On The Parts That Remain

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

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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.