my heart is a mausoleum
a secret sepulchre
hidden beneath layers of tissue
muscle and blood and bone
tangled vines and twisted branches
conceal its entryway
a dark, warm, bloody vault
never suffused by sunlight
pulsating… vibrating… rhythm
behind fleshy, bleeding gates
my most sacred treasure lies
and breathes, and laughs, and loves evermore
it is you,
it is you,
it is you.
It’s been two and a half years, almost to the day.
My hands are clammy and I am fidgeting with the big turquoise ring on my right ring finger. I love this ring. It’s one of the oldest pieces of jewelry I own, something I purchased with my own money from a job I got myself, in a city neither of my parents had lived in before. I purchased it at a store with a kind-of “Abercrombie for hippies” vibe called Urban Outfitters.
The stone is real, and huge and just this side of gaudy. I wear it almost daily, even now. Gosh, those were the days, when I was young and having fun and wasting my potential, secure in the knowledge that I had time to figure out my life.
Watching the trees pass by out the window, I strain to see behind them. Every few seconds, if I purposely blur my vision just so, I think I can see through the forest. I’ve become very good at games like this. They help to distract my mind from what’s happening, where I’m going and why.
We are pulling into the driveway now. I take a deep breath and put a hand on my belly to steady myself. “You can do this”, I whisper. Most of the car ride, when my gaze is not on the trees, my eyes are down, concentrated on my hands, my lap, my feet, anything but the route. I feel like a young girl who is waiting to be disciplined, anxious of what’s to come and fighting back tears.
I only drive this way to see my dad, and this time I know he will not be there at the door to greet me. This visit to his house where we shared so many special moments will be different. The beautiful white house he built. Soon it will belong to someone else – to strangers. I do not want to enjoy the scenery, or to recognize the landmarks, or smile at the familiar small-town shops as we make this dirge, my little family and I. So I look down, and I take deep breaths and I fiddle with my gaudy turquoise ring.
*******************************
Chicken and rice and the dimples in your smile
Bean bags and jumbo jenga and
That classic rock playing on the speaker in the living room – all the songs that are too good not to sing out loud, but not bad enough for karaoke.
Tomorrow marks three birthdays without my wonderful, beautiful, strong, intelligent, funny, generous, kind, brave, incomparable dad.
The last birthday of mine that we were together, in 2021, he asked me where I wanted to go out to eat to celebrate. I said I think I’d rather go to your house, and have your chicken and rice. Would that be OK? Would you make me chicken and rice, Dad? I didn’t want to go out, I wanted to go home, to just be with my people and eat warm nourishing food that I knew was made with love, and sit and marinate in this beautiful life of ours.
And my dad smiled a big wide smile at my request, and I watched as he inflated a bit the way some men do when they’re proud, but in a humble way. Of course he would do that. He would love to do that. I kissed his cheek, delighted.
So we gathered at his house, informal and comfortable with bare-foot kids and the TV on mute and my brother with his arm over the back of the chair, telling a story about some kid he knew in middle school. We talked and we laughed and it was loud, the chicken and rice was better than the cake and I told everyone as much, and we hugged and took pictures but not enough of them together.
My heart swells tonight, full of love and joy and grief and pain. I’m so glad I chose to spend that birthday with family, in a sacred place, engaged in conversation and eating comfort food. It’s insane how quickly my world imploded, how unaware we could be of how fragile it all was. Tomorrow I will not eat chicken and rice, because no one makes it like my dad, but I will remember my last birthday as a whole person, and send a kiss to the heavens and hope it reaches him.
I love history.
I love the stars.
I love language.
I love theory, hypothetical, legend, ideas, possibility.
I love a good strong Irish breakfast tea, slow brewed and then poured over ice.
I love nostalgia.
I love old books.
I love when a person’s eyes crinkle at the corners when they smile.
I love photographs.
I love freckles.
I love laughter.
I love discipline. I love spontaneity. I love contradiction.
I love the way my sons can give themselves over completely to a giggle.
I love family.
I love sunrise at the beach.
I love curiosity, and questions, and the quest that comes before the answers.
I love an underdog story.
I love baking.
I love nature.
I love poetry.
I love music.
I love secrets, and stories, and reasons.
I love delicate, precious, intricate things.
I love.
I love.
I love.
Thoughts I’m having while drinking tea tonight…
Why do I talk about death so much?
Well… the most significant people in my life up to a point all passed away in the span of a few years, and all unexpectedly. No long illness or time to prepare. One day life is normal and the next day it’s shifted. Parallel. Other.
And they weren’t just significant in my eyes. They were cool people. Good folks. Strangers used to talk to me about my grandparents, my dad. Tell them hello for me, they’d say, or ‘I remember when’. Now the people who knew them are dying too. The ones who shared dinners or saw them at church or remembered when. They are all leaving. So what happens if I don’t talk about my loved ones, don’t say their names, tell their stories?
Some kind of metaphysical black hole, I think. I don’t want to find out.
When I talk about death I’m talking about the people I could point to, as a way to explain myself, as a map to who I am and how I got to be. They gave my life meaning, and me a sense of belonging. Now, I don’t have that, and I find myself grappling at the frayed edges of a faded papyrus chart, tracing my fingertips over ever-fainter sketches of a land that it seems only I have been to, trying to convince others that it does exist. It did exist. I’ve seen it. I was there.
I can never go back home, you see? Home has been buried, and cremated, and scattered out to sea. It was wonderful, and warm, and safe, and real. All I have left of all I have loved is a memory that feels like I dreamed it, made it up. Because no one else has seen it, or remembers it, or cares.
So I talk about it, to remind myself. To steady my heart, to try to re-orient myself with a world without them, without home. To remind others. I came from somewhere, even if that place is no longer. I remember it. It did exist. We were there.
“I want to make all your fantasies come true”, he whispers softly in my ear, before turning to look away from me and back towards the sunset we have just watched together.
My eyes begin to well up with tears and I get a catch in my throat. I clear it – a quiet “ahem” – and blink the tears away before he can see the effect his words have had on me. He is trying to be sweet. I know. I wish I wasn’t so damaged. I wish I wasn’t so… well, … me. I wish I could tell him in words that would make sense that my deepest, truest, most primal desire is not what he thinks it is.
My fantasy – the thing I imagine and long for and throw pennies into fountains for – isn’t a house, or a car, or even to win a game show, as cool as that would be. My fantasy is simply to be loved. Oh, to be a woman who is seen through the eyes of a man who thinks he has found the last true treasure on Earth! To be admired, cherished, kept safely in the arms of another. It is all I have ever wanted, and it is the only want of mine that as of this moment, has eluded me. I don’t tell him. I don’t know if I will ever tell him, but for now, I choose not to spoil the moment.
I wonder if he knows my dad.
I’m standing in the checkout line at my local Publix. Lane number 4, to be exact. I recall the number because it was only one of two lanes open on a busy Friday afternoon. My kids are waiting in the car, “I’ll be back in five minutes”, I tell them. “Well”, I think to myself as I stand in the long line waiting to purchase my items… “at least the little one can’t tell time yet”.
Standing here, noticing this middle-aged man as he’s noticing me. Not in a creepy way, just in a curious way. I see him look at my face, then back at his grocery items as they move forward on the conveyor belt, then back at my face again. Does he recognize me? Do I look like someone he knows? He probably knows a lot of people.
Dad knew a lot of people. Never really met a stranger, and he had managed to live a lot of life in his 68 years. We could travel three states to the left, then two north, then drive to a remote campground and still run into someone he worked with, served in the army with, had some crazy story about. That was my dad. He loved people. Enjoyed them. I bet he made a new friend nearly every day of his life.
Bringing myself back to the current moment, I observe the man in front of me again, as discreetly as I can, picking up some peanut M&Ms and tossing them into the green basket hanging from my arm. I want a Butterfinger but they don’t have any. M&Ms are a solid second choice.
If I had to describe the man succinctly, I would use the word gruff. I like the word. It’s a way of saying a person is rough around the edges, appearing unfriendly at first, but is actually quite soft on the inside. Likely only the ones closest to them get to see their warmth. Everyone else gets the gruff. I smile to myself. In my mind, it’s a compliment. I wonder if he would feel the same.
Longish salt-and-pepper hair peeks out from his camouflage-patterned trucker hat, hanging down in tight ringlets. He is wearing a red t-shirt and gray sweat pants, the thick cotton kind with good pickets and tight cuffs at the ankles. His face looks tired, but not unhappy. His hands look dry and calloused, his hairy arms polka dotted by years of sun exposure.
As he grabs the last few packages of deli meat from his grocery cart and tosses them onto the belt, he looks at me again. I stand still, curious about his curiosity. Again I wonder what he might be wondering. I half expect him to speak, but he never does. He pays for his items, gathers his grocery bags in his weather-beaten hands and makes his way to the exit.
****
Hours have passed. I am now engaged in an Instagram conversation with a dear friend. The man at Publix already a memory, the current crises my only focus.
My friend has lost her dad. She has just shared the news of his death with me.
The room spins in slow motion. I picture myself reaching out to her from the backside of a mirror. I live in a sort-of perverted Wonderland now, in this strange space called Grief. The rules are different here, and nothing looks or sounds or feels like it did before.
My friend has tripped and fallen down a hole, not because she chased a white rabbit but simply because she loved. I understand because I fell down the same hole two years ago. Now, I feel responsible to act as a sort-of guide to people in my life when they find themselves here.
I read the typed-out paragraphs explaining about what happened. I gingerly ask questions about her needs, whether she is eating, are the arrangements made, how can I help? She sends me heart emojis and crying emojis and typos because her brain feels like mushed bananas. (It’s OK, I tell her, we’re all mushed bananas here.)
We exchange stories about our cool fathers and their Earthly adventures, their mustaches and machismo and the private jokes we shared with them. She posts old pictures of her Papa for all her friends to see. She travels to her childhood home to take care of funeral things and hug her family.
She needs quiet, I know. I don’t reach out to her for days, weeks.
The next time we talk, I ask her how she feels. She is good-ish, she says. Wounded, but breathing. Yes, I tell her. I know what you mean. She says she is grateful her father was such a good man and that he loved her so well. She tells me she believes he is in Heaven now, with the ones who went before him, probably making new friends and having great new adventures.
Only one thought crosses my mind as I imagine the scene:
I wonder if he knows my dad.
I imagine a rope
Thick, braided, coarse
Connecting us at the center
It’s been pulling me since you left
What are you doing over there
That makes my stomach lurch
In the middle of the night?
What kind of mischief are you up to
That makes me yearn for unknown places?
In the moments it pulls less,
Are you closer to me?
When I get sick over you
Are you at universe’s edge?
One day when it’s time,
Will you tug on your side of the rope
And lead me back to you?
I imagine a rope
Thick, braided, coarse
Connecting us at the center
You guiding me,
Crying and laughing with me still
And I hang on.
It was gray outside this morning. All day, really.
Driving to work, half asleep, I thought about you. Were you real? Because I think you were real but now you don’t exist and I don’t know what to do with that. I have memories but I can’t hold on to them, can’t hug them. In my mind I try to squeeze the idea of you and it slowly dissipates until my thoughts are hazy nothings.
Other people are scattered in the parking lot, all walking towards the building, trying hard not to see each other. I wonder if they’re hurting like me. Chest on fire, eviscerating me from within, while my ignorant body sends tears down my face – my face! – to quench it. It doesn’t help, of course. It just makes my face wet.
I am in so much pain, it hurts to breathe and I marvel at my own movement – that one foot goes in front of the other, then the other, repeat ad infinitum until I am somehow in my office, saying words I can’t hear to co-workers who blow into their hot coffee and smile weakly at me.
Wearing a red sweater, I think how powerful red used to make me feel. Today this red sweater makes me think of my broken, shattered heart. Bleeding. Choking me. I’m showing the world with my wardrobe that I am a wound, raw and throbbing like an exposed nerve. They don’t notice.
Getting over an illness is funny in that, when I thought I was going to die I pleaded to live. Now that I have returned to my lukewarm half-life, I am reminded how nice it would be to die. To just slip away into the gray fog that surrounds me, quietly, and let go of all this pain.
You left me, and when you left you took me, and now nothing is here in any real way except I am the nothing now, and there is enough of me to feel the beating of losing you over and over and over again. Nothing means anything. Nothing means everything. I am tired.
I am standing in a hotel bathroom 5:58am. It’s 6:58 at home, and late for me to be just waking but yesterday was full of travel and catching up with family and I’m pretty sure I got chicken-finger-wasted.
There’s a package in my hands. White rectangle the size of a book. In fact, I know now that it is a book and I’m feeling disappointed. I have waited weeks for this package. Why would he send me a book? And it’s hardcover. Must be some new Stephen King. My brother and I have very different definitions of “treasure”. Why in the world would he say it was irreplaceable?
Two weeks ago, maybe a little more, I got a text from my big brother saying he mailed me something important and it would arrive in two days. He wouldn’t say what it was, only that it was worth more than gold and could not be replaced.
I love a good surprise so I went about my days expectantly curious. I waited two days, four days, 10 days. The package never arrived. I looked up the tracking information and it said it had been undeliverable, with an incomplete address. I asked my brother if it had been returned to him. It hadn’t.
The more I thought about his description and secrecy, the more I knew that whatever was in the package was related to my dad. I needed to have it. I drove to the post office.
The line was what you’d expect for two days before a major holiday: long and unmoving. I stood there for maybe 45 minutes until the one clerk working called me up. His name was Ben and he was very kind. He took the tracking number and set off to find my package.
Finally. I might hold the treasure today, I thought. I hoped with all my heart it was something like Dad’s old bodybuilding photos. I’d love to have them.
Ben was gone a long time, and I thought for some reason about jury deliberations. Is it the longer deliberation, the better outcome? Or if they come back quickly that’s a good sign? I couldn’t remember.
I held firmly on to hope until Ben finally re-emerged from the warehouse portion of the post building.
“It’s in the unprocessed bin”, he said with a shrug. I grinned at him as politely as I could, disappointed but hopeful. I wanted him to show me what bin. I could find it myself, I thought. Instead he asked me to write down my phone number and he assured me that he would find my package. I hadn’t told him what it was but I think he could sense my urgency.
The next day, Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I drove five hours up Chattanooga way to be with my mom and her husband’s family. I invited myself months ago, thinking that being in the country with people who feel like family would be good for my heart, and for my boys.
I was sitting in a lime-green chair in the kitchen, gazing at the pristine 1970s wallpaper that was older than I am, when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number so I didn’t answer. Next, I received a text. It was Ben. He found my package. He was holding it for me.
I called my husband, who was still in town and would be meeting us that night, to see if he could go and grab it for me. He was able to retrieve the package and bring it with him to the hotel last night. I woke up and there it was.
My heart sank when I stumbled towards it this morning and finally was able to hold it in my hands. In the pictures my brother sent me, it looked like a flat white envelope. Pictures. I knew it! Now I was holding this huge hard-cover novel (who even reads books this big? People with giant hands?) full of confusion. My dad never wrote any books.
The room was dark and everyone was still asleep so I took the package to the bathroom to open it. It’s loud and I’m sorry but not sorry enough to leave it. I’ve waited a long time for this. I have a fleeting thought that I’m opening something from my family on thanksgiving and that’s pretty nice, since I won’t be with them today.
Here I stand, under harsh unforgiving hotel bathroom lights, equal parts eager and apprehensive, considering this package. I rip the soft plastic mailer and pull out a book and for a moment I just stare at it. Blue, hard-cover, part of a series I read years ago. Maybe it’s a Christmas gift? I don’t understand. I deflate a little. I know my brother. He isn’t a prankster or a practical joker. He is generous and thoughtful and above all, he is honest. Why would he have sent this to me in such a hurry? What does it mean?
Looking closer, I can see there’s something inside the book. I carefully flip open the front cover and find two cards and two letters from my dad. Treasure. They’re from 1990 or so, when I was 10 years old and he was in jail. My mom never let us have them -in fact, we thought he went three years without reaching out at all – and kept them in boxes in her living room. Maybe that’s for the best, since kids lose things.
One of the letters is folded neatly in a square shape. I gently unfold it as if it were a napkin made of thin crepe paper and my fingers were sharp blades, to reveal the most elegant penmanship. In his distinctive slanted cursive, my Dad had written, “this one is for Jenée only.”
Shaking, I open it and begin to read.
Princess, I wonder sometimes if you know how truly beautiful you are.
It’s a love letter. An appreciation of my attributes, what’s to be admired and adored about me, a two-page missive on me as a human and why it’s so good that I have been born. Why it’s so good that I belong to him. I cry. I sob. This – these words from my father – is everything I’ve needed from him my whole life. I’m in awe. It ends with,
I have much to be thankful for, not least of which is you.
Love,
Dad
I am blown away by the remarkable timing of this. The magnitude of it. I don’t know if I have ever seen this letter before. (Later in the day I ask my brother and he confirms that I have not read it before, and that no one knows its contents but me and my beloved Dad.) I don’t know how or where my brother found it. I do know, with all my heart and soul, that my dad loves me. He loved me then, and he loves me still.
I know that yesterday at Zaxbys, someone yelled out my dads name. I know at Chick-Fil-A, a cellphone rang and Wyatt looked at me with wide eyes and said “Mommy! Grandaddy’s call! I hear it!” I know that eagles have gone before me on this trip and when I see them in the sky above me I think of him.
5:58 in the morning. 2 star hotel in the middle of a cornfield. Crying in the bathroom. Best Thanksgiving ever.
Attitude Soup 