Protected: Dan and the 9 of Swords
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Category Archives: Grief
Four months today
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.
An unguarded moment
I continue to feel lost, not just in the miasma of sadness, but more generally. What am I meant to be doing? I have no fucking clue.
The ongoing national and international crises don’t help. Nor does the epic heat which communicates to every cell in my body that the summers I once knew are gone forever.
We will be having a service for Danny —probably in September. With that in mind, I accessed my old laptop and started collating pictures of him — like the one above.
This morning my writing spit out a surprising fact: I am terrified of all the ways that I will forget him.
Bodies and minds
I just had the worst massage I’ve ever paid money for. This guy used the same somewhat frenetic sweeping gesture on my back, over and over and over. He’d insert a little neck action or a quick rub of my arms and then return to sweeping, sweeping my back. Big circles. Nothing along the spine. No delicious pressure in the lumbar region. Not really relaxing.
And then there was how he sometimes used hot oil, which eventually felt good but was at first too hot and that of course made me tense up every time he went for more oil. At the end, he used a rough, hot towel to wipe my skin, which I actually liked but again it was initially too hot. WTF?
My thoughts didn’t help. I kept hearing in my head: I have a body and Danny does not. I have a body and Danny does not. Over and over the thought went through my mind like the masseuse’s ineffective and boring back sweeps. I have a body and Danny does not. At one point, I wondered about the Reiki session I’d set up for Danny the week before he died. Did he relax? Did she touch him?
On the table today I found it a little hard to breathe because the face hole was lined with a cloth that shrank the opening. My mind wandered. What if my masseuse was sloppy and inattentive because he was attuned to the ether? Any minute, he might ask, “Who’s Danny?” And then he’d tell me my son was near.
Ha! Such are the disordered experiences of bereavement, I guess.
I slept like shit last night. Apparently all I had to do was publicize my gratitude for decent sleep to bollocks things up. I was busy, busy, busy telling myself that I’d out and out failed at creating a family, because, well, look!
Ken woke up long enough to tell me that wasn’t true but I stuck with it as if a self-trouncing was the commandment of the wee hours.
Eventually in that wounding perseveration, I remembered Danny’s despair. Suddenly compassion entered the bedroom and bloomed in my chest. This wasn’t about me at all. Danny had not been able to handle how fully life had disappointed him. My poor sweet child could see no path forward. He was sick of trying.
Last night I attended some Dem-blue organization’s zoom call because Jamie Raskin was slated to appear. I admire him deeply, but I’ll freely admit that I showed up at least in part because Raskin also lost a son to suicide. His 25 year-old Tommy left behind a note that said: “Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”
Danny quoted Stephen King: “Monsters are real, ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
Because I don’t want to end with such darkness, I’ll leave you with a saying of Roberto Frega that Raskin quoted last night: “The solution to the ills of Democracy is more democracy.”
So LFG Maine. A new candidate — now.
Chewing grey
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, that guy, 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 going 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 that poem-reciting grandmother of mine, 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.