On What Was Still Ahead

This writing includes the themes of childhood sexual abuse and ending one’s life. Please be aware before you continue. If you are in a difficult situation please reach out for help.

Photo not the property of the author.

The matriarchal line of my family is wrought with trauma.

My grandmother was an alcoholic who died young, but not before giving birth to nine or ten children by several different fathers.

My mother was the oldest.

A few years ago, I learned that my grandmother froze to death in a doorway in Boston. She had been drinking and didn’t make it all the way home.

Before she died, things in the house had become bad enough that my mother, legally an adult by then, went to court and asked that her younger brothers and sisters be removed from the home.

One of those children was my uncle.

He went into foster care, where I was later told he was molested.

Eventually, he would sexually abuse girls in our family.

After my grandmother died, my mother took him in. He was still underage. Her sister, the second oldest, took in his full sister.

My uncle came to live with us when I was four.

That was when he first molested me.

He babysat while both of my parents worked.

He told me he would kill me if I told anyone.

So I didn’t.

Eventually, our house caught fire.

We barely made it out.

I remember coming down the stairs, hopping from foot to foot because they were hot beneath me.

My uncle was the one who woke everyone.

At the time, none of us knew he had also been the one who set the fire.

He had set our house on fire to kill us.

Then he saved us.

My parents decided to leave Boston. My uncle did not come with us.

It wasn’t until years later that they learned he had been the arsonist responsible for our house fire as well as others in the neighborhood.

We settled in Michigan.

I don’t know how long we had been there when I learned my uncle was coming to live with us again.

I was eight.

I knew immediately what his return meant.

The molestation would start again.

I had never told my parents.

He had told me he would kill me if I did.

So I decided to die.

I don’t know how I knew that ending your own life was something a person could do. I don’t know what I understood about death at eight years old.

I understood enough.

If I were dead, he couldn’t hurt me anymore.

I put on my blue calico dress.

It was relatively new and I felt pretty when I wore it.

If I was going to die, I wanted to wear something that made me feel pretty.

Then I went into the garage.

There was a rolled-up piece of carpet lying on the floor. I climbed onto it with a length of rope in my hand.

I had decided to hang myself.

I don’t remember whether I tied a noose.

I don’t think I understood all the individual things I would have to do in order to die.

I remember the light.

Late afternoon.

Long stretches of it across the garage floor.

Dust motes stirred by my movements floating through the air.

The smell of dry, hot wood.

I tried over and over to throw the rope over the beam above my head.

I couldn’t do it.

I became hot.

Sweaty.

I was breathing hard.

Eventually I sat down on the roll of carpet and coiled the rope in my lap.

I was angry with myself.

I couldn’t even do this right.

My uncle came to live with us.

The molestation began again almost immediately.

Exactly as I had known it would.

It occurs to me now that by the time I was eight years old, I had been sexually abused for half of my life.

Half.

Four years is not very long to me now.

To an eight-year-old, it was half of everything.

Sometime later, my uncle became sick and needed his tonsils removed.

The night after he came home from the hospital, something happened to the sutures in his throat.

It was the middle of the night when I heard noise coming from the bathroom.

I got out of bed.

I tiptoed toward the sound.

I slowly opened the door.

My uncle was sitting on the floor in front of the toilet.

There seemed to be bright red blood everywhere.

I watched him spit out a clot.

He looked at me.

“Go get help,” he whispered.

I stood there looking at him.

I hoped he would die.

I hadn’t died.

But if he died, it would stop.

I reached into the bathroom and turned off the light.

I pulled the door closed.

I went back to bed.

I have no guilt about this memory.

None.

I was eight years old.

I had already tried to remove myself from the world because I couldn’t think of another way to make what was happening to me stop.

Now the person hurting me was sitting on a bathroom floor asking me to save him.

If I died, it would stop.

If he died, it would stop.

I hadn’t died.

So I turned off the light.

I have spent much of my life trying to understand what those early years did to me.

There are easy answers.

They taught me not to trust.

They taught me fear.

They taught me how thoroughly a child can hide what is happening inside her.

Those things are true.

But there is something else I have struggled to put into words because saying it feels dangerous.

I think surviving what happened to me as a child helped me survive the death of my daughter.

I do not mean that I am grateful I was abused.

I am not.

The abuse was not a gift.

I would never hand what happened to that little girl back to her and tell her that someday she would be thankful for it.

Fuck that.

But she learned something.

Something I carried into adulthood without knowing I knew it.

The world can end.

I had already experienced that.

Not the way it ended when Becca died. Nothing in my life prepared me for that particular devastation. Nothing could have.

But long before I became a mother, I knew what it was to stand at the edge of a life I could not imagine continuing.

At eight years old, I believed there was nothing beyond what was happening to me.

I was wrong.

There had been a beyond.

I had lived long enough to discover it.

So when Becca died and the world ended again, somewhere beneath thought, beneath language, beneath everything I consciously understood, perhaps there remained the knowledge of that little girl.

I had survived the end of the world before.

I knew terrible things actually happened.

I knew innocent people were not protected simply because they were innocent.

I knew a person could carry something unbearable that nobody else could see.

I knew morning could arrive after a night you thought should have ended everything.

I knew that sorrow and beauty could occupy the same world.

I knew something could happen to you that divided your life permanently into before and after.

And I knew, though I could not have said it then, that after still existed.

That was not the gift of being abused.

The abuse was a fucking terrible thing that happened to a little girl.

The gift, if there was one, was something I made from surviving it.

Knowledge.

Deep, wordless knowledge.

I could survive end-of-the-world things.

Surviving did not mean remaining untouched.

It did not mean getting over them.

It did not mean the world would return to what it had been.

It meant there could still be a world.

When I sat on that rolled carpet with the rope coiled in my lap, I could not see one.

I could see dust floating through late-afternoon light.

I could smell hot, dry wood.

I could feel sweat on my skin.

I could feel the weight of the rope in my lap.

That was as far as I could see.

I didn’t know what was coming.

I didn’t know there would be people I would love.

I didn’t know I would become a mother.

I didn’t know there would be Becca.

I didn’t know the exquisite joy of loving her.

I didn’t know there would be two boys at once, two entirely different human beings arriving together, who would grow into men I would someday have to love enough to let go into lives of their own.

I didn’t know the devastation of losing her.

I didn’t know that after she died, those boys would still be here.

Or how fiercely I would have to resist making their lives smaller because I was terrified of losing them too.

I didn’t know they would have worlds of their own.

I didn’t know there would be grandchildren.

I didn’t know I would someday tell both of my boys that I was ready to leave my small town and enter the world.

I didn’t know I would somehow survive long enough to see any of it.

I didn’t know there would be years when surviving was almost all I could manage.

Or that eventually surviving would cease to be enough.

I didn’t know I would begin wanting things again.

Beauty.

Art.

Words.

Strangers.

Cities.

Trains.

Connection.

The world.

More life.

At eight years old, I thought the life I was living was all the life there would ever be.

I was right about many things.

I was right about my uncle.

I was right that the abuse would begin again.

I was right to be afraid.

But I was wrong about that.

There was so much more life.

I hadn’t even found the apple tree yet.

That was still a year or so away.

The girl in the blue calico dress didn’t know there would soon be a place she would run toward instead of a world she wanted to leave.

She couldn’t see it from where she was sitting.

But the apple tree was already waiting.

It was still in my future.

I wonder what is in my future, now.

On Reclaimed Territory

I sometimes think I am living in the wrong time.

Given the opportunity and the support to create without interruption, I think I could make marvelous things.

There is arrogance in that sentence, perhaps. I don’t care.

I believe it.

I imagine a room with good light and a battered wooden table. Trays of pastels left open because there would be no reason to put them away. Paper stacked against a wall. Paintings leaning everywhere. Notebooks open to half-written sentences. My hands stained with pigment.

I would disappear into a tree trunk for six hours because I needed to understand what violet could do underneath green.

Then a sentence would arrive and I would abandon the tree exactly where it was, find my notebook and write until the words stopped coming.

I would probably become completely insufferable about being interrupted.

Of course, this imagined life has probably never existed quite the way I imagine it. Artists have always had bills. Women have always had responsibilities. People have needed patrons and jobs and food and somebody has always needed the damn laundry done.

Perhaps I am not living in the wrong time.

Perhaps I have simply reached the time in my own life when I understand that creating is not an accessory to it.

I work. I care for people and animals. I walk the dogs. I buy groceries. I come home tired. I carry grief and relationships and worry and all the ordinary demands of being alive.

And still I make things.

Sometimes I come home, pull out a piece of Pastelmat and put my hands into pigment. An hour later there is something in front of me that did not exist before.

At the same time, I am writing a book.

Lately I have wondered where all of this is coming from.

Maybe I know.

I have spent my entire life noticing.

The smell beneath an apple tree. The exact place where meadow becomes cut grass beneath bare feet. The sweep of branches caught by wind. Light on water. The posture of an animal. What someone’s face does when they are hurting. The impossible weight of an empty hand.

I have been learning to see for decades.

Technique can be learned. A pastel stick can teach me what it will do when I turn it sideways. I can discover what happens when I break it and use the sharp edge. I can learn when to layer and when to stop. I can learn that I don’t have to blend anything simply because someone else does.

But seeing?

That has taken a lifetime.

And now, perhaps, I am beginning to find out what my hand sounds like.

I love that idea. That somewhere between what my eyes notice and what appears on the paper, there is a language that belongs specifically to me. The pressure of a pastel against the surface. A broken line. A violent mark beside a quiet one. The things I exaggerate and the things I leave out entirely. I am beginning to recognize myself in the marks before I completely understand what they are saying.

Maybe that is why this feels so ravenous now.

I am not beginning from nothing.

It feels more like doors to rooms inside me have opened all at once, and I am discovering they have been full of things all along.

Trees. Words. Color. Memory. Grief. Bodies. Light. Water. Desire. Anger. Beauty.

Things I have carried for decades without knowing they were waiting for a form.

Last night I had henna done on my hand. 

I chose that hand deliberately.

It is the hand I create with.

The hand that holds pastel sticks and pencils and brushes. The hand that moves across paper when I write. The hand that has touched bark because looking at a tree wasn’t enough. The hand that has held other hands and paws at the ends of lives. The hand that has spent decades doing necessary things.

For a little while, that hand will itself become a piece of art.

I love that.

And perhaps there is something especially right about decorating it now, when I am only beginning to understand what it has to say.

I cannot go backward and give the girl I was a studio and uninterrupted afternoons. I cannot give the younger woman years devoted entirely to making things. I wonder what she would have created if someone had given her that freedom.

But I have this woman.

I have her now.

And instead of mourning the imaginary life in which somebody gave her permission to become an artist, I can begin giving her more room in this one.

She is already here.

She is already making things.

Let me recognize myself.

Let me take up room.

Let my hands make what they know how to make.

Let me want what I want.

Let me remain open without abandoning myself.

Let me see what happens next.

I want to see what happens when I give her more territory.

On The Parts That Remain

Turtle, watercolor, ink, and acrylic, 2025. Commissioned work by the author.

There were turtles everywhere in my dream.

At least a dozen of them had spent the winter crowded into a small plastic tote. The water was shallow and dirty. It was that uncertain place between winter and spring, when the days grow warm enough to promise something and the nights still freeze the surface of the water.

Two of the turtles were frozen into the thin ice.

Instantly, I was enraged that they had been left in this condition by my sister. She’d collected them over the years and kept them there. I knew I needed to release them so they could have the chance at a wild life.

They were pale and sluggish. Some were larger than others, but all were crammed into a space too small for even one of them. The water they belonged in was down a hill and just past an expanse of trees. Something deep inside of them must have known it was close.

As the day warmed, the turtles became more active. One by one, they began climbing out of the container. As they did, I could finally see the bottom of the tote.

There was a large snapping turtle lying there. He was a milky gray, almost without color. From his size, I knew he must be old. He was so still that for a moment I thought he hadn’t survived the winter.

I could see that he was still alive. I knew I needed to get him out, but snapping turtles can be dangerous. Even weakened, he could injure me if I handled him carelessly.

I lifted him from the cold, dirty water. He managed to wiggle free of my hands and landed in the grass.

For a moment, he remained there. Then I watched him lift his head, eyes closed, toward the pale spring sun.

Color began to appear.

It started at his beak and his toes. Vibrant green. Deep gray. Slowly, the color moved through him, filling the pale places until I could see the turtle who had been there all along.

Then he moved.

The speed surprised me. He headed toward the trees and the water beyond them with a certainty I hadn’t expected from an animal I had thought might be dying only moments before.

I had thought I might need to help him make it to the water. Instead, I stood still and watched him go.

For a long time after my daughter died, I mistook dormancy in myself for something that was gone.

People often asked if things were “getting back to normal” for me, and I had no idea what that even meant. Some things had changed irreversibly. Others disappeared completely. New things replaced some of the empty spaces. And some things had simply gone quiet.

For a long time I thought quiet meant gone.

Then I started making things again. I had not lost my creativity. It existed before my daughter was born. It had been still for a very long time.

As a child, my right palm was always smudged with pencil lead from drawing. Today, my fingertips are covered in pastel dust. My clothes have streaks of color from where I wipe my hands.

I hadn’t become creative again. I had begun creating again.

Other things I had thought I lost were not gone. They survived and came back to me.

My curiosity returned. I began leaning toward beauty again: paintings, color, music, unfamiliar places. I wanted to travel. I wanted to learn. I wanted to love people even though I knew what loving them could cost.

I discovered that desire itself had survived.

There are things about me that did not exist before my daughter died. Grief changed me. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

But I have begun to wonder how much of what I once called transformation was actually return.

These were not replacements for what I had lost.

They were parts of me that had gone dormant.

They had survived the winter.

Dormancy isn’t absence. It isn’t death. And it isn’t waiting to become something else. It’s a living thing becoming quiet because the conditions don’t allow it to flourish.

I craved connection. Connection with people. With animals. With places. With art. With the world. The turtle in my dream moved toward the water. I moved toward connection. I wanted the conditions in which I could live.

I reached with my writing. I put pieces of myself into words and allowed other people to read them. Then I began making art again.

Writing reaches outward, but I’m still sitting alone when I write. Art reaches outward, but I’m still the one holding the pastel. Eventually, I wanted more than connection at a distance. I wanted to participate in the world again.

I still had to reach.

I stood still and watched the snapping turtle move through the grass toward the water. By the time he disappeared behind a small hill, his color had returned completely. I smiled as his deep green tail slid out of sight.

I didn’t need to carry him to the water. I didn’t make sure he safely arrived on the bank. I didn’t protect him from whatever was going to happen next.

I wanted to inhabit my life again.

Muddy fingers and train tickets and paintings and dogs and music and curiosity and making things. All the ways a human being says:

I am still here, and I want to be in the world.

On The Place Beneath The Branches

This is a stock photo as the tree written about in this essay is no longer standing.

Little House on the Prairie books were my favorite to read when I was growing up. I had a dress that was blue calico print and it had a matching bonnet. I’d secure the bonnet strings tightly under my chin, grab my book, and head out to the apple tree. I had to wait until my chores were done before I could go, and I always worried someone would see me and discover where I went. That’s why I created a slip of an opening on the side of the tree that faced the forest, opposite the house.

The sun also set behind the forest.

That was my favorite light.

By mid-July the grass was tall, and I could see grasshoppers perched on blades that bent under their weight. As I drew closer, they took off in an explosion of wings. The branches, weighted with small green crabapples, reached for the ground.

I imagined the earth and tree were holding onto each other.

Each year I had to bend a little more to fit beneath the branches, but I could still crouch slightly and enter the cool space beneath. I lowered myself to the flattened grass and leaned my back against the gnarled trunk. The bees sounded busy as they buzzed overhead between the branches.

Later in the summer, the air beneath the tree smelled of sweet decay. Fallen apples fermented in the grass. Beneath that was the clean smell of crushed grass and damp earth. Sometimes there was a musky scent. Years later, I wondered if it had been left by the deer I sometimes saw near the tree when I peeked through the branches.

I let my weight settle against the tree, and my body would begin to loosen. The earth was damp and reassuring when I dug my toes into the soil. I removed my bonnet so I could hear if anyone approached or was yelling for me.

The good days were the ones when all I heard were busy insects and an occasional bird.

There were times when I didn’t even open the book on my lap. Instead, I would watch the changing light as the day drew toward dusk. The insects would quiet, and a hush would fall over the meadow.

Other times, I would get so lost in the stories that I felt as if the Little House world would be waiting for me when I stepped out from beneath the tree branches. The meadow would have become a prairie. The dirt road near our house would be the one that led into the heart of Walnut Grove. And Ma Ingalls would be waiting for me in the little house.

I could spend hours imagining worlds beyond the leaves.

There were times when I would bring a sketchpad and pencil with me instead of a book. I would draw those imaginary worlds, humming softly as trees and deer and rabbits grew from my pencil.

Many times, I wouldn’t realize how late it had become until I could no longer see the paper in front of me. By then, the light on the barn would be on, and I knew it was time to go in.

My head would hang low, my dirty-blonde hair obscuring my face. I didn’t have to watch where I was going because I knew the journey back by heart. My stomach would tumble and my shoulders would clench. I would walk slowly until I reached the place where the meadow and the cut grass of the yard met.

My feet could feel the difference.

That was when I would start listening. To the quiet of the night closing down. For my family inside the house. For whatever I needed to hear so I could prepare myself.

On Care That Doesn’t Heal

Image: quick study for color done by the author.

Please be aware this essay contains the topic of end of life care.

I carry the tray back to the kitchen. Nothing on the plate was eaten. The paper hadn’t even been taken off the straw. Under the plate cover, placed on top to keep the food warm, there were two pancakes with butter, maple syrup, and strawberries. I could smell the warm sweetness as I walked down the quiet hallway.

I had prepared this plate for an elderly man who I knew, from talking to him a few weeks ago, only liked his mother’s pancakes. He could remember sitting in the kitchen, on a red stool, as she stood at the stove flipping them for him and his brother. Saturdays were for pancakes. And, during the summer months, they came topped with the strawberries his mother grew out back. The strawberries needed to be cut so they resembled little hearts on the plate.

Begrudgingly, he had tried the pancakes I brought him the first time I made him breakfast. He’d told me they were “good enough,” which made me smile. From then on I would enter his room and ask him if he wanted “good enough” pancakes, to which he’d reply, “I guess, if that’s all you got back there.”

His tray was heavy as I opened the kitchen door. Not physically, but because I knew what this particular tray represented. A life growing closer to death.

Much of the time, as people near their end, they start requesting their comfort foods. The usuals: macaroni and cheese, oatmeal with brown sugar, soup, mashed potatoes. Then there are times when I have to get creative with the ingredients I have in the hospice kitchen and get as close to what they are describing as possible.

I’ve seen a number of deaths since I’ve been at hospice, and I have learned there are certain stages the majority of people go through as their bodies start to die. Delusions. Restlessness. But before that, appetite disappears. Preferences change. Sometimes three bites constitute a successful meal. Sometimes the tray comes back untouched.

Like today.

I hold preparing food for the dying in the category of a sacred task.

One patient told me I made the best omelet he’d had in fifty years. Another patient couldn’t feed himself, so he was tenderly fed and sung to with each meal I brought. And when no one comes, staff and volunteers step in to fill that space.

It was the same way in animal care. When there was no owner who would stay for euthanasia, I stepped in. Holding the animal closely and pouring all of the love in my heart into its body so it could leave feeling cared for.

When I worked in veterinary medicine and was a part of or performed humane euthanasia, I understood that we were providing a kindness to the suffering animal and to the owners as well. I had a coworker who said, “Sometimes death is the last kindness we can offer.”

I finally understand this.

One does not have to save someone for care to matter.

I learned that in tending to dying animals and, now, in the human capacity. Presence is necessary even when nothing can be fixed. Dignity often comes in small gestures and choices. Appetite, touch, music, humor and preference remain human even near death. Care without hope of recovery is still profoundly worthwhile. Ordinary acts become enormous when time is short.

The empty room after one of our hospice patients passes is heavy. Heavier than I thought it would be. It’s cleaned and prepared for another person to spend their final time in. It feels obscene to be cleaning all the belongings out so quickly for the next patient. One life has recently come to its end and we are moving to the next so quickly.

When someone passes, we truly express how sad it is, but then we have to move on to the next thing that needs to be done for the living. The living, and their families, still need care.

I didn’t arrive at this facility innocent of death. I lived what death does.

I am what death does.

My daughter’s death was a rupture of our lives. There weren’t neat goodbyes and handholding as she passed. It was me standing on a highway a mile from her dead body.

When I began working at hospice I thought: I’ll be okay here. I have had an intimate relationship with death for nearly two decades. I can carry the weight. The sorrow.

And I can.

But what I didn’t expect was that death could teach me to see it differently.

My first couple of weeks working showed me that death, some death, is a natural process and will happen no matter how we rage against it. It may sound odd, but there has been comfort for me in seeing a life lived fully from A to Z, decades of life, coming to its end. Does it make it easier? No. But I see death in a different light now.

In the aftermath of my life being torn apart by my daughter’s passing, I would never have been able to accept someone telling me that death could bring gifts. I am still not certain that is the right way to say it.

Death took my daughter. There is no gift in that.

What I have learned is that beauty can exist beside death.

A person can be dying and someone can still sing to him. Someone can still laugh. Someone can still care whether the oatmeal has enough brown sugar or whether the strawberries are cut into little hearts.

There is a woman here now, in her eighties, who asked me if I could butter and brown her hamburger bun when I brought her dinner.

“Like my mother used to do.”

So I did, of course.

Her mother must have been gone for many years, and yet here was her daughter, now an old woman herself, remembering the way her mother buttered a bun.

It made me think again of the man and his pancakes. The red stool. Saturdays. Strawberries from the garden cut into little hearts.

Mothers are still caring for their children long after the mothers themselves are gone.

Sometimes another pair of hands gets to carry that care forward.

This woman is not my child, but today I can carry on her mother’s mothering for her. I can keep what is important to her important until she is no longer here.

I have watched people traveling toward the end of lives they cared for and have seen what matters and what falls away.

These are the things I will carry with me into my future: Attention. Food. Touch. Curiosity. Showing up. Saying things. Going places. Love.

Loving people while they’re available to be loved.

I carry the untouched tray with the pancakes and carefully cut strawberries over to the sink and empty them into the trash. This is the last time I will make these pancakes for this man. That saddens me.

But I now know, I continue to mother. 

On Visiting

Little Spectacle Lake, Allegan MI. Photo taken by author.

Two days ago I drove an hour south to pet sit for a veterinarian friend of mine. She has eighteen animals. Seventeen cats and one dog. My friend has a heart that will not allow her to give up on anything living, and so her menagerie consists of animals with varying degrees of disability and need. The dog is just old.

She took two of them on vacation with her: a paralyzed cat who requires around-the-clock care and the elderly dog she refuses to travel without. That left me here with sixteen cats at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a house that does not belong to me, with a small inland lake waiting quietly in the backyard.

Upon arriving and meeting the animals I felt a bit panicked that I would not remember everyone’s names and needs. I even made myself notes with descriptions of each animal. I am visiting someone else’s life and I want to get it right. 

By evening, after everyone was cared for and my duties to them were done, I wrapped a coat around my shoulders and stepped out into the night air. I walked slowly to the edge of the water and settled into a chair.

The sun seemed suspended between the darkening sky and the dense trees lining the opposite shore. It was the very time of day when the sky becomes something more than sky. When color dissolves into feeling. When edges soften. 

I closed my eyes for a few moments, listening as the night gathered around me. Small splashes in the water. Birds singing goodnight to one another. Announcing, perhaps, they had lived another day. Rustling in the tall grass to my right, where I had been told the deer would eventually make their way to the water. 

The sun had disappeared behind the tree line when I opened my eyes. The colors had deepened into something I always wish I could recreate in paint and never quite can. In those colors I felt Becca draw near. She was a part of them somehow. Her laughter alive inside them.

A smile formed on my lips.

There you are, my sweet girl.

Then, somewhere from far behind me, I could hear geese calling into the deepening evening.

I heard them before I could see them. The melancholy calls drawing nearer. I tilted my head back so I could watch them pass overhead. They appeared in a straight line. A few dozen of them suddenly above me, moving across the still water.

Something in my chest ached then. Not the sharp ache of absence, but the longing ache grief leaves behind. The ache of loving someone whose voice you no longer hear.

And yet, my smile grew.

It felt, somehow, as if Becca understood this kind of longing. As if she moved somewhere inside the beauty of the evening and ached gently for me too.

Their calls were lost to my ears before I no longer saw them. Their shape remained a little longer. Then, that too, was gone. 

Night seemed to fall quickly after they disappeared, as though they had pulled the plum-colored sky in behind them.

The birds had finished their songs by then. The lake quieted. Evening grew still as it accepted the night.

I sat there for a few minutes longer, wrapped in the hush of it all. The water darkening. The last color leaving the sky. Somewhere in the grass to my right, something moved softly toward the shoreline.

Then, eventually, I accepted the night too.

I stood and made my way back toward the house where sixteen cats waited for breakfast and medicine and reassurance in the morning.

And I thought about my daughter.

For years, I imagined her reaching for beauty. Chasing it somehow.

I no longer imagine her reaching for beauty.

She is made of it.

On What Can Still Be Tended

Image was not taken by author.

The past six days I spent at one of my son’s homes. The time together was priceless and I wasn’t ready to leave. I’m never ready to leave either of my sons. Even when times are good. 

As I was packing to leave, my son had already left for work and my ability to hug him one more time had passed. I picked up a stuffed animal that had belonged to him as a child. A striped orange cat with camouflage shorts. The rest of his outfit was lost years ago. I held the cat to my face and inhaled deeply, as if I could smell my son as a child again through the animal. I tucked him under my arm and carried him down the stairs with my pillow. I just couldn’t put him back down. I needed him. A connection that spanned who my son was then and who he is today. 

A link from when he lived with me as a small child to stretch across the miles between us now. 

The drive from his house to mine is roughly two and a half hours and I generally cry at least part of the way. I can’t stop the tears. It is hard to say goodbye when I know that I have already lived through a “last one” and we aren’t guaranteed another with any of our children. 

When I got home I was exhausted. Emotionally. Physically. Mentally. My face was puffy and my nose was stuffed. I cried longer than usual.  I wanted to take a nap right away. I tried. My mind wouldn’t stop circling. I tried to paint. I couldn’t get anything to look the way I wanted. I finally turned on the tv for background noise and cleaned up. Did laundry. Trying to stay busy until bedtime. The house was quiet in a way that wasn’t peaceful, but empty. 

Bedtime finally arrived and my mind was able to slow down and allow me to sleep. I slept deeply and for a long time. I would like to say I awoke rested but in truth I didn’t. I woke up less physically tired, though. 

The sun was bright as I sat down on the couch with a cup of coffee in my favorite mug. The animals arranged themselves around me as they usually do. I felt a bit lost and wasn’t sure how to fill the day. Next to me, on the table, was a little notebook I was using to plan a new garden. I picked it up and let my eyes wander over the plans I’d been making the week before. A list of plants I wanted to add to the area. Another list of plants and seeds I already had – given to me by friends. A third page held the names of people who offered me flowers and small trees if I wanted to come dig them up. Then, I remembered it was Saturday and the farmer’s market was open.

My friend and I decided to go down to the market. What a perfect place to wander for a while. The entire side yard is a blank canvas so there is a large area to fill. There are a number of songbirds who come to the feeder so I knew I wanted to build the garden around the wildlife that visits daily, and nightly. Birds, rabbits, turkeys, possums, a skunk, and last year we had two adolescent raccoons who stopped by at dusk for nearly a week. I don’t have a preference about who eats at the feeder. Any hungry animal is welcome to partake. 

There are also a handful of domestic animals, stray cats in particular, who seem to come to our house in order to feed. There is one big old scruffy gray tom cat who I see once in a while. His left ear is tipped so I know he has been fixed. I love catching a glimpse of him now and then even though I can tell he wants nothing to do with me. That’s ok. I just want him fed. 

Part of the garden, the area in the back protected on three sides, is going to be a semi-permanent area for the strays in the neighborhood. A handful of insulated houses. Fresh food and water. Safety. 

There was a booth at the market that had little plants for sale. One of the plants had the most beautiful green leaves. Their shape pleased me immediately. I asked about them and learned they are nasturtiums. The woman at the booth said she had two kinds. Orange and red, and just red. The flowers are edible. I bought four. Two of each color. Then I saw catnip. I had planned on getting a few plants to put in the cat shelter area so I got one plant for them and one for the two cats who live in our house, Walter and Avi. In a box next to the catnip were bulbs. A sign on the front of the box said “Tulip bulbs – fill a bag for $1”. We filled two bags and brought home roughly forty bulbs. I have no idea what colors they are but I am looking forward to finding out when they bloom next year. 

Later in the day we went to a garden center and my friend purchased six fruit trees. We hadn’t planned to but I am so happy we did. Two apple, two pear, and two peach. Years are going to pass before we get fruit, I imagine, but that’s alright. They felt perfect for the pollinator section of the garden. It is easy to imagine them bursting with blooms. By next year, I hope, the branches may be able to hold the weight of a nest. In five years, fruit will fall to the ground and feed an animal. In ten years there will be shade enough to cool the yard. 

A few hours after getting home from the garden center I remembered I hadn’t finished the laundry yesterday. I got off the couch, looked out the window at the fruit trees lining the fence across from the bird feeders, then went down to the basement. 

Moving clothes from the washer to the dryer, I suddenly heard a loud buzzing very near my head. I looked up at the small window and saw movement. I realized there was a bumblebee that was trying desperately to get outside. She (they are all shes to me) kept hitting the glass. Her body was dirty with cobwebs. I couldn’t figure out how she had gotten down there but I knew I had to get her outside. 

I ran upstairs and grabbed a cup and a piece of paper and was able to catch her easily. She was right where I’d left her. She wasn’t going to leave that window with the sunshine falling through.

She was on the wrong side of outside. 

I got her outside, removed the paper from the mouth of the cup, and gently shook her onto a flowering bush. She didn’t land, though. She dropped a bit then took flight. I watched her fuzzy bottom zig-zagging across the front yard. 

As I watched her disappear, I understood something familiar in her earlier desperation: my grief did not remove me from the world entirely. It placed me beside it. Life remained visible. I just could not always reach it. 

Bereaved parents live life adjacent.

I walked toward the new trees again imagining future blossoms, feeling the cool shade to come. There was a small chickadee perched on the delicate branch of one of the apple trees as it gently swayed in the breeze.

I picked up the gardening notebook when I went inside. I wanted to add the plants that came home with us today. The inventory of what we have is growing longer. This isn’t just a list of what we physically have. If I read between the lines it is also a list of what remains. What is possible. What is alive. What can still be tended. 

What brings me back into life.

On Care That Doesn’t Save

Reader note: This essay addresses animal injury and end-of-life care.

Photograph by the author.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—a tiny animal moving near the curb. I swore out loud, because I already knew it wouldn’t end well.

I believe that when you see an animal in need, it becomes your responsibility to respond. You don’t get to turn away. Maybe that’s why dying things find me. Or maybe they’re placed in my path.

Late last summer, during an unbearable heatwave, I was driving home from a long day at the clinic. Sick animals, a euthanasia, broken air conditioning—everything had frayed me thin. I just wanted to go home. I didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with another animal in need. Instead of passing by and doing nothing, I rounded the block and came back.

Before I even reached the street, I saw the remains of a rabbit nest dragged across a freshly mowed strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the road. I was immediately angry. Someone had to have seen it—if not before, then after—and still left its inhabitants scattered and helpless.

Before I could do anything, a crow swooped down, picked up a squirming baby bunny in its beak, and flew into a nearby tree. It settled on a branch beside another crow. I turned away before I had to witness what would happen next. I yelled. I started to cry.

Frantic, I searched the grass and didn’t see any other babies. Then I peered over the edge of the curb into the street, where I’d first noticed movement. One tiny rabbit was still alive, trying to right itself. Afraid the second crow would spot it, I scooped it up and wrapped it in the hem of my scrub top. It was covered in ants. Blood trickled from its nose. Both eyes were missing. I knew it wasn’t going to live.

I could have left it there, or I could take it with me—to the clinic—and help it pass quickly and completely.

I called the vet and told her what had happened. She wasn’t there anymore, but she told me to meet her back at the clinic. The fact that she came back speaks volumes about her integrity.

During the drive, I wailed. I told the baby I was sorry it would never get to live its life. I cried for the one carried away by the crow. I cried for the others I knew must have been in the nest, too.

When I arrived, my coworker had turned on the surgery table so it was warm—maybe comforting. We laid the baby down. The vet examined him. Breathing was labored and uneven. We all knew. She prepared the euthanasia solution and injected it. The three of us stood quietly around the table, hands resting on or near him. Tears fell. We waited. We listened for a heartbeat. He was gone.

My coworker prepared his body for cremation. I didn’t know she’d requested the ashes be returned. When they came back, the label read: Steve — baby bunny. She had cared enough to give him a name. I brought him home.

The bag inside the tin held the smallest amount of ashes I have ever seen. They fit easily into the palm of my hand. They’re still on my dresser, next to my daughter’s ashes. I had planned to scatter the bunny’s ashes under some flowers, but part of me felt I was rushing his life into and out of mine too quickly.

I needed him to exist a little longer.

I had planned to scatter my daughter’s ashes, too. That was always the intention. It’s been nearly twenty years, and I still can’t. I know she isn’t in the urn. I know the rabbit isn’t in the tin. But I can’t. Not yet.

This spring, I plan to buy a flowering bush and plant it over the bunny’s ashes, placing a small stone rabbit nearby. No one else will know he’s there. But I will.

The earth held his body once before, in the nest. It will hold him again. There is something right about that—about returning him to the ground that tried, briefly, to keep him alive.

On My Journey

Original watercolor study by the author for a larger painting.

As I enter the nineteenth year of living without my daughter, I took a moment to look back at the landscape behind me. From where I stood, I could see the distance I’ve traveled since this journey began. I could see other things, too. 

On the horizon, the skyline of my former world still rises. Not as it once was, but as it remains. The skeletal dome of a grand building. The bases of structures that once held entire lives. The outline of something magnificent, now hollowed. The smoke has long since cleared. The dust has settled. What’s left are ruins—quiet, stable, undeniable.

Closer in, the destruction is more intimate. A section of wall without a room attached to it. A doorway twisted slightly out of true, opening into nothing. These are the remnants I once moved among, back when looking up was still impossible. They no longer threaten collapse. They simply exist. Like a ghost, the old world remains—visible if I turn my head, no longer pulling me toward it.

Laid out below me are the paths I have traveled. Seen from this distance, they no longer resemble lines on a map, but something more like a tapestry—its pattern only visible now that enough thread has been laid down.

Closest to the ruins, the weave is rough and uneven. These are the rocky paths that lead out of the detonation zone, their direction dictated by damage rather than intention. Some of these paths end abruptly, blocked by debris I could never move. Entire directions closed off to me from the beginning. Not because I lacked will, but because the passage simply no longer existed.

Other paths continue for a while before thinning. The vegetation has begun to reclaim them—not thick enough yet to erase their shape, but the growth signals they are no longer meant to be walked. They carried me only so far. I can still trace their outline, still recognize where I once stepped, even as they quietly return to the land.

Then there are the paths that appeared without warning. The ones that don’t follow logic or planning, but necessity. Like the shortcuts pedestrians make across grass when the designed walkways fail them. These routes sprang up where no road had been intended. Awkward at first. Barely visible. Born of urgency, not choice.

Farther out, I can see walkways that were once wild and unknown to me. Terrain I never imagined entering. Over time, my walking has worn them down. What was once unfamiliar now holds the imprint of repetition. These paths are becoming permanent, their lines darkening, their direction clarifying. They are no longer accidents. They are part of the pattern.

From here, I can see how the tapestry has changed as I have changed. The early weave is survival. The later weave shows skill—not mastery, but familiarity. An understanding of tension. Of which threads must hold, and which can loosen without the whole thing coming undone.

I am still walking.
The ruins remain.
My pattern continues to form.