If you’re the kind of person who pays close attention to nature, you’ve likely noticed that forest canopy has thinned and the green has dulled. Some trees and bushes have already started to turn, though we still have a few days left to summer.
You’d think that autumn would be my season since I’m a late fall baby, born on a cold day in December, but this season has always been a sad one for me.
In childhood it meant going back to school, no more spending hours exploring the backyard and junkyard next door. No more riding my bike around the neighborhood. Soon I’d be cooped up in the house, staring longingly at the piles of snow in our backyard, wishing for spring and summer to return quickly. Warm weather meant I could be outside. My love for nature is decades old.
I’m a middle aged woman now, already missing my garden. The flower bed was an incredible success this year.
The flowers on my deck (yes, I have another garden on my deck) that keep me company when I’m working.
I didn’t find out until well into adulthood that I suffer from seasonal affective disorder.
This year there’s an added sadness, a different longing… In June my mother died after 364 days of no contact.
I’ve spent the last few months since thinking a lot about loss and longing, and why it is I can’t just get over my childhood, the various traumas I’ve endured (I am diagnosed with complex PTSD), the hard losses I’ve had.
I can’t count how many times I’ve been told “get over it”. Because I write about my life. Because I’m vocal about the things that haunt me, memories, people, their cruelty and my own. Because I refuse to sweep things under the rug and pretend I’m unaffected. I’ve witnessed firsthand what that stoic self-denial has done to people, including my mother. I did it to myself for years. I’m not doing it anymore.
I spent most of this summer hiking the deep woods, putting my hands in the soil of our land, planting seeds and watching them bring life and beauty.
This summer I thought long and hard about why I do this work. Why I write about my life. Why I write about the people in my life.
This summer I have worked to come to terms with the reality that not everyone, including some folks in my family, will like or respect my work or agree with what I do.
I created a class called Family Trouble where we take on what comes with writing about family. Of course this class came out of my own struggles. I tell my writers to periodically and consistently check in with themselves: ask yourself why you are doing this work, why are you writing these stories, how do we feel about issues that may (often do) arise when writing about family? We have to keep ourselves accountable. We have to check our motives and intentions. We won’t always get it right but we always have to try.
I also tell them: be as ruthless with yourself as you are with other people.
I’m trying. I’ve been trying for years. I’m going to keep trying.
What I’m really wrestling with, chewing on, like gum, is my own mortality. Why? Because I am coming to know my mother more now that she’s gone. How so? Through the journals I found in her apartment weeks after she died. Some of the entries she wrote 20 years ago, when she was 49, just two years older than I am now, or, I should say one year, since I’ll be 48 in three months.
When I first told my mother I am a writer, way back when, before I had my daughter (who is now nineteen), she pulled a legal pad out of the bottom of her bookshelf (the same one she had since I was a kid and still had when she died) & shoved it into my hands. “Yo comenze a escribir me historia,” she said.
I flipped through the pages. Her hand was so hard, the back of the pages felt like braille. Then she suddenly snatched it away.
“I wanna read,” I said, reaching for the pad.
She laughed. “Cuando yo me muera.”
I’ve thought about those pages so many times since. And I’ve thought hard about how she said I could read them when she died. I’ve wondered if she kept writing, who she was writing for, why she was writing this. I confess I hoped to find those pages and so much more when I went to her apartment. She knew I’d go looking. Why wouldn’t I? She’d promised me this…but I don’t know what I expected to find.
I’m not ready to divulge beyond this:
The condition of my mother’s apartment is clear evidence that she was not emotionally or mentally well.
I have tried for decades to not be like my mother, contorting myself endlessly, only to find that I am through and through my mother’s daughter. I can smell and feel it in her writing, in the things she describes, in the way she was a collector of memories, like I am, though she lost some control of that over the years and became a hoarder…
I was a melancholic child, a super sensitive one, and was taught that this wasn’t a good thing, that it was to my detriment, it made me weak, ridicula… I didn’t know I’m not the only one.
Maybe this sadness was meant to teach me.
I call the little Vanessa I was Peleona. Because I was a fighter. Because I pummeled with my fists to release the pain, the anger, the fury, the frustration, the helplessness I felt most days.
Because I felt unloved.
Because I felt unseen.
Because a man touched me in ways that felt wrong when I was just five and I didn’t tell anyone. Because I couldn’t. Because it was my fault.
Mom had warned me not to sit on men’s laps (no te sientes en las faldas de los hombres!). She demanded that I wear shorts under my skirts, cross my legs at the ankle when I sat, keep my legs closed, eyes down, quiet. She didn’t tell me why, so when I had to learn the why for myself, I blamed myself. And as a five year old, I did things to punish myself, to my body, I clawed and scratched until I bled, then I whimpered into my hands.
I didn’t tell anyone this until my daughter was five and I was in my 30s. I was at a playground in northern Manhattan, talking to a friend as I watched my daughter play. I can’t remember how the conversation started. Maybe we were talking about our lives, our childhoods, what we were like when we were children. And as often happens, we started talking about our wounds, the things we’ve endured.
“I mutilated after…” The words poured out of me like they’d been fighting to be released.
My friend gasped. “You were your daughter’s age?”
I inhaled deep. Looked over at my daughter, in her pink shirt, her Princess Leia buns, her big smile, so innocent. Just a baby…
It was only then, 30 years after I’d been violated, that I truly saw and understood that I was a baby too, and what happened to me wasn’t my fault at all.
Do you know what it’s like to carry that for so long? The heaviest cross.
(No, I don’t blame my mother.)
I remember once being pissed at a Facebook friend for posting that we should be grateful for our traumas because they made us strong, resilient…somehow better.
I felt my nostrils flair, my jaw clamped, my tongue plastered to the roof of my mouth.
It’s true that trauma often shapes us— how could it not?
It’s true that some of the most empathetic, loving, generous people have been profoundly shaped by the painful things that have happened to them.
That doesn’t mean that it was somehow a “good” thing that abuse, neglect, or other traumas happened to us. To me.
It’s true that I don’t know who I would be without the painful things that have happened to me. I probably wouldn’t be a writer. I probably wouldn’t be a teacher. I probably wouldn’t be a healer.
I know my stories help people. I know sharing my life, what I’ve suffered, how I’ve survived (and how I’ve fucked myself up along the way), help people. That doesn’t mean I am “grateful” for the painful experiences that inform what I write and what I teach.
I’m not grateful that I felt unmothered for most of my life.
I am not happy that I thought myself unworthy of love as a result of feeling unmothered.
I am not happy that I broke my own heart over and over clawing for love from emotionally unavailable people.
I know all this has informed my writing and teaching, how I show up in the world, and what’s become my life’s work: Writing the Mother Wound.
I also know I would give that all up to have had a mother who could love me with tenderness and kindness.
If you’ve shared your struggles, you likely had someone tell you that what you went through made you “stronger” or “kinder” or “resilient.”
I say this with zero sarcasm: I could have lived without having to prove how “resilient” I was/am.
I could have done without being made “stronger” or “kinder.”
I know this and also understand in profound ways what Mary Oliver was saying in her poem The Uses of Sorrow.
The Uses of Sorrow | Mary Oliver
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
I’ve been reading Bittersweet by Susan Cain, which is based on the premise that "light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.” The book explores a new method for dealing with sadness—not by denying it or by surrendering to it, but by acknowledging it.
Cain asks, on a scale of 0 to 10:
Do you seek out beauty in your everyday life?
Do you know what CS Lewis meant when he described joy as a “sharp, wonderful stab of longing”?
Do you react intensely to music or art or nature?
Are you moved by old photographs?
Do you experience happiness and sadness simultaneously?
Have others described you as an “old soul”?
If your answer is emphatically yes to these and similar questions in Susan Cain’s Bittersweet Quiz, then you will score highly, like I did, and qualify as a “true connoisseur of the place where light and dark meet”.
You are dubbed bittersweet, which means you are sensitive, creative and spiritual, with a “tendency to states of longing, poignancy and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world”.
Bittersweet, writes Susan Cain (with a sincerity that made me sigh deeply more than once) means the transformation of pain into “creativity, transcendence and love”.
My wife and I have completely different tastes in movies. She often rejects the movies I list as options. She doesn’t like to watch things that will make her cry. I’ve been trying to get her to watch The Color Purple for years, mortified that she’s never seen the classic. She refuses, says she knows it’s gonna make her sob. I usually reject the movies she suggests: violent action movies, zombie flicks, horror thrillers. “I can’t with that violence.,” I say.
I love sad movies and shows where people suffer, die, have enormous losses that leave them changed forever. I binge watched Grey’s Anatomy at least three times during the pandemic. And I remember vividly watching Pretty Woman in the basement of my dorm in boarding school when I was fourteen. I clutched a pillow to my chest at that scene were Vivian (played by Julia Roberts) leaves the hotel, having fallen in love with her client. When Roxette’s “It Must’ve Been Love” starts playing as Vivian stares out the window, heartbroken.,I sobbed and buried my face in the pillow, leaving it soaked with my tears. (My love for romantic comedies is a whole other story and is tied to my years long skewed view of love & relationships.)
Give me a story that will tear at my heartstrings, music that will make me ache (hello, I absolutely LOVE Sade), and I’m hooked.
I want a movie, a song, a play whose story line lacerates me.
Philosophers call it the paradox of tragedy. It explains why we listen to sad music, why we watch movies that make us cry, why we read stories that wrench us.
In an NPR interview, Cain says:
Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow when the rest of the time we will quite naturally do anything we can to avoid it?… I have come to believe that, really, what we are craving at bottom is that state of longing, that joy that's laced with sorrow, which is often triggered when we experience something so exquisite that it seems to come to us from some other world. And this is why we give painters and rock stars such exalted status - because they're the ones who bring us the breath of magic from that other place. Except it only lasts a moment. And we really want to live there for good 'cause we know that we live in a deeply flawed world, and we have this stubborn conviction that we come from a perfect and beautiful one that remains forever out of reach.
And maybe that sounds depressing to you, but this state of mind, this longing, is actually the deep source of all our moonshots and our loves. It's because of longing that we play "Moonlight Sonatas" and build rockets to Mars. And it's because we're all in this same strange state of exile that we have the capacity to empathize with each other in the first place.
Is that what I’m seeking out when I watch those sad shows and movies?
***
My mother had plants all over her small, railroad style apartment, the same one I was raised in in Bushwick, perched at the top of cabinets and bookshelves, on window gates, hanging from hooks in the ceiling, on the table in her living room, a table that was made for four but could only seat one due to all those plants. I inherited some of them when she died: a Ficus Ruby, a Golden Pothos, an Arrowhead, an enormous Aglaonema.
I played Rocio Jurado’s best hits when I potted the plants. Rocio Jurado is an old school Spanish ballad singer in the vein of Juan Gabriel, José José, Camilo Sesto. Their songs make me ache.
I remembered my mother, on those early Saturday mornings during my childhood, when she cleaned the house. I smell the King Pine whirling in the air, I see ma in her nightgown, stained with oil and sofrito, she stops when the song comes on, closes her eyes, raises her head slightly and whisper sings it, “algo se me fue contigo madre…las raíces de mi vida y de mi sangre…” (Something went with you mother, the roots of my life & blood)
I teared up as I scooped the soil and cleaned each leaf with a wet rag.
What was I looking for? What emotions was I calling in, embracing, conjuring?
I was sad, yes, but there was also exquisite, piercing joy. I smiled as I wept.
***
I saw an Instagram video of a young black women getting pressure point work. The person working on her spoke softly to her as he pressed on her. “Let it out.” I watched as she released screams she held in when she was abused as a child. The screams were locked in her muscle tissue.
I thought of the fascia work I’ve had done. During the first few sessions, the healer spoke as she pressed, telling me what she felt intuitively. “There’s a lot of pain here,” she said. “You struggled with your relationship with your mother.” I whimpered softly. “Let it out,” she said. “It’s ok.” I was shocked by the force of the sobs that came out of me.
***
In the new series of And Just Like That (The Sex & the City reboot), Carrie reads from her latest book, a memoir about her husband Big’s death: “My sadness never shrank but I grew and grew, until I was so large, the grief just felt smaller… You don’t move on because you’re ready to. You move on because you’ve outgrown who you used to be.”
The grief after my brother’s death was so dark and rageful, I knew quickly that it had the potential to take me out. It didn’t because I didn’t let it. Because I picked up a chair (metaphorically, of course) and sat in my grief. It eventually gave me life, new meaning, and my life’s work—Writing the Mother Wound. But first it destroyed parts of me.
This grief over losing my mother is different. Maybe it’s because I’ve been grieving her for so long. Maybe it’s because I have done so much deliberate and attentive healing around that wound. Maybe it’s because I’m older now, middle age, wiser… Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some really hard days where I cry so hard, my chest hurts afterward, and I can hear the wails ricocheting in my body for hours… but this grief just feels different. Not worse, not easier, just different.
Reading my mother’s stories has been giving me courage. Sometimes she was pissed that I wrote about her. In one of her letters she referred to my writing as “esos libros ridiculos”, and said the only thing I respect is my writing. But she contradicts herself when she pens her own stories, insisting she has to write about her life because she wants to heal, she needs to get it out, so on some very deep level, she understood why I do this work of writing about my life and the things and people that have influenced it and me. Ma was just as conflicted about it as I am.
I wonder, was it jealousy that I could do what she couldn’t?
Listen, I am aware of my privilege. I did not grow up in devastating poverty. We were poor but I don’t know hunger. And while the schools in the hood weren’t great, at least I had access to an education, which led to the elite education I got in boarding school and then at Columbia University. My mother went back to school when we were older but says she stopped to give my sister the opportunity to continue her education after having her son at 17. She never went back…
It’s said that the mother wound can manifest in jealousy of one’s own daughter when she is able to do and accomplish things mother never could. Poverty, patriarchy, racism, her own mother wound robbed my mother of so much, it makes sense that she resented me for what I’ve done. She was, afterall, only human.
When I brought my mother to my garden late last spring, I was so excited to show her what I’d created, the vegetables and flowers, how I’d turned a bed left in the garage into an actual flower bed. I wanted her to see how she’s inspired me. This was the second of only two times she’d been to my home.
The first time, she complained about how far we lived, that it was campo, so far from everything, she complained about the size of our livingroom. Who complains about too much space?
The second time, after walking around the garden to tell me what I did wrong, she finally sat down at the table I strategically placed so I can take in its majesty from where I sit and write. She said: “Quien vive así?” (Who lives like this?) I didn’t know what to say.
Later, when I cried in my wife’s arms, she asked: “What were you looking for? Affirmation?” I shook my head. What I wanted was connection and she couldn’t even give me that.
When we left, I got a flat tire, my first ever, and getting a service to come fix it was impossible because it was a Sunday and we live in the woods and Murphy’s Law and all that. It took hours. I had an anxiety attack in a stranger’s driveway. It was terrible… That was the beginning of months long car issues that left me without a car for six months. That’s how powerful a sorceress my mother was, though she never claimed that…
It was also just a few weeks before I went no contact.
***
In an interview in NPR, Hanif Abdurraqib said:
I'm of the belief that one doesn't move past loss. Or at least in my life, I don't move past loss. Grief makes a home within us if we allow it to...I believe that I should be a generous steward to my grief. If I tend generously to my grief then it treats me well in return. That means that each time I'm confronted with the grief, I have a newer depth of tools to move through it. Understanding that grief is not only tied to death or loss, but grief of the various heartbreaks we live with…
I think grief treats me best when I'm channeling the people I've lost through my current living… There are a couple songs that I love, that I'm really drawn to, but they're songs I'm loving because I know Tyler would love them. And so I am loving them through him. Or there are things I know how to make, to cook or bake because I watched my mother do it.
I think grief treats us well when these parts of people that we've gotten to enjoy greet us warmly. That's the real gift, to say I am not just one person, I am multiple versions of a person and some of those versions of myself have been loved immensely by people who were so incredible.
Through their loving of me I have a richer texture, and that texture that allows me to navigate the world in ways that I am not equipped to do so on my own. And that means that on my best days I get through the world, through the challenges of living, navigated by a whole host of people who have created a generous blueprint through which I have learned to maneuver this life well.
***
My mother & I may have had a difficult relationship, but I know a few things today that I didn’t know before she died:
She was just as tortured about our relationship as I was.
She loved me with a ferocity that she didn’t know how to handle or demonstrate most days, because of her own trauma and struggles.
I inherited the best of her, including her writing abilities and her main love language: acts of service.
I also inherited some of the most difficult parts of her including my temper and my ability to cut someone in half with a few choice words.
I wasn’t channeling my mother in my writing before she died. Now I know doing so will be a part of my memoir and likely much of my writing going forward.
I am more sure now than ever that I will never stop writing about my mother.
***
I found a folder next to my mother’s bed, closest to where she lay her head, with a pile of academic awards & certificates I received in school before I left her home at 13. What does this mean? I’m not sure.
Perhaps this was a way to keep me close when I was so far away, both physically and emotionally (though this too is false, since I was never as far from her as she might have believed).
***
Rene Denfeld writes in her essay “The Other Side of Loss”:
We have to make friends with sadness. We have to hold our losses close, and carry them like beloved children. Only when we accept these terrible pains do we realize that the path across is the one that takes us through.
The longer I do this the easier it gets. Isn’t it funny, how we can find beauty anywhere? A fallen feather on the ground. An empty nut husk. A child’s face, even in hurt or anger—sometimes I think active emotion is the most beautiful thing of all, because it signifies energy.
***
In her TED Talk “The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days”, Susan Cain shares:
In Hebrew, the word for longing, leh-heesh-toh-kek, it comes from the same word, from the same root, as the word for passion. The place you suffer is the same exact place where you care desperately. It's the same place that inspires you to ease someone's pain however you can. And it's the place that you vibrate with the insane beauty of this world. So, remember, there's light and there's dark. And when the dark times come, and they will come, don't be surprised, but ask yourself: What are you longing for? And follow your longing where it's telling you to go. It's pointing you in the direction of the sacred. If you don't like that word sacred, I get it, call it the wondrous instead.. Once you look, you will see it everywhere around you. It's in the arch of your best friend's eyebrow when she makes a joke. It's in the smallpox vaccines and the Golden Gate bridges that humans somehow managed to invent against all odds… Follow your longing where it’s telling you to go, and may it carry you straight to the beating heart of the perfect and beautiful world.
As I listened, again my mind mind flashed to that image of my mother in her sofrito stained bata, a mop in hand, the smell of King Pine swirls, her eyes are closed, she is swaying slightly, and she is whisper singing along to Roció Jurado’s song about the ache of her mother’s death.
In a TED Talks interview, Susan Cain (yes, I’m a bit obsessed with her work lately) says that our longing for a perfect and beautiful world, manifests in different ways, like the longing for the career and love we always dreamed of. She insists that longing is the source of our greatest works of art and love. She speaks of a woman she met who said that she’s carried the generations of grief from the women of her family (mother, grandmother, great grandmother and so on) and as a result her life is one gigantic offering–she started a charity where she works with refugee women. The woman says that most of the time she walks around broken by this inherited grief, but when she works with these women, when she helps them, she feels whole.
Of course I thought of all the pain I live with because of the relationship I had with my mother and the reality that we never did and never will reconcile. And I thought of the Writing the Mother Wound work I do and this book I’ve been working on for the better part of the last 15 years, my memoir. The act of working on this book so intensely an act of longing and devotion. Like Cain, I too am “confronted with that chasm with what [I am] devoted to and what [I am] trying to present…”
We all have a different way of addressing this longing.
I think this longing is what inspired Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado. As the story goes, Salgado was stationed in Rwanda in the early 1990s, where he covered the genocide. He returned traumatized to his home in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where he hoped to find solace in the lush green forest of his childhood. Sadly, what he found was a dusty, barren land stretching for miles, devoid of any wildlife. "The land was as sick as I was. Only about 0.5% of the land was covered in trees," he remarked.
Witnessing Salgado’s suffering, his wife Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado proposed that they replant the entire forest. Together, over the course of the next 20 years, they planted an astonishing 2.7 million trees, an effort that resulted “in the rejuvenation of 1,500 acres of rainforest, and the site eventually became home to 293 plant species, 172 bird species, and 33 animal species, some of which were on the brink of extinction.”
I think this longing is what inspired the dirges the women working the fields sang in the Chris Abani’s essay (one of my favorite all time essays ever), Ethics and Narrative: The Human and the Other:
I remember that as the women planted rice, they would sing mournful songs, dirges that were made up of the names of everyone in the town that had died during the civil war, as though the women could somehow seed the souls of the dead into the tender shoots of green they threaded through the mud of the rice fields. I learned the songs and sang along, threading with them, back bent. Months later, as we harvested the rice, the women would sing happy songs, and woven through them would be the names of all the babies born that year. The following planting season, we went back to the dirges. I had always assumed the songs were fixed seasonal ditties, designed to make the work easier. Later, I learned that this tradition was new and began just after the civil war, and that far from being seasonal, the songs were magical. I began to notice that the number of dead who appeared in the dirges dropped in proportion to the number of births that year. This wasn’t a simple belief in reincarnation, but the palpable and powerful transformation of sorrow and pain, and even an underlying anger and hate, into absolute redemption. These women, quietly, textually and bodily, in their way, were changing the narrative of the world.
And I think this longing is what Stephen Colbert is talking about when he says “you have to learn to love the bombs” in a GQ cover story that I’ve read at least a dozen times. The youngest of eleven, his father and two of his brothers, Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, were killed in a plane crash when Colbert was 10. His elder siblings were all out of the house by then so it was just him and his mother at home together for years. Colbert shared:
…even in those days of unremitting grief, [his mother] drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.
“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”... To elaborate, Colbert “described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”
He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.
“It's not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can't change everything about the world. You certainly can't change things that have already happened.”
It's our choice, whether to hate something in our lives or to love every moment of them, even the parts that bring us pain. “At every moment, we are volunteers.”
I think of the proverb “all is grist for the mill” which means that everything can be made useful. According to Writing Explained:
Grist is the corn that is brought to the gristmill to be ground into flour. A gristmill is the building with the machinery to do the grinding. Therefore, grist for the mill can mean the useful ingredients that the mill will use to make a profit.
When I clicked on how to use it in the sentence, as synchronicity would have it, the response was: “Now that he's a writer, he regards his difficult childhood experiences as grist to the mill.”
Susan Cain’s instructions to follow our longing when times are dark is reminiscent of the instructions writer mentors have given me: “Write from the wound.” Write what pains you. Write your secrets. Write your life. Write it all.
But what the fuck does that really mean? And why do it? I ask myself that a lot these days now that I’ve lost so much because of my writing.
I always come to this: I write because it’s saved me. Over and over, since I was 5.
James Pennebaker, the first researcher to study the therapeutic effects of writing, proved that writing about difficult experiences improved psychological and physical health. The studies have been replicated dozens of times with the same results.
Is this why my mother wrote all those pages?
Is this why I’ve been writing for all these years? Sin duda.
But writing for me isn’t just about healing or processing. It’s what I do because I’m good at it. It’s what I do because people’s suggestions and demands of “just get over it” “move on” “let it go” has done nothing to help me heal or move on or let go. What’s gotten me closer to being more healed and whole and functional is my want and willingness to write about my life.
I write because I am my mother’s daughter. I write because as kids, my sister was a writer and reading her stories (which I read secretly, when she wasn’t looking) made me want to write because I wanted to be like her so bad. (Back then, not now.) She stopped writing. I never did.
I write because of longing and grief. And I write because it reminds me of joy.
The day after my mother died, I was in the Starbucks drive thru waiting for our order when I spotted what looked like a Luna moth resting on the underside of a leaf. I put my car in park and scurried over to the bush, and sure enough, that’s what it was—an enormous Luna moth.
I smiled and teared up. I thought this was my mom communicating with me from the other side. She knows to come to me through nature—a red cardinal chirping loudly overhead as I planted seeds in my garden days after her death, a mourning cloak butterfly flitting around me while I hiked in the deep woods of Orange County, NY, that luna moth in a driveway in upstate New York.
People may not understand why I do this. I think on the other side, my mom finally does. There is joy in that…and the deepest sorrow too.
Reading this piece was an emotionally charged experience for which I am so grateful. You are an inspiration. I’m so glad you’re a writer.