Mom-mom, 1934.

My obsession with ghosts started in the sixth grade, though it had its roots in my grandmother’s death two years earlier. We were in the kitchen, putting groceries away when she suddenly clutched at her throat and started gasping for air, frantically motioning to the kitchen chair. I stood there, confused, scared. Finally, I moved the cat, and Mom-mom collapsed into the empty space.

It was up to me to dial 911. We waited 40 minutes for the ambulance to come all the way from Elkton. She was dead or close to it by the time it arrived. Congestive heart failure. In a couple of weeks, my mother, her boyfriend, and I moved in with my grandfather and tried to cope with her absence and our new living situation.

I’m not sure where the Ouija board came from. Maybe it was a Christmas present. I started carrying it around with me, taking it to school, begging my friends to help me contact my grandmother. They went along with it and I believed everything. Mom-mom had a friend named Sam up there in heaven. Everything was all right, and she was watching over me.

My mother took the death chair out of the kitchen, eventually storing it in the attic space over the garage. I was into sleeping in tight spaces, under picnic tables, in tiny tents I set up in the backyard. One night I convinced my best friend to spend the night in the attic with the chair. The space was hot and smelled of cut wood and roofing tar. I kept staring at the empty chair, waiting for my grandmother to appear.

Over the years, through neglect and hard times, I kept on waiting. When, as a teenager, I moved to the Little House adjacent to my grandfather’s place and felt totally alone, I wished for a sign of her presence, a sign that someone was watching over me.

Now I know that such hopes are false.

Tags: grandmother, Death, ouija boards, ghosts, grief, writing prompt

Fall, 1978, Newark, Delaware: Desegregation of the Wilmington city schools! Teachers’ strikes! Afternoons spent at the Deadhead-run Malt Shoppe on Main Street! I read books and ate toasted onion bagels with butter, while I waited for my mother (emphatically not a Deadhead) to finish her shift at the Shoppe. It was a little slice of the sixties in the late seventies, but Delaware has always been a little slow on the uptake.


Elk River, Winter of 1977-78

The year before, my mother had decided to go back to college. In order to save money, she moved in with Jim, her future former husband, while I went to my grandparents’ house in Maryland. It was a year scented by cigarette smoke and coffee fumes. Mornings were my favorite time of day, sitting in the warm kitchen, a tray of food prepared for me by my grandmother, usually Eggo waffles dabbed with Parkay squeezable margarine and dripping with Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, cartoon-character shot glass of orange juice on the side. That winter the snow kept coming. It piled up and formed five-foot drifts in the driveway, places to dig out forts and make snowmen. Snuggling in my grandmother’s bed as we listened to the radio school closing announcements became an almost-regular ritual.

Mom scored a one-bedroom apartment in student family housing in the summer of ’78 and I moved back in with her. She took the couch in the living room while I slept on a full-size mattress on the floor in the bedroom, a wooden orange crate for a bedside table topped with a flowery ceramic lamp, a clock radio, and an “I Love You This Much” figurine -- a robed, potbellied man, arms outstretched – that she had given to me in first grade.

1978-79 was the first year of court-mandated school desegregation for the Wilmington city schools. We were bused 34 miles roundtrip from suburban Newark, a predominantly white, middle class community at the time, to an elementary school in the middle of the inner city. It was the fourth school I had attended since kindergarten.

The dark, institutional halls smelled of ancient gymnasium mats and cafeteria pizza. Because I didn’t like sandwiches, Mom would pack things like crackers and cheese or the occasional hard-boiled egg, cooked until it was sulfurous and the exterior of the yolk was green. I’d display the egg to my friends and toss in the trash can to a chorus of ewwwws.

After lunch, students were herded over crumbling asphalt to play outside on ancient metal jungle gyms and rusty swings. Murals with selected scenes of black history covered the exterior walls. At night the surrounding neighborhood leaked into the schoolyard; people left behind their bottle caps and broken glass, empty lighters and plastic bags. The atmosphere became more unwelcoming when I acquired the nickname “Kermit,” a name given after I came to school in a kelly green, polyester, three-piece suit (worn with white turtleneck!). Think Saturday Night Fever meets Annie Hall meets the Muppets, a well-meaning gift from my grandmother, who had become accustomed to choosing my clothes.

The teachers weren’t happy either and went on strike from mid-October through most of November. Much of that time is lost to me. My third grade teacher brought me back to Chesapeake City Elementary for a day or two; I read a lot of books from the small children’s section at the University of Delaware library, spent many hours staring at the ceiling of the Malt Shoppe. The ending of the strike coincides in my mind with reports of the Jonestown massacre, images of children lying on the ground beside their parents, as still and peaceful as if they were asleep.


April 1979

By early March, 1979, my grandmother was dead and Mom, Jim, and I had moved back to Maryland to watch over my grandfather.

Our grand experiment was over.

Tags: grandfather, Delaware, grandmother, Muppets, Kermit the frog, step-father, school, desegregation, Mom

The Little House is nothing fancy. My grandfather and uncle built it in the early 1970s, two rooms slapped up over a concrete slab. A suburban shack with aluminum siding and a roof of grey shingles on tarpaper, it has no heat, plumbing or telephone line. Inside, the chemical tang of cheap paneling and indoor/outdoor carpeting competes with the earthy funk of mildew. Spores thrive beneath the floor squares, bloom underneath the pattern of brown and gold fleur-de-lys, while black colonies spread on the dark side of the faux wood walls, invisible hordes that constrict my lung passages. I always keep an inhaler nearby.

My first memory of the house is from the summer of 1972. I am three, walking the 20 feet from the cottage to my grandparent’s place, planting my sturdy feet in thick grass and clover. I take off in a run when the ball of my right foot meets something small and sharp. It burns. I begin to cry. Someone – my aunt? my grandmother? – whisks me into the main house, probes tender flesh with pointed tweezers to remove the bee’s stinger. Afterwards, I lie on the family room sofa in cool air conditioning, injured foot propped on a pillow, a thick paste of soothing baking soda drawing out the pain. I watch cartoons, sucking on a straw to get at the last of Coca-Cola over ice.

That was over thirteen years ago. My grandmother has been dead since 1979 and the Little House is now my home. I spend my days waiting for darkness to fall. Bring on the night, I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.

Inside the main house at 9:30 p.m. sharp, my grandfather takes out his hearing aids and removes his prosthetic foot, trapping himself in bed for another night of muffled sleep. Four houses down the street my mother, blinded by man and money troubles, sleeps in a cocoon of sadness. My father is sixty miles away, a prisoner of debilitating depression; his kindly wife is totally focused on his well-being. Unheard, unseen, and seemingly unimportant, I slip into the night or let the night slip into me.

This is where my power of description seizes up.

Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I don’t want to rehash the past in angry diatribes here.

But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst of the never-ending stillbirth story, attempting to write about my time in the Little House, a companion piece to my biological grandmother’s experiences and as I try to get my mind around it I find myself asking: WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?

When reality broke through, when my pregnancy became apparent and ended a month later in a stillbirth, in dramatic labor occurring in the Little House, when it became clear that I needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING CHANGE?

These are not new thoughts, but the underlying feelings have changed. My anger before was mainly self-directed, anger at my family turned inward: what evil in me brought on their rejection? But now I am reaching a different conclusion: my mother and father had so little respect for themselves, for their power as parents, that they gave up, figured I was fine on my own, or maybe even assumed that they would only make things worse. My mother stopped parenting; my father never even started. They deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who don't see their own worth.

Now I have to work through the feelings, unpack the meaning of the Little House, dense with suppressed emotion, so much a part of who I am. I’ve left it almost completely out of most other versions of the stillbirth story because it feels like an emotional bomb. As I try to get back into that time of isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger, my self-protection (or something) kicks in.

It is time to control the explosion through language, to capture the shards of the experience on the page.

I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the experience controls me.

Tags: writing, existential angst, grandfather, grandmother

My biological grandmother was still in high school when she got pregnant. Since she remains silent, a hidden participant in our family's history, my mother's origins are a mystery. Was my mother the product of passion, young love that couldn’t wait for marriage, clothes that flew off as kisses multiplied? Or was she the result of a moment – or more – of coercion, the forced coupling in the broad backseat of a car, the push to the ground, the inexperienced fumbling leading to blind acquiescence?

When my grandmother started to show, her parents sent her to the city. They dropped her off at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers. I imagine her emerging from the black car alone, tattered suitcase in hand, looking nervously up the set of granite steps. Inside, somnolent girls in the late, leaden months of pregnancy, inward, deliberate, walk slowly through the gray halls.

It is the home of permanent in between; the suppressed energy of smothered potential thickens the air. The girls, all going by pseudonyms, make very little small talk. In the nursery, rows of bundled babies silent as dolls wait, neatly packaged in individual bassinets. Once retrieved, the babies seek out their mothers’ faces, liquid newborn eyes encountering guarded glances. Both mother and child have learned not to waste energy on tears or outward displays of emotion. The bonding and the break are inevitable.

This is how I picture my mother’s birth: hazy trauma of labor, discovery delivered as flat fact – “it’s a girl.” They undo the straps, let the drugs wear off. Hours later, my biological grandmother holds her swaddled daughter, names her Lois. Lois is tiny – less than five pounds – too little to be released to her adoptive family. Over the next six weeks the pair are entangled in the monotony of new life, the seemingly endless cycle of feeding, diapering, and sleep. They calm to one another’s warm, familiar scent. Their gazes become intimate. Bone-deep.

When the six weeks are up, Aunt Ruth, a go-between, my adoptive grandmother’s sister, comes to take the baby. Waiting in the home's entrance, the young mother frantically bounces her silent infant, dreading the break. Finally, Aunt Ruth appears, says her hello, and waits.

“It’s time.”

The mother hands over the baby. It is as clean as a guillotine strike.

Before she has time to reconsider, she races inside to the central staircase and runs up two flights of stairs to her room. Her breathing is contained, shallow, a precaution against tears. She’s been trying to memorize every inch of her daughter, the moon face framed by white-blonde hair, her blues eyes, dainty toes and impossibly tiny hands, but already the image is fading. She reaches her room and slips inside, leans against the closed door taking short, sharp breaths. A glass baby bottle sits on the bedside table, a remnant from the final feeding. The girl eyes it, finally reaching out. Then, the satisfying sound of glass irrevocably broken, the implied threat of jagged shards.

Taking several deep breaths, the young woman calms. She begins to push the glass into a pile with her shoe and decides to find a broom and dustpan.

There will be no tears.

Tags: Mom, adoption, grandmother, family

I've not been myself.

Maybe it was the week of haze, the sun a bright disk behind clouds of diffuse smoke, the smell of fire hanging in the air. Or I could be homesick, tired of a landscape of bungalows, thirsty for brick and marble.

That's it. I want to go home. Not to DC (though I wouldn't mind just a taste of that city), but back to my grandparents' house in Hollywood Beach, before it was ruined by death, back to some sweet summer when my grandmother was alive.

We'd drink sugary Coca-Cola over ice, hang out in her freezing bedroom. She had a perpetual supply of Cheez-Its (it was a land of hyphenated foods, tasty concoctions of flavored chemicals with catchy, meaningless names), and I'd jam handfuls into my mouth while we watched The Price is RIght. Sometimes I would listen to the sound of her sewing machine humming along as she worked on another outfit or colorful muumuu.

After lunch, I would walk down to the river, step in the soft tar by the side of the road, sink into its soothing warmth. Somebody's grandparent was always sitting on one of the benches overlooking the beach, smoking a cigarette, keeping an eye on the young swimmers. With a running leap, I'd arc into the water, trying to avoid the muddy river bottom, several inches of sludge and leaves. I was heading for the raft or for water deep enough for an underwater handstand, ready to emerge with handfuls of muck and dirty fingernails. When a container ship came through the channel on its way to or from the C & D Canal, swimmers fought the pull of its engines and treaded water until the ship passed.

I'd swim until the skin on my fingers and toes wrinkled in protest, until I was covered in a thin film of mud, sometimes until I was shivering. Then it was time for the walk up the road, a towel wrapped around my waist, looking forward to farm-fresh corn on the cob and summer tomatoes.

Nostalgic memories are free of pain. They do come with an ache, however, a longing for simplicity. I'm sure it wasn't so simple, but my grandmother's house was a safe place, a place where I could be a kid. As I've been working on the stillbirth story again, I've been thinking of the dramatic event as the final nail in the coffin of childhood. That it happened in the one place where I had truly been able to be a child, where I was safe for a short time, seems especially sad to me. The happy memories will always be tinged with loss.

So maybe this funk has been a little burst of mourning, more grief experienced years after the fact. Let's hope that getting it out will allow me to let it go. I'm tired of the mental smog. I want to enjoy the sun, revel in the blue sky freed after a week behind smoke.

Tags: grandmother

The paneling tacked up against drywall, the damp concrete slab with its thin covering of plywood and carpet. The mildew, the cigarette smoke, the asthma attacks. Hollywood Beach, Christmas 1980.

In this photograph, from left to right: Jim, the unemployed soon-to-be stepfather, who spent his days lifting weights in the Upper Room; my grandfather, demanding, handicapped as the result of an industrial fire, who kept his candy in a cabinet by his porn; and me, a little freak 11-year-old who dragged a Ouija board everywhere and had séance parties, all in the hope of contacting my dead grandmother.

Mom was behind the camera. She commuted two hours round trip to work and came home every night to a hungry, demanding household. Once the plates were cleared, the complaints were served: the meal was too simple or too complicated. Had she gone too far this time, or held too much back? I listened and hated them, wanted to defend her honor. But I just sat there instead. This was not a happy time.

My grandmother collapsed suddenly one February afternoon in 1979. We were in the kitchen putting groceries away when she started breathing heavily. Unable to speak, she motioned in the direction of the sleeping cat on the kitchen chair. I was helpless. Finally she removed the cat herself, sat down, and closed her eyes. I called 9-1-1. The same volunteer fire department that whisked me off to Christiana Hospital six years later took her limp form away. They didn't tell me she was dead, but I knew.

The grief we were all smothering after her death came up in unpredictable ways. Just when we thought we had stamped it out, had ripped up the roots and crushed the last toxic leaf, we would discover another dank tendril wrapped around the front doorknob or emerging from the drain in the kitchen sink. It would not be denied. The only photographic evidence I have of her from my lifetime is a picture of the two of us. I'm playing on the floor, looking off at some distraction, away from the camera. She is a disembodied hand holding a cigarette.

It's been almost thirty years and I still miss her.

Tags: grandmother, grandfather, step-father