My first fall without you since you were born thirty years ago.
The crickets sing
and the breeze makes the down-hanging maple branches sway.
The light is fading. Fall comes. Fall comes and you will not be in it.
I sweep the patio, remembering the sound of your voice. A bird zooms
past within inches of my head, an energetic thrumming.
Was that you?
What do you do when time behaves like a rascal, defiant and disobedient? What day is it? What month? How long has Danny been dead?
Time always slips around some, but in acute grief it stretches and compresses like an unruly adversary — another aspect of loss.
Today is the four-month anniversary of Danny’s death. Ken and I find ourselves flummoxed. We seesaw from wondering how it can be only four months to wondering how it’s already been a quarter of a year.
I didn’t think this was a significant anniversary, but the amount of weeping I’ve done today tells a different story.
Last night, I tossed and turned and dreamt about Mick Jagger. Nonsense, really. I was in the kitchen and something frustrated me and I pushed some objects violently aside. Mick Jagger said, “You’ll never be president.”
Why would I want to be president and why is Mick Jagger in my kitchen, judging me?
We saw him in the stands of the England/Argentina game, of course.
I don’t know enough about soccer to have an opinion, but boy are people mad on Threads. Many think that Argentina was afforded every advantage in ways both obvious and unfair. I don’t know. I just know that when the games end, there will be a space that needs filling.
Hand-wringing returned. Yesterday I kept imagining calling 911 that final night. I hear myself whispering that they shouldn’t use their siren and that they should approach the apartment quietly. And then I imagine announcing to a furious Danny that I couldn’t let him throw his life away.
You don’t have to chime in about culpability or whether such an intervention would’ve worked, even for the short term.
I know. I know. I think I know?
Last week, I met with a friend whose child has made more than five attempts on their life. This mother, my friend, shared that both times they institutionalized her daughter, it made things worse.
There’s so much suffering in the world.
The rabbits eat at a furious clip this summer. It’s hard to watch my ferns drying up in the heat and the hosta being devoured by those cute little fuckers. More death.
Our corrupt dipshit of a president plans to address the nation tonight. I’ll admit to being on edge, even though sane commentators say, Calm down. The federal government doesn’t control elections. He can say whatever he wants and it doesn’t mean he has the power to do what he says.
There are many things that I wish I believed.
Meanwhile, the upside of this diarrhea lettuce outbreak is that we have twice recently shopped for local produce.
I got some gorgeous onions that the bagger said you could bite right into they’re so sweet. And look at these beauties below!
For dinner, we’re gonna have an onion, goat cheese, burrata, ham, and asparagus tart.
Yum. Can’t wait.
As usual, after about ten days of wall-to-wall TV programming that I have no role in selecting and the tricky dance of determining a meal that my brother will actually eat (and failing half the time) plus my own inability to read while here, start to get to me.
Don’t get me wrong, it was cool to watch the final two Knicks’ games and the World Cup is kind of engaging, but?
A catastrophic fire at a large cold storage facility about six miles south of here continues. It looked like it had been put out after two days, but then the fire reignited.
Because it’s a cold storage facility, it is piped with ammonia and one of those pipes leaked. The contents of the facility are now also of concern. Most of it is meat.
The city’s handing out masks and air purifiers but also running out of them.
The dog panicked the first day — we think because of the chemical smell to the cloud (which we could see from the front deck). Now the air merely smells of fire.
June gloom. It’s a thing — often caused by “the marine layer.” For some reason the term amuses Ken and me and we walk window to window, announcing, “Oh look! It’s the marine layer.” At least we’re past stumbling over the California highway naming convention: “the 110,” “the 5.” We’re perhaps a little too satisfied by this.
The fog usually clears by noon. Today the smell of fire and ash spices the marine layer. Maybe that’s now also an LA thing?
Fortunately I can manage to quilt while here.
Don’t know what this is. It started as a central heart with a few smaller hearts to the bottom left — mostly blue with a yellow border. I added a moon and then orange around the heart. I’ve been filling in with some of the flimsy cloth I brought along with me — many are scraps cut from garments purchased in Longmont. That source occupies me some as I stitch.
It’s weird to spend so much time on a piece that is chaotic and unpleasing and that doesn’t really show any signs of future resolution.
But maybe that’s apt: chaotic, unpleasing, with no resolution in sight. Of course I’m not talking about quilting.
Context: Written 6/11/26 the day after we arrived in Los Angeles. In December of last year, we flew Danny out and met at LAX and spent many days together at my brother’s.
Prompt: “It was supposed to be fun…”
Retirement was supposed to be fun, or at least fun–adjacent. Relaxing, self-paced, marked only by travel complications and joint pain.
Not this.
It was supposed to be a time to clean out attic and garage, tend the garden, meet up with friends for a matinee.
Not this.
This time was supposed to be anticipatory in two directions — death, yes death, ahead on one side, an unavoidable tally of years but birth on the other, grandchildren, babies coming into the world.
Not this.
We flew over Colorado and I cried. We flew over the Nevada desert and I looked out the window wondering if he’d looked at the same on his last flight west. (His last flight west).
We landed at LAX. I held back tears at baggage claim because the last time I waited for a bag, we were also waiting for Danny’s flight to land. I cried on the way to the Uber pick up area — just folded like a hinge, put my head on my bag near the handle, and cried. Ken didn’t notice. He was so intent on getting to the pick up area which is, I swear, a mile from the terminal.
Later, we picked up Danny’s car from his brother’s and I cried. I sat on the seat where we’d found the box of bullets, an impossible recollection. I looked at the dusty dashboard and asserted, “Danny wouldn’t have let his car get this dirty.” We agreed on that point.
Now, the rejiggering retrospective includes highlights of a long and slow retreat. Did we even talk in the backyard that time, I wonder? Did we talk during that meal or that walk? My memory is poor, but my son’s silences grew to be pretty constant, epic even.
I write letters to Danny almost every day now. Yesterday I asked, “What happened to that joyfully kinetic, friend-loving guy?” Always there’d been fear and panic, doubt and worry, but always that negativity had been braided with the antics and cheer of an outgoing affectionate imp. Where did he go?
And now I recall a visit ago, let’s call it a penultimate visit (a penultimate visit), asking this very question “You’re so tamped down, Danny. Where did that more cheerful guy go?”
There was no answer. He had no answer.
The “what-if’s” take a break for a week and then storm back with a fury.
What if early on I pulled him out of the public schools? Or what if later on, I’d temporarily moved to Boulder to arrange proper psychiatric care? What else did I have to do?
All the interventions were so incremental, band-aids or suggestions of help, not lasting, meaningful help. Why didn’t I treat the situation years ago as a full-blown life or death crisis, which it was. It always was, as it turns out, a life or death crisis.
Reminiscing was supposed to be, if not fun then at least marked by a bittersweet nostalgia – an annoying echo of a Raffi song or a shrug of a memory at being beyond tired but going to Drumlin Farm anyway.
Not this.
Every counter and table is now covered with nails pointed upward ready to wound. Every floor is puddled with black grease ready to cause a slip and a fall. Every shelf is loaded with regret. Dodging the dangers makes one tired. There are retreats, but no actual respite and if I’m to believe half of what I read, there never will be. There is no getting over this. There’s no getting around this, this loss, this grief. Ever.
Update on visit: California weather does not disappoint. Billy is doing well. Lila is fine too except for a prolonged panic attack yesterday when a neighbor’s shrill and piercing alarm went on for hours. Poor thing. We finally gave her a trazadone.
I’m so grateful that I was here in this sports-loving household the night of the Knicks game because it meant I watched every minute of it. Wow!
To just see the comeback in the final quarter would’ve meant so much less without weathering the quarters where the Knicks were losing by a lot.
Also of course we watched the first U.S. Men’s soccer game which as it turns out was played here in LA. Also a gratifying win.
Today? Cary and his girlfriend visit. I’ve already made cold cucumber soup.
And perhaps, a dip in the pool!
Lately all I say about my cloth creations is: it’s finished, it’s almost finished, this one’s not been finished for a long time.
Maybe I’ve become vacuous. Maybe thoughts about what I’m making aren’t cohering right now.
The house as symbol of home has endured for me. Home as sanctuary, home as placemarker, home as stand-in for the self.
Let the cloth do the talking is certainly one way to go.
What I will say about this little piece is that I kept working on it long after I might have considered it done in the past. You could say: I fussed.
I kept adding to rooflines on the big houses and kept finding more places to add a roof in the woven foreground.
Unlike business as usual, I wouldn’t quit quilting as long as even the slightest bulge was in evidence.
I might be in less of a hurry. My standards may have shifted slightly. I don’t know. I certainly don’t think of my home as a sanctuary right now, so maybe straightening rooflines and quilting a moon to within an inch of its life gave me something to do other than cry.
We went to three performances in our town’s Porchfest yesterday. The heat stifled and against all reason most songs made me think of Danny. But at least we got out and connected with friends and family.
At 12:18 last night I realized, outside of getting choked up talking to another mom who lost a son to suicide, I did not cry yesterday. Yesterday, then, was the first day since March 16 that there were no tears.
I’m not sure that’s to be celebrated.
P.S. I included pieces of both of these cutter-garments and one other that I bought in Longmont.
P.P.S. The quilt includes a Deb Lacativa scrap (house on right) as well as pieces of six other garments, including one I purchased in Denver a few years back and also including a rectangle from an old pair of boxers of Danny’s (the green plaid under the black window).
Andrea Gibson (deceased) and Megan Falley.