Tag: writing to heal

On Returning

A picture of Lester Street. The street where we lived. Where I brought my Becca home. I drove back up there today just to get this photo because I knew it had to be the image I used with this piece of writing.

Whenever I am up at the farm, caring for the animals while the owners are away, I feel myself pulled north. Where I live now, fifty miles from the town I grew up in, I never feel the urge to return. But the farm sits only sixteen miles away, and it feels almost wrong not to go. As if the town has its own orbit, and once I step this close, I’m caught inside it.

I don’t know why I am drawn to the town I gladly left. The farm is less than twenty miles from the street where I lived. A short ride in physical distance, but the time I travel into the past is much farther. Usually, by the second or third day of farmsitting, I drive to the stop sign at the end of the road and turn the car north.

The flickering of sun through the trees unsettles me, making it too easy to slip into the past, to see the landscape as it was forty years ago. Enough has changed, but just enough remains to trick me into believing I’m heading back to the place I once left.

The curve in the road, to the left, and the bridge traversing the Muskegon River. The Manistee National Forest sign. The intersection where a bar stood in the 70’s, and the urban legend of a girl hit there one night—her remains scraped from the asphalt. A factory that promised jobs for the people in the impoverished area. The big sign welcoming drivers to the spot “where the north begins and pure waters flow.”

By the time I reach that sign, my stomach knots. My hands grip the steering wheel tighter. A lump rises in my throat. Why do I do this to myself? As always, I turn right down the street that takes me to the millpond where I spent many summers swimming. It’s gone now—the dam must have broken.

I park in the small lot across the street and let my mind slip back to those summer days—the long, hot walk from my house, the dread that certain kids from school would be there waiting to bully me, the immense relief when they weren’t. Always on guard, always scanning. And then the cool shock of the water when I finally dove in, the pruned fingers and tired muscles after a day spent trying to swim myself clean.

When I leave the lot I drive a block or two north and turn left, passing the old co-op. The building I remember on the right is gone now. The one on the left still stands. How many times did a younger me push through that door, the smell of goat feed my parents had specially mixed hanging in the air. The voices of gruff old farmers rose and fell around me, and the woman at the desk, gruff herself, always lowered her voice when she spoke to me, slipping me a wink. And each time the door opened, the bell gave its jingle, marking my passage in and out. 

The car bumps over the railroad tracks and I am back at the main road.

I pull to a stop at the red light, waiting to turn left and go through town. Was there even a light here when I was young? Or just a blinking yellow for those passing through? My eyes fix on the dark wood building half a block up. It used to be Smith’s Tavern; now it’s a fireworks store.

A horn blasts behind me and I’m yanked forward into today.

I notice Rosenberg Hardware has moved, though the name endures. The old courthouse—huge, ornate, proud—is gone, replaced by a flat, forgettable building with no character. The post office is unchanged, and I realize I’m going through a kind of checklist: this is still here, this is gone. Why do I keep doing this?

And then the library. How could I forget? That place was my escape, my portal. Until the day a worker said: Let her bring that baby in here and I’ll be able to tell who the father is. Even remembering it now makes my chest burn. I was angry then, heartbroken. This had been the place where summer reading programs lit me up. My name filled the checkout cards again and again, proof that I belonged here. For years, it was safe—the one place the bullies never followed. It turned out it wasn’t children I had to fear, but an adult. I never went back.

Decades later, it still presses against me. The library full of books and worlds became hostile ground. And even now, I feel the old surge—to shield my daughter, even her memory, from a town that once wanted to cut her down. A town that kept telling me I was an outsider.

The weight of that pain presses against me as I turn onto Lester Street. One block in, I reach the corner where I was ripped off my bike after school. Not the only time I was jumped there, but the one that stays: the day I lost the bike that had been a gift, something precious in a childhood where little came easy. The shame of walking home empty-handed, of trying to explain it to my parents, pressed heavier than the bruises.

Another memory rises. A car full of girls circling the dirt road, one furious because she thought I’d spoken to her boyfriend. I can’t remember if I had, but I can still see myself – legs flashing, weaving through trees, sprinting for home while they prowled the road. Branches whipped my arms and face. My chest burned with breath and shame, the crunch of dried leaves and twigs underfoot loud in my ears. Anger pushed me forward, but hopelessness chased me harder.

Driving it now, decades later, I see her again, that blur of motion. And my heart aches for her—for the small, scared girl running faster than she should have had to.

I spent so much time in this town just trying to keep myself invisible, unseen. Maybe that’s why I drive back now—to prove I’m no longer hidden, no longer theirs to erase.

Still, not everything in that town was shadow. When I turn toward the land where our house once stood, the grass grown over, the best of me rises. I see the apple tree where I lost myself in books, its heavy branches dripping with blossoms, bees humming above me. April, my sheep, followed close—nibbling my fingers, laying her head in my lap as if she belonged to me alone. And my horse, steady as breath, carrying me bareback through the woods with nothing but her mane to guide us, taking me where no one else could find me.

And then—the brightest memory of all. The day I carried my daughter home, small and perfect in my arms. I remember the weight of her, the way the house seemed to hold its breath as I crossed the threshold. For a moment, the world was only light. That single joy outshines so much of the darkness, and it always will.

Maybe this is why I keep coming back. To test the balance of shadow and light. To remind myself that even in the hardest years, there were creatures who loved me, beings I cared for who, in their quiet way, healed me. And there was her. Always her.

I return to measure what still presses against me and what has loosened. To trace the outline of the girl who once ran unseen, and the woman who refuses invisibility now.

Maybe I drive back not to punish myself with memory, but to claim it. To say, with both ache and defiance: this was mine, too.

And when I leave again, heading back toward the farm, I feel the orbit release me. For a while I am free, until the next time I drift close enough to be pulled in again.

On What Holds Its Breath

When I found an old folder filled with poems I had written years ago, I sat down and reread them with surprise . . . and recognition. I had forgotten how much I love the form of poetry, how it demands chiseling down to only what is necessary. A poem does not allow me to hide behind excess; it asks me to distill, to press thoughts and feelings into their most essential shape.

For years I’ve shared essays and reflections here, weaving stories into paragraphs. Now, I want to also let poems find their place among them. Poetry is another way of carrying the weight and wonder of life, grief, beauty, memory, love, in a form that breathes differently. It may arrive spare or lyrical, but it always asks the same thing prose does: to speak honestly, to hold what matters, and to offer it in words.

Not my image.

A field holds its breath
beneath a low veil of fog.
The grasses bend with dew,
each blade jeweled in silence,
waiting for the sun to rise high enough
to burn the mist away.

This is the hour between.
Not sky, not earth,
not gone, not yet held.
A place where sorrow lingers close,
dampening skin,
refusing to vanish.

Slowly I extend my hand into the vapor,
always hoping she’s reaching back.
Tender quiet is broken by the cry of a loon
from some unseen lake
whose edge I cannot name.

Soon the day will come,
the light will sharpen,
the dew will dry.
But for now,
I belong to the mist,
this tender veil
as thin as a breath,
between what was
and what remains.

Don’t Forget Her – Please

I’ve always wondered what the moments immediately following my daughter’s death were like for her. Was she scared? Confused? Angry? Sad? Maybe all of them. Probably all of them. I can let my mind ponder these things for only so long before I dissolve in tears. Recently, I saw a contest that invited the writer to choose one of five prompts and craft a story around it. I chose a simple prompt: write about someone who is afraid of being forgotten. I knew I could use the question to dig down into losing my daughter, Becca. 

None of us want to be forgotten. Not when we are alive but especially after we die. I started to imagine how Becca would have taken some time, before leaving this plane, to ensure she didn’t easily disappear from people’s thoughts. What would she have done? Who would have mattered to her? How could she affect physical action when she no longer had a corporeal body. A story started to form and I decided to enter the contest with my writing.

Those of you who knew my daughter when she was alive understand when I say she is truly unforgettable. Those who never met her . . . I hope my writing brings her to life for you. 

Below is my piece entered into a Reedsy Prompt Writing Contest.  

“Don’t Forget Her, Please”

In the quiet place between life and eternity, the in-between place dividing then and now, there was a girl named Becca. In life she’d had an infectious laughter and a lightness of spirit. Truly a gift to those who knew her. Where she stood now, there was a solemness and her being felt stuck. Becca had died too young, with dreams left unfinished and a heart heavy with the weight of time she would never have.

She had spent her twenty-three years filling journals with poetry, capturing the world in sketches, and weaving laughter into the lives of those she loved. As she had grown it had felt as if time passed slowly. But in the grand scheme of things, she feared it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to have made a difference in the world, to have left her mark. What was a handful of years compared to the vastness of forever?

Becca stood in the place between, a division of two very different realities, an ethereal landscape of soft lights and whispering winds. A soft humming hung in the air around her. From which side did it emanate? Was it the buzzing of the activity of the living or the soothing, somewhat disconcerting, sounds of timelessness?

She could see the world she left behind, a hazy fragile globe cradled in the hands of the living. Her mother, her twin brothers, and a few close friends—they mourned, they remembered. Becca could feel their pain. But she knew memories were fleeting things, like footprints in the sand, washed away by the tide of time.

“I don’t want to be forgotten,” she whispered to the nothingness around her. The universe didn’t answer. It rarely did.

And so, Becca resolved to make herself unforgettable.

Her first act was to find a way to linger in the minds of those she loved. She watched over her mother, who sat at the kitchen table every night, holding one of Becca’s old notebooks and looking at her daughter’s picture. Guilt gnawed at Becca’s spectral heart. If only she had written more, she thought, left behind more words. She longed to touch the pages again, to whisper in her mother’s ear and tell her to share the poetry with the world.

“Let them see me,” she pleaded, invisible hands brushing over the paper. And somehow, her mother’s hands turned the pages to Becca’s favorite poem. With the line “she was here in the beginning and there in the end – don’t forget her please”. A soft smile touched her mother’s lips as she traced her fingers over her daughter’s handwriting. Becca felt a whisper of relief.

But she needed more.

Becca wandered through the lives of her brothers, whispering old jokes into the air between them, nudging them toward memories they had buried under grief. She slipped into their dreams, crafting moments of their childhood—midnight snacks, summer days spent by Lake Michigan, their yearly Halloween parties where the whole neighborhood celebrated. Slowly, they started talking about her again, as if she were still present, as if she had left more than a fading shadow.

Still, it wasn’t enough.

She turned to the world outside her family, haunting the spaces she once loved. She watched as her best friend, Linda hesitated considered deleting Becca’s number from her phone. Becca felt a moment of panic. That number was a thread connecting her to the world of the living. So, she whispered into Linda’s thoughts, planting the idea of writing down all their adventures. A memoir of sorts— through Becca and Linda’s eyes. And Linda, sensing something more than nostalgia, began to write. As she wrote, her endless tears mixed with moments of laughter and her heart began to heal.

But even that didn’t feel like enough.

In the next moment Becca found herself in her old college library, floating among the shelves where she had spent so many hours. Her plan had been to be a teacher and use art to help children learn. A thought struck her—what if she could leave behind more than memories? What if she could lead people toward the books, she had left her sketches in?

With a determination only the dead could muster, Becca began nudging people toward the forgotten corners of the library, where her sketches were tucked away inside textbooks she had once studied. She watched in quiet joy as strangers stumbled upon her drawings—little pieces of herself scattered through the world. Some took pictures, some smiled and moved on, but the thought that her work might continue to exist beyond her death filled her with a fragile kind of hope.

Still, the fear lingered.

Becca knew she couldn’t stay forever. Spirits weren’t meant to cling to the living world for too long. And so, she made her final effort—an act of quiet defiance against oblivion. She whispered into the hearts of those who knew her, urging them to live boldly, to carry pieces of her within them. She wanted them to chase dreams she never would. To create in ways, she didn’t have the chance to, and to live the life, fully, she no longer had in front of her.

One by one, they listened.

Her mother shared her poetry on a blog she wrote about healing from the loss of a child, where strangers found solace in both of their words. Her brothers took her dreams of travel and embarked on adventures they knew she would have loved. Linda finished the memoir, sharing Becca’s stories with anyone who would listen.

And Becca? She watched it all unfold, a soft presence in the breeze, a shimmer in the corner of their eyes. Eventually, she felt the tug—the quiet call of the beyond, the promise of peace. And though she was afraid, she realized something profound: being remembered wasn’t just about clinging to the past. It was about inspiring others to carry a piece of you into their future.

With that, Becca let go, drifting toward the unknown with a heart that no longer feared being forgotten. She had left enough echoes behind.

And that, she realized, was enough.

On Navigating Grief

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I’m sitting in Denver International Airport as I write this, the echoes of my visit still vivid. I spent three days with my son and his family, meeting my new grandson. Those moments were magical—soft, fleeting reminders of life’s beauty. Yet, yesterday was my deceased daughter Becca’s forty-first birthday, and her absence hovered, both painful and profound.

Every time I find myself in an airport or on a flight, my thoughts turn to Becca. This time was no exception. As the plane ascended into the sky, I watched the edge of the new day breaking on the horizon. A thin, delicate line of pink separated yesterday from today, and in that liminal space, I felt her presence. I imagined her fingertips tracing the soft colors, delicately weaving through the dawn as if waiting for me to draw closer. For a fleeting moment, I felt so near to her that I half-expected her face to materialize just beyond the oval window, smiling in that way only she could.

Flying often feels like being untethered from the weight of the everyday, floating somewhere between earth and eternity. In those moments, I cry. Something about being suspended in the sky, outside of normal time, brings me closer to the everythingness of life. I sink into my thoughts, letting the vastness of the heavens make sense of the tangled grief and joy within me.

This season, my season of deep sorrow, has been especially heavy. My emotions simmer close to the surface, ready to spill over at the slightest provocation. Irritation—whether an emotion or simply a state of being—has overtaken me so often that I’ve had to apologize to those around me. It’s not that I want others to carry my grief; it’s that I feel I will implode if I don’t release it.

As the sky shifted from pink to gold that morning, I silently talked to Becca. I told her where I was heading—though I’m certain she already knew. My sons and I often talk about how we believe she has known my grandchildren before they came into this world. She must have guided them, whispered reassurances to them, and protected them as they prepared for their new lives.

Shortly after her death, Becca visited me in a dream. “Mom,” she said, her voice steady and sure, “I couldn’t do what I planned in life, but I can still do it here.” She told me she was helping children who had crossed to the other side, soothing their fears and uncertainty, just as she had planned to do as a teacher. “I’m still helping children,” she said. It felt so deeply her—her nurturing spirit, her fierce love for others. Knowing this, it makes sense to me that she would guide her brothers’ children as they left her space to enter this realm.

Holding my newest grandson, I marveled at the thought that he had been with her more recently than I had. His calmness carried an echo of her giving spirit, and I feel her presence in the stillness of that tiny moment.

Writing is a strange process for me—so much to say, yet so often, I can’t find the words to do my feelings justice. But in the in-between of travel, when the weight of the everyday lifts, the words sometimes come. I scribbled notes in the airport, trying to transform fleeting thoughts into sentences. Writing demands emotional vulnerability, especially when grappling with grief. It feels like opening a wound that will never truly heal, yet I’m compelled to try.

Flying over the Mississippi River on the final leg of my journey, I watched it stretch below like a living thing, winding and meandering without apparent direction. From the air, the river seemed both chaotic and deliberate, as though its detours were as vital as its course. It reminded me of life—how we imagine it as a straight path but find ourselves pulled in unexpected directions. I thought of Becca, her life like a tributary that veered away too soon, fading into the landscape before it could meet the sea.

We spent her birthday together, my family and I, sharing stories and laughter through our tears. The heaviness of grief became too much at one point, and I excused myself to sleep—a reprieve from the unrelenting sorrow. The passing of time doesn’t ease grief; it sharpens it. Each memory is another act of mourning, a reminder of what was and what will never be.

As night slipped in and pushed the day away, I found solace in the quiet truth that tomorrow would come. Grief remains, but so does the hope carried in each sunrise. Writing this has been its own act of healing, however small.

In sharing our stories, in embracing even the smallest acts of life, we find moments of connection and healing. And perhaps, in some way, we draw closer to those we’ve lost, their love continuing to ripple through us like the great river’s winding path.

I look forward to traveling again soon. When a stream of consciousness flows through my thoughts without direction, and I can experience where I end up and what healing awaits me.