ANIMAL STORIES by Jason Brown

To reach the cabin where we would spend my sabbatical from teaching, we had to drive along the twisting two-lane road that followed the river at the bottom of the canyon north of a scruffy old ranching community with sofas and rusty trucks in the front yards. The red canyon walls rose on either side of us. Tectonic plates had slipped under the surface of the continent 80 million years ago and pushed up to form these mountains. If the land was still slowly rising, it was also slowly falling as the wind and ice eroded the peaks into the valleys. The remains of prehistoric crocodiles were lodged in the striated rock in the jagged landscape undisturbed by the scars of human presence except for the contrails tracing the sky above. I tried to imagine the planet before there were so many people living on it, before the culture in which I had been raised, the culture that had metastasized over the globe, had forged the myth that man should dominate nature. Humans would wreak more havoc on the planet, but in the end, we were just another animal. We wouldn’t have the last say.
We turned off the pavement onto a narrow dirt road and started the climb to the top of the mesa and the cabin. Little if any work had been done on my mother-in-law’s place for more than twenty years. The wood siding was brittle and perforated by the wind and sun. I could break it off between my fingers. The wind poured in around the window frames, the bent metal chimney had never been cleaned, and the well water coughed out of the faucet in orange spatter. In a high wind the tin roof flapped because the screws had never been tightened. During storms the whole place shook as from an earthquake. Probably in part because the place needed saving, I loved it. If I didn’t get to work right away, we would never make it through the winter. We had to secure the roof, cut firewood, get a sled so we could hike groceries in from the main road in the winter.
We were miles from a ski area and beyond the absurdly wealthy enclaves that surround skiing in the west. None of us – Nicola, me, or Nicola’s mother – were wealthy, but because Nicola’s mother had bought this place years ago, our family now had the opportunity to spend time apart from the human world while I was on sabbatical from my teaching job. We had a chance to spend time with our twoyear-old daughter, Bella. The absence of people was a shock and a relief. Except for the boundary lines on the county property website, life on the mesa was governed by laws that preceded human dominion.
To be in a place where human presence was tolerated provisionally and to sit in the dry grass as Bella learned to run across the field chasing our dogs filled me with a sense of vertigo. I wanted to stay here forever watching Bella wheel away from me on her springy two-year-old legs only to stop and turn around to make sure I was still there. “Papa,” she would say, her voice cutting through the constantly blowing wind. Our Australian shepherds had been bred with a similar radar. They would race through the grass until they were twenty or thirty yards away, then arc toward us to touch base before racing away again. Nicola, Bella, the dogs, and I, we never tired of this ancient ritual of pulling away and circling back, of periodic contact: Bella’s hand against my arm before she ran into the field again, a wet nose grazing my palm or rising up to brush my cheek before following a scent into the scrub oak.
I reminded myself that the relief I felt at living apart from people shouldn’t be confused with thinking of the wilderness as paradise. I had to keep an eye on Bella at all times. Several years before, my mother-in-law, getting ready to leave the cabin, placed her hand on the handle of the glass front door, but realized she had forgotten her coffee mug and walked back through the kitchen. When she returned to the door, she found a mountain lion sitting on its haunches on the other side of the glass. Two years before, while on a visit from Eugene, I was walking our two dogs and my mother-in-law’s Lab a hundred yards south of the cabin when we came around a scrub oak to face a bear cub. The Lab chased the cub into the bushes to our left. The mother bear appeared ten yards to our right and rose onto her hind legs. Franny, a little more than a year old, started barking. I grabbed her, turned in place, and ran west through the scrub – exactly what you’re not supposed to do, I was later told. Cheever led the way as the branches scraped against my face and arms. I heard crashing behind me and kept running until I tripped on a stump and flew headfirst into the grass. There was nothing behind us except the twisted oaks and the sky.

***

We had left my mother back in Eugene, Oregon. She lived in a small apartment two miles from our house, which we had rented to one of my former students. Though she was in her late seventies now, she was still physically agile and strong. She hadn’t had a drink in many years. Signs of dementia had just started to emerge, but she was still able to care for herself – as well, that is, as she ever had. Age was not the problem.
I’d been sober for over twenty years, and many years had passed since my mother had been jailed for grand theft larceny in Arizona, many years since I had rescued her from homelessness. My sister and I paid her rent in Eugene, and I tried my best to keep an eye on her and to make sure she had enough food and went to the doctor once in a while. I worried what would happen while I was away.
When I called her to check in, I thought I recognized the same old force inside of her driving her to tear everything down. I recognized a similar force inside of me. Some kind of mental illness, it was hard to deny. The phrase mental illness flashed in my head like a roadside construction sign. I had spent most of my life in fear of becoming like my mother.
I knew I had made some progress. In Eugene, Nicola and I had bought a small house on the hill above the university and worked overtime to fix it in the years before Bella was born. I tore up shag, laid down wood floors, rebuilt the carpeted staircase with cherry, skimcoated over the popcorn-finish drywall, and built a deck off our bedroom. I labored with the awareness that we were striving for what many people had striven for over time: a place to raise a family. I loved the work and loved working together with Nicola to give shape to our future together.
On our hikes and walks in Eugene, Nicola and I had started to talk about becoming parents. We didn’t have forever to think about it, and I was afraid of what it might mean. In speaking with Nicola about my apprehensions, I leaned on my own limitations by telling her that I might not be a good father. I really feared that there was something wrong with me that couldn’t be fixed. Nicola had never seen me drinking or depressed. She’d never met the man who dodged every responsibility, careened into fights, drove headlong into fire hydrants, and wanted to curl up in a ball and hide. That person was dormant but not gone. In short, when the subject of children arose, I worried about all that could go wrong.
“Things can always go wrong,” she said, and I knew she was talking about her father dying from injuries sustained in a car accident and her half-brother dying of a heroin overdose. She herself had struggled with depression, especially after her father’s death. She didn’t like her job, which didn’t pay very well. I didn’t make enough to support us all in the long run; she didn’t want to rely on me anyway. At night before bed, we sat at the kitchen table and schemed about our future. We weren’t young anymore, but we both felt a kind of youthful restlessness. We were as hungry for life as kids in their twenties, and like overgrown kids we conceived of dreams that didn’t quite make sense for two middle-aged people about to have a child: moving to Alaska to homestead, retraining me as a cabinet/furniture-making carpenter (a persistent dream of mine), or, in Nicola’s case, training as a helicopter pilot. One day we drove to a Coast Guard recruiting office and sat in the car talking about who would feed our baby while she flew into storms to rescue fishermen from sinking ships. I think we both knew that our dreams would evolve as soon as we were responsible for a new life.

***

While we were in Colorado, three things happened at more or less the same time – our tenant in Eugene moved out earlier than we thought he would, my mother’s landlord wanted her out (her lease had expired), and the world was beset by a global pandemic. We could have pushed to keep my mother in her apartment, at least for a while, but even if the landlord had agreed, he was going to raise the rent as much as he could. My sister and I couldn’t go any higher. When I called my mother to see what she thought of living in our house until we returned, at which point I would build her an apartment in our oversized garage, she was silent.
“What if I don’t want to live up there with all those fancy people?”
“There are no fancy people,” I said. “It’s Eugene.” After half an hour of persuading her that our neighborhood was not a right-wing stronghold, she grew lukewarm to the idea and finished off the conversation with, “I don’t know, we’ll see.”
When I suggested to Nicola that my mother move into our house for the rest of my sabbatical and into a garage apartment thereafter, she studied me for a while as if I had just returned from a long and perilous journey to the moon.
“Are you crazy?” she eventually said. Bella looked up at me as if she also expected me to answer this question.
I had to wait until after Bella fell asleep to pitch my idea a second time. I had formed a presentation with clear points: we would save money on paying my mother’s rent, we could use the savings for childcare, maybe my mother could provide some “supervised” childcare, the “apartment” I built in the garage would add to the value of our house . . .
“And as an added bonus, every time I leave the house with Bella, I will run into your mom sitting in a lawn chair outside our garage ready to yell at me because you haven’t met her needs,” Nicola said.
“I will build a separate entrance on the other side of the garage. She won’t be able to get in through the gate to our front door.”
“A gate? Your mother is a criminal mastermind. Within a week, she would be living in the house, and we would be living in the garage.”
“That seems extreme.”
“Does it? When are you going to build this apartment in the garage with new windows, doors, floors, a bathroom and kitchenette?”
Bella came into the room with all three of her stuffed white unicorns somehow loaded in her arms – Papa Woodrow (the size of a German shepherd), which I had bought on sale at Lowe’s, Mama Woodrow (about the size of a corgi), and Baby Woodrow (the size of a kitten). She kept repeating the phrase “Baby Woodrow booboo” because Baby Woodrow’s horn was coming off. She was looking at me with her huge blue eyes because I was the one who knew how to sew.

***

My mother had more than a month’s warning that I was returning. On the phone she had said she was packing and getting ready to move. She complained that it was hard to find boxes, so I talked her through a plan to pick up boxes. She complained that she had no packing tape, and I explained that there were places called stores that sold packing tape. I decided to hang up and call back fifteen minutes later. Sometimes that worked the way it did with restarting my computer to get rid of a glitch. When she answered, she said, “Yesssss,” and I mentioned that the previous conversation hadn’t gone very well. She agreed. I asked her if she didn’t want to move into our house.
“What choice do I have? When Stalin commands, you do what Stalin says!”
I tried to explain in my strained calm voice that she did have a choice, of course, but when I thought about it, I wasn’t so sure how much this was true. Her landlord wanted her out so he could repair the damage she had caused to her apartment. We could fight him under the new Covid regulations, but that was a temporary solution. I would be lucky if he didn’t come after me for thousands of dollars of damages to the apartment – my name was on the lease. She didn’t have a social worker because she refused to work with one, she wasn’t on a list for public housing because that was beneath her. She was dependent on me, and she hated to be dependent. She hated to be a burden.
I drove 1,200 miles back to Eugene and arrived at my mother’s place to discover that she hadn’t packed one single thing. Not even a fork. Since I had last visited her apartment, before we left for Colorado, she’d added quite a bit of raw material. There was an earth-tone La-Z-Boy that had spent most of its life outdoors and what my mother generously called a “love seat,” which someone named Hank had helped her drag in from the curb. One corner of the room was occupied with a rusty bike, two suitcases, some tools, and what looked like several trash bags of clothing. I guessed that the bike and tools belonged to the guy named Hank and his cronies who had hauled in the filthy love seat so he could watch movies on my mother’s big screen TV, which was also new. My mother informed me that the TV was probably “hot.” We stood looking at each other.
“I thought maybe you would have packed or cleaned a bit,” I said.
“I did,” she said and gestured to the room.
Mounds of garbage stretched back to the bedroom. Everything smelled of urine. When I touched a seat cushion and the mattress, my fingers came back wet. I asked her what was going on, and she said she was having a problem. I shouldn’t worry, though, because she was wearing rubber pants now.
“Have you gone to the doctor?”
“You’re going to really like Hank,” my mother said. “He’s a fascinating man. He lives right over there.” She pointed out the window. I cleaned the pane with the sleeve of my shirt and squinted at a grey apartment building – Section 8 housing for downtown Eugene.
“What floor does he live on?” I asked. If he wasn’t too many flights up, maybe my mother could live with him. I had tried to persuade my mother to sign up for Section 8 housing.
“No, he lives in front of the building.” There was nothing in front of the building except a rusty, old Ford F-150 with a demolished front end and what looked like a self-fashioned tarp home in the truck bed. “He has a generator in there,” my mother said and nodded approvingly.
“I bet he does.”
It wasn’t long, of course, before I met Hank. Reeking of whiskey and not wearing a mask, he stopped by to say how sorry he was that he couldn’t help with the move. After he left, my mother watched him limp down the street toward his truck. He pulled back the tarp and crawled in over the tailgate.
“Poor Hank,” she said, “someone is going to steal his generator. He’s very excited about my moving to your house. He knows the neighborhood very well and loves it up there.”
I asked my mother to please take a seat in one of the many chairs and sofas I would have to move on my own. Every time I turned around, there was a new piece of furniture aimed at the TV. Several pieces of luggage, different size shoes, drug paraphernalia – a bong and a bag of needles. Two different TVs, probably stolen, other than the one she’d been using.
“You know,” I said, “with Covid, it’s not safe to have the whole park population in to watch movies.”
“They don’t have Covid, they live outside.”
“That’s not how Covid works.”
I tried to add up how long it would take me to disassemble the apartment. Most of it would go to the dump. It would be much saner to hire someone to help me, but I had sailed beyond sane the minute I had set foot in her apartment.
My mother offered me some apple juice, which I declined, though I used the mention of a cold beverage as an opportunity to open the refrigerator door and check on the state of things. As a whirling comet of gangrenous rotten food crashed onto my Muck boots, I leaned over and dry heaved. I had neglected to eat for the last six hours. Evidence, maybe, that part of me was still sane.
“Are you okay?” my mother said.
I replied that I was not. When I recovered enough to stand upright, I decided to triage the situation and returned to the more important subject of Hank. The man named Hank, I explained to my mother, would not be visiting my house while I was not there. Nicola wouldn’t stand for it, and it was her house as much as mine. It wasn’t a big house, it wasn’t a fancy house, but it was all Nicola and I had. I told her I was setting up cameras in the house that would be connected to my iPhone – not to spy on her, but to make sure everything was okay – and that I would know right away if Hank crossed the threshold. I had not planned to set up cameras – the idea had only just occurred to me as I spoke.
As my mother’s brow furrowed and her shoulders slumped, I felt my chest tighten with shame.
“You’re a monster,” she said. “What do you think those people at the university you want to impress would think of what you’re saying?”
“I have a kid, I have to think of her,” I said.
“That’s what everyone like you says.”
My thoughts spun with arguments for why I had security and she did not. I had worked hard, I wasn’t beyond thinking, if not saying, and I made the right decisions while others – Hank, for instance, and my mother – had not. Seeing through one’s own thinking is no defense against believing in it. My mother knew, and, more importantly, I knew, that I needed to believe that I had earned a place for my family in a middle-class neighborhood while she had not. She lived in a urine-soaked apartment with a rock-bottom alcoholic. Why was this? she had asked many times.
As I moved furniture out to the lawn and bags of trash to the dumpster behind the apartment, she set up one of her kitchen chairs in front of the building. Whether she knew the person or not, every time someone walked up the street while I was carting her stuff, she pointed at me and shouted, “That’s my son, the monster!” Several of her neighbors said they hadn’t known she was moving. “Off to the gulag! The Stasi have come for me,” she said. When I was young, she had suffered from hallucinations, imagined voices, and a conviction that people in blue shirts were stalking her. We weren’t there yet at least.
I briefly wondered if I should reverse course and find another solution. As long as she was living somewhere else, in her own apartment, I could step away from her to some extent. If I moved her to our house, she would become more my responsibility than ever.
I took eight trips to the dump in the Subaru, straining my back in the process. Whatever she couldn’t part with, I loaded into our garage for storage, and finally I moved her into what would be Bella’s room.
“There,” I said, when she emerged from the room to join me in the kitchen. “Isn’t this better than where you were?”
She looked out the large windows facing the woods and at the art on our walls.
“Yes, I can die in peace now that I have moved to bourgeois heaven.”
We spent several days in the house discussing how she could get her food, where she should walk for exercise. We sat in front of the fireplace and discussed the apartment we would build in the garage. I’d set up an appointment at the doctor. It turned out she had seen another doctor about her incontinence, and he had prescribed medication, which she had refused to take. We went to the Walgreens and the grocery store. I had a modest sense that we were gaining control of the situation. Just in case, I bought plastic covers for the bed and a blanket for the sofa.
By the time I was ready to drive back to Colorado, my mother had reluctantly agreed to my conditions: cameras in the living room and kitchen connected to my iPhone, no Hank, no leaving the doors open and wandering around the neighborhood, no messing with the complicated thermostat, which I had set for her on a timer. She had a friend who drove a cab who would take her to the grocery store. She said her car was broken, and in any case, it wasn’t registered or insured, and she had no license. I had the car towed to the driveway, and she agreed not to drive it.
I presented the situation to her as I saw it. We’d build her a nice place, she would be in a nice middle-class neighborhood twenty feet from a hundred-acre park, she wouldn’t have to worry about all the pesky problems with maintaining an apartment and utilities. I would take care of that, and she would be close to her granddaughter, close to us. We could help her as she got older. She wouldn’t be so alone. I didn’t point out that I would feel less guilty. She seemed aware that I was somewhat satisfied with myself.
“It’s a good argument,” she conceded and scowled at me. “Those are very reasonable points.”
When I drove off, I thought we were on decent terms. In other words, I thought I had won. She was in the house, not in the apartment. The garbage was at the dump, not in the house.

***

As soon as I arrived back in Colorado, I started to feel more guilty for setting up the cameras in the living room and the kitchen. Nicola joked that I was like the NSA, but I hadn’t told her everything about what had happened on my trip to Eugene. If she’d known about Hank and the urine and the state of my mother’s apartment, she wouldn’t have been joking. Our friends Marjorie and Brian, two of the writers I worked with at the university, thought I was kidding when I told them over the phone. “You set up cameras to spy on your elderly mother?”
I was about to call my mother and tell her to unplug them when I decided I would, just once more, open the app on my phone and see what was going on in the living room. There was a blazing fire with no screen in front of the fireplace. Light from the flames flickered off a large pile of bags, an old rusty bike, and a broken keyboard stacked against the wall. Four candles burned on various wooden bookshelves around the living room, the flames dancing inches away from the books. In the kitchen on camera #2, a tall, bald man, standing center frame, prepared what looked like an appetizing vegetarian stir fry on our stove. Hank.
My mother appeared on camera #1 in the living room, settled herself in front of the fire, and put her feet up on the coffee table I had made for Nicola. Hank appeared momentarily with two plates and some silverware. I immediately called my mother. She pulled out her phone, squinted at the number, and set it down on the coffee table. When I called again, she reached over and turned the phone off.
Maybe, I thought, I’m being unreasonable here. They were just having supper. Hank was a friend of my mother’s. He was a homeless active alcoholic – I’d known plenty of those as a member of AA – who was looking for a place to crash all winter. Why couldn’t I be generous? Maybe what was wrong with me in this case was the same thing that was wrong with the world.
It didn’t help to know that Hank was not exactly a victim. My mother had told me that he had many options for places to live, all of which required him to stop drinking. He’d stopped drinking many times, according to my mother. He just didn’t want to. The question of agency was thorny business with an alcoholic. To even have a chance of staying sober, they had to at least want to stop drinking. It also didn’t help that my mother had told me, as a way of establishing the normalcy of her own condition, that Hank regularly pissed himself in his sleep when he drank too much. Based on the contents of my mother’s former apartment, it was also clear that he had a habit of helping himself to things that didn’t belong to him.
“What’s wrong?” Nicola asked. Bella was asleep upstairs, and we were sitting by the woodstove sipping tea. I must have looked tense. I told her nothing was wrong as I tucked my phone under my leg.
“There’s this guy named Hank,” I said eventually, “and he’s moved into our house.” I confessed everything I knew about what was happening in Eugene, everything I had seen in my mother’s apartment, everything I knew about Hank. My mother’s old friends, the Go Bernies, seemed to have been replaced by the riverside addict community. She had always been tight with the homeless community wherever she lived and was always trying to help them.
“When were you going to tell me this?” she said.
“I knew I had to tell you,” I said. “But I was hoping that after I left . . . she promised not to have him over. I thought it might fix itself.”
“Did you hear what you just said?”
“Sort of.”
“So now that he knows where we live, all the other people who were hanging out at your mother’s apartment know where we live. They’ll be over soon.”
I nodded. It seemed inevitable.
“Shooting drugs in our daughter’s bedroom.”
I hadn’t thought of it this way, but the answer was yes.
Nicola squinted at me. “We can’t have strangers using drugs and getting drunk in our home.”
I nodded but at the same time I wasn’t sure. When it came to my mother, I had always felt that I had to do whatever it took to rescue her.
Out on the porch an hour later, I checked the cameras again – empty except for a mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen. No one coming or going. I called my neighbor Jamie, who picked up right away. His house, designed by his architect partner, had large glass panels looking out at our dead-end road. I asked him if he had happened to see my mother in her car.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I just saw her drive away with some bald guy in the passenger seat. I thought you told me that car no longer worked.”
“It didn’t, or at least I thought it didn’t.” My mother had lied to me about the car being broken. The car was in my name, but I had removed the insurance because it was not registered and didn’t run – so I had thought.
“Seems to work fine,” Jamie said, “except it’s night and she doesn’t have the headlights on.”
When I finally got my mother to answer the phone, I gently broached the subject of not driving and not bringing Hank – or any other active addicts – over to the house.
“I’m gonna have to talk to Moose about that one.”
“Moose?”
“My therapist. He’s training to be a death doula. Do you have a therapist?”
“What? No. What’s a death doula?”
“You should. You are very angry.”
She looked at her watch. I could see her looking at her watch on my phone.
“I have to go,” she said. “This conversation is over.” She hung up and exited stage left.
I waited five minutes and called my neighbor Jamie again.
“Yep,” he said. “She just peeled out in the Focus.”
A half an hour later she and Hank were back on-screen bobbing around the kitchen making dinner again. Hank did a little jig in front of the camera with a bottle in his hand, gave me the finger, and swatted his fist right at me. His fist was replaced by the message: Video Disabled.
While Nicola helped Bella assemble an octopus puzzle, I reluctantly brought her up to speed on the latest developments. She nodded patiently and responded in a remarkably calm tone.
“So, she’s driving around without a license in an uninsured car titled in our name and living in our house with an active alcoholic who has no place to live? And soon there will be a party of others there carting off all our things to sell at the Saturday market. And this is just Act I of this drama, am I right?”
I hadn’t mentioned all the burning candles my mother had set up on the bookshelf.
“I understand why you had to try this idea out,” she said. “But you can’t just lift your mother out of her life into our own. Whitebird (an organization that helps the vulnerable in Eugene) can’t save your mother, DHS can’t save your mother and this guy – what’s his name?”
“Hank.”
“You can’t save them. You can’t. We’ve tried to bring her inside the wire, and it’s not going to work. Even if you build this apartment on or in the garage with the spare time you don’t have – instead of spending time with your daughter – all of this will continue right next to us with Bella there. What does that lead to? You talk about not wanting to repeat the past. In this case – in this instance – you have to make a choice.”
Nicola had understood all along that this wouldn’t work, but she had been generous enough to let me run the experiment for myself one last time. I had felt as if I had left my mother behind, alone in a dirty apartment on the other side of town. I didn’t want her to live that way, but she was determined to live the way she wanted to live, even if it caused her pain and misery and isolation. I understood that people wanted to make their own decisions and live on their own terms. I’d seen it in AA. Several of the guys I had worked with over the years had died young rather than change. This didn’t mean I couldn’t help my mother or others. It just meant I was no one’s savior.
“Now we know,” Nicola said. “And we are not going to try this again. Do you understand? If you want to return to Eugene and live with your mother, you can do it without us. Bella and I will come later after you’ve solved this problem. Not today, obviously, but soon. Before Act II.”
Nicola wasn’t threatening me. She was careful to point that out. She was simply stating that she had limits. The thought of losing Nicola and Bella had never crossed my mind, and I had to sit down on the floor. Nicola was calm and direct, as always, but her eyes were watering. I could see she was serious and upset.
Bella stopped playing with her puzzle and looked at me. In saying no for the first time to my mother – for the sake of my family, if not myself – I was learning what I had never learned as a child.
I told Nicola she was right.
“I know I’m right,” she said without looking away from Bella. “I think it’s time to call the police.”
I must have looked anguished. Nicola eased up on her outrage and touched my arm. I said I didn’t know and found my face awash before I knew what I was feeling. I couldn’t cut my mother out of my life any more than I wanted her to cut Hank or others out of her life. None of us could afford to cut people off by deciding they were hopeless and didn’t matter. Not without inviting the kind of sickness we think we can escape by running away. I had come to see that the question of what role I should play in my mother’s life – the question, from one point of view, of what I owed her – was really a question of what we all owed each other. All our troubles begin when we seek to separate ourselves from others, and yet (always a yet) here I was on the verge of trying to separate my small family from my mother and the chaos we feared.
I tried to explain how I was feeling to Nicola.
“You’re not trying to cut her out of our lives,” she said. “We’re taking steps to make sure they don’t destroy our home.”
When it came to my mother, I would have to listen to Nicola and Bella and trust them to show me the way forward. In marrying Nicola and having Bella, I had chosen life. Protecting that life, protecting our lives together, had to be the most important thing, but it was no simple thing
After my mother and Hank finished their supper, I called the Eugene police to explain the situation about Hank trespassing at the house. I didn’t want a big scene and I didn’t want them to arrest Hank. I just wanted them to send a message, if possible, that he shouldn’t be there. The police showed up a short time later and knocked on the door. My mother shut off the light. She and Hank crouched by the window and tried to peer around the blinds. When the police kept knocking, my mother finally answered the door. The police were kind, they didn’t pull Hank out or make threats, but they let him know that he wasn’t supposed to be there. My mother later told me that after the police left, things unraveled. Hank got drunk and became abusive. In the midst of the ruckus, he destroyed my second camera. He took a piss on our mattress. He threatened to really hurt my mother. She thought he might kill her. He called her names she wouldn’t repeat. Names that no one had ever called her before. She phoned her cabby friend – a guy who also knew Hank – and the cabby dragged Hank and all his belongings back downtown to his nonfunctional truck.

***

On the phone several weeks later, I told her I was sorry for setting Hank off by bringing the police into it.
“He scared me,” my mother said of Hank. “I didn’t know he had that other side to him.”
I didn’t want to mention her father. “Alcoholics often have that other side,” I said.
“I don’t understand what it is with me and these alcoholic men. It’s like an addiction.”
“It’s not like an addiction,” I said. “It is one.”
“You’re so right. I wish you weren’t right. But you are.”
“You can’t save them,” I said. “And they’re dangerous.”
“I’m sorry I drove the car. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Bella and I were sitting in a window seat I had built on the second floor of the cabin that looked west over the rolling fields of the mesa toward the San Juan Mountains. My mother was in our house in Eugene and was trying, she reported, to make a fire in the fireplace without the help of Hank, who was sticking to his truck these days.
“Listen,” I said, “I know things weren’t easy when you were young. With your mother and stepfather or with your father – on the farm.”
“And it wasn’t always easy for you either,” she said.
“But it was worse for you, I know that.”
“It was worse for my brothers, I think,” she said quickly. “But I don’t know.”
“The point is that I understand. I’m going to do whatever I can. You know that. You’re not alone, so you can relax a bit.”
She was silent for a few seconds. “Thank you,” she said. “I just don’t – I don’t know. . . . Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
Bella stood on the bench and leaned her nose against the doublepane glass as Cheever jumped up with us and looked through the window. A purple monsoon cloud sweeping toward us from the west fired bolts of lightning into the mesa.
My mother asked how I was doing, and I said, “I don’t know.”
My inability to protect my mother from herself brought my daughter to mind. I had no idea how to hold her close without holding her too close. I didn’t always know when I should intercede and try to protect. Sometimes Bella caught me looking at her, and she would tilt her head and smile. Sometimes leap in the air and spin in a circle. I was often astonished by her joy – the joy of a child who was loved and safe – and I felt an immediate bond with all those parents for whom nothing could be more important than watching their children thrive. The idea of not being able to protect her from harm was too painful to imagine, yet I understood that far too many parents all over the world and all throughout history had had to watch their children suffer. A single person is nothing in the history of the world, but when that person is your child, then they are the whole universe.
I knew the day would come when Bella would look over her shoulder at me before running into the world. I would call to warn her of the dangers she couldn’t see, and she would take off through the grass. I could already feel the thrill and terror of watching her go.
What if, I wondered, everything we would lose and all that would cause us pain was not a threat but rather the very shape of who we were? Our days not empty because they would end and be forgotten but extraordinary because we were here for such a short time. A fairweather thought, at best, which quickly slipped away.
I pictured the mesa at night. When I let Cheever out to pee before bed, his ears twitched, and he was often reluctant to leave the deck. If I shut off the lights, the sky ignited with distant stars, other worlds, and I imagined the animals around us – mountain lions, bears, elk, and coyotes – wandering among the spindly shadows of aspen groves. For thousands of years, humans had shared parallel lives with all that walked and grew, yet we still didn’t understand their language. Bella tapped on the window with her finger and said, “Grrr.”
“Was that Bella?” my mother asked. “What is she saying?”
Bella tapped on the window again and looked at me. Out on the mesa, half a mile west of us, a large brown bear loped across an open field. The muscles along its back and flank churned under its thick coat. When my mother asked me what was happening, I did my best to describe what we were seeing: the thunderheads approaching, the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in the distance, the enormous bear traversing the field, probably headed toward the creek.
“You’re so lucky you get to see that,” my mother said. “Do you know how lucky you are to be there with Bella and to see what you’re seeing?” I didn’t know how to answer.
Cheever growled at the window and Bella told the bear to “come here right now.” She’d never met an animal she didn’t want to pat.
The bear stopped before reaching the tree line and looked over its shoulder. Bella’s eyes widened. She rested her hand on my back without looking away from the window, and together we waited to see what the bear would do.

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Jason Brown is the author of the novel Outermark (Paul Dry Books, 2024), and three collections of short stories: Driving the Heart (W.W. Norton, 1999); Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (Open City Books, 2007); and A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed (Missouri Review Books, 2019). “Animal Stories” is part of his memoir in essays, Character Witness (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). Other sections of the book have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Harvard Review, and The Florida Review.

FROM PLAY DEAD by Winter Grasso

THREE TIMES

I am a waitress. Sometimes on the drive home from work I want to stop at the liquor store by my house and get a six-pack of cheap beer and drink it on my porch. It is an appropriate time of day and a normal thing to do. I remind myself that I cannot do this because when I drink I get raped. I do not drink at all anymore, not because I have a problem but because I do not know exactly how much alcohol it takes for a man to decide that he will rape me that night and no one else seems to know either. Not that it matters necessarily. I have been raped drunk and tipsy and dead sober. But I miss the stupid complicated drinks. Just ordering them. Long Island Iced Teas taste like rape. Tequila Diet Cokes in tall glasses taste like rape.

Sometimes I think about how hard it will be to love. I will not ever again be a simple woman with whom love is easy. No one will write a January Wedding about me. It will be pulling teeth.

You do not get to be a simple woman when you are raped three times before you have turned twenty-two, and two of them by people who have claimed to love you. Who you really thought loved you. If you love me you could still rape me is what I have learned. The sex can be not rape the first hundred times and then the next time it is rape is what I have learned. I am a person who wants badly to forgive but knows nothing about what is right to forgive (and forgives anyway) (and forgives without an apology).

Some therapists will tell you there is another person living inside of you: a child who can be made pure again. You’ve just got to open the wounds back up and clean them out and hope to heal the right way this time and then your current self and the child, who is you, will come together again and you will finally be the Whole. That is what some will tell you. When things don’t happen to the child of you it is much different. There is no other person living inside of me, no distance to x, there is only my orange heart, with the mesocarp so thin that the acid seeps through and scorches the earth of my insides. The promise and the nature of rotting happens quickly, and then there are the fruit flies and this new heart feels nothing like a metaphor.

To love me you will have to consider your touch. How from behind you could be B**** or C**** or (I didn’t catch his name) for all I know. How the line between good touch and bad touch has blurred together in some ways and is sometimes the same thing or just the prelude.

To love me you will have to know the gun is always hot. That I am scared of you in the animal way of knowing you can hold me down, trick me, love me.

When I am at the bank or the pharmacy (or any public place where there is not much to distract you while you stand in line) and there are only men around me I think about my safe bets:

My dad My brother Wyley John

And then I think, people get raped by their dads and their brothers and their Wyleys and Johns and I assume they did not see it coming either.

Some people say it is good to suffer. But you get to a point where you don’t want to be strong if it means this. I don’t want it if I have to get raped for it. I know that what doesn’t kill me does not actually make me stronger because I am becoming very weak to it all. I want to go on a walk at night, how about that? I want to cry until I die. I don’t want to learn how to use a gun or how to shatter a kneecap. I don’t want to run through the dark with eyeball under my fingernails. I don’t even want to go on the walk at night if it means I may only consider guns and kneecaps and eyeballs the whole time.

I am twenty-two and have been raped three times. I think How many more times will this happen to me in my life if it has happened three times in twenty-two years? I think in formulas and quotients and algorithms. I think nine times is what the math says.

BEAU

Beau is six-foot-four and pretentious for a firefighter, though the hollowness of the display is evident. He is naturally slim but getting older and slower and has not allowed himself to accept this yet, so he has a first trimester beer gut and his body sort of resembles a malnourished child from a third world country but much taller and white of course. I imagine someone filling his stomach with air using a bike pump. He is only in town for three days. About an hour before, we sat on a rock at the cell towers, and he told me how his parents are writers for The New York Times culture section. Now, suddenly, we are in my room, and he holds himself over me awkwardly, balancing on one elbow that trembles and sinks into the mattress, the other arm precariously arched over my shoulder, not touching me, though I don’t believe this is intentional. It is just ungrace. Actually, the only part of him that is touching me is his huge (huge) erection, which is pressed into my thigh. So then I know where this unearned ostentatiousness comes from: his only real offering locked away like that day in and day out.

With a breath that is American Spirits and lunch meat and somehow primally sexy, he whispers from too far away to constitute whispering,

“Don’t worry, I won’t try anything. I know you’re not the kind of girl that fucks on the first date.”

This is less sexy. I have to hold back a laugh. Because I am the kind of girl who fucks on the first date. I know the contract I sign. Really, I am not any kind of girl except a weak one. Too tired for the theatrics of “no.”

This thought distracts me, and I get all forlorn about it inside my head, so I don’t even notice that he has moved down my body, on his knees at the edge of the bed. I don’t really care to engage with this current condition of reality either, so I continue my internal social critiques but with a polite alertness and a touch of drama. I manage a calculated series of gross porny whines, though my body doesn’t move at all. I fake it, not well. I give just enough, not more.

Isn’t it strange how a man will continue to prod pleasure into you as you stare at the ceiling like there is a very serious question written on it? Instead of looking at the question too? He looks up at me complacently, like a shrug but with the eyes, caresses my arm like a rapist (weird, not violent.) I think there is probably some rape in him, something that knows it will disregard certain pleas in ode to his enormous want. He tells me he usually doesn’t do that because one time a girl gave him throat gonorrhea and he should have known by the smell. So, he must really like me. He is unduly sweaty for the labor performed, which agitates me for some reason. I bet he will leave a stain. I fall asleep facing away from him thinking about washing my sheets using the “Heavy Duty” preset, instead of my usual “EcoWash.”

The next day, I promise to mail him a copy of a Joan Didion book I like, which I never do. I drop him at the college dorms where his crew is staying, and he waves me off like a girl. I delete his number as I drive away.

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“Three Times” and “Beau” are excerpted from Play Dead, Winter Grasso’s memoir in progress. This is her first publication.

TO THE ELEPHANT by Janet Champ

I am aware that we do not save each other very often.
But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.
– James Baldwin

There are the ugly things in life, and we talked about them. Looked them in the eye most the time, although every so often one of us just blocked the sight. Those things most of us don’t prepare for because they’re so unexpected: being unable to have children together, for one. Being told we couldn’t keep both our relationship and our jobs, for another. Once we were together for about a year, we wrote separate lists of imperative needs and wants, and then read them together over dinner or maybe after, one of those, and I know the fact of these documents is both weird and wonderful. One of us had already been married. The other had already lost a parent while too young. We knew adversity would come. How we handled it would say everything about us. Even define us. Because no marriage, no relationship, exists in a vacuum. There are elephants in so many rooms, aren’t there? We had two of them.

So, trust me, this isn’t a story of bravery.
It won’t tell you how courageous my husband Rick was, although in all the essential, unstoppingly human ways he made bravery seem routine. When cancer comes in words and pictures and explanations of stages and treatments and months expected before an expiration date, we often look for superlatives. For all the deft, wondrous thinking that might lead to the rabbit out of the hat, the body surviving being sawed in two, a sudden We were joking! from the powers that be. Because if you beat the devil, can’t everyone? Can’t the rest of the world sigh and relax and think, Oh, look, life goes on?
You’re so strong, you’ll beat this. Stay positive, it definitely helps. Don’t let this get you down! Fuck cancer, no way will it win. The nearly identical phrases and syllables uttered with meaning for nine and a half years were as if from a book we hadn’t read, a cheerleader prayer. Rick knew these shining attributes meant both well and little. Cheers felt hollow, sometimes, against cells radically multiplying, tricking flesh and blood into thinking the pain, the numbing exhaustion, was normal. Dealing with cancer is both mundane and profound: one foot in front of the other until you can’t walk anymore. It’s doing what you have to do because this is now your life. Far too often, it’s also your probable death. You’re waiting for the executioner to come but there might be a last-minute stay, a reprieve, that beautiful beckoning word we never, ever heard: remission.

For all those years Rick—my husband, best friend, creative partner, lover, ballast, and a human being all his own, so smart, so talented, so often impatient and beautifully, sarcastically apt—survived Stage III and Stage IV cancer. He lived through it with a kind of dignity that honestly, and almost always deeply, inspired others. He beat at it with hope, fear, blindingly quick humor, sorrow, gratitude, a simple and dedicated decency. Six times he was told death was imminent; six times he just kept passing Go. Healthy as that proverbial horse when he started feeling something was wrong, our endocrinologist of 13 years ignored his concern and pain, telling us both There’s no reason for a scan, even though Rick had previously battled thyroid cancer, where the only offered treatment was drinking radioactive iodine. Everyone, please: demand a second opinion when you’re told to shush, stop, behave. Everyone, and I mean everyone, who believes their body wrong, sick, off-kilter, take that body into your own hands and find a place where attention is paid. We did not demand. We acquiesced. By the time of his emergency surgery, his abdomen was suddenly swollen as if four months pregnant.
Anyone reading about cancer lately has heard that deaths are declining: as much as 33% in the last thirty years. And you’ve also heard that exceptional new treatments and cures and improvements abound. But the truth is so much more complicated, and I’ll go with the words more frightening, than that. In late 2023 CBS Evening News quoted a new study that found “an alarming rise in cancer rates among people under 50” between 1990 and 2019. How sharp a rise? A staggering 79.1%. And then there is this new reality asserting itself: that same research flatly states that by 2030, cancer deaths will rise by 21%, while early-onset cancer rates will have an increase of 31%. My husband was not under 50 when he was diagnosed with his second cancer. Yet he also had absolutely none of the markers that doctors use to predict cancer: he was a lifelong non-smoker, dedicated athlete, a vegetarian for decades, fortunate to have a specialist as his primary care doctor. Yes: his diagnosis came as a shock.
What happened in those nearly ten years? Almost seven years of chemotherapy. Anaphylactic shock where the paddles stood waiting, an inch from his chest. An ostomy bag opening while out with friends, leading to shame and dread it might be permanent. A clinical trial nicknamed The Mother of All Surgery and The Shake & Bake (look it up, it’s chilling) that patients half Rick’s age weren’t healthy enough to have. Neuropathy so terrible he couldn’t walk in the heat, or pick up a knife, until acupuncture and Eastern medicine finally reversed it. Sepsis from an infected port after an “easy” surgery. Paramedics here at 2 AM when he fell on the floor with a fever of 104. Seven emergency room visits for sodium IVs (chemo can destroy hydration). One visit for sudden blood clots throughout his heart and lungs (chemo and cancer make these common). Our loved “last” house, built by friends in these old-growth woods, burning to the ground two years after his diagnosis, the fire taking everything we owned except for our garage. Starting a new job two days after that fire without telling anyone what we’d lost because fighting cancer costs . . . it’s obscene what it costs.
What else happened?
Nurses who make the word hero riotously insignificant. Two oncologists—ones the director at the OHSU Cancer Institute called rock stars—we fell in love with after we refused the first one when she patted Rick on the knee as she emphatically told us the next time she saw him, it would be for palliative care. A deeply humane surgeon who cried with us, laughed with us, gave Rick more time. The wide saving grace of phenomenal friends and unconditional family. A purpose for Rick: the women and men and children he met in chemo wards and waiting rooms and holistic clinics, in our own little community and through other friends. The ones he shared war stories with, hope with, panic with, advice with, for some reason being so outrageously optimistic, him believing in every magic trick in this daunting world. Working through chemotherapy treatments in all those hospitals, all those clinics, because why wouldn’t we, weren’t we both alive? Weren’t we going to keep trying to be?
After the fire we began to ask ourselves if we might be the reincarnation of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, a dozen other tyrants rolled obnoxiously together. It was our metaphysical joke, a way of never asking why us? The luck we tried to make just kept falling into crevasses. But then it would rear up again, rise. Both of us, knowing so many family and friends who hadn’t survived longer than six months, six weeks, two years after their own diagnoses. Who didn’t receive our chances, even our choices. So, one more foot placed again and again: we built our new house on precisely the same footprint where our original house had stood, uncomplaining, for 14 years. Then that new foundation began to sink, a quarter of an inch at a time. That philosopher the world loves to quote was wrong: what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. It beats and scars the hell out of you. What makes you stronger is: you.
All this time there was a ludicrously loud cacophony of praise for my caretaking, saying that it was me who was saving Rick’s life. As if all the doctors all the treatment all Rick’s own raging agency wasn’t doing the heaviest lifting. But when the person you love more than anyone (no: everyone) gets up every hour from the couch to walk slowly to the garage and back just to try to keep the cruelty of chemotherapy from deleting his entire sense of humanity, you don’t think what a wonderful cheerleader you are. You think How is this person still standing after all these endless assaults? How is he making giddy inane jokes as he makes us breakfast at the same time?

And I realized it’s far easier and way more comfortable for too many people to identify with the one taking care instead of the one who might die. We’re not fond, our species, of mortality sitting next to us. We look for mistakes made, cigars smoked, foods not eaten, so we can maybe avoid the whole death trap. But what if the meaning of life is that it ends? And that in all our unacceptance, we surround dying with terror and avoidance, instead of the decency, grace, and kindness it deserves?
Since very young, I haven’t been particularly afraid of death. Quite the opposite, unfortunately. And the thing is, Rick did save my life once. A fact known only to ourselves, our local hospital, the state police, a grief therapist. And now, you.
Ten months after my mother killed herself and eight months after my only brother died of misdiagnosed cancer, my cousin Dana—a best friend to Rick and myself—called with a quiveringly odd voice to say he’d just been diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. He was sure he’d be all right. Having seen my father die at only 49 when I was 19, also of cancer, I had forgotten that shock is a bumper, a protective shield against pain far longer than we assume. Dana’s call shattered that gorgeous bubble and out my grief and pain came bellowing. I knew a voice like his was a clarion call of malignancy. And I did what I had wanted to at nine years old, and again at 15, and yes, a few times since, now armed with pure hopelessness and a way to do it, and that’s kill myself.
Or at least I made the attempt. It was Rick who found me, wrapped my arms in towels, rushed me to the hospital. Rick who watched as the police were notified. Watched as I told them in the smallest voice he’d ever heard that I’d had a hard year. Rick who heard them say I had 30 days to begin mandatory counseling. Rick who found the therapist, drove me two hours each way once a week for three months, telling me that Yes, I could do this and No, he wasn’t turning the car around. Rick behind the wheel to Seattle to spend time with my cousin and his devastated family. Rick who held my hand at Dana’s funeral when he died thirteen weeks after that diagnosis of benign.

If cancer and death are the largest elephants in a room, depression is nearly the same size. It’s still wildly misunderstood. Still considered a weakness, something akin to mere sadness instead of raging despair, hope ripped and vanquished. Yes, and thankfully, mental health is talked about more openly now than ever before. Publicly and without apology, well-known celebrities including Billie Eilish, Kerry Washington, Bruce Springsteen, Taraji P. Henson, Dwayne Johnson, Emma Thompson and Channing Tatum have revealed their own struggles with what is, in every aspect, a disease. But when William Styron wrote his groundbreaking memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, in 1972, it shattered the silence around our illness and let thousands of people not feel so deeply alone.
Styron knew the word depression is almost meaningless – it sounds like we’re just slightly down, half an inch below soil – and woefully inadequate in describing how true depression attacks the body not just the mind, the way it suffocates hope with what he called “despair beyond despair.” Styron described his illness as “the grey drizzle of horror . . . that takes on the quality of physical pain” and colors abound in descriptions of depression, but they’re surely not rainbows; Churchill called the depression that would overtake him his “black dog.” It’s also ferocious, feral: being buried in mud you didn’t realize was rising, the “fury of rain storms” that pummeled Anne Sexton until she could not survive the storm any longer.

For me, and so many others like me, forced therapy was a lifeline. An existential flotation device that uncovered unfinished mourning and traumas sealed away for so long I’d thought them gone. Everyone, please know therapy is there for any of us who are sinking. Who tread and keep treading the waves without realizing we can get out of the water. My husband, angry that I would try to leave him, saved me and kept saving me just as surely as I helped to keep him thriving through his last years on Earth.
Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do with love?
Isn’t that what any kind of vow, spoken or silent, is for?
And then, after so close to ten years of survival, Rick died on his birthday. His vital signs so robust, so vivid, that our hospice nurse was filling his prescriptions for another two weeks just moments before he left. Write the story of us he said a week or three before he died. But the story of “us” is miles and fathoms more than the last few years of his life. Repeatedly and with occasional furiosity he said that cancer is not a character trait. Nor is it a character flaw. It will never define anyone it touches; it’s malicious and horrifying and petty. His story, like millions of others, is far greater than that he did his best to conquer it, lay waste to it, simply live.
My husband was here. He was a breathing, joke-making, handsome, and extraordinarily decent man. And then in a split second of a second, he died. I was holding his hand. His blue eyes open, looking at me. He had been utterly non-responsive for over 19 hours. Until he suddenly wasn’t. After he died, his body was so warm. I don’t even remember letting go of his hand.

Trauma and loss, they alter everything. The flop of your heart. How past tense feels immoral. How you can appear upright to others simply because showing them your true fetal position is too much to bear. Nick Cave describes grief so well not simply because he is a brilliant writer, but because he understands its supremacy all too well: “There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence . . . that ultimate and inevitable departure of the other takes with it a fundamental piece of ourselves, a part of our being, leaving us with a terrible feeling of incompleteness.”
It’s grief that is laying waste to the human I was. It’s what I must go through, not around. What I loudly refuse to ignore or throw euphemisms at, even knowing that others want me to be, well, “fine.” In our abnormal culture we treat grief as another disease. It’s so ugly, isn’t it? It doesn’t want to dance, it sure doesn’t play well with others. But grief is the measure of love. It is the measure, width and depth and height, of love. Depression often accompanies it. It has for me. And while I am a pugilist against my depression, I take the gloves off near grief. The site and podcast refugeingrief.com have helped tremendously, because the woman behind it sees me, understands this echoing vacuum because her loss was also overwhelming. She knows there is no “Time’s up, get over it!” because grieving is to move through at my own time, own pace. You, too. You, too.
But. To be honest. To be writing and living through this while reading C.S. Lewis and stopping at his perfectly accurate words: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Yes. That’s why the heart races. That’s why the panic of reality, the past tense so universally accepted, the cloak of invisibility that’s thrown over the one you loved/ love while you’re wondering Of course they’re dead. But does that mean you’ve all forgotten they were here at all?
Good friends said that Rick’s death was a hole, a cut across their lives. For me it was a tear in our own little universe. At times it begins to knit together. At times all I think of is the beauty. There isn’t a single cell of me that doesn’t know Rick would want me to remain alive. My lost father, mother, brother, cousin, and far too many gone friends would want the same thing. Still. It isn’t up to them. It’s up to me. Several months after the love of my life was forced to leave, my executioner might be me. I don’t know. Every day is walking on waves that submerge or carry or radiate towards shore or yes, overwhelm.
Sometimes when the light is just right I want very little, or very much: I want to want to live again. Sometimes, the one we get to save is ourselves.

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“To the Elephant” is Janet Champ’s debut essay publication.

UNWRAPPING THE BODY by Natasha Singh

1.

You have already seen the pictures on her website: class participants rolled up in white sheets like mummies, lying next to one another on a carpeted floor. Having taken a course on becoming a death doula with this instructor, you know she also teaches about attending the dead.
Whenever she’s called, she shows up in her station wagon with sheets of dry ice. After ritually bathing the dead body, she lays a sheet behind each shoulder blade like frozen wings, beneath the sacrum and hips, and, for the first few hours, below the neck and across the lower abdomen. When turning the body, she is careful to place towels nearby to absorb any fluid expelled from the lungs or stomach through the nose or mouth. Then she commences the ritual wrapping, swaddling the body in fabrics and shawls like she’s delivering a baby back to the womb.
“Three days is the optimal time,” she has told you repeatedly. “Spend at least three days with the dead body.”
When you first heard this, your heart sank, for you did not spend even three hours with your father’s body before it was carried out, flushed pink, and emptied of his spirit. Like a seashell being tossed back to shore, you’d thought. You’d spent less than an hour washing and cleaning the skin that was visible, finding it increasingly difficult to move his limbs because rigor mortis had set in and you were too afraid of bending, pushing, or forcing more compliance from a body that had, in its final year, already complied so much. Using oatmeal soap and a warm washcloth, you’d moved your hands on autopilot, not because you felt numb but because you weren’t quite sure what to do, how to do it, or whether this ritual held any meaning for you at all. You had taken it upon yourself to do it only because your mother used to talk about the ritual bathing of bodies after relatives in India died at home. You’d imagined she would know what to do when this time came – that she would take the lead, as she did with all the other family rituals – but she just sat on the bed across from where your father’s body lay, eyes glassy, chin in her hands.

2.

You recently saw a video of your instructor alongside the family and friends of a deceased person. The video begins not with the death, but with the life of the deceased person before she experiences a fall that becomes her doorway to death. Before her fall, she is lively with sparkling blue eyes and short silvery hair. Statuesque and elegant, she wears a blue silk scarf and bears a countenance that borders on regal. Laughing heartily, she shows off colorful caftans in her closet just above rows of pretty – if not unnecessary – high heels. The camera lens zooms in on grainy pictures of her younger self when she was a dancer, still in her prime.
Though she has cancer now, she shows no visible signs of weakness or distress. In fact, she appears joyous and determined when talking about how she would like to die at home surrounded by loved ones, as if planning not her death but her final dance recital. Though she seems at ease about the inevitable, surely she never imagined what followed. The next frame shows her after her fall. Astonishingly thin, she lies on her side in a hospital bed, tubes going into her, trachea down her throat. She appears to have aged another eighty years.
After your father fell and suffered a hip fracture, he, too, seemed to age another eighty years. Before undergoing a surgery he never wanted, he’d smiled nonetheless – joking with you over FaceTime and raising his hands into a trembling namaste – as if surrendering to the medical machinery that quickly assumed control like a despotic god. Not one of his doctors informed your family about what anesthesia can do to a ninety-five-year-old man already suffering from dementia, so the father who emerged from that surgery was shockingly different from the father who went in.

3.

He lived for another year after that, his survival a bittersweet miracle, for he lost his ability to walk, feed himself, and tend to his garden. Sometimes, when you looked in on him through the app your brother installed on your phone, you saw him sitting alone in his wheelchair, watching the clock while thin rays of light streamed in through partially closed blinds, bathing his body in dim light. You could have spoken to him if you’d wanted, kept him company with your voice. Instead, you’d watched over him with an exquisitely pained yet protective air while your family rallied, convinced he would live at least another ten years.
In the video, your instructor expresses deep regret at this turn of events, at not being able to finish making plans with the now deceased woman who died alone in the hospital, a shell of what she’d been. Since your instructor owns a funeral home, she is permitted to cart the body away in her station wagon, bring it back to the deceased woman’s apartment. After placing it on dry ice on the kitchen table, she invites the women’s family and friends to bathe the body and dress it.

4.

Not long after you finished bathing your father’s body, two people in dark suits entered his room. You had no idea who called them or why they were there. Only later would you curse yourself for being so death illiterate, for not knowing what happens after someone dies. You were so focused on tending to your father while he was alive – keeping vigil during his final days – that it never occurred to you to consider the minutes and days that would follow.
The men in suits asked only your brother to stay with the body. Bewildered, you’d looked to your brother who raised his eyebrows, as if they were shrugging for him. You wondered if the men had come to note the time of death, dress your father in different clothes, or if they were medical examiners sent by the hospice nurses. “Most people don’t want to see this part,” was the only explanation they offered.
You sat in silence next to your mother in the living room, rising only when the men re-emerged, carrying your father past you in a zipped-up blue body bag. As your mother’s protests filled the house, neighborhood, and then the skies, your fingers gripped the sofa’s arm rest like claws. You released a sound so guttural, you became animal. Filled with wild grief and even wilder fury, you watched the men carry your father out of his home, then past his rose garden. “Come back,” your mother kept wailing. Come back. You still don’t know what those words meant. Had she wanted your father to return to his body? Had she wanted the men to bring his body back?
All you know is that something was taken from you that day, not just your father’s body but your ability to determine for yourself what was needed. Maybe you would have felt nothing sitting at his bedside for three days. Maybe you would have kept vigil over the spirit the holy books say is there – hovering above the body, the family, the room – after the body dies. Maybe you would have been able to see for yourself the slow ebbing away of this spirit, for even as you’d bathed your father’s body, he’d worn the most beautiful glow, as if that particular light – and not his white pajamas – were his true and only garments. Or maybe you would have carried his skeletal body onto the lawn in your arms and laid it before the bowed heads of his beloved roses, so that they, too, could express gratitude for his careful tending over the years and offer their blessings for wherever he was going.

5.

After your instructor and the deceased woman’s family and friends attend the dead body, you see it lying in a cheap cardboard box that has been painted in vivid colors. The body is wrapped in silk caftans and scarves from her closet. In theory – and before seeing this part of the video – this ritual had sounded beautiful to you, like something you should have done for your father. But after seeing it, you can’t help but think the body resembles a shriveled apple doll, the kind you used to make in art class as a child. You feel even more disturbed when people begin dancing around it, stopping on occasion to kiss a hollowed-out cheek, or run their hands across wrinkly skin. You shudder as if in the presence of something sacrilege, but the guests seem oblivious to this possible affront, for they flail their arms and sway as if dancing to a song only they can hear.

6.

You suppose the rituals following your father’s death were supposed to be your own grieving song, but they demanded too much, too soon. The funeral director asked for eulogies and a slide show, which plunged you into a prolonged state of doing. Then there were all the visitors who needed constant attention. When your family finally found a Hindu pundit, his prayers held no meaning for you, not only because you don’t understand Sanskrit, but also because your father’s prayers had always been made in silence behind his closed door. While your siblings appeared to have no problem following the pundit’s rapid-fire instructions, you’d bumbled practically everything, as if trying, even then, to rebel against centuries-old dictates.
All these rituals and rites, in the end, had seemed no different to you than the conveyer belt your father’s body was placed on just before it was cremated. While watching the brown box being carried forward, moving closer to the flames – as if keeping time with a drumbeat of meaningless repetition – you did not cry out as your siblings did when the body began to burn. Instead, you’d thought, It looks like a piece of borrowed luggage.

7.

Before your father’s death, you did not know what you truly believed about death and dying. But when you got the news that he had only days to live, a hidden cosmology began to reveal itself like a thing emerging from the depths of the sea. When he spoke to dead relatives in his final days, you saw that you believed in the visitations of your ancestors. When he tossed and turned, picking at his sheets, his clothes, and then his skin, as if trying to remove an unnecessary layer, you saw that you believed in the restlessness of the spirit – its longing to return home. When his agitation began to ease, you saw that you believed in the power of mantras and in the sacred syllable of Om.
Just before the men took his body away, you saw something else that would stay with you: the permanently creased wrinkle of your father’s brow had become astonishingly smooth, an empty page. You’d released a small gasp, as if realizing two things simultaneously: the soul has a doorway through which it leaves and enters the body, and your father’s brow – the space between it – had been that doorway. As you leaned over him, circling that place with your index finger, never had you been so certain that the body is just a shell.
When your eyes wandered across his full frame for a final time, trying to memorize the shape of his absence, you noted his tan blanket lying crumpled by his feet. For a moment, you thought of gently covering him with it, but then you let your hands drop to your sides. Perhaps you knew even then that there would be no way to wrap your father, no way to make a dead body more beautiful than when the spirit still resided within it.

---

Natasha Singh’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Brevity, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, and South Asian Review.

YOU CAN SHARE THIS by Maria Zorn

On a red-eye flight hurtling toward New York City, I observed my sleeping mother’s face. The glow of the reading light she’d forgotten to shut off illuminated the gentle slope of her nose, the pink moles on her cheeks. The plane was oddly silent, minus the toneless hum planes always make. Something about the quiet made it feel like this moment would never end, that I’d get to gaze upon her forever, counting the pores on her forehead. She seemed familiar but foreign, someone I didn’t know but very much wanted to, almost like I had a crush on her.
It had been eighteen months since my mom called to tell me my brother had died. Six years since my dad shot himself, four since my mother’s father hanged himself. Our pile of dead men was so tall we couldn’t step over them. We needed a stool.
I was nearly twenty-three, the oldest my older brother would ever be. We were headed to the city to celebrate my birthday. How did my mom feel about this, I wondered, her youngest becoming as old as her oldest? He and I were finally going to be twins, which we’d been telling strangers in bars we were for years. Everyone believed us. Tall, broad-shouldered, the gravelly voices, the throaty laughs. We moved our heads too much when we talked, like chickens. It’d be even worse when I turned twenty-four, impossibly more tragic to be older than Tomm would ever be. Had my mom considered this yet? I wished I knew.

I always wanted to be like my mother. I imitated her bubbly disposition, I had her same broad smile and frizzy hair. When I got my braces off and discovered that my teeth, though straight now and without large gaps between them, did not look like hers, I felt ripped off. Her teeth were perfect, and I’d worn my rubber bands and threaded floss through the wiring of my braces so that I would resemble her. But my teeth, as it turned out, were smaller, my smile gummier. My frizzy hair typically remained frizzy even if I tried to beat it into submission with a blow dryer, but she could tame hers into soft blonde curls that fell around her square jaw.
My mom and I worked as a team to survive my father and then to help Tomm survive his own recklessness. We passed our first mission and failed our second. After Tomm died I could hug her, I could press her into my chest until I felt her rigid body soften, and then several months later I could hardly stand to look at her. Her eyes reflected back all of the guilt and anguish I was desperately attempting to stave off. This trip felt like the kind you take when trying to reconcile with an ex, in a sense. I had spent most of my life feeling certain that nothing could ever come between my mother and me, but now I was not so sure. No belief was unshakeable anymore, no love unconditional.

***

When my mom told me that Tomm went to sleep and didn’t wake up, her voice sounded like she was controlled by a ventriloquist. I could picture her mouth jerked open, slammed shut. Her poor jaw. I was living in New York with her and my brother, but on a trip to Phoenix, visiting my partner. My mom’s ex-boyfriend found me at Target, where I was shopping for socks, and made me come with him so I could answer my mom’s call someplace quiet, as if the news would be more palatable if we escaped the store’s fluorescent lights. After she told me, I wanted to offer her some kind of balm, but I couldn’t conjure anything up. All I could do was argue.
“Why? How? How? How does a twenty-three-year-old fall asleep and not wake up? A twenty-three-year-old doesn’t fall asleep and not wake up.” I wanted to shake her through the phone because didn’t she care enough to even guess what had happened? How was she so quickly accepting this new fate?
“I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry,” she said.
I felt like I was a child again, getting screamed at by my father. When he’d yell, I wouldn’t meet his eyes and insist he be different. I’d instead look at my mom and think: Why aren’t you making this stop? Can’t you do something? I was twenty-one now but I still wanted my mother to be a god. She didn’t have an answer to any of these questions. The only sound on the other line was a sharp inhale, one meant to usurp a sob. I pictured the ventriloquist who was making her say these words. Nothing was her fault, obviously, and this deflated my rage. We were both silent for a while. Then, the only words I could mold with my tongue were her words, parroted back to her: “I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry.” I said it again and again. I mourned my mother in that moment just like I mourned my brother, for she would never again be the same person; now, always, a woman who once held her son’s still body in her arms.

When she hung up the phone to speak with the police, I locked myself in the bathroom and knelt on the tiled floor in front of the toilet, waiting for vomit to come. I tried to focus on the way the grout pushed into the skin of my knees. Time passed, and then my boyfriend Chris’s voice was on the other side of the door saying, “Baby, let me in.” I crawled to the handle and twisted the lock. He’d been at the gym and was wearing sweaty shorts. He closed the door behind him and sat on the ledge of the bathtub. I licked his calf to taste its salt. I told him Tomm had gone to sleep and didn’t wake up, but that I didn’t understand why. At some point Chris transferred me from the bathroom to the car and I was told my mom’s ex-boyfriend was buying me a ticket to New York for that evening. He offered to buy Chris a ticket too, but Chris declined. I don’t remember the ride to Chris’s house, whether I texted my mom, if I packed my clothes or if he did. I can vaguely recall sitting cross-legged in the bed of his old pickup truck, eating a Filet-O-Fish sandwich from McDonald’s in the hundred-degree afternoon heat. There was, apparently, a drive to the airport and a flight out of Phoenix and a cab ride into the city. There was a key to find in my purse and there were steps to walk up to get to our apartment. How all of this happened is unclear to me. I had been picked up like a pin and dropped 2,400 miles away. In memory, there is only the bathroom, rank with Chris’s sweat, then the fish sandwich with its slimy yellow cheese, then walking into my mom’s arms, clutching one another like we’d fall into quicksand if we ever let go. The first few days after it happened, we couldn’t stop looking at photos of Tomm. He is a tiny blur from running in circles yelling, “Green grapes, green grapes,” a phrase he loved to shout for some reason when he was three; he is hunched over a pile of toys, showing me how to play with Barbies, teaching me how to give them names and backstories and problems; he is wearing a Roc-A-Wear gray velour tracksuit with freshly buzzed hair and tinted glasses, holding a folded-up piece of paper containing lyrics to a song he’d written; he is gothic, then a raver, then cloaked in a mink stole; then he’s prancing around New York City wearing six-inch platforms, his hair dyed platinum blonde, midnight blue, DayGlo orange. Each photo is of someone we lost. We lost hundreds of Tomms.

Tomm got a tattoo that said my way on the side of his left hand two days before he died. He had heard Frank Sinatra’s song and decided this was a sentiment he wanted on his body forever.
His friend Leslie accompanied him to the tattoo shop in Williamsburg. Before they went in, they went to the bar next door and ordered pickleback shots. Leslie had written my way in her notebook multiple times in slightly different handwriting – slanted, jagged, loopy – and Tomm selected one. He posted a photo of himself getting the tattoo, and in it his eyes are downcast, serenely admiring his new ink. He looks like someone who wants to let this tattoo heal, then get another one, and another one.
My mom, Tomm’s friends Billy and Leslie, and I returned to the tattoo shop the week after Tomm’s death. We had the original slip of paper on which Leslie had written my way. “Do you remember tattooing this on someone last week?” we asked the artist.
“Of course,” he replied. “Is there anything wrong with his tattoo?”
“He died,” my mom said.
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” The man was very tall and had tattoos that went from his neck all the way up to his bald head, meaty red roses hanging off of thorny vines.
We told him that we would like to get the same tattoo as Tomm. As the artist prepared his station, we went to the bar next door and ordered pickleback shots. Why the pickleback, when you usually order champagne or a gin and tonic or a spicy margarita? I wanted to ask him. I didn’t know we liked pickleback shots. Strange.
When we went back to the tattoo shop, the artist was blasting Frank Sinatra’s song on surround sound. The tattoo gun whirred loudly but the music was louder. And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain, Sinatra crooned. When it was my mom’s turn, I could hardly stand to look at her. I’d never seen another human look more hopeless than in that moment, not even in movies. She was too sad for tears. Her whole face looked like someone had grabbed it and pulled it downward. The tattoo artist started to cry.

During the days that followed, my new tattoo still puffy and red, I aimlessly walked around the city like a zombie, I took the subway to nowhere. Back against the hard plastic seat of the E-train, I saw Tomm sitting across from me with his legs in a figure four shape, the pussybow on his black blouse fanning out from his collarbone like flower petals. His head was tilted slightly to the right. He was appraising something, but what? The outline of his body was entirely serrated. You couldn’t touch him without getting cut. I didn’t get off the train until he disappeared. Never quite figured out what he was thinking.

My mom and I struggled to grieve together. We both knew that our combined sorrow was too large for any container available to us: the apartment, the street, the city. When one of us became emotional, the other became stoic in an equal but opposite measure. One crumbled, the other held her breath. Then switch, then switch, again. There was no collective exhale. I didn’t know what to say when we were in a room alone together. I wanted her to be an antidote but instead she was evidence, this human who birthed and raised us, that Tomm was once here and now he was gone.

If the memory of Tomm was serrated, then the memory of my grandfather was polished and smooth like a nickel. I could turn him over in my hand whenever I chose. My dad was slippery, covered in oil. If I pictured them all side by side on the subway, they didn’t seem like they knew one another. A wide-backed old Polish man in a flannel shirt, twinkly blue eyes, so sentimental that he’d stand at the end of his driveway and cry whenever our car pulled away at the end of a visit. A forty-six-year-old with hands shaking, bags under his eyes, every feature could be described as shadowy, a man who grew up on welfare, became a millionaire, then lost it all and grew addicted to alcohol and opioids. The first hanged himself after his wife died and the second shot himself because he believed he was never going to get better, he was never going to be able to stop tormenting us. And then, of course, there was Tomm. A nightcap after a Grindr date, went to sleep and never woke up.
I wanted these deaths to fit into one another tidily, like Russian dolls. I wanted each one to make more room for the next. I wanted my mom and I to become better at grieving every time, and instead it felt like my entire body was made of overstretched muscles. We did not have the capacity for this. We were too battered.

The toothpaste hardened in the sink bowl was Tomm’s. I knew this to be true because it bothered me that he didn’t rinse it off and I told him this a hundred times. I stared at the blue calcified lump and wondered if I could make it soft again. If I hit it with a blow dryer, maybe that would do it. But then what? Would I rub it into my skin like a lotion? Yes, that’s exactly what I’d do. How could I explain this desire to anyone, even my mother? I kept staring at the sink and the ceramic gleamed white. There was no toothpaste. I’d imagined it.

I kept walking past the Molly Wee, a rank Irish pub we tolerated solely due to its proximity, where I once paid Tomm five dollars to drink a bottle of Miller High Life. Five dollars plus the cost of the beer, that is. He’d sat across from me wearing a black and white Mongolian lamb vest so voluptuous he was nearly drowning in it and we giggled over how hilarious he looked with a beer in his hand. “You need to be on TV,” I told him.
“I know it,” he’d said.
After he’d finished his beer Tomm ordered us a round of Hendricks gin and tonics, then a second, third, fourth. That night we didn’t mind that the bar smelled like the urine of a man who had consumed both Seagram’s 7 and a vitamin B tablet. We’d clasped our hands together, elbows resting on the sticky epoxied wood table, and told each other: I love you, I don’t know what I’d do without you, you’re the best sibling in the world. Our eyes welled. Tomm’s fingers were reddish-purple from the cold, from his poor circulation. I hadn’t known how it was possible to worry about him like a second mother, but idolize him the same way I did as a child. He blinked his big eyes, his eyelashes thick and dark and grouping together like Twiggy’s from the tears that clung to the ledge of his lids. I remember thinking how beautiful he was, even with his eyeliner all smeared like that. The sides of his icy fingers cooled mine, which had warmed from the Molly Wee’s wheezing furnace. He’d felt already partly dead. In three more months, he’d be completely.
I was certain I’d die right there on the gum-smeared pavement if I saw that neon Miller beer sign one more time, the sadness would just sweep me right into the gutter.
I look back now and my actions feel impossibly selfish, but I told my mom I couldn’t stay in New York with her. I was too broken to see Tomm’s shadow all over the city. On Eighth Avenue, the sex shop where we bought poppers to sniff on our way to parties; on Thirtieth Street, the pizza place from which we ordered delivery in the winter despite that it was located directly beneath our apartment. My mom clung to the city as much as I fled from it, dusting every surface for his fingerprints.

When I was back in Arizona, I went to dive bars that Tomm would’ve hated. Checkered floors, dartboards, stickers covering every square inch of the bathroom stalls. There was no trace of him there. Drunkenly fighting with Chris in alleys littered with overflowing dumpsters, I could convince myself, even if just for a second, that none of it had happened. Chris was fourteen years my senior. He had massive muscles and wore ripped tank tops that exposed his nipples as he bent to scoop ice at his bartending job. He slicked back his ringlets with pomade and wore a bandana as a headband, perhaps to cover his receding hairline or maybe it was just part of his brand. I started dressing like him: combat boots, ripped skinny jeans. I bought a New Order band t-shirt. I felt certain there was a shape I could contort myself into that would make Chris love me more if only I tried hard enough. It felt good to have a job, it felt good to be a different person.

I requested a copy of the toxicology report from Tomm’s death. My mom said she didn’t want to know anything more, but I hungered for answers. The letter took weeks to arrive and when it did, I couldn’t open it. It sat on my bedside table next to a stack of unread books and my yellowing retainers. I slept on the opposite side of the bed from it, as if it might explode during the night. When I finally worked up the courage to unseal the thickly stuffed envelope, I stared at the list of things that killed my brother: Xanax, Adderall, alcohol, cocaine. I knew he consumed these things. But then I saw heroin. It was not cocaine then, the white powder sitting beside him when he died, but this. Should I tell my mom? The word bore into my skull, heroin heroin heroin heroin until, when she and I were catching up on the phone about who knows what, I just spat that fact out, as if it were information that could be relayed in any old way, as if it wouldn’t obliterate her. She responded, “Hmm,” softly, like she’d consider it.

I wrote about the losses of my grandfather, father, and brother during this time, in the context of inheritance. When I read the words later it seemed as if I had forgotten that it was my maternal, not paternal, grandfather who died by suicide. His death was related to my father’s only in that they both were suicides and they both impacted my family. Outside of that, they were like an apple and a chinchilla. Packaging all three men together made me feel better when I wrote it down though, a line of dominoes that fell. The inevitability of it softened the guilt that I hadn’t done enough to prevent the deaths from happening. This notion made things easier and harder at once, because at the same time: I didn’t want Tomm’s death to be inevitable. I wanted it to be the most specific tragedy there ever was.

Chris would come home from his bartending shifts at 4AM to find me in our bed, still awake. He used to put on classical music when he left for work to soothe his old bulldog. The dog’s former owner had been sent to prison and he was extremely anxious as a result. He came with the name Deez, as in “deez nuts.” Now, instead of typing: relaxing music for neurotic dog into YouTube, Chris put on an infinite loop of Tom Rosenthal songs and left me lying board-stiff on my back. Stripes of light would come in between the blinds and crawl down my belly as the sunlight waned. My mom had discovered Tom Rosenthal on the first plane ride she took after finding Tomm’s body. His songs made her think of Tomm, so they made me think of Tomm. If the songs meant something to her, they meant something to me. I don’t know why I couldn’t tell her that. I knew she was lying awake too, steeping in hurt with her phone by her side. Was grief lessened when shared? We were too scared to find out. What if it doubled when shared, like joy?

At night I’d stare at the red onion skin of my shut eyelids and think: Why did you tell him he was driving you crazy when you were in Vegas together a few weeks before he died? So what if he was trying to buy PCP off someone at the pool, you shouldn’t have shamed him. Why didn’t you act more remorseful when you borrowed his favorite pencil skirt and ripped it when you were getting out of a cab? Why did you say you didn’t want to live in New York just because you knew it would hurt him? He adored the city like a lover. If I had been more patient, he’d still be alive. If I had been kinder, more supportive, more loving, harder on him, easier on him, I could have snatched the heroin right out of his nose.

Blame is covered in porcupine pins. Sometimes it feels like we have to toss it around after someone has died until we find the right person to catch it and hold it and we can watch their hands bleed and feel better until we remember that the dead human we love is still made of fine dust now.
My brother was named after my dad. Thomas. These deaths were related, sure, but was it inheritance? I pictured the brother who ends up like my dad. He has well-defined biceps and drinks whiskey and is mean to his girlfriend. That brother dies from an overdose, and it feels like tragedy begetting more tragedy. That brother is not my brother. And yet.
When Tomm cried, he fanned his face like his palms were paper fans. Driving the Toyota Camry that he hated because it was gray, not black, he’d grip the steering wheel daintily with his right hand and dangle a Parliament Light 100 out the window with his left, he’d shimmy his bony shoulders as he belted Britney Spears. When he danced he seemed boneless, he grew extra limbs, joy spurted out of him. He was effervescent. He considered legally nixing the “Jr.” that followed his name, he added the extra “m,” Tom and Tomm, different.
Tomm did not routinely use heroin, but he drank too much, treated pharmaceutical drugs like they were Skittles, never ate enough. He numbed his feelings with alcohol, shushed his past with pills. His death was self-inflicted but seemed accidental, like that of a child who runs out into the street to get his ball without looking each way and gets hit by a car. Or no, maybe a child who keeps throwing the ball into the street.
Did tragedy beget more tragedy? Sometimes I thought about grabbing the biggest rock I could find and letting myself sink to the bottom of a very deep lake. Stay there. How my hair would undulate underwater, a peaceful way to go I’d read. And then what of my mom? Tragedy begetting tragedy begetting tragedy.

My mom stayed in New York for several months after Tomm died. She wasn’t sleeping much at all and would often go for threeor four-hour walks around the city in the middle of the night. A close family friend came to stay with her and this was how she could escape his watchful eye, sneaking out like a teenager. Before Tomm died, this would have made her feel unsafe. Now, she didn’t care. While I thought of suicide in a more concrete way, I wondered if this was her own way of flirting with death. Choosing a dark street to walk down, seeing what happened.
She called me quite often, and I updated her the way I would a distant great-aunt, not the person with whom I used to share every detail of my life. I felt she was too fragile to hear about how I was actually doing. Whenever I considered initiating contact, I thought about how much she loved Tomm, how good a mother she was. I pictured the time she got into a car accident on her way to work from crying so hard after having to leave her sick baby boy at daycare; I pictured her covertly driving around the elementary school playground during recess to make sure Tomm wasn’t getting bullied for being gay again; I pictured her pushing the locksmith away from Tomm’s door when he finally got it open, protecting the young man from what he was about to see: her son’s dead body. Or perhaps she was protecting Tomm one last time, giving his corpse a few more moments of dignity before he would be poked and prodded and investigated. Lit on fire. My arm would freeze, suspended in the air with my phone in my hand. How could I possibly lessen her pain? I was the person who was supposed to bring her the most solace, and instead I brought her none. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her, I thought. It was that I loved her too much. I buckled under the weight of it.

Sometimes, Chris would prop me up like a ragdoll when he got home and say: “Take a few deep breaths, drink some water, we’re walking the dogs.” Wearing his giant t-shirt and boxers, I’d stumble around the block and listen to him talk, incoherently interjecting random questions as if he were Google. This habit of mine reminded me of the Wikipedia rabbit holes Tomm and I would go down when we were high together. All we needed was our first search, then we’d click a link embedded within the webpage, then another.
Mount Vesuvius, epigram, Niko Kazantzakis. Who was Niko Kazantzakis? He once said: I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
“Who wrote Still Life With Woodpecker?” I asked Chris.
“Tom Robbins.”
“Did you ever show Tomm that video of Klaus Nomi?”
“Uh yup, I think I did.”
“What type of bird is that chirping?”
“Mourning doves.”
“Morning like sun or mourning like death?”
“Mourning like death.”
“No really,” I said.
“Really.”
One night he pulled me out of bed but didn’t reach for the dogs’ leashes. He said, “Follow me,” and walked past our bookshelf made of cinder blocks and two-by-fours, through the kitchen, out the back door. Dawn cloaked our dusty desert yard in gold and there was a smattering of pastel purple bits in the sky, muddled blackberries. Chris unsheathed a Japanese sword he’d found at the bar that night, long and curved, and used two hands to pass it to me. He pulled a watermelon seemingly out of nowhere, tossed it up into the sky, and shouted: “Slice!” as I swung murderously at the fruit. He picked up the two halves and threw one up, then the other. We continued on like this until my bleary eyes couldn’t spot the last remaining hunk of green speckled rind, chest heaving. I went back to bed feeling both empty and sated, like I’d accomplished something grand. I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.

Every platitude offered was glib and stupid. I didn’t care that people were trying. How terrible an era to grieve, when you’re in your early twenties and laughably self-involved. No one had ever experienced a similar loss, of this I was certain. I received Facebook messages that someone’s uncle had died earlier that year, that Tomm was in a better place, that their sister’s coworker’s brother just passed away and would I be willing to give them advice? Ah yes, just what the newly bereaved long for, to be a volunteer psychologist. I banged on the keys of my laptop like a toddler, then reprimanded myself. What they are offering is love. Take it, give it, please. I responded, eventually, to each and every message. I told people how sorry I was for their loss, I thanked them, I talked to their sister’s coworker whose brother had just died and told her things I didn’t yet believe, like: you’ll be okay in time.
Find an unhealthy relationship with which to preoccupy yourself, I wanted to say. Hide from the people who love you most. Externalize your locus of control. These strategies were not therapist-approved, but she asked how I got through it, didn’t she?

Tomm’s memorial was held in New York City on July 24th, nearly two months after he passed away. It would have been his golden birthday. He was supposed to be in Greece – proof that he didn’t mean to overdose, proof that he regretted trying heroin that night. He was meant to be on a sandy beach for a friend’s wedding, drinking ouzo, splashing in the water, blue and white checkered tablecloths, platform sandals, octopus, he loved octopus, he’d be eating octopus, he was so fucking excited for this trip.
Before the mourners arrived, we gathered with Tomm’s closest friends on a white leather couch in a white loft in Chelsea that was so bright it burned my eyes. Leslie projected a video compilation she’d made of Tomm on a white wall. There he appeared, so large that we could live inside him. The video begins with him getting ready to bungee jump in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He’s on a platform hundreds of feet above the ground, palm tree fronds bouncing gently in the breeze below him. His eyeliner is quite smudged. He’s wearing a black tank top that has a crucifix on it with a note tied around the top that says: “BRB!” I’d gone bungee jumping at the same place a few years before. It almost felt like it was somewhere that I could go meet him. If I went now, he’d come soon. He’d be right back.
The man assisting with his jump reads out instructions to Tomm.
“Number one: put your hand like this:”
Tomm wraps his long fingers around the scaffolding.
“Number two: stand on the edge, like this.”
Tomm doesn’t let the man get to number three before he says, “Throw yourself over?” He’s drunk. He says this with a smile, with a wink.

After the service, Tomm’s friends wanted to go out. The plan was to meet at the Boom Boom Room, on the roof of the Standard Hotel. My mom didn’t want to go. Chris and I went back to the apartment with her and waited awkwardly for her sisters to come, so we could go party without leaving her alone. The living room felt like a hospital waiting room. Chris had gotten mad at me a few nights before because I didn’t want to stay out with him. Watching him sing “Thunderstruck” at a karaoke bar in Midtown versus back in Phoenix didn’t feel revolutionary. I didn’t understand why he needed to be out so late doing the same things he did at home. He’d told me I was being selfish. You do realize I’ve never been to New York before, don’t you? Telling him my brother had just died felt so obvious as to be insulting, so I kept my mouth shut and did what he wanted.
When my mom’s sisters got to the apartment, I stared at her vacant face before we left. I will not be choosing you tonight, my actions told her. I hope I said I was sorry.

My mom and her ex had broken up the night Tomm died. He wanted her to be a stepmother to his young children, to move back to Arizona, but she refused to leave Tomm. When she did move home months later, she asked Shane to give their relationship another chance. He said no. He’d already started seeing someone else. She began running every day, up and down the canal behind her house. Her dirty tennis shoes held her upright, except for when they didn’t. We didn’t live together anymore and I couldn’t let myself imagine what this compounded grieving process looked like for her. So mostly I just pictured her spending all day every day running.
Once, we got drunk together and I held her as she cried about losing Shane. How cruel it was that she was not allowed this anodyne. Another man on the pile. He wasn’t dead, but she still had to grieve him. Not a stool. She needed a ladder.

I saw my mom living and mourning and moving through her days on her own and said to myself: I do not want that. I stayed in my relationship with Chris for far too long and devolved into the worst version of myself: jealous, histrionic. Maybe I believed I was training my mourning muscles. I knew that there was no chance we would work out, so when things were good I was preemptively depressed about how much it was going to hurt to lose him and when things were bad, I thought: not yet not yet not yet and did everything possible to fix us, to throw myself down like a human patch.
When I finally left, I sobbed as I packed up my things. At first his eyes welled up and he asked me not to go. Once he realized I was really leaving, he hardened. “Okay tiger,” he said, like he was a Little League coach. “Get moving.” We’d been together for over two years by then. With his arms crossed, he stood watching me as I packed all of my belongings into reusable grocery bags. I carried them out to the car by myself.
I moved back in with my mom and pushed through the following weeks and months like wading through thick seaweed. Losing Tomm made every other anguish in my life seem like a minor inconvenience: a fender bender in a CVS parking lot, accidentally buying decaffeinated coffee, my favorite pen running out of ink. But it did not shrink my parting with Chris. The energy I spent attempting to hold our broken relationship together was reallocated to pining for him. I saw my mom living and mourning and moving through her days, less alone because I lived with her but still proverbially alone, and she seemed to be doing better and better. There was more color in her face. She didn’t run as much as I had imagined, but she did run a lot. I wanted to be like her, but my feet felt like bricks.

When I got invited to go out to bars in Old Town Scottsdale by girls with whom I went to high school, I’d get black-out drunk. I’d wake up in my bed––sometimes in the outfit I went out in and sometimes naked with one arm fully submerged in a bag of Doritos––and have no idea how I got there, or how I got the purplish-yellow bruises that would appear on my knees several days later. Once, my mom woke to the sound of me choking on my vomit. She rolled me over, cleaned me up. The next morning, she expressed her concern over my recent behavior. She told me that even though I was in pain now, one day I would be okay again and I had to remember that. She told me that when she felt her saddest, she’d think about how upset Tomm would be to see her so broken up. She pulled herself together for his sake. These did not feel like glib, stupid platitudes, finally.
“Please, please talk to me when you’re feeling down,” she said. “Talk to me when you’re feeling anything.”

We went to dinner, and I swear Tomm’s ghost was in the seat beside us. Tomm loved Pita Jungle. A falafel wrap was one of his favorite drunken indulgences, plus they had cheap wine and poured it with gusto. We paused our conversation when Tomm would have produced some funny comment, set our forks down and looked at the empty chair. I felt affronted, and I think my mom did too, that our server didn’t leave a wine glass out for Tomm. How could she not see him?
Not many people looked like Tomm. He was angular and androgynous with round eyes and full lips. He swayed when he walked, like a cat. When we did catch someone who resembled him even obliquely, we became obsessed. I rewatched the same episode of Schitt’s Creek over and over, the one where David and Patrick go on a hike and David is a big pill about being in nature and then Patrick asks David to marry him. How Tomm would’ve put his hands in front of his face just like David does, just so, if he were ever proposed to.
My mom found excuses to go to the post office to see the young trans woman who worked there and had the same protruding clavicles and slender arms as Tomm. Everyone was going to be getting a letter. She’d call me each time after she went, telling me every detail she learned about Sophie.
A realization began to unfurl itself: my mom and I were on the same team, united by our magical thinking. We were mother and daughter and we were grieving humans and we were two single women who were getting over painful breakups and we were roommates and we were friends and we were the only remaining members of our nuclear family unit and we were the closest people to Tomm Zorn, the only two who remembered the exact angle at which he threw his head back when he let out a cackle. Probably she would rub his old toothpaste scum into her skin, too. The losses we’d experienced together before did not make room for this one, as I had hoped. Tomm’s absence left a crater in us both. But I wondered if we could invite one another over to our respective craters, if we could plant zinnias and make couscous and refinish an old dining room table, spruce them up and then cut a trap door that led from mine to hers.

Once, high, I started to type how to grieve into Wikipedia, but when I got to how to gri–– the site suggested How to Grill Our Love, a Japanese manga series. There was no page for how to grieve. There was only grief. Under grief, there was a link for another page: grief (disambiguation). Disambiguation? The removal of ambiguity by making something clear.

I wanted to feel better but I didn’t want to forget Tomm. These desires felt complicated to hold in one palm. I began going to yoga, and at the end of class my instructor sometimes led us through a body scan meditation. I’d lie on my back with my feet splayed out to the sides like a corpse, and scan Tomm’s body instead of mine. His dark lashes, his thin neck. I always thought his hands could’ve been in a magazine advertisement. Narrow knuckles, never had a hangnail. I could still picture him, crystalline. My palms facing up toward the ceiling, I waited for a sign.

***

I hadn’t been to New York since Tomm’s memorial. The city lights looked just like tinsel as our plane approached the tarmac, permanently dressed for a celebration. The Uber ride to Chinatown––the neighborhood where my mom and I were staying, the neighborhood in which Tomm died––felt like gradually lowering myself into a Jacuzzi that was several degrees too hot. I had the urge to ask our driver to slow down, even though traffic had brought us to a crawl. I felt certain I’d been inside every building we passed, thousands of them. I needed to look inside.
The next morning I went on a walk on my own, to nowhere in particular. I found myself on a quiet street, all things considered. The honks from cars and music from open windows were still audible, but there was hardly anyone on the block. Mostly what I could hear was the faint echo of people chanting. I followed the sound until I found an inconspicuous temple––I nearly walked past it. The door was open, letting in the smell of garbage and cigarette smoke and letting out the sound of mellifluous voices. I felt hypnotized and stood very still by the door, out of sight. I inhaled the smell of cigarettes. Tomm had picked up the habit at thirteen and never stopped. His clothes always smelled slightly of smoke, but cigarettes clung to him in a different way than other people I knew who smoked. I thought they smelled stale and acrid, but he never did. The small hairs inside of my nostrils cleansed his scent of the harsh odor and turned it into an expensive perfume, like alchemy. Cigarettes didn’t remind me of death, they reminded me of life. I closed my eyes and listened to the chanting, and when I opened them, a black feather came into my peripheral vision, floating down in front of me so slowly it reminded me of a cartoon. It was fluffy––not a crow’s, not a pigeon’s. It looked like it came from the ostrich-feather-trimmed robe Tomm had bought as a swimsuit coverup several years earlier. I caught it in my open hand.
When I got back to our Airbnb, I sifted through tea bags that were arranged in a fan-like pattern on a gold tray and prepared cups for my mom and me. I sat on the windowsill and felt the heat from the mug spread like a glow across my palms. It felt like remembering something, like I hadn’t experienced the sensation of a temperature change in eighteen months. I watched as my tea bag floated in my cup, and I was reminded of drifting on a lazy river at a Scottsdale resort with Tomm when we were seventeen and nineteen. Every year since coming out in high school, his swim trunks had gotten shorter and shorter, exposing the Naired pearly white of his thighs. Floating beside him, I commented that I’d missed a stray pubic hair along my bikini line when I was shaving. He misinterpreted this to mean the pube was no longer connected to my body and therefore could, conceivably, fall off of me, swim the requisite few inches between our tubes, and jump onto him. He leapt from his floatie in a flash of flailing limbs, all elbows and knees, that created a glittering splash, interrupting fellow river-goers luxuriating peacefully by with their strawberry daiquiris in hand. He paddled to the edge and dramatically pulled his body out of the pool and onto the wavy beige pavement that was steaming from the sweltering heat, gasping for air like someone who had very nearly escaped drowning.
“It’s attached to me, you idiot!” I yelled through bouts of chortling, my inner-tube bouncing gently as my shoulders shook. I craned my neck to continue watching him as I floated away. He was laughing now as well, lying flat on his back, dark curls glistening with droplets of water, gazing with squinted eyes up at the cloudless sky.
I had the impulse to pat my hands up and down my torso and legs as if checking for knife wounds, seeing if this memory had caused anything to ooze. Instead, impossibly, I felt the feather in my pocket. It pressed into my thigh. I kept my fingers wrapped around my mug and turned my head to look at my mother, who had her eyes closed, sunlight bouncing off her face. “Can I share something with you?” I asked.

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Maria Zorn’s work has been published in Longreads and West Branch.