All the things

Milwaukee Heat Wave

It had been the hottest, most generally miserable, Summer of my life. 1988 in Milwaukee, just after the end of my first year of graduate school, I was wildly pregnant. We lived in the upstairs flat of a dilapidate building just outside the inner city, drove (as little as possible) a 1972 Dodge, and spent many an afternoon, as did so many without air-conditioning or money, at the beach of Lake Michigan. There, I’d slather buckets of sunscreen onto my little boy, trying to snag him as he’d run along the dirty surf. He’d dart down the shoreline with the sea birds while I lumbered behind him, laughing aloud at the ungainly futility of catching up. But he could hear the worry in my voice, and would snap back in my direction, wrapping his little boy arms around my belly, listening to the life inside whose name then was “Arlo.” Some days were too hot even for the beach. We’d sit, little boy and mommy, in a tub of cool water playing checkers, the board atop a plastic crate, the pieces often tumbling first onto the expansion that made the board nearly too far, and then into the tub.

Hardest thing, until now

Carley was born at 5:10PM on a Sunday, August 28th, 1988, on the eve of a break in the Summer swelter, the only one of my four children I was able to birth by my own sheer will, and over nine pounds to boot. Her white blood cell count plummeted almost immediately having been compromised, unbeknownst to me, by the transfusion that saved my own life having hemorrhaged giving birth 6 years earlier to her brother. The Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee was about six city blocks from Marquette. Classes began for the term the following Tuesday, for me at 11AM, Logic. I had never taught. I’d spent the Summer practicing in my head. I’d put up a hard fight against the threat to curtail my financial aid. I’d won, but only if I made it to class. I did, and I thought then that it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life — walking from the hospital to school, taking out my books, writing on the board, making assignments. I don’t remember anything that I said except that our first day of class would end a little early because I had just on Sunday had a baby who was sick and needed me to return soon to nurse her while we waited to see whether she required a transfusion. The students’ faces were kind, as they are now. I thought I could never be so tired as then; tired but resolute. But while the tired of that now had an object, a point, a resolution in her having of life, the tired of this now is bottomless.

Here I am, bringing her home. In a box.

Bathy-Time

Some things you learn by witnessing surprise in the faces of your children. Say, the cool Summer grass under your little girl’s feet as she makes her first four-year old steps onto her first backyard of her first real house — steps made tentative by the unknown; steps made possible by grass without spent needles and glass.

Some things are so small and ordinary, they can be lost if we don’t write them down. Here’s one: in my early years at Bloom, I’d come home exhausted, always fearful that I would fail, that we could find ourselves faced again with poverty. But here was another bathtub, all warm water and bubbles. Carley and I would climb in, and she’d turn her back to me — waiting for me to draw pictures of flowers and sunshine and doggies and kitties and houses for her to guess with my finger, through bubbles. We learned the alphabet and how to count to ten, and after we’d climb into bed for a story about the adventures of Barbie, the doctor, the pilot, the world traveler, the dog-walker, the teacher, the good friend, the helper. I’d begin to drift, and Carley would remind me that the story wasn’t over. Where did Barbie go? She was five. By the time she was eleven, Barbie had transformed into Scarlet O’Hara, and Gone with the Wind never seemed to end, not really, not in Carley’s world of romance and intrigue. I can smell each of the fibers and tendrils of that world. Her little girl damp hair, the cotton of her jammies, my own relief at the deep-good of her body curled into my own, and later, the pages of her paperbacks, the tang of her nail polish, the smell of adhesive from the glow-in-the-dark stars we pasted to the ceiling of her room.

Peace Corps

Another teaching day many years later, 2014, I am bringing my cell phone into class awaiting word on evacuations from Ukraine. Finally finally finally, she calls from… Potomac, by way of Austria and Germany. I thought I could never let her go again, but of course, we must and I did. A year later, she packed her Yaris such that opening any door but the driver’s would ignite an explosion of the contents from the car, and she drove to Colorado by herself to join AmeriCorps teaching English to recent immigrants in Denver.

And in all of this light, all of this open-handed good, there somehow crept in this thing — this dissonance at once formless and patent, elusive and craven. Between the pasting of stars to the ceiling of her room and her driving away to Colorado, a blight began its grip, and with it a battle so pitched that the guilt that drowns me in her death isn’t because I could not protect her from its possession, but because I feel relief in not having to sustain its brutality. This is heroin. It is a destroyer from which there can be respite, but no escape.

He-Man Castles and Barbie Mansions

Christmas, 1985, I am trying to assemble a He-Man Castle for which I have diligently saved. I have all the figures, their swords and transports. I arrange them just-so to make this surprise from Santa Claus the most magical thing in the world — even if the cinderblock living room of our shabby little apartment in Manitou Springs is too small to contain the marvelous. Lindsay is four and jubilant. He lives, and marries, and has a son of his own. Christmas 1993, I am trying to build a Barbie Dream House. I have a real job, and more money, so Barbie lives in luxury. We have a fireplace, but don’t make a fire until morning — after Santa comes. Carley is five and beaming, and I don’t know that she has only twenty-six more years.

Box of Ashes

Yet, here I am, bringing her home. In a box the funeral director calls an urn. That I sit next to the boxes of her things. Her scarves. Her favorite pearls. The ones she wore with everything all the time. With her zillions of earrings, some with mates; some not. And her pizza bowling alley waitress t-shirts, each one tie-dyed. Each one with the smell of her muddled in with soap. And her cigar boxes; the ones that look like the cigar boxes on my dresser, be-jeweled with sequins and beads and bits of braiding and nail polish. Given to me as Christmas presents as boxes for earrings and movie tickets. Like the cigar boxes I found in her closet, way in the back, under her out-grown clothes; boxes that hid tiny zip lock bags with names on the outside stamped “King Kong” or some other uninspired joke. White powder in the inside. Instead of earrings and movie tickets, tiny spoons and razors; thin straws and post-it notes. Grief is like a stillness that feels as thin and brittle as a sheathe of ice on glass, but whose shards pierce you as deep and thick as ax on bone.

Brule, Nebraska

Day after Christmas, 1987. Standing in a women’s bathroom stall at a Greyhound Bus station, a five year old clinging to my pant leg while I puked up Cheetos into a grimy toilet. The bus stalled for the night in a white-out winter storm blasting across Nebraska corn fields. I was waiting for my sister to make her way from another near-by hamlet. The recognition that I was pregnant hung like a curtain suspended around us, trying to keep us clean. I could hear someone talking on a payphone just outside. I can hear a radio and “a horse with no name” drifting by. I can still see the worried gray-green eyes of the little boy looking up at me while I wiped my face with some Kleenex pulled from my jeans pocket. His green eyes are the only bright thing there is on that night. So many years later at a place that reminds me of a Greyhound Bus station, I look for that very same green that I remember, and am deliriously comforted when I see it ignited by another little boy. Only this time the little boy is my grandson, and I am his YaYa. And his father is all grown up, and I love this grown man-son in every cell of my body. He is the Fisher King. And a father. And a husband. And a man. I am grateful. I drive to and from West Virginia past the exit to where Carley went to college. I think about how things seem a little better — even though she doesn’t have a car anymore and has to ride her bike in the Winter in Colorado to get to her job at the pizza bowling alley. I worry. I want to hold her in my arms. I remember Winter, and it brings me back to Brule when she and I first met. When she and I and her brother stood together in a bathroom stall.

What is good enough?

Carley’s friends tell me that she was always trying to be good enough for me. I laugh. I think that’s the silliest thing I have ever heard. She was always good enough for me. Truth is, I wish even now that I could be good enough for her.

Grief doesn’t come in waves. It rushes over you like a tsunami that can speak. And is says: you did not do enough to protect your child. You didn’t do enough to protect her from those who’d do her harm. You didn’t do enough to protect her from her own worst impulses. You didn’t do enough. And you should forfeit your own life as the price of your failure. You choke yourself awake. It’s time to get up, put on your pants, brush your teeth, feed your dogs, glance at the paper, warm up the car, and drive to work. But the cold soak of the tsunami lingers in your bones with an aching that walks with you every minute of every day.

The Kitty-Princess

Halloween at Our Mother of Guadalupe Headstart, Milwaukee, 1991. The gift of a face-painting palate that could turn the faces of three and four year old kids into Spider Man or a unicorn or a warty-witch — or, for Carley, the Kitty-Princess. So bright pink and glittery, with a magic wand and a tiara, of course.

Talking to Carley’s friends, I realize — over and over — that she talked more about me than to me. The “about me” was lovely; the “to me” was feast and famine, glitter and giggling, and numbing terrorizing silence.

Sheetie, Baby-Baby, Fire Engine

Carley dies January 18th, 2020. The Corona Virus descends by the 20th. I resent this; I embrace it like a lover too. I resent it because it disrupts my single-minded grieving. I embrace it because I only need leave my house for necessities. A house where she is everywhere. Yet I’m always looking for her.

Sheetie. Fire Engine. Baby Baby. Dancing Dolly. Casper. Scarlet O’Hara. Chuck Palahniuk. Abe Lincoln, Vampire Slayer. Lake Jean. Learning to fish. Chicken-Pock scar on her nose. Mr. Luv-Lyte. Ocean City in March. To the moon and back. What if I get old and forget? What if the Coronavirus suffocates me? Who will remember?

If I understand anything, I understand the way in which death can come like a thief, utterly unexpected. I understand to the pit of my gut what it’s like to have been afforded no goodbye, no last gaze that says all the “I love you to the moon and back” that can ever be said.

Holidays

I hate Walmart. But not at holiday surprise care package time. Funny thing. Probably more care package than holiday, especially this past year. Blonde hair dye — check. Socks — check. Underwear — check. Glitter — check. Face masque — check. Toothbrushes — check. Gummy vitamins — check. Holiday decorations — check. I stand in a busy aisle going through the list in my head. Do I have all the things? I can hear her — Mommy, did you send all the things? We both loved cards. I’d always deface them changing the figures on the front to make them into us, making word bubbles so we could talk to each other as she opened her holiday box. Carley would write little notes in the cards, telling me she loved me. Telling me she was OK. Telling me not to worry. But I did worry. All the time. In all the things. I have all the cards now. They came in another box — the one with all her things. All the things she had in the last minute of her life. Someday store aisles will be bustling again. I don’t know how to think about that. Someday there will be holidays again. I don’t know how to think about that either.

The kind of terror that stays

A cold March that will never be long enough past. Carley calls me from her job. Bartending. Restaurant chain. She is sick. She is incoherent. She’s about to drive her car home. I plead with her to let me come get her. I’ll be there in a minute. Really. Just wait. Just …wait. She doesn’t. It’s raining thin and misty and sullen. I drive out to find her. I am frantic. I am terrified. I know without yet knowing. I find her in her car. Jack-knifed on a local rural road. Close enough to home. She is slumped over the steering wheel. Foggy. Everywhere. I pull her out. She yells at me. I half carry, half drag her home. About a quarter mile. I know. I run it in daylight and sunshine. I am crying so hard I can’t see the backdoor of my house. I don’t know how we got up the stairs to her room. She is psychotic. Her left eye is bulging. She yells at me, and I am afraid. And I am ashamed of being afraid. I beg her to let me take her to the hospital. She is sweating and breathing heavily. She is throwing things. She is laughing. She is screaming at me that I am the ruin of her life. I don’t how I am going to get her to the car. I can’t get her to the car. I run downstairs and lock the dogs in the bathroom. Should I call the police? I don’t. Should I call the police? She is pleading and screaming. I am terrified and confused. I don’t yet know what I will vomit out the back of her closet in the coming days. Dawn arrives as a smudge in the corner of my eye. We’re laying on the floor. She is still breathing. I have been counting out her breaths. Making sure. I have pulled the blanket from her bed to cover us. We had seemed to shiver in synchrony for hours.

Laramie, Wyoming

Sometimes Carley would call me during her drive from Ft. Collins to Laramie where she did CPR demonstrations as a Red Cross field worker for oil and gas workers out in the Wyoming gas fields. She’d laugh at me when I would tell her for the hundredth time about how my dad worked for Colorado Interstate Gas Company, had probably driven the same roads, but I would always be thinking that my dad was driving a heavier tank of a car and was safer on the endless stretches of that thin black ice, ubiquitous in Winter in the West. I’d ask her to call me when she got there. Sometimes she did. Those phone calls remind me, with that dry cheer pulled under by heartache, of other phone calls — these on her school house lunch breaks from Korea. Carley would call to keep me company while I did the 12AM-3AM security shifts at a besieged mobile home court just outside of Williamsport, PA. How funny! Here I was guarding a barricade made out of the sheet metal rooves of abandoned trailers, trying to prevent gas company thugs from entering a mobile home court to evict its last few struggling families, while Carley munches down a cheese sandwich and chirps to me about stubborn Korean adolescents and her plan to visit Singapore. I am thinking: “I am so proud of you, honey!” Carley returns, “I am so proud of you, Mommy!” And we are happy. We are having the times of our lives. I text her pictures of the warm Summer moon; she texts back a picture of a smiling Carley wearing her favorite pearls, the ones in a zip lock bag in a box next to a thick plastic bag of ashes in the closet of her room. I think: too sterile. Go get them. But I can’t.

Covid-19

How funny, and dark, and twisted — perhaps. The absolute terror and devastation of the corona virus pandemic registers in my brain like a lighter weighted kind of thud next to the grief that now pounds in rhythm with my heartbeat. “Covid-19,” it struck me as too-sterile a name for something so intimate, so visceral, something I already know — just in a different outfit. And yet, of course, I don’t. I don’t know Covid-19. I don’t even know what all might be behind the eyes of the terrified faces of people I see on the news every hour of every day. But I have an idea. A pretty fucking good one. I have an idea that our faces are not very different from one another. Not right now; maybe not ever. I wish I could talk to them. I think: we have words in common; words like “unnecessary,” “without warning,” “off guard,” “alone,” “no chance to say goodbye,” “how could this happen?” “Did she suffer?” “Did. She. Suffer?” Even these words seem a little hollow, and that much I can hear in the voices of the mommies and dads, the brothers and sisters, the friends, the people struggling to answer all the same questions from all the same reporters on what feels now to be all the same never-ending day. Carley worked for the Red Cross in Colorado. I wish I was a nurse. To call Covid-19 the apocalypse may be to give it too much. Except it’s not; Covid-19 is a harbinger of death, and there’s no too much to give it.

Christmas in a Hot Tub

Christmas Eve 2002. Snowy slow drive to a friend’s to feed his dog.

I have plastic champagne glasses and bubbly cranberry juice.

Carley is 12.

We play with Brenna and get her dinner while the hot tub warms in secret. I have our beach towels and swim suits hidden in the back seat of my Jeep. I go get them.

Carley is delighted.

I pour “champagne,” and we pretend we’re languishing lavishly in a scene from her favorite movie besides Gone with the Wind — Titanic.

Fluffy steamy bubbly hot tub. Freezy-frosty Winter night. Snow falling on our faces.

We pretend there are stars to count behind the darkness.

We giggle and chatter, and it really does seem like every single snowflake is different, is it’s own world as we are ours’.

The snow is very heavy now. We crawl home slowly, and are relieved to hear our own doggies barking in welcome, or scolding.

I made brownies. I make cocoa. We watch the Walton’s Christmas Movie and laugh, and say “Goodnight Jim Bob!” I call her Car-Bob, like her friends.

She glances at me sideways.

It is Christmas, and we are sleeping under a holiday blanket on the couch.

1.18.21. Door

Death never leaves.

And it is always leaving.

It is weight, and it is the absence of substance.

It is the struggle to catch your breath, and a long heavy sigh — as if breath were cheap.

There seems always to be more of waiting.

Thinking she’ll come home.

I stand by the door.

I will stand by the door.

1.18.22. Treasure Chest

My mother is 90 years old. Her name is Gloria Francis. She is a masterful Lego architect. She can make miniature pianos that can be played, Eifel Towers that can light up a room. I still have her, a thing for which words like “gratitude” seem tragically understated. She’s far away, in Oregon, and each day when I call to check in I can hear tiny bits of her memory peeling away, drifting off across thousands of miles of phone line while I try to catch them one by one in imaginary fingers that are too big and too clumsy to retrieve something so fine, something whose filaments — yesterday’s weather, last week’s grocery delivery, the names of her grandchildren — are so specific, but easily jumbled and torn. I try to put them back into my mother’s head — as if there should be some treasure chest that can only be opened by those who love her the very most. Yet, although I know it must be so full, so full of my mother’s life, her adventures and sorrows, her daily routines and her confidence that more life is just around the corner, I want all the memories to stay put. I want them all to stay in the box, none to be lost or misplaced, the box that is my mother, that is her specificity, her particularity, her irreplaceability.

As Carley would often chirp, “we must have all the things, all the things.” Memories, earrings, adventures, movie tickets, cigar boxes, glitter, pictures, puppies, flip-flops. All the things. My mother knows that Carley is dead. She keeps Carley’s picture, unmoved, in the gaggle of photographs in her tiny living-room’s shelf of honor. Mom sometimes tells me in a small voice that she has trouble believing that Carley’s gone. She cannot say dead; I gently change the subject to the grocery order, the dastardly news, the anything else. Sometimes I am ashamed that, as I absorb that small voice across the miles, I wish I could excise the memory of Carley’s death from the treasure Chest of my mother’s remembered life. I feel shame not because such an erasure would do violence to my mother’s autonomy, though it surely would, but because Carley’s death was a part of Carley’s life, and therefore my mother’s, mine. To excise that cataclysmic memory would be to erase Carley altogether — a violence that eclipses autonomy with vacancy. How do you tip-toe back from a stop that has no sense, no date? How, from that empty lot, do you go about retrieving all the things? In part of every other phone call, I remind my mother to eat right and to exercise. She jokes that, for God’s sake, she’s nearing 91, and that we must all lose our parents someday. I cannot breathe. She hears me trying. She says she knows I have suffered. I blanche. I think the aloneness of loss is the thing we all have so much in common these days.

I hear Carley on a phone call from Oregon, 2015, telling me she’s moving out of grandma’s, and in with her new “gal-pal” buddy, who got her a job on a farm. Carley is learning to drive a tractor, a big one, she says. She can sit inside, in air-conditioning, motoring across corn fields. “It has all the things, Mama,” she tells me. I tell my mother this story, and it is a tiny bit new to her each time. I’m putting it back into the treasure chest, putting it back with all the things.

8.28.22: New Year’s on the Ganges

December 31st, 2009. Kolkata, India — The River Ganges. It is New Year’s Eve. Carley and I are the luckiest girls alive. In a few minutes fireworks will light up this river of life, and here we are — on a flat boat, idling on the water, waving to people on the shoreline, making room for more passengers, soaking in the smells of thick coffee, street dogs, naan, and puri, and diesel wafting over the square bow. The flat boat has seen many seasons of repaint and repair. We joke about its seaworthiness, and Carley says we can use her giant handbag as a life-raft — just in case. But all is well for the boat, and only thing night can be on this New Year’s Eve is a canvas for explosions of glitter, smudging the Kolkata sky with fading sprays of Geranium and emerald, electric blues and marigolds.

I still have that big brown handbag. Neatly packed away with her necklace, with her important things. It’s funny. You cling to these things as if there’s some semblance, a signature of the people who took them out of drawers, put them on, carted them around, stuffed things in them, got them dirty, broke them, fixed them. Some things are more than things; they’re moments, echoes of a life as particular as it is irrecoverable. Now and again, I take that big brown bag out of the box of bags and sweaters, hair clips and flip-flops, and wait for a voice I know I will not hear. I close my eyes, and listen. Sometimes I pretend to hear it. I can still conjure up that cadence, the lilt and pitch. I can still feel the way she walks and sits, crossing her legs, looking to see where I am. And I think, “I am right here,” though I want to say, “Remember that New Year’s on the Ganges? Does it get any better? Could it have been any more awesome?” But, of course, it could be.

Happy birthday my precious girl. I miss you. I love you, Carlita Bonita.

To the moon and back.

What to keep

Well-intentioned folks, folks who love me, tell me to only think of the good things, the happy things, not all the things. Definitely, not all the things. But memory should not, I think, be left to caricature.

Carley Aurora Lee-Lampshire. This is my daughter. I can no more write about her in past tense than I can tell her story as any other than my own. As any other than a singularity that struggles to capture not a sentiment, not a therapy, not a comfort, but a thing more precious, sometimes fleeting, sometimes inexorable: truth. Or, her. I shall write more.