Category Archives: Grief

I feed the birds

I feed the birds
I walk in the rain
I Windex the glass
I forget my toast in the toaster
I get dressed
I wear a necklace with navy blue beads
I wonder where you are
I look at the scattering of dogwood blossoms on the ground and think of you,
dead
We walk through the playground where you went to elementary school

You were alive
My umbrella is red
My necklace is blue
My heart is broken
Cliches cluster inside my aching throat
Those dogwood flowers shone pearly white, edges tinged with pink not long ago. Not long ago you were staring at a screen, face lit up — gaming? Or maybe researching where to buy ammunition for a 9mm gun
The dogwood blossoms rot. You are ashes

Muscle, bone, skin incinerated

I cook my strawberries
I buy local lettuce
You are gone. Gone
It’s almost time for lunch
Lentils and rice
Rice already cooked, lentils in a bag.
You are well and truly gone
Not every meal has to be from scratch.

In making you, our bodies traded genetic material. Some of me was in you and some of you is still in me. How do I think about this?

We pile up stuff
We fill the trunk
We drop boxes off
The weight of our belongings. So little of it holds meaning now, if it ever did.
I need a mug, my pillows, baskets of fabric, pins and thread, fans, a mirror or two, a few favorite paintings, my electric toothbrush. Some notebooks.
How little really!

What you needed was out of reach, beyond you, or so you thought. A life rendered impossible by a failure of imagination is one way to look at it.

I wish you could have stayed. I wish you were here. I wish you could have stayed.

Feathers? A picture falling off a shelf. That one dream. It’s not enough.

I know you’re at peace. At rest. That’s something. That gives me peace too.

My thumb hurts. My eyes are tired. Another day comes to an end.

Yesterday’s collage: Fall will arrive without you

PS Readers — forgive the repetitive nature of how I am processing the loss of Danny. I give myself permission to bore you, to repeat myself, to hammer the same words home over and over as I try to make sense of what makes no sense.

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Recycling redux

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Grieving and tossing shit out keep each other good company. In this house, saturated as it is with sorrow, I’ve been surprised at how casual decluttering has become — like it’s a matter of showing up and puttering, going away for a while, returning, and chipping away some more. Order begins to show. No drama.

Sorting like this normally requires a ruthless resolve. Not long ago the stakes would have felt higher. There’d have been resistance to overcome. Now, as I’ve recently mentioned, most things don’t feel important. How could they?

And so. I cleared a small studio bookcase and a bin jam-packed with paper and notebooks.

First, I consolidated all the tags from my craft show days. Tags listing an old website or email, I recycled. Easy, peasy. And then, even though I may never use them again, I tucked the rest in boxes under my ironing cart, tidy and out of the way.

I threw out a couple of old sketchbooks. Do I hear you gasp? One was filled with kid drawings of the wild and barely-able-to-hold-a-marker phase. Lots of stickers. More critically, they weren’t signed. Not knowing who made them meant it was easy to let them go.

A sketchbook of my sister’s that had one drawing in it? Out. I have a lot of her artwork elsewhere and the remaining blank pages were ruined. I had saved a sizable folder filled with Noreen’s teaching xeroxes for a gravestone rubbing project. I kept a few pages and recycled the rest.

I ripped out page after page from some of my old craft idea notebooks. Instructions from a gel-printing class. Rudimentary cat drawings for felt toys. Very basic sketches of patchwork ideas.

Came upon a quote from The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, a series I was obsessed with in college. It was weird because just a few days ago I mentioned the books to Ken.

In other news, we went to the Farmers Market again yesterday (yeah!) where I picked up fresh corn and a beautiful head of purple cauliflower. For another veggie side, I blistered some shishito peppers and drizzled them with honey. Ken grilled chicken breasts with BBQ sauce. They were tender and tasty. We ate in front of another episode of Foyle’s War.

Today’s an unscheduled day. Days without any plans unnerve me a little right now — another symptom of grieving, I think.

Maybe I’ll type up some of the scenes I’ve written recently (or even not so recently). Or not. Lately, I can’t seem to settle.

Back to blue

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I dyed two newborn articles of clothing purple once upon a time. Afterwards, I twisted the cloth and secured the twists with rubber bands. And then abandoned them.

When cleaning out a storage area in the basement recently — there they were. They’d sat untouched for many years, maybe as much as a decade.

Sewed the cloth into a tube, scrunched into a jar, then added sewing clips

This square plexiglass resist (above) left a lot of white, so I redyed. First, then second results below.

Turns out the powder I purchased is “pre-reduced” meaning it’s synthetic. Oh well. I don’t really understand the difference. It sure smells like natural indigo. In any case, I’ve appreciated how simple the process has been.

Cleaning out the space underneath the cellar stairs is part of the impetus for dyeing here. It’s where I kept everything. Another part of the impetus is forward looking — to an indigo workshop in October. Looking back. Look forward.

Since Danny died, culling things for giveaway has changed. It’s easier somehow. Most material possessions just don’t seem to matter much anymore for one thing. Maybe they never did.

For another thing, we’re acutely aware that at our deaths only Cary will be left to deal with everything. That makes these efforts satisfying but also heartbreaking.

Grief Collages

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A few recent collages from the Grief Series, in chronological order.

“What good are cloth and pages if you’re still gone?” (That’s Tyler the cat in B&W)

Lastly, in my many boxes of older papers where I dug up some of these images, I found this picture of Danny. He’s with his cousin and looking away. He’s wearing a cast (bright green) so that would make him 14.

Pattern and Outrage : Dee Mallon

cloth, justice, writing, and food