs were mottled and blue. This happens when someone is very close to death, as the heart loses its strength. She said she hadn’t realized how close he was. Our capacity to be surprised by what we know is coming reveals the tenacity of hope, and once again I was so grateful for her. That steely pragmatism, undercut continually by love.
I slept in their room that night. We lowered his hospital bed to the same height as ours, the mattresses forming one continuous field. We drifted to sleep.
I woke in the dark. Something had changed. At almost the same moment, the dog raised his head. So did my mom. She got up and went to my dad, putting her arms around him. He took three ragged breaths and died.
I looked at the clock. It was 11:18 p.m. It was March 8, 2023. We turned on the light and quietly removed his catheter and oxygen line. We arranged his body, touched his still face. After a while, we went back to sleep.
❇
In the weeks after his death, I saw my dad everywhere. Not literally, but I’d be stopped in the street by the odd twinkling of Christmas lights strung up across a second story balcony. Old men on bicycles in Costco jeans.
I told my therapist I was embarrassed that as an ostensible atheist I’d suddenly become consumed by wondering where he was. Roger said not to worry too much about what made sense. That it wasn’t necessary to have a totally cohesive world view right now. Maybe not ever. This is how grief rearranges us. Someone is reincarnated – the person who lives.
I had physical symptoms. My body ached and I felt hot and cold but when I took my temperature, I didn’t have a fever. My left leg buzzed, and I slept three hours at a time. I sometimes felt a sense of hyperreality and a strange energy.
They don’t tell you about euphoric grief, which is the buoyant feeling of becoming suddenly aware that you’re alive. It’s the other side of vertiginous grief, which is the dizzying experience of realizing your mom will die, and everyone you love, and you, and not necessarily in that order.
Sometimes the grief creeps up, surfacing when you least expect it. Like when I was signing for a prescription at the pharmacy and the little screen asked, “Are you the patient or the caregiver?” Or when I was walking down the sidewalk and found a crescent moon charm with an engraving that read, “I love you to the moon and back.” The tears came so fast. Even though he’d never said it. Never would have said something so schmaltzy. Never will say it.
Other times I went looking for it. I listened to our songs. Our taste was bittersweet oldies. John Prine. That part in “Lake Marie” where he asks, “You know what blood looks like in a black and white video?” My dad would always finish the line, yelling, “Shadows!”
It was on the playlist I made for his memorial. The title was YCNYLN. It was an acronym from a long-ago joke that had started on the drive to a friend’s twelfth birthday party. We had been laughing about how they’d put both the party’s start and end times on the invitation: you come now, you leave now. We were indignant, like, who are they to tell us when the party’s over? But it turns out that’s exactly what happens.
About the author:
Ramona is a writer and nurse in Philadelphia. She is currently working toward her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania where she studies drug use and addiction. Her work has been published in Allure, Buzzfeed, Wired and The San Francisco Appeal. You can find her at ramonaemerson.substack.com
In the heat of the first pandemic summer, I set off alone on an ill-advised, improvised, road trip toward my mother.
More than a year before COVID plowed into our collective lives, my brother and I had moved her from her home of 35 years to memory care. On moving day, she walked out of her house with her head up, although she had only reluctantly conceded to this plan. “I can adapt to anything.” she had told me, years earlier, as she resisted any serious discussion of this eventuality. She proved herself correct.
Every few months I flew 2,841 miles from Seattle to upstate New York for a long weekend visit. Although I told her I was coming, my arrival was always a delightful surprise. When I was there I felt loved and mothered, even as I zipped up her coat and reminded her who I was.
In the selfies I captured on my phone from my visit in late January 2020, our heads tilt toward one another, we are smiling, and my arms are wrapped around her shoulders. She is bundled in the ankle-length puffy blue coat I bought her to guard against the cold winters. On the day I flew back to Seattle from that trip, the first person in the United States was diagnosed with Coronavirus. Soon the promise of safety we had bargained for her freedom evaporated into the contagion-filled air.
As the COVID-19 lockdown stretched on, the staff at the memory care began orchestrating video calls. One day, in a sweet moment on FaceTime my mother smiled at my image on the tablet and said, “It’s so good to be together.”
And then her face clouded. “Is that what we are?” she asked.
“Yes,” I tried to assure her, “we are together.”
“But how is that?” She asked, looking up from the screen and scanning the room she was actually sitting in with a skeptical face. “I don’t think it’s like that.”
She had a point. It really wasn’t. Even her muddled mind could see something was amiss in the space between us.
In July 2020, with cases dipping, New York State lifted some of the visitor restrictions on congregate care facilities. I ruminated obsessively on the question of how to get to my mother. It was the bewildering pre-vaccine days of the pandemic. Waves of illness overwhelmed hospitals and ravaged assisted living facilities like a capricious deity. I did not want to be the vector that killed my mother. Flying was too risky. A friend had a camper van she would lend me immediately, available for just enough days to drive from Seattle to NY, spend five days there, and drive back. I would travel in my own sanitized spaceship and arrive untainted.
My mother was, as a rule, up for adventure, but even she would have questioned the wisdom of this proposal. Then again, she might have done it in my situation, if she could have grasped my situation.
I’d driven six hours eastward over the Cascade Mountains, across the Columbia River, past acres of potato fields, and was just hitting the Washington/Idaho border when New York State’s Governor announced that Washington State had just been added to a travel advisory. Residents from WA entering NY would now have to quarantine for 14 days. I got a text notification that my campground reservations at NYS Parks had been canceled based on my home address and a voice mail from the director at my mom’s facility. I pulled over and texted a friend who worked in the WA Governor’s office. “We’re trying to get off the list,” she texted back. I kept driving.
Somewhere in Montana, my second-rate cell phone service got spotty and the GPS gave out. Never one with a good grasp of geography, and having left without a map, I texted my wife from a truck stop “What are these mountains called and when do they end?” She was not amused.
I bought a paper map at a truck stop, asked the man at the counter where I was, and texted my wife again. I asked her to look up the meaning of the dashboard indicator light that had just turned red. This is the sort of problem my anxious mother would have envisioned. She always told me to leave time for an emergency on my way to the airport, which I never, ever, do.
The hours delay for impromptu camper maintenance derailed my hastily planned itinerary. As darkness fell that night, I pulled off at the first highway sign tent symbol. I slept parked in a campground that was just a wide field somewhere in Montana. A ridiculous grouse waddled past my window in the morning. I got up and drove East.
As I crossed into South Dakota, I got another message from the friend in the Governor’s office. “It doesn’t look like we are getting off the list,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
That night I stayed in a vast campground in Hermosa, SD, on the outskirts of Rapid City, surrounded by RVs festooned with Trump for America flags. Alone in my queerness in the van, I briefly considered trying to cover up the gay bumper stickers. Instead I called the memory care and asked to speak to my mom. I told her a funny story about my son that I had told her before and read her a poem she always asked to hear twice. I hung up, closed the curtains on the van, lay down and marveled at the absurdity of both my effort and its failure.
I was working as a consultant at the time of this endeavor. I kept most of my work meetings on Zoom, pulling off the highway to find a place my hotspot would connect. I met with a client to discuss political coalition dynamics in the parking lot of a gold mine in Idaho, surrounded by real-life oversized Tonka trucks. I interviewed graphic designers for a policy report while parked on the edge of a state highway near the Badlands, a ragged, bewildering landscape. It was 101 degrees and I couldn’t figure out how to run the air conditioning in the camper without draining the battery. I smoothed my unwashed hair into a ponytail and tried to project some not-very-credible professionalism as sweat drained down my chest in rivulets and pooled in the waistband of my sweatpants.
I didn’t turn around in South Dakota. Having driven 1,140 miles, I decided to go another 617 in the direction that wasn’t home or my mother. A dear friend in southern Minnesota was living with cancer. She’d been living with it for decades, with a quiet sense of refusal. When I pulled into her driveway, she came out and gathered me in a hug. I tried not to let my face show my shock at how worn and delicate her body looked. We had a glorious visit. She died seven months later.
The visit with my friend, my fiercely alive friend, wasn’t about death at all. But, then again, it wasn’t not about death. Would I have continued on if she weren’t sick? Maybe not. The whole venture was provoked by my ardent hope to outpace death’s path to my mother. On my return trip a woman at an RV park in Wyoming asked where I was headed. “Home,” I said. “I was trying to go see my mother.” I told her of my thwarted effort. “I’d be afraid to do that long trip all alone,” she mused. I was more afraid not to.
I returned home eight days after I left, to exactly where I’d begun.
Two months after my failed voyage to see her, my mother was hospitalized with a non-COVID infection. Desperate and scared, I flew East wearing two masks in a nearly empty plane.
My mother recovered. I spent a day with her at the hospital, gallivanting alongside her through a generally pleasant delusion. She seemed to be sending me off to college, with great excitement for me about what was to come. A sweet fantasy, since when I actually left for college at 17 we couldn’t afford a second plane ticket, so I traveled alone. When a gaggle of medical students passed by the door to her room in a walking lecture she asked “Shouldn’t you join them?” But I said I’d catch up later. The social worker arrived and announced she would be discharged. But memory care wouldn’t take her back. She had to move to the nursing home next door.
The pandemic rules required that anyone discharged from a hospital to a nursing home had to be isolated for two weeks. My mother had no way to understand the foundations of this policy; not contagion or a calendar. The first option was to stay in one’s own room, a little gate across the door, like one used to deter toddlers. This attempt at containment made her wary and suspicious, and then afraid, angry, and unruly. She walked through the gate and out of her room and raised her voice. The head nurse made a determined face and announced the second option; she’d have to stay in the empty COVID isolation ward.
We wheeled her there across the open grounds. Fall leaves crunched under the chair wheels and she smiled as a cool breeze brushed her face. In the isolation room, a jumble of tables and chairs were shoved to the side to make space for a semicircle of hospital beds. A giant TV loomed on the wall. Piles of dusty puzzles and games spilled out of a corner, detritus of the pre-pandemic times when this space was a day center for people living with dementia. A sole staff member sat in a chair at the edge of the circle of beds. It was not the place I wanted to leave my mother. I hugged her. She hugged me back with strong arms and held my face in her hands. I left her there and flew home to my wife and child.
Just eight weeks later, I was ringing a doorbell and shivering in the winter darkness at the back entrance of the nursing home. My mother had had a stroke. The head nurse called and told my brother that she was dying. Not today, but soon. We were allowed to come see her, one at a time, although the doors were locked, and no visitors were allowed. There were exceptions for death.
Entering the nursing home every day was traveling through a portal, outside to inside. Through the back door, I entered a narrow hallway. A pile of plastic wrapped gowns, face shields, and masks cascaded across a gray table that also held a blue binder and a thermometer. I logged my name, the time, and my temperature in the binder. I took a gown from the pile and put a plastic face shield over my N95 mask. Gowned up, I was allowed to walk across the common space, a big open kitchen with empty tables and a living room with empty couches, into her room. I could stay as long as I wanted, but I could not leave her room until I was leaving the building.
Alone with my mother in her room, my body pulsed with problem-solving adrenaline with no outlet, and ached with anticipated loss. I gently brushed her hair back from her forehead. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move most of her body. To transfer her from bed to wheelchair involved two caregivers and a mechanical lift. She was reportedly dying, but she didn’t seem to be. She seemed more suspended in some unknown realm, floating, just like she was when the sling gently lifted her from bed to chair.
I was asked to keep my PPE from day to day, to save resources. I learned that, even if it was 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside, I should wear a tank top under my clothes and strip down before putting on the gown. The paper-plastic material didn’t breathe and sweat immediately soured whatever clothes I wore underneath. The nurses and nursing assistants were all wearing tank tops under their gowns too. They worked 12 hour, 16 hour shifts. The whole team was trying to avoid hiring agency staff, who work across multiple facilities, and could introduce COVID. I bought them cans of lattes when I made my curbside pickup order from Target. I ordered bottles of wine from the liquor store next door to Target and opened them alone in my hotel room.
When I arrived at the nursing home, they had successfully kept COVID out for the first nine months of the pandemic. But soon the first case settled into a resident’s lungs. Day by day the number grew. The staff wouldn’t talk about it; when I asked questions, they just shook their heads. But it showed on their strained faces, in the whispers between them, and in the flashing red lights that shimmered on the frosted window of my mother’s room as ambulances came and went. It was, we know now, looking backward through time, the first deadly winter surge.
My mother’s mind was a veil. I played music and didn’t know if it was annoying or pleasant. I talked. She squeezed my hand. She held my gaze. She communicated with her eyes, but the meaning was open to interpretation. In the background there was an endless, mechanical sighing and clicking of the inflating and deflating mattress, specially designed to prevent bedsores on the papery skin of the old when they are bed bound. I took an audio recording, because it was the soundtrack of the last days of my mother’s life next to me.
Before we moved my mom out of her home, we attempted to sort through the accumulations of 35 years. In the crammed drawers of an old wooden desk, I found the yellowed, typewritten pages of a small memoir my grandmother wrote. I sat down amid the piles and read it through, absorbed in a sudden intimacy across generations. She was a good storyteller, the language vibrant with scenes from her life as the youngest of 13 Irish kids in a small town in Connecticut.
And then another pandemic appeared in the pages–the Spanish Flu. She wrote of an older brother sick in bed. Every day the priest came and prayed. The doctor came and whispered. After the doctor left, her mother would cry. Her oldest brothers were sent home from military training to sit at his bedside and hold their mother’s hand. My grandmother’s brother, fevered and suffering, called out for his mother, although she was right there beside him.
After her brother died, as my grandmother told it, her mother gathered her remaining children around her and promised they would never take another family photo, because their family was irrevocably changed. Nothing was the same. Nothing would ever be the same.
In the midst of my own pandemic, listening to the click and sigh of the mechanical bed holding my mother, I could see, in my mind’s eye, my grandmother a hundred years ago, her little child self, watching, waiting, quietly keeping a record. I sat next to her, with my mother, in that strange room, the thin December light filtering through the window. Watching. Waiting.
I can’t remember the name of the nurse who, on my mother’s last night, came to check on us every hour, squidging little vials of morphine into my mother’s open mouth until the rigid clenching of her hands and shoulders eased and she breathed more quietly, without the ragged edge of pain. She was balancing her care for my mother with the rise of the deadly outbreak around us, but I felt nothing but her gentle focus.
In the early morning hours of our night vigil my brother and I broke the rules. I crept to the back door and let him in. We stood together, holding hands over my mother, as her breath slowed, telling her how much we loved her, how grateful we were for her. The night nurse saw that we were both there and said nothing.
My mother died and we buried her on a cold day. A small portion of the people who loved her scattered six feet apart as light snow fell in impossible beauty over the rolling hills of the cemetery.
A death of COVID and a death during COVID are not the same thing. But neither is the same as a death without COVID.
My home in Seattle was across the street from a big hospital. I could look out my living room window and see people huddled, families gathered around cars parked on the street or in the parking lot. They lingered there, outside. One day, a man got down on his knees on the sidewalk, face turned upward toward the brick building.
For the first two years after my mom died, I only allowed myself to feel grateful. Grateful I had been able to touch her, talk to her, hold her hand, wait for her last breath. I was grateful. I am grateful. Because I was with her, and because in those strange and frightening months in the first year of the pandemic so many people had to say goodbye on a screen, through a window, or not at all.
Late at night in the months after she died, I replayed the hours alone in the room with her, trying to remember what I’d said or not said, done or not done, worrying myself into a terror that I’d failed at something essential in those stretching, awkward, lonely days. Then I’d shudder and shake my head, reminding myself I was lucky not to have been on my knees on the concrete. My grief stunted and clenched in my chest.
On the second anniversary of her death, I took myself to the wild, empty Washington coast in winter. I plunged myself into the frigid ocean. I spoke to my mother, sitting on the damp dunes in the cold gray mist. I apologized for all that I couldn’t explain, that I couldn’t fix, that I couldn’t resolve for her or for me. For the way my mind wandered when I sat alone in that room for hours, and how I played solitaire on my phone sometimes. For the way I never was sure what to say and worried about it instead of just lying down next to her, afraid of bruising or bumping her frail body, invading what remained of her personal space. I remembered the way she, in her advancing years, grew into a stunning clarity of knowing what mattered and what didn’t, and that she laughed often and freely. I remembered the way she loved me, the cool smoothness of her hand as she brushed my hair back from my face, how she would leave the room shaking her head slightly, lovingly, when I said or did something she couldn’t make sense of, or disapproved of.
The clotted river of grief under my rib cage softened and broke open.
My great-grandmother speaks across 100 years from one pandemic to another. Nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same.
Listen as Siobhan reads from her essay…
about the author:
The good life is freedom, safety, love, and community. All of us deserve it, and not enough of us have it.
Siobhan Ring is a writer, organizer, and progressive movement-builder in the Pacific NW. She writes about parenting, caregiving, health, illness, and survival in a world that seems bound on destruction but overflows with beauty anyway. Her work has been previously published in The Write Launch, Lunch Ticket, and The Forge: Journal of Organizing Strategy and Practice. She lives with her sweet queer family in Seattle.
Our parents park the ancient pop-up camper in the sandy driveway. We kids and our friends sleep out here in the summer sometimes, at the bottom of what used to be an inland ocean. We fall asleep to the suck and billow of the heavy canvas sides, as though we’re on a sailing ship or inside the body of the breathing night, the belly of the whale.
I wake to my father’s shadowed face, his incandescent eyes. He and my mother are shaking us all awake. His hands gather me up. “It’s going to rain. Let’s go in.”
Instead, he holds me in his arms in the yard under the boiling purple sky as wind turns the oak leaves inside-out and bends the young poplars almost to the ground.
Nights when my father doesn’t come home, I imagine his permanent disappearance—car-crashed, drowned. He makes promises he doesn’t keep. He makes our mother cry.
“Look,” he says now.
A slender starfish stretches its legs across the sky, and its voice is everywhere, thunder woven through the air. It reaches across the humped backs of the bluffs, and an electric charge rises up from the ground to meet it, up through my father’s body and through mine, and we laugh with delight.
There will be years of strife between us before I accept what he is—elemental, a creature of instinct and chaos—before I understand how I am like him. How none of us asked for this. We all just ended up here somehow, together. Unjustified.
About the Author:
Heidi Bell’s fiction collection Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse and Other Stories was released by Cornerstone Press in October 2024. She works as a writer and editor of books and educational products.
Rose Marie’s younger son chauffeurs her to the cookout; she is too weak now to drive. She comes across the yard, her sagging cheeks bright with blusher, drooping lips painted pink. She is wearing faded straight-legged jeans and a shirt unbuttoned at the bottom and tied up under her bust, revealing several inches of midriff scarred from surgery. She sits down across from me at the peeling picnic table, and, behind her, the sun comes—a girl stepping down the sky—to dip her toes in the shimmering river that flows by at the edge of the lush midsummer yard. Rose’s auburn wig begins to glow.
Rose and I have forged a connection through the years over various mental health crises and then female cancers—like a Ping-Pong game. But we won’t see each other again. What is there to say? I win.
The grilled meat like river sand, ashes in my mouth.
Later, my sister, Rose’s daughter-in-law, says in a bewildered voice, “I don’t know why she was wearing that outfit.”
There are clothes that live at the margin of my closet—sleeveless blouses and miniskirts and fitted T-shirts and turtlenecks that I long, against all reason, to wear again someday. The flowered fabric and cashmere seemed to have slipped through my fingers before I had a chance to appreciate how they felt against my skin, how it felt to be who I was then.
Maybe Rose, ravaged by uterine cancer, has finally reached her target weight. Which of us women past a certain age wouldn’t be tempted to accept that mean little gift—the sharp edges of hip bones, the shadows between the ribs.
About the Author:
Heidi Bell’s short story collection Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse (Cornerstone Press, 2024) was named a 2025 Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association. She is at work on a novel and a collection of micro memoirs.
