The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).

Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.

There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).

As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.

Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.

I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.

I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.

Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.

After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.

Tags: Facebook, Death, Pets, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, school, car accidents, dying, grandfather, isolation, Round Robin, writing prompt

Here are the things I don't write about here:

My son's colds and coughs

Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three cats, a dog, and three humans

The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I may mention this in passing, but not in great detail, since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious, like work-on-the same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours laborious)

The difficulty of writing something that is long-term, of continuing through it without the instant feedback of blogging

Cooking dinner whether I want to or not

How we're figuring out where the kid will go to school for kindergarten in the fall

Tips and tricks for keeping one's sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with an energetic four-year-old

Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr. T's business trips

My political views

Natural disasters

The pros and cons of having another child

The perhaps impossibility of having another child

My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my current career choice

RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for this space. I'm not sure that many people want to read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers are interested in my personal pieces, either angst from the past or my depressive musings on current life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.

It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is working on something. I just need a few hours with a keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just feels like the right thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify my existence.

So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of the oldies but goodies. We'll see.

Image: Everyday me, as recorded by my computer.

Tags: blogging, writing, preoccupation, NaNoWriMo, preschooler, sick kid, school, National Novel Writing Month

Tom was pinned to the sea floor, staring into the gloom of pale green water, when his family started drifting past like surreal floats in an underwater parade. The first one to show was Faye, his father’s girlfriend, jammed into a one-piece bathing suit with a plunging neckline. It was the same suit she had worn on the Mexico trip and even in the murk he couldn’t stop staring at her cleavage, worried that something would pop out. Faye was bounteous, but untidy. She was a concern. He tried to speak, to get her attention, but his words came out as a giant bubble. Faye’s pale blue eyes were open and unseeing. Tom watched with increasing tension, staring into them, not noticing the pocket of air that contained his voice had winnowed its way to the surface. It was the same with all of them, his sister Veronica, his parents. They floated past one by one without purpose or reason, looking as they did in life. Except for their eyes. Unresponsive, flat and always open, their eyes were sightless. It was as if they were dead. Veronica, in her pajamas, wearing one of those high-necked flannel nightgowns their mother insisted on buying, clutched a leash with a stiffened hand. Tilly was on the other end of it, pulling in undeath as in life, stretching the girl’s arm past her head as she floated by on her back. From the look on his father’s face overhead – his eyebrows raised, mouth shaped like a giant O, as if he were in mid-shout – the man was surprised to find himself there with the rest of them. He was dressed for a pickup ball game, with catcher’s mitt and a ratty Phillies baseball jersey over a pair of running shorts and his legs, weighted down by over-technical sneakers, just missed brushing Tom’s face.

It was only once his father floated away, became a speck in the water, that his mother showed up. She was almost within touching distance, if Tom could have moved his arms. Her body slowly began to turn, the white terrycloth robe twisting around her legs and then spinning out again. With each turn the fabric fluttered and fanned in a slow motion dance. There was a beauty to it. For a second Tom thought he caught her eye, thought he saw a flash of recognition, but then she, too, was gone, carried away by the current.

He was emptied. Bereft. How could they leave him tied to the bottom of the sea where there was no air? But he was alive. The air just came. He became aware of the heaviness in his chest, how his lungs, thickened and clogged, would fill like balloons, suddenly buoyant. His chest would start to expand and his body, reborn, light, would pull against its tethers, and then his lungs would empty again. He would wait for the next breath to push into him, to refill his body with lightness.

An eleven-year-old boy lies on a hospital bed, his body a pale thread under bleached sheets. A cap of greasy blonde hair clings to his forehead and underneath his sallow skin blue veins trace a map of the body. Sleep glues his eyes shut. White Velcro ties bind his wrists to the bed frame and his arms are so thin that the elbows jut out like smooth, rounded stones. Two lines run from a plastic port in his hand to an IV stand. A tube snakes from his mouth to a ventilator sitting to the left of the bed. The night nurse re-taped it a few hours ago, inadvertently placed the tube at a rakish (though more comfortable) angle, so that Tom looks as if he should be holding a candy cigarette between his teeth instead of a ventilator line. For the moment, his lungs are receptacles. They expand and contract at the ventilator’s bequest. Intake and outtake, the machine does the work with quiet hums and hisses. His breath is external. Electric.

The room is dark. His mother sleeps in a slate blue reclining chair by the window, mouth slightly open, head slumped against her shoulder. A copy of the New Yorker lies open on her lap. In this light the circles under her eyes look like shadows and her unwashed hair has the tousle of sleep. Because she keeps forgetting to brush, her teeth are mossy and her breath sour. When the respiratory therapist, a large square man named Joseph, walks into the room, she doesn’t stir, having become accustomed to the strange cadence of hospitals, where day and night are delineated by the migratory patterns of doctors and residents, the dominant physician leading his or her flock with authority during business hours. The way they trample! At night, residents travel alone or in whispering pairs, quiet in soft-soled shoes, not wanting to bring attention to their drawn faces and wrung-dry minds.

Joseph visits twice on his shift to check on Tom’s numbers and clean the vent line. He pulls a pair of gloves from the box by the door, struggling to get them on. Underneath the latex, his pale hands shimmer with a thin layer of sweat. He smells of cooking grease and baby powder. Tom’s vent tube is gummed up; he has pneumonia and the thick secretions interfere with his breathing. As the man bends over him and attaches the vacuum line to the vent tube, his body exudes heat. Tom feels the warmth of breath, of Joseph’s proximity, followed by the industrial pull of the vacuum. It sucks away thick clots of mucus. Every ten seconds or so Joseph dips the tube into a glass of clean water. The water rushes with the joy of movement, of life.

With each suction Tom’s lungs sag. They deflate, go limp, until they spasm in protest. He begins to cough. The coughs are productive and Joseph continues with his careful cleaning, until, satisfied, he leaves the room, nodding politely to the bleary-eyed mother who has just woken up. Exhausted, scraped clean, Tom falls into a deeper sleep while his mother adjusts his blankets and smoothes her hand over his forehead. She is grateful to feel his skin under hers, is even relieved by the warmth of a fever. Tom is still here and fighting.

The bottom of the sea is murky. Out of the green, a small shape moves toward him. It travels in a nimbus of light made blurry with disturbed silt. The slow movement is hypnotic and Tom is filled with a sense of calm. As the form emerges, he recognizes the fine long hair of his maternal grandmother, white as bone, a flash of brightness in the deep. The mud and sand, the irregularities in the sea floor slow her down. She catches his eye and waves. Tom feels warm, well-fed, almost satiated. Gram will catch up with him. Everything will be ok.

But someone is tugging on his elbow. His mother has returned with purpose and animation. Tom looks into her eyes, her face a series of hollows, furrowed brow over darkened eyes. Her dark hair floats around her head in crazy corkscrews. We love you. Stay here with us, she demands. Gram waves again, smiling, encircled by jaunty bubbles. There is no hurry. When it is all over, the end will only matter to the people left behind. He has infinity stretched out before him. His suffering will eventually be a memory and such memories are stored in the body, destined to rot.

Give the living a little more time.

Image: "Murky Water" by -Ebil-Bils.

Tags: NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, hospital, ventilator, Death

I’ve been reading a lot about death lately, death and long hospitalizations and the kind of hope that people with sick children cling to, a stretched kind of hope that comes with chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. When I started writing for National Novel Writing Month, that’s where I was drawn, partly out of some kind of voodoo thinking that writing about it would protect my family and partly out of wanting to work through how someone copes with the loss of a child.

And then there was what happened to Kevin.

I’ve written about Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, here before, in short bursts of roundabout language. He came into our lives when I was fourteen and nothing was ever really the same again. By the time I was fifteen, I was living in the Little House with disastrous results and he and my mother were at the thin edge of eighteen tumultuous years together. Kevin is starting to lose his mythical qualities, has become more human in my mind in the last year, more culpable and weak. He was a bully, really, a smart and witty bully, though that of course was not the whole of him.

[Warning: The below goes into detail about an illness and a harrowing hospital stay and may be upsetting to some readers.]

In March 2002, Kevin, 55 years old, died of, well, it’s a little murky. He was in the final stages of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disease, though it was probably pneumonia that did that last dirty work. With myelofibrosis, the bone marrow becomes fibrous and hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the bone marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in a last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary hematopoesis. These organs try, but ultimately fail, to make useful blood. Instead, they produce bad blood, the cells immature and misshapen, blood that does a half-assed job of keeping the body healthy. People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and bone pain. While there are drugs to manage this disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell transplant, which is always a dicey position. If you have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will cease to work (because of the extramedullary hematopoesis).

Before March 2002, before we called in hospice and accepted the fact that Kevin’s death was imminent, Kevin spent six months in the hospital, nearly all of it in the Critical Care Unit (like an intensive care unit) or a unit one step below Critical Care. Trying to write about that time in a way that makes any sense is impossible. I’ve tried it, tried to come up with a timeline and a reason why he ended up on a ventilator (aka respirator) shortly after he was admitted and how early on we thought he was going to slowly bleed to death until a miracle worker hematologist/oncologist came up with a genius solution to get Kevin’s blood to clot, and how Kevin couldn’t swallow because his epiglottis was damaged from his emergency intubations, so he couldn’t eat and how there was a doctor we called Dr. Death because he insisted on telling Kevin he wasn’t going to make it, let alone walk again (he was right on the former, wrong on the latter). Kevin was on the vent/off the vent. He kept on getting pneumonia. He was hooked up to tubes and lines, trapped. But alive.

Fall 2001 was full of death and fire, of anthrax scares and work closures, of mail that came to the federal library where I worked months old, crispy and irradiated. It was the beginning of Kevin’s long end, a journey that required great vigilance on my mother’s part and the amazing efforts of a large number of doctors and nurses. Being in CCU for six months is incredibly intense, all-encompassing, and stressful, and when a patient is as fragile as Kevin was, you have to be vigilant. It isn’t that the professionals aren’t competent, it’s just that they want to do things, think that action is always the best course. And sometimes it isn’t.

When I sat down to start my NaNoWriMo novel, all those details of his hospitalization came out, details I have stored away for years: the sound of the ventilator and the beeps of IVs that need attention; the smell of pneumonic mucus as I suctioned it out of Kevin's trach; the image of Kevin trapped under a blanket of tubes and devices, so fragile you didn't want to touch him (and the too-late knowledge that he must have been desperate for touch); the horrors of his frequent intubations, emergency procedures where doctors had to essentially jam an air tube down his throat after his oxygen levels dropped precipitously; the rushed meals at Taco Bell Express, knowing we had to get back and that eating in front of him when he was getting his food, this green sludge, through a stomach tube would have been horribly cruel; how skinny, impossibly skinny he became. How, after being bedridden and hospitalized for three months, he took his 80-pound frame and a walker and did halting laps around the CCU, in an act of pure will.

So all this came spewing out last month, disguised under a new premise with a much younger protagonist. After the month was over and the first draft off my head, I realized I had a lot of legwork to do. For example, I know next to nothing about the disease I had chosen to grace my unlucky character with. And what do I know, really, about parental grief, which is a particularly virulent strain? I've been doing research, reading books and looking at websites. There is one blog out there, very detailed and well-written, created by a mother who was chronicling her little boy's fight against cancer. That little boy died in September. The whole thing is horribly sad (and as I read it, I wonder: why, exactly, am I doing this?).

When you are in the middle of a life-and-death-struggle, the intensity of keeping someone alive, of trying to make them well, it's all you can think about. Everything becomes medical and you find out all you can. You learn about the strength of nurses and the support system that crops up in a hospital. You learn to live with things you never thought were possible before. You are steeped in the smells and sounds of illness and it feels like it will never end. You don’t want it to end with death, but sometimes it does and you have to let go of the struggle. I read this blog and I cry, for this family and the little boy that will never grow up. I hope that I can do justice to him and to Kevin and to all the people who have experienced such prolonged pain.

The kid at Kevin's grave on Maryland's Eastern Shore, April 2009.

Perhaps this is an impossibly tall order. What I'm looking for now is authenticity, a way to write something that sings and is true and real, that doesn't exploit illness as a book topic, but brings it to life and honors those that have gone before us.

It's daunting.

Top image: Kevin at Georgetown University Hospital, January 2002, about three months before he died.

Tags: Kevin, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, grief, hospital, ventilator, Critical Care Unit, dying, Death, myelofibrosis

Part I: The visit

Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.

I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon:  develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.

Part II: Resonance

OK, OK, OK, Part I was the result yet another prompt, from a family visit in September. It was a photo prompt that had nothing to do with the resulting piece. I was going through my old stuff, looking for something, saw this, thought: Aha! That feeling some of us get after too much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years, and if I did, it would actually be wonderful to be with my mother, though Kevin's absence would still be palpable.

Sometimes I'm afraid that you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe you think that I sit around immersing myself in the past, feeling sorry for myself and penning various memorials to the me who used to be. Or that I prefer to dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy and light.

I write about what resonates and I have a complex relationship with both happiness and the past. The past is always present for me; it informs the present, keeps me grounded. And it provides me with great material. Don't even have to think about it. As for happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy. I'm generally happy, except when I'm not. The hollows, shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me. Light is meaningless without darkness. I need texture, a rough patch here and there, a little complexity and strife to make it more interesting.

But maybe my next post will be about puppies. More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or maybe it really will be about puppies, cute little fluffballs, good enough to eat.

Tags: family, family visits, holidays, NaNoWriMo, Round Robin, Thanksgiving, writing prompt

There was an oak tree just outside the back window. Brown leaves clung to it through the winter, unwilling to sever their ties until they were forced out by new growth. Some nights, when I was tired of waiting and had a little too much to drink, I would slip out in the dark and throw my empties at it. My mother did the same thing – tossed cheap wine glasses against rustic mantles, flung half-full bottles of Sangre de Toro against cracked linoleum. Broken glass every time. Me? I lobbed 7-ounce Budweiser bottles here, old jelly-jars-turned-cocktail glasses there. Every single one landed with an unsatisfying thud in the frosted grass or clinked against mildewed siding.

One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.



It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.

From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.

Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.

Tags: The Little House, alcohol, anger, writing prompt, NaNoWriMo

It started with Maggie May's post on how one could possibly cope with losing a child. Or maybe it started before then, in my first grief at nine over the death of my grandmother, the grief that morphed into my obsession with Ouija boards, seances, and ghosts. Or possibly it was before even that, sparked by the hit-and-run death of the unpredictable feline Sheba, or the demise of acrobatic Regis, whose neutering stitches became infected, or the abrupt disappearance of Hector, my future ex-stepfather's dog who had to be put to sleep because of his epileptic fits.

The themes of death and grief and how we cope with them have been on my mind, simmering under the surface. I watched Kevin fade away in puffs of canistered oxygen and piped-in morphine. I've had my own sad mourning story, the first line written in the Little House when I became responsible for someone else's death, when what was left of my childhood was stomped into flatness.

So when I just started writing without a plot in mind for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), maybe I shouldn't have been surprised at what was coming out of my fingertips.

If I say anymore, I might just stop writing. I seem to be on a roll and I don't want it to stop. And I can't get A.S. Byatt's poem Dead Boys out of my head. She wrote it after her 11-year-old son was killed in a car accident. She had to go on living, because it was her only real choice.

An excerpt from Dead Boys by A.S. Byatt

One son is many sons.
A bundle, a putto, a grave
Boy with kind eyes. One blow
Cracks all their bones at once.
Pastes all the gold hair red.

Soft lip and toothless mouth
Drop blood on the breast.
A white-haired crawler on grass
Head like a dandelion-clock
Above daisy faces that come,
Yellow and white and green
Year after year after year
Stops like a toy wound down.
Like a doll dropped in the wet.

I am a cold grey house.
In every room a boy
Gestures and halts and falls
Again and again and again,
A boy with his hamster curled
On his trembling extended palm,
Like a rigid ammonite,
'Is he dead, is he asleep?'
And the boy who leaned his head
On my shoulder in a bus.
He slept so deep, he jerked
And lolled as the bus ground on
Like a puppet, like a sack,
But he was warm that week --
My cheek was damp with his warmth --
And five days later cold.

Image from Celestial Dome.

Tags: National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, grief, Death, A.S. Byatt, Dead Boys (poem)