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.
