Author, Poet, Speaker, Book Coach, Editor
I am delighted to announce that Print: A Bookstore in Portland, Maine will host the release party for Now You See the Sky, which will launch Gracie Belle, a new Ann Hood imprint that will focus on grief and loss, on November 7th at 7 p.m.
Please come celebrate with me! Bring a friend. If you’d like to pre-order your copy of Now You See the Sky , you can do so here and choose to pick it up the night of the event.
I hope to see you there!
We don’t need the four-bedroom house we’ve lived in for the past six years. My eldest son is living abroad. That leaves me and his sixteen-year-old brother at home. Time to downsize, simplify.
But it doesn’t make sense to move. It would be cheaper to stay in our home with its high-ceilings, sunny rooms and neighbors we love. Our new place has no yard or balcony and overlooks a parking lot. Moving is a hassle. We have housemates who are quiet and ask me how I’m doing and wash their dishes and a landlord who responds within minutes to any request. But something in my gut, as soon as Tahn suggested moving to a small apartment, said yes. Something told me it’s time to move and to move on. Something told me it’s time to get rid of all the stuff that holds me down.
Since making the decision, I’ve become more and more intrigued by the prospect of decreasing the weight of my earthly possessions. An image keeps coming to me, not unlike a woman in childbirth: my body, belly-up, legs bent, poised to gather all the muscular momentum I can to shove the block of my old life over the edge of a cliff and watch it sail into the depths below. I like this image. Never in my life have I felt so ready to let go of my earlier life, so interested by the prospect of now.
Lately I have gone through closets and drawers and rooms and filled bag after bag to take to Goodwill. Every Friday I have rolled a huge recycling container down to the curb filled completely with papers. Each time I move into the rest of my day, I feel lighter, happier, even physically larger. My story of my son’s birth, illness and death, has finally been written and gone to print. I think this has a lot to do with this feeling of readiness to discard.
One July morning, crouched in the attic, breathing scent of sunburned wood and dry paper, I was peering into boxes of clothes, children’s artwork, journals, old datebooks. I came to a cardboard box, smaller than the rest. When I pulled back the four interlocking flaps on top, I found letters from my ex-husband, framed photos of the two of us when we were first together, first in love, twenty-eight years ago. They are beautiful, these images and words representing something as inimitable yet common as new love. I looked at each one without lingering over any and returned them to the box. When my newly ex-husband moved away after the divorce, he left a collection of boxes in one corner of the attic, fitted neatly together and covered by the blue tarp we always took camping. I put the small box of letters and pictures on top of the tarp. Not quite ready to throw all that evidence of love in the trash, I thought I’d give him the option. Let it be his problem, I thought. My addition dented the flat center covering his belongings like the puddles of rain that gathered there and threatened to spill onto our young family’s busy picnics in the woods.
Opening the next unmarked box revealed the corner of a quilt covered with colorful teddy bears smiling up at me, a gift the Cancer Care Alliance gave five-year-old Chan when we first checked into the hospital. So many hours he’d spent lying on this when he was sick. Its happy faces, I thought then, might help diminish his pain, my fear, so I lay it on my lap, the floor, his bed. I remembered, but this time I didn’t feel the tug of pain and tenderness I had grown used to after his death. Instead I thought, I don’t need this.
I pulled up the quilt and found the pair of scuffed black cowboy boots, small and sturdy, his dad had bought for him when he was only four. This was before we knew he was sick, when the cancer was still silent, growing. I remember when he and his big brother came bursting into our basement apartment that day, so excited to show me their new identical pairs of boots. I was tight-lipped and quiet for days, angry that their dad had bought something so decadent when we barely had rent money. But Chan loved those boots and wore them on city strolls in Seattle and jungle hikes in Thailand.
Next to the boots lay the little high-tops he’d worn as a toddler, bright blocks of primary colors and Velcro straps. Without hardening my heart, without the familiar forced numbing that had seen me through so many hard times when I didn’t want to cry in the years since his death, I packed the boots and shoes and blanket back into the box and set it beside the box of love-letters on the blue surface. I don’t need those anymore. Everything I needed from Chan’s life is in the book, were the words that came to me. Where was the familiar numbness, the distancing from my heart I’d had to do so often before?
Now that I know I will soon hold the book in my hands, now that I know Chan’s story will be out in the world, I am ready to let go of these bits of evidence of his life that, until now, I held so tight. I don’t need these souvenirs anymore because his life will be between the covers of the book. I know what happened. I told what happened. That’s all I needed. I’ve shared Chan with anyone who wants to know him. Some of my images of him will be out there, floating in the invisible but very real dimension of the collective mind of those who read the story. That is all I need. I’ve written him down. He’s not gone. Now my boy is back in this world. And I can move on.
I cannot stop thinking about the families at our southern borders. I cannot stop thinking about the children, about the parents. I tell myself not to. I tell myself the world is far too big for me to absorb all the tragedy and trauma that media-for-profit carries into my sight. I tell myself it is not natural for my heart to feel more than the grief of my own neighbors, the accidental death of Tahn’s friend at school last week, the routine instances of racism that still permeate our community. But this particular story, families being forced apart, dogs me even when I don’t turn on the news, don’t click deeper into the details on my screen. It hits too close to home.
It is devastating when your child is taken from you by some unavoidable act of nature, an illness, an accident. But when it is because of a governmental policy, some act of insanity that is dressed in logic and law, it must be even more unbearable. Our southern neighbors come to our border because they want safety and education for their children. They want their children’s suffering to end, so they make the immense emotional and physical sacrifice of leaving their homes and families and friends to seek a better life. Yet when they arrive, the unthinkable occurs: their children are taken from them.
For me, the pain of losing my son was only surpassed by seeing his brother’s sadness and not being able to fix it. The parents whose children were taken from them by our border keepers can not only not fix their children’s pain, they cannot even hold them in their arms to listen and soothe and murmur tender words. They know their children are tormented by terror and confusion, yet they cannot even speak to them on the phone to reassure them. They don’t know where their children are. There is no guarantee that they will ever see their children again.
Children in cages. The image brings back my worst childhood fear, the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the character who stole children from their parents and locked them in cages. Now the official keepers of the law, those who are supposed to keep us safe, have taken on this sinister role. And I wonder, even as this barbaric policy is being reversed thanks to international and domestic outcry, what has allowed people to lose touch with their hearts? What has allowed detention center guards to follow orders not to let children touch each other, to comfort each other? What has driven people so far from the natural state of protecting children? These are the questions we must answer. These are the wounds that must be tended after the families are reunited and this shameful moment in our history is past. It is the broken hearts of our own citizens, of those that supported and enacted this policy, that need mending. How can we turn to our own people, so hurt that they find something to fear in people seeking shelter and safety, and heal what blinds them to their own sense of community, of belonging in the world?
In my country on our birthdays, we receive presents from the people we love. In the country where my son was born they celebrate birthdays in a different way. His cousins and grandmother and neighbors take food to the temple to offer to the monks so that the people they love who have died will be able to enjoy it in their own realm.
I never know what to do on Chan’s birthday.
Twenty years ago today, he was born at home in our bed. He was so loved. And then, when he was six and a half, when he was the center of our family, when we were trying with everything we had to make him well, to keep him with us, to cure him of the disease inside his bones that was spreading through his body, he died.
That was a long time ago. I was still a young mother, thirty-seven. Some people would say “a part of me died then too,” but I won’t say that. Instead, I will say a part of me was born. The part of me that had to learn to integrate grief into the life of our family, that part of me that learned that love and pain are inextricable.
I only survived the pain because I somehow knew I had to feel it, not push it down. Of course, I pushed it down most of the time. But each day, when I could not smile at my children, or each night, when I could not sleep, I walked myself away from them or my warm bed and stood on the earth under the sky and let myself fall into the pain. Just for a minute at first, then more, letting myself miss my boy so much I could hardly breathe between sobs. I walked into the heart of loss and stayed there while a little of the sadness burned away each time.
Today I think about his birthday. He would be twenty today. But I don’t think about him big. I only think about him small, forever six in my mind. I wonder, as I do each year, how to mark the day he arrived in our lives. Now I am so far from that pain. I have sobbed and raged and written his story almost all the way out of my heart and mind and body.
And now I am giving it away. I am giving the story of his struggle to the world for his birthday. Yesterday the book went to print. Everything is finished. Now You See the Sky, the story I have wanted to tell for over a decade, is going to be released to the world in a few months.
When it comes out, I will travel, talking, reading about his life with us, about his death. I will meet other mothers who are grieving, and I will try to offer them a hand on the climb out of the pit of their desolation. I will give Chan’s story to them as they begin to open to their own stories of loss. Rather than taking food to the monks for our children to eat, maybe we will feed the ones we love who have died in a different way. Maybe in that other realm where our children play, they will feast on our offerings of emotional expression and story and connection and determination to live through hard loss. This vision is how I will celebrate my son’s birthday.
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
How honored I was to be invited to present at this event. We are fortunate to have Chaplaincy Institute of Maine in our midst. I loved seeing this compassionate and connected group of people dive in deep to do the work of compassionate listening to the self in order to be more present for others.
Catharine H. Murray 