Cut-up Poems and Consolation
Writing and walking through grief
My brother died last week. His death wasn’t unexpected—he’d had kidney cancer which was controlled through immunotherapy for five years but then metastasized. However, he dropped dead, apparently from a stroke or aneurysm. So the sudden exit was a shock.
Since the COVID shutdown, I’ve been in cycles of grief. Many people I know have died. Some of the closest: my dad, my mom, my husband’s sister, my half-sister, my lifelong close friend, my brother, a writing workshop buddy.
Uncanny Consolation
Sometimes I’ve had the good fortune of receiving their words in uncanny ways.
I had fallen apart at the death of my very dear friend. When driving to her memorial service, my eyes were burning and I had tears running down my face before I even got to the freeway. I had to pull into a gas station because I couldn’t see to drive. Makeup running down my cheeks, I had the whole raccoon thing going. I didn’t feel well and wondered whether I was sick or just stressed.
I felt worse as the day rolled on. At the reception after the service, my friend's husband told me that he’d found a little box in the house with my name on it. Since I was feeling overwhelmed, I took it home without looking inside.
I had company for a few days, yet continued to feel sick, and left the box on my dresser. Three days after the memorial, with visitors gone, I opened it. Inside was a stainless steel insulated mug with the words “Love Wins” printed on it. It was true of our friendship and a last message to hold close to my heart.
Life events collide in unanticipated ways. On March 15, 2021, I was waiting in a downpour for the interment of my mom’s ashes at Miramar National Cemetery. It was the official publication date for my debut collection of short fiction. It was also the publication date in the Newfound Journal of a personal essay I wrote about place and grief during the period before COVID. This was when my brother was undergoing cancer surgery as his wife lay dying in USC’s Norris Cancer Center. Yet it’s a hopeful essay centered in nature, dogs, reading, and writing (cut-up poems)—and how all those things help us both connect and grieve.
“Silt” feels especially pertinent now that my brother, too, has crossed over.
Silt
I have long had a practice of walking up a steeply sloping alluvial fan into the hills near my house, a designated wilderness area. In prehistoric times, heavy rains and floods released granite potatoes from the local mountains. Today, one finds these smooth melon-sized rocks everywhere in my inland Southern California region, above and below the earth—a torment to gardeners, but a handy building material. For the hiker, they are scenic stumbling blocks.
Our lives are too short to imagine in geologic time. Yet this year, close layers of tragedy and dark ribbons of dejection alternate to solidify, in an earthy way, distinct strata that are reshaping me. In time I will see if I become that metaphorical rock, the emotional anchor of knowledge and empathy stacked, a bulwark against despair.
Over the last several months, it is serious illnesses that have propelled me out of doors. My parents appear to age precipitously. My father is awake most nights in a panoply of joint and muscle pain. If my mother had her wits about her, she would express a preference for venturing to her heavenly reward over living as she does. Dementia has caused her to regress. She picks imagined bugs from her hair and later simply pulls her hair out.
My brother John, diagnosed fourteen months ago, is battling stage-four kidney cancer; during treatment, his wife is diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. In the midst of this, my brother-in-law dies of complications of alcoholism. Overwhelmed, without making a conscious decision to do so, I stop visiting a close friend who had a massive stroke in the fall.
For years, I was accompanied into the hills by my two big dogs, until they became too old for strenuous activity. This year, against the advice of friends who fear predators both human and animal, I often go alone. In my collapsing world, heading into the wilderness is one of my few coping strategies.
When I engage in my only other coping strategy—reading—Thoreau often helps me make sense of the need to be outside. His long essay “Walking” bluntly states that “health and spirits” cannot be preserved “unless I spend four hours a day at least . . . sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”
A revered American thinker, Thoreau is often referenced in other things I pick up to read, even when the general topic appears to be something entirely different. In an offbeat book, the philosopher Crispin Sartwell argues that people depend too much on narrative and language to make sense of life and recommends a Thoreauan existence:
To walk into a serious wilderness (which is admittedly a whole lot more difficult than it was in 1850) is to be overwhelmed by what stands in excess to our own purposes; it is to enter a place where human purpose is puny. In the wilderness we experience the powerlessness not only of ourselves . . . but the powerlessness of the human quite in general. Wilderness stands so obviously in excess to human purpose, is so obviously indifferent to human purpose, that perhaps we can get a little more indifferent to our own purposes there, stop struggling to reduce everything to means which we can annihilate into ends. … To experience wilderness is to be dwarfed and it is to be dwarfed in a particular way: by fate. (End of Story, 121-22)
I know this is part of my purpose in heading outdoors—to accept all that I can’t control. But in thinking about Thoreau, I remember his eye for the tiny delights of nature, for the intimate respite and solitude of it, how he could spend hours watching ant armies in battle or taking notes on local ponds, the changing colors of the leaves, and the spring thaw.
My wilderness is often dry, drought-ridden, the victim of a single yearlong season with little rain, never mind snow. It is not the nature Thoreau immersed himself in. There is little sense of abundance, so when abundance arrives, I have a particular awareness of grace bestowed.
On a winter’s day, my heart is too heavy with the knowledge that my brother’s current cancer treatment—employing a chemotherapy drug called Sutent, which has many side effects—has begun to fail. I stop on a trail across from a parched meadow. Here, dry grass is not brown, but soft and gray, highlighted with golden stalks. I stay because it seems so like an animal’s fur, strangely alive, warm. Suddenly an open-weave comforter lifts from the meadow and flies away, lifting, too, my heart. “Meadowlarks,” I say, though I’ve never seen them before. They are as gray as the grass. Their breasts, I learn later, can be gold, but they are beige in keeping with the environment.
My brother’s doctors are undaunted and decide on immunotherapy. John claims to have no side effects, feels well, and continues to work. By spring, the extent of his cancer diminishes and when he is healthy enough to allow surgery, he is scheduled to have his kidney removed at UCLA’s hospital in Santa Monica, some one hundred and fifty miles south of his home in the small town of Lompoc.
My sisters, my niece, my husband and I wait long hours for word of the surgery’s progress. Finally, a nurse tells us it is over, and the surgeon will be out shortly. When he arrives, the first thing he says is, “Well, he’s alive.” This shakes me. What is that code for? The surgeon commits to some details: removal of the kidney and the spleen, which was supplying the vast tumor with blood via vessels as thick as a man’s fingers. Of course, the tumor itself is gone, and areas that it pushed into had to be repaired—the diaphragm, the lungs, the pancreas. I forget, temporarily, the surgeon’s first comment and am only grateful, in the most straightforward way, for his skills. I refuse to think past the moment.
There is little sense of abundance, so when abundance arrives, I have a particular awareness of grace bestowed.
The surprise of spring comes in several heavy rains after a perfectly dry winter, after we’ve surrendered any hope of refreshment. The gray-gold carpet of the wilderness area has become not just green, but an emerald I haven’t seen in years. I arrive at what was formerly part of a ranch, an area called Johnson’s Pasture. I take out my phone to record the color so I can later show my friends, admonish them that we are in a now-or-never moment. As I record, focusing on a stand of live oaks nestled at the bottom of the slope, a deer peeks out from behind a tree—then another and another until there are five. They move in a single file, carefully lifting their legs over the rocky soil, silent, appearing to sneak by. They thrill me in their comic posture. Later, I upload them to social media for my friends, one of whom comments that Elmer Fudd must have been nearby. “Exactly,” I reply. “I was waiting for them to go up on their hind legs and tiptoe.”
I’m not a believer in celestial signals, but something about those deer now has me looking everywhere for signs. When I walk Zainy, my thirteen-year-old Labrador Retriever, I have to stay on flat ground. On our next outing, we walk toward a protected path as she is desperately afraid of big vehicles, sometimes bolting away from curbside monstrosities into the very real danger of oncoming traffic. I cross the street to avoid a waste disposal truck. On the other side, I smell the vanilla of the line of Jeffrey pines at the curb’s edge, undetectable except in the closest proximity. I think, here’s a little gift from the universe, and believe it.
On the path, Zainy heads to the fence lining a concrete riverbed, one that is perpetually dry. She crunches through the fallen brown leaves of the sycamores pressed along its border. That she seems to enjoy this small thrill as much as she once enjoyed those long hikes in the hills is a small blessing to me. Pay attention, my heart says. Everywhere there are worthwhile experiences, even now, in the year of sorrows.
In her days of hill running, Zainy was accompanied by our large, wolfish rescue dog, Fletcher. Together, they would clock the miles, elemental creatures. But Fletcher was euthanized a few months ago, just short of his sixteenth birthday. Six days after his death, Zainy couldn’t hold herself up, but kept finding her legs, first one and then another, collapsing under her as she tried to walk. She appeared to have had a stroke.
I was sure she was dying too, but the veterinarian said no, age had made her weak in the back legs. And truly, the anti-inflammatory medication, Galliprant, seems to have renewed her. Yet the timing of the onset of her difficulties indicates grief. She gives other signs, sometimes digging her snout into Fletcher’s blankets, flipping them to see what lies beneath. Nothing. We walk our truncated route, taking our broken hearts on our adventure in miniature.
Because I’ve taken to contemplating rocks, I’m on the lookout for a pretty, painted stone I’d seen a few days before, set against a fence post by some kind stranger, a delight to the passerby who is alert enough to spy it. It is gone, of course, someone deciding to deposit it in her own yard, soon to become familiar and unseen. I am angry at this and then become angry at everything. When Zainy and I pass the old drinking fountain—made of those granite potatoes—it’s leaking. It’s easy to shut off properly, to keep from wasting the water. Drought! my mind screams, and I add this small detail to that of the missing stone to confirm that people are self-centered jackasses. There’s no particular truth to this, but I’ve had some bad news and need to be irate, even at imaginary strangers.
My sister-in-law had been experiencing back pain since January, diagnosed as a compressed or fractured disk. By the time my brother is to have his surgery, she is in excruciating pain and can’t make the trip to Los Angeles with him. As he is recovering from his kidney surgery, she is more accurately diagnosed. When it is discovered that her platelet count is quite low, her disk surgery is held off. She has acute myeloid leukemia; it’s in her spinal fluid. She is given few options: do nothing and die very shortly or try treatment with a slim chance of recovery. She decides that lying around and dying is too passive. My brother, who is staying at my parents’ house while recovering, cancels an appointment to talk with a doctor about a clinical trial and drives home as soon as he can get his surgery staples removed.
My sister-in-law is so weak that she is transported by ambulance—a four-hour trip in traffic—from a hospital in Santa Barbara to USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. Because LA area traffic and parking are both impossible, my husband and I take the train forty miles west to Los Angeles twice a week. Others visit Ellen as well—her son, both of my sisters, my brother. Yet, when a nurse comes in to check her vitals, Ellen asks that she come back because no one sees her. The nurse gently tells her she’s confused, that she has visitors every day. As I listen, my estimation of her beating the odds dips. Something is wrong with her brain. Still, she remembers kindness, thanking the doctors and nurses each time they come in. In her confusion, she worries about my brother undergoing the same treatment of spinal injections, which she finds painful. She breaks my heart by blaming her eating habits for her illness, and I am glad the doctor tells her in no uncertain terms that this is not her fault—leukemia strikes even babies, innocent of any habits at all.
The youngest of my three sons visits from college on spring break. Not wanting to break my habit, needing my outdoor reprieve, I suggest he walk with me in the green hills. As we climb, Alex, who rarely hikes, doesn’t lose his breath the way I do. This is age, I think to myself in a more fearful way than usual. A week earlier I’d gone to see my general practitioner about my plantar fasciitis. Wearing a boot at night, massaging my foot with a tennis ball—none of the usual tricks work anymore.
My doctor notes my weight gain—averaging a pound each month for a year. This is true, I say, although my eating habits are steady and I am getting more exercise—and it’s another reason why I must not stop walking. He knows about my family situation, gives me a cortisone shot, and reminds me that self-care is important. He says the shot will take about a week to be effective, and he’s right. My foot cooperates on the hike with my son.
We stop in Johnson’s Pasture because I want Alex to admire the grass, no longer emerald, but still a deep green beauty. A black lizard sees me make for a smooth, painted wooden bench where he rests. The bench’s legs are uneven, taller and shorter pieces of pine trunk on either end. The lizard starts to skitter away but the downhill slope of the bench causes him to glide as if on ice, a scaly skater. Watching him is a simple joy. He does a few pushups.
My son remains standing, taking in the wind over the grass. As we are in the same spot, I think to show him my video of the stealthy deer. He watches but only sees deer being deer. There is no particular message in their behavior for him. A moment more of gazing at the tall grass and he gives voice to what I am thinking. “This spot reminds me of Fletcher.” Because, yes, it is the spot where I, too, picture our dog running, his swift beauty, his grace as natural and perfect as that of a wild animal.
In “Walking,” Thoreau also wrote “I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor.” Fletcher was not like any other dog I’ve encountered, simply uninterested in being petted or snuggled. He lived to be outdoors, was my only willing companion more than a decade earlier when I was training for marathons. But his body finally broke, as all bodies do, and he suffered the humiliations of my caretaking until the veterinarian said that my lifting him, my cleaning him, was now something painful. To euthanize him, the vet told me, was a gift I could give him.
So I was the agent of Fletcher’s death. It was so quick, so painless that as I stand looking over the pasture, I can’t help wishing for something similar for myself when the time arrives. I’ve seen too much pain lately to consider this a dark thought, but it comes a few days after a judge threw out California’s aid-in-dying act on a technicality.
There is a loud flap of wings in an oak behind us on the other side of the path. But no hawk or falcon hides there, though they often circle the grounds. A much more moderate bird, grey and black, hard to distinguish through the branches, settles in. The breeze still moves the grass, makes it bend so that the curves silver in the sun, shimmer as if they might tinkle like chimes. I think of a song from a book of nursery rhymes I had as a child:
White coral bells upon a slender stalk
Lilies of the valley line my garden walk.
Oh, don’t you wish that you could hear them ring?
That will happen only when the fairies sing.
But just as there are no deer now, there are no fairies, no magical mischief here.
All worlds end, every single one. I start to cry, looking out on that empty pasture. My son turns to me. “It isn’t just Fletcher,” is all I can say, afraid that he’ll think I’m a bit looney. He silently nods. We stay a few minutes while I mourn future losses.
The following week, my sister-in-law tells me she thinks the medical staff is poisoning her food. She confides that the hospital workforce includes Dr. Frankensteins who are doing painful experiments on her. A few days after this, I ask during a visit why she is receiving so many platelets, whether it is possible for a body to contain or need them. The answer is no; her body is simply rejecting them.
The next day my sister calls during her visit to the hospital to tell me Ellen’s small pillow seems to have disappeared in a change of sheets. Could I make her a new one tonight since I am visiting tomorrow?
I do, using material that looks like sunlit water. I appliqué bright fabric—red, yellow, pink, and orange—in the shape of fish. I hope she will see the whimsy in it, have a momentary pleasure. But when my husband and I arrive the following day, she appears underwater herself, unable to stay awake, lacking any consciousness of our presence.
We stay many hours, and as we are about to leave, the entire medical team arrives. Though her doctor is kind and sympathetic, he indicates that Ellen’s treatment will not succeed. He remembers to ask after my brother and the progress of his treatment, says something less crass than ‘lousy break’ about their circumstances and shakes his head. I wonder whether his work is anything I could handle emotionally, hope he has mostly successes, and doubt it at the same time. I also mumble something about the universe not being in our corner just now.
A little poem by Stephen Crane comes back to me from my college days:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
A week later, Ellen dies.
On the morning of her death, Ellen comes to me in my sleep. She says only, “I’m looking for the right words.” I respond that the right words are something we all look for, that it’s important. A few hours later, my brother calls to tell me she has passed. I don’t know what to make of my sense of a visitation from the dead. I decide, as no one in the history of the world has any answers about what is beyond death, I’m not going to find them just now. Instead, I simply choose to take her at her word.
Ellen liked to write micro-stories, many of which were exactly fifty-five words. I reread these stories, pick out my favorite words, arrange them in several fifty-five-word pieces about her favorite place, about her personality, about writing itself, and about grief and remembering. A ‘found’ eulogy, entirely in her own words. I hope she enjoyed it.
But all of this is weeks in the future as I walk home with my son. When we get to the house, he stays inside. I walk out to the backyard. There, my mother-in-law, who is approaching her ninety-fifth birthday, is asleep in a patio chair. She is tilted over to the side in an unnatural way, and I approach her to assess the danger.
She has been unable to live alone for several years. Yet of all the elderly people I know, she most enjoys her life. She has diabetes, high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, macular degeneration, and neuropathy. She takes a vast array of medications, carefully distributed by my husband. Surprisingly—at least to me—all of these medications appear to do their job. She carries on, visits family and friends. Though spring is coming to a close, our drought-resistant landscape—plants offset by carefully placed boulders, which highlight beauty through contrast—is in full bloom. She’s come out to see the yellow flowers on the palo verde trees, the red kangaroo paws, and the hummingbirds that are attracted to them.
Once in a while she talks about death; each time she tells us she’d like to die in her sleep. Good luck with that, I think when she says it. Who doesn’t want to die peacefully in their sleep? And now here she is asleep, leaning so far over to the side that her head is at the level of her waist. I wonder if she is getting her wish. I know her precarious position would send any of her own children to wake her, alarmed. I stand close enough, at the ready, but consider her desires and my earlier thoughts of agency, of a good death like Fletcher’s. I wait.
She awakens, slowly lifting her head, broadly blinking like a cartoon character. She doesn’t see me, off to the side. I go back in the house to call my own parents.
My husband and I make a hundred-mile round trip journey each Sunday to my parents’ house, making dinner and visiting. My sisters, who live nearer to my parents, help them a lot. In this way, they have been able to live in their own home with only a caregiver for my mother during the morning hours.
Generally, when I call, my mother hands the phone to my father. Due to her dementia, she is no longer able to track conversations or even remember who is on the phone. The one time recently that she stayed on the phone, she was crying.
“How are you, Mom?” I asked.
“Not good.”
“What’s wrong?”
“We’ve had a death.”
“Who died?”
“John.”
“No, Mom, John didn’t die. He’s very sick. He didn’t die.”
“That’s not what we were told.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
I get my dad on the phone because I’m a little afraid of the possibility that she’s right, considering the precariousness of my brother’s health. My father assures me it’s the dementia talking. My mother had a nightmare about John and is no longer able to distinguish her morning dreams from reality.
This time, as I say I called just to remind her that we are coming over with dinner on Sunday, my mother, oddly, stays on the line. She’s never enjoyed talking on the phone, even when her mind was sound. I’ve always imagined it was her strict Catholic upbringing that made her appear colder than she really was. Now, in her dementia, she has forgotten to be ashamed of being a flawed person connected to other flawed people. She says, for the first time I can remember, “I love you.”
Here is the thing I’ve always wanted to hear, and I return her love, grateful in the moment for the right words and the right signs, the rock-solid ones.
What I’m Reading
Finished Remarkably Bright Creatures. I can see why It’s so popular, but it was not for me.
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell. I’m enjoying stories with the uncanny right now because so much about death and grief feels and the strange coincidences surrounding loss feels uncanny.
I’m still reading from small presses. Inlandia launched Breaking Pattern this week, a YA novel about a rodeo-loving girl and her goals and dreams. I wrote a review on School Library Lady. Fun stuff whether or not you have horses in your life.
Library News
I saw this bar graph in a PEN America Newsletter this week. Obviously, some topics overlap so the total is more than 100%. I knew about most of the subjects of banned content, except the themes of grief and death. Obviously, this speaks to me now. We need to write about it. We need to talk about it.
(I have lots of thoughts on banned books. Here’s a post on my experience.)
Oh, Virginia! A big hug from Houston to you. You show up for your people. As the daughter of a mother with dementia, this line gave me something new in what feels like a generally bad shake: Now, in her dementia, she has forgotten to be ashamed of being a flawed person connected to other flawed people.
You're right. We do need to talk about death. Years ago, someone recommended Advice to Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them) by Sallie Tisdale. Once I got over my initially clammy palm response, I read the book. It was helpful. I haven't done all of the paperwork stuff she suggests, but it did motivate me to work with my dad to get my parents' documents in order.
All I can say right now is Thank you.