Day 112 without Danny. July 5. This was written on Tuesday in my writing workshop (June 30, 2026).
I’m chewing grey and it tastes like shit or rather, it tastes like nothing at all with a mouth-feel of wet cardboard.
Where is that online-photo of a Black girl dressed for prom in a chartreuse gown? I’d like to nibble that hem and restore myself. Audrey came by, as people of character do, with calla lilies the color of dried blood.
The air around those proud upstanding blooms quivers with grief and we all know why.
Three days ago my temple kept jangling with pain – sudden and sharp. “Inexplicable” is a word I use too much and it was that, the pain — until I remembered, remembered that the right temple is where Danny held the gun and pulled the trigger. Funny, I don’t hear the sound. “A 9 mm,” one of the sheriff staff at the site announced, weirdly with a kind of proud, know-it-all tone. Like, of course it was a 9 mm. Maybe to you, Shortie (and yes, I get to call all manner of people short and you don’t need to say anything about that) — It may have confirmed your map of reality, Shortie, but it’s nothing but news to me. He was grey, striped with a sick yellow, probably due to move on to brighter and cheerier colors but not yet. Maybe attending too many scenes of violent demise stripes an aura with sickly yellow.
I’m due for a purge, a cleanse. Can’t I be purple for a change? You know, royal, at peace? Instead, I’m jangling through my days like an octopus, indigo one minute, heavenly green the next, hiding among the rocks except I am (or feel anyway) so very conspicuous in my grief.
Danny was a dull brown at the end, wanting, I suppose to return to the earth. Brown is underrated as a color, don’t you think? Our living room is taupe, a custom blend based on a Martha Stewart interior we saw once. Audrey’s very classy handbag matched our walls so closely it warranted comment. She wore white. Elegant, as usual. I also wore white, with pale blue pants, but somehow I looked like a refugee.
Speaking of brown, there are worse colors to be – acid orange, for instance. Putrefying, ghastly ghost white for another. Face and hair of a monster, I don’t need to tell you.
We all make accommodations to the horrors around us. My sleep runs gold, though. I’m not sure what I did to deserve that, but I’m oh, so grateful. It would be hard, hard, hard to walk around a jagged red-striped no-nonsense black if I was also exhausted. Of course, I AM exhausted but that’s the grief speaking, or so they all say. Grief lives in your body. No shit, Sherlock. You had to form a platform and monetize it to share that? Of course, I’m not paying, taking the free stuff only. I pay for Marc Elias and Sherrilyn Ifill and that should give you a hint as to where my priorities lie.
Audrey didn’t know I had finished and published my novel. We both raised two boys. My older and her younger have been fast friends since kindergarten. I gave her a copy. I hope she knows the dedication includes her. To the American enslaved and their descendants with gratitude. I was hoping to hear that her younger son was planning a wedding because that might mean my only surviving son would come East for a few days. She shrugged and laughed. “I don’t know!” A point of commonality – the vague, unknowable plans and inner workings of our sons. It’s a theme: what I could’ve known but didn’t know, what perhaps I should’ve known and didn’t know, and all the things I could not in a million years have known.
If her son did have a wedding, would his bride wear white? White chomps down on landscapes with a voracious purity, by the way. No matter what it devours, it remains white. That is its power. Its majesty. Danny wore green Converse high tops the day he died and that’s all I’ll say about that. Green eyes are a mutation, did you know? I can relate to being a mutant more than I can relate to being a daughter descended from a long line of Irish women. Why is that?
I’m worried that if I perform an Ancestor exercise, nothing will be given me. I’ll leave with empty hands and a puzzled heart. Don’t I deserve gifts from the Ancestors? Nana Jacques could recite poetry, as one can if an Irish immigrant, though truth be told it’s not entirely clear if she was born in County Cork or here in Brooklyn. That uncertainty itself speaks to an ancestral knack for storytelling and feels more apt perhaps than knowing a clear geographical starting point. Who knows where my other grandmother was born. Eastern Pennsylvania? I know so little. So very little. She ended up in Queens, though, that I do know.
The not knowing is a vibrating pink. A pink that invites the imagination to start swinging other colors at the walls. Danny was named after Nana Jacques, nee Healey. Daniel Healey Potochnik. Cary was named after one of his grandmothers – Carolyn. No Williams or Franks in our line, although Cary’s middle name is Francis. His father’s middle name is Francis. My paternal grandfather was Francis and my husband’s Dad was Frank. But “Cary Francis” ? – Really, Mom? I have to put a ‘mister’ on my resume. I suppose these days he could simply include his pronouns. She/her is yellow, by the way, and not pink.
A Grief Companion’s favorite color is purple she tells me after I say I want to send her a gift. Do I have any little quilts featuring purple or will I have to start from scratch? I wish starting from scratch offered a more powerful new beginning than merely rifling through fabric bins and sitting down to sew. What is Tuesday? Coral, I guess. It’s a coral day that tastes like ash.
€€€ many collages featured here were made quite a while ago — 2012, 2019. Many collages are made with one or the other of my boys in mind. The ones shown here were referencing Danny. Top photo: one layer is Assisi. Neon signs: from a fairly recent exhibit at Boston’s MFA.
I wrote in my glossay a while ago, color is a feeling, and this post is so much a confirmation of that.
Yes. And it can be personal, idiosyncratic. Also its own entire vocabulary. Documenting a personal vocabulary is something you’ve been doing for a very long while now.
It really helps me find myself.
And by sharing, it helps others as well.
I am oddly happy when I notice a fabric I own in one of your collages… today- TWO. wow. and I think- I should gather some cloth and sew….but I can’t…still I can’t…..I wonder if it’s a permanent thing….and time to get rid of the tubs full of cloth……I am 79 and no Grandma Moses.
I wonder if collage or drawing or watercolor would be more readily picked up. Fabric requires lots of supplies and makes a mess.
Especially at the beginning the landscape of grief is gray; all the other colors seem like imposters.
Well said. Food goes kinda grey too
This post… love to you. And love for brown- the comfort and earthiness of it. Yesterday, sorting the mess of fabric here. Three boxes of blue, one each of brown, green, and white, and only one to hold all of the yellow, red, pink, and purple together. Going back to read this again…
Thanks Hazel. I didn’t spell it out, but I meant my appreciation for brown to include the brown skin of refugees too — the Haitians and Syrians now subject to deportation very much on my mind.
So on the day that Rich died, I was wearing one of my light apple green shirts and black leggings. I so often wear green but lately my color palette has turned to black and I feel as if my Spanish female ancestors, my Curandera grandmothers, have put a hex on me, insisting that I wear black, the traditional widow’s garb…but I’ve getting to the point that I have had enough of this color. I am starting to break away, although as I write this, I am again in those black leggings, wearing a black t-shirt that I borrowed from my daughter Shelley. But the letters on the shirt are colorful, light blue, red, green and white. The t-shirt says, PBS, Public Broadcasting Service. Tomorrow when my family is here, we are taking my grand kids, Rowena and Spencer, to the VA to meet the people who cared for Rich when he was in Hospice. I’ve already picked out what I will wear and it will not be black. Olive green slacks and an Aloha shirt with coral, olive green, white, taupe and a bit of brown. This particular Aloha shirt, is mine, not Rich’s and is one of my favorites. When we lived in Maui, I often went to to the kids section and bought a boys large Aloha shirt. They always fit and were cheaper than women’s shirts. I like the grounding colors in this shirt and in time, I will wear more of these colors as a way of healing myself.
The colors of that Hawaiian shirt sound healing. And the garment also honors Rich, as you have said. I can’t see you wearing black for long. Sometimes I wish the old conventions held, though, I must say. A black armband to signal to strangers: I am grief-stricken.
Like on the flight home. I was seated next to a mother/daughter duo. The girl was two and active like a volcano. Like Danny was, really. So I knew how much work that mother was doing to keep that child entertained, distracted, and engaged. It was a marvel, really. But about four hours in, the girl was seated in her mother’s lap directly next to me and opening the food tray and then slamming it shut with her foot. Over and over and over. I finally said, “that’s actually bugging me.” The mother stopped her daughter but defensively pointed out that she was two, did I not get it? I wanted to say, look if one behavior in a six hour flight of nonstop activity gets under my skin, I’m going to accord myself a little grace because I just lost my son — a boy who was as active as your daughter, BTW, so I appreciate how hard you’re working over there.” I said nothing. But a black armband? Would it have stood in for some of that?
Yes it would have because a black armband is a universal symbol and out of respect, maybe the hard working Mom, would have quieted her daughter, before it got too much.
I too had an incident the other day but I said something and in the end, it bothered me. The other day, I went to the post office wearing black jeans and an embroidered black shirt, the stitching on the shirt, subdued in color.. A man, arriving at the same time as I did, looked at me and said, “You look like a CA beatnik teacher!” Oh hell, I thought, a maga moron… I looked him up and down and snapped, “I wear black because I am a new widow.” He turned red and apologized. Since I was all in black, I’m not sure wearing an armband would have been noticed . I have to admit that I did feel a twinge of being an ass in my response, when I got to my car but the anger of grief, sometimes, just grabs hold of you.
I wouldn’t give your widow-response another worried thought.
A black armband would be nice .. it is so tiring .. having to explain the what and why of things we do and say. My twin grandsons were born with Asperger‘s so often when we would be out and about with them they could and would have some serious meltdowns … and oh my god did we get the looks. I remember wishing we could put something like armbands on them so people could show a bit more kindness. I had a children’s book years back when my girls were little that had a different color for all their different moods. I can’t remember the name of it but I did love it.
People can be so unkind in public spaces. I’m sure this woman has gotten push back because the level of activity was so extreme. The sad thing is I really got it.
(((Dee)))~ So much to digest in regards to color here. I love browns, blues, greens the most. Wondering what that says? Always double think about using white in the traditional meanings now…white is pure? Mmmm? What if black or brown was purity and white something else? What if the moon was magenta?
I totally understand your wonderings about the armband. What if the world wore t-shirts or round pins, which shared the internal a bit? Would it help or invite too much in that is not helpful? Would it make the world kinder?
I’m just rambling now.
Very nice to see past…AND your current collage. You always say so much through your collage work.
xo
There was a really nice ad circulating for June that showed how reassuring it was for the LBGTQ community to see a rainbow pin or lanyard or something like a rainbow watch band…