A Preface

As much as I- a huge writing enthusiast- love to work out new ways to say things, there have certainly been many times in my life when words have failed me. At least, the kinds of words that make sense in normal human conversation. As vital as it is to reach out to others to express sentiments like “I’m sad,” what do you do when saying that doesn’t feel quite right? What do you do when you aren’t sure what words there are to be found in the chaotic maelstrom of your emotions? What do you do when you don’t know what to ask for?

To further discuss this concept, I’d like to share a personal story. Please bear with me as I do not have a talent for brevity. Plus, this is my attempt to convey a concept that is both very important to me and something that feels wildly difficult to pin down, which probably only increases the length of this. If you’re feeling up to a bit of a long hike, though, then I’d be honored to have you walk with me. 

Let me take you back.

It was late April of 2021. Things were just starting to regulate again after the extreme upheaval of Covid, and vaccinations were teetering on the cusp from being difficult to obtain to becoming more widespread. My grad school classes were still being held online while I was just wrapping up the spring semester with all its finals.

One morning, I got a phone call from my dad to let me know my grandmother was sick. Not just sick, but very sick. A just-put-on-hospice level of sick, with my mom dropping everything to fly out to South Carolina where my grandma lived in order to take care of her full time. As a (now retired) stay at home parent, my mom had the flexibility to relocate to the other side of the country for the unknown amount of time necessary to do so. “Decide on a time to fly here so you can say your last goodbyes,” I remember my dad saying to me. Ever organized and practical, but I could hear how worn thin his voice sounded. “I’ll be here until the end of the week before I have to go back home for work.” 

I remember the feeling of being stunned into stillness. My grandmother had hidden the fact she was sick in the first place, so from one moment to the next my concept of her went from “She’s doing fine,” to “She won’t be alive in six months.” Furthermore, there are a few things I knew about my mom. She’s a fierce caretaker, the kind of person that would wake me when I was sick with my next dose of medicine the second it was due alongside a cup of broth because it shouldn’t be taken on an empty stomach. She’s a worrier, too, the kind of person that when the sun sets at 5:30 in the winter months and you wanted to drive five minutes away to grab some ice cream, she’d fret over the fact that it’s already dark out, and you really shouldn’t be going anywhere when it’s dark. 

What’s more, I knew one final thing that was a nail in the coffin of my lungs. My mom was very close to her mom- my now dying grandmother. My grandparents got divorced when my mom was 7, and she grew up with her life largely revolving around just the two of them. 

Becoming a caretaker

In that moment, having just heard this news, I remember a few images flashing through my mind. My mother, with bloodshot eyes and pale skin, lying awake at night as she tried to listen for my grandmother’s footsteps ambling down the hallway. My classes were online for at least one more summer semester before the schedule was going to transition back to in-person meetings for the fall. I also thought of my partner cooped up all alone at home… but at least they wouldn’t be facing death looming like an unwelcome shadow in the doorway. 

In that moment, I knew what I needed to do. So I booked a one way ticket, packed a bag for the next four months, and set off. I was not excited for the trip. But more than anything, I was desperate for my mom to not face this alone. I was determined to be the one that showed up. 

It was late when my plane landed in South Carolina. My dad picked me up from the airport and filled me in on the whole drive- how much my mom had been crying, what the doctors had been saying, the schedule for nurse aide visits, and to do list items. It had been years since I’d been in the Carolinas of my childhood, and I remember how the towering trees outside of the car window blurred past us, startlingly green even through the navy veil of nighttime. Somewhere in the back of my mind, there was a concept that though the season outside was mismatched to my grandmother, this was the way of things. Lush growth would eventually give way to the colorscape of autumn decay, and then winter. What a shame that humans don’t die nearly so beautifully as leaves. What a shame that the seasons never prepare us for what it looks like to mourn as someone withers away in slow increments. 

Of course, being able to put these thoughts into words has come with distance, time, and the effort I’m putting in now to write down this story. At the time, there weren’t words. Only a vague sense of wistfulness, determination, and the ever-present wash of dread that pervaded the whole of that summer. At the time, I could only have called that vague concept discomfort. 

In the trenches of caretaking

Slowly, my mom and I managed to wrangle our inconsistent days into a semblance of a normal schedule. At least, it had most of the bullet points of normalcy, like a breakfast that became so rote to put together that I knew when there was just enough time while waiting on the bacon to pull my mom into a hug and rub her back while she cried. We had a master list of all the medicine bottles and when to crack open each one, organized diligently in a basket we’d carry from room to room as needed. In the evenings I’d pile pillows in the guest bedroom to try and make a desk out of my bed for classes while my mom watched old western movies with Grandma in the living room. 

There was a strange sort of irony in those moments for me that I’m still not entirely sure I could put into words. I’d just finished a crisis management class from the fall, and while my other classes didn’t feel nearly so on the nose as that, it was the semester that I took pre-practicum, which was a class all about being the final push of preparation for practicum and actually having clients sit down in front of you, trusting themselves to your care. Both my days and nights felt filled with plenty of practice. 

At the time, I swore I was doing fine. It was sad, of course, and I missed home, but that felt like a very quiet feeling in the face of the loud grief I saw all around me. Even that was interspersed with moments of camaraderie amidst that grief, like when my siblings would visit and jump with alarm every time Grandma stood up, and Mom and I would share secret little smiles about how funny it was to see people not used to what was really cause for alarm or not. I felt like a small but sturdy block that was simply doing its job, propping up the ones around me who needed it. Feeling the weight of it, but nothing more. 

Of course, I can see now in hindsight the way the stress weaseled its way into my life in lieu of having any other outlet, with a record high number of migraines manifesting, or the way that every moment of being too hot as Mom and I battled with the way my Grandma’s heart failure made her cold angered me excessively. Sometimes I wanted to tear my skin off. 

Some type of outlet was desperately needed.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I consider myself something of a writer. At that point in time, I hadn’t really written anything in ages, setting the practice far on the backburner while I spent my time on decidedly more important things. Like school, and spending my free time on hobbies that didn’t feel so creatively taxing, things that didn’t create openings for accidental vulnerability. 

The concept of “it’s too much work” had become embedded inside the practice of creating without me realizing it, and kept me turning away from something that brings me joy not in spite of its challenges, but because of them. So you can maybe imagine my surprise when the idea of writing again came up suddenly- and seemingly out of the blue, even though it was from my own mind- with one of my classmates when we were practicing intake sessions for class. 

Looking back, the way that she encouraged me to lean into it, to write as much as possible, is probably one of the most helpful things a therapist said to me that summer, even if, strictly speaking, she was only roleplaying as my therapist. I did also have an actual therapist that summer, but if I can tell you a secret, I didn’t really like her that much. But as part of our curriculum, we needed a therapist to sign off that we’d seen them for five sessions, and I wasn’t in my home state, anyway, so I wasn’t looking for a long term match. Just someone to sign off on my requirement. At the time it felt like far too much work to try and find another therapist when I didn’t really have enough reason to- after all, I was fine. I was doing just fine, even if things were bad. Best not to turn it into another stressor for my mom. On the bright side, I learned some genuinely helpful notes of things to steer away from in my own practice. 

So my classmate/therapist told me to write, and I found myself staring at a blank page on my phone’s notes app. It’s where I would usually write poetry, which at the time, I would have considered my best type of writing. I remember thinking through what I could possibly try to pen down about the reality around me. How some important images bubbled up, like the hospital bed set up in the living room where my grandma slept now, or the way I’d seen my mom’s face twist up when Grandma got fixated on wanting a keurig so that come the holidays, she could make all the seasonal flavored coffee, and how no one spoke up to say that the holidays were past the life expectancy she now had. 

The strange fear of what I might create

Lying there, I found myself thinking the strangest thing- my mom doesn’t need to hear whatever I could write on top of everything else. The thought stopped me, because it’s not like I was drafting a text or a letter. It was just a note, just a potential poem, perfectly private. I didn’t need to share it with my mom, or with anyone, for that matter. I could write it just for me. It didn’t even have to be good, it just needed to be a process that I took part in. 

In some ways, I think that was a whole new brand of terrifying, because then I’d have to try and put into words how I was feeling, and… What if it was bad? I couldn’t really afford to break down, not when my mom needed me. Or, worse, what if I wasn’t actually feeling sad at all? I’d been feeling okay so far to such a startling degree that sometimes I wondered if I should feel bad about it, if there was some level of separation from the grief that made me guilty of being uncaring and unfeeling. 

Write anyway, I urged myself. It’s just for you, the blank page beckoned. After all, what if I didn’t try something, and that absence was what would lead to a breakdown? I couldn’t really predict the outcome, so all I had to go on was that I needed something to change. So I laid there in the dark guest bedroom with its cheery yellow walls and painted flower trim, and I made myself begin. 

I wrote many things that summer, from prompts to reminiscing thoughts, several of them not even about the situation at all. At a time when I couldn’t have possibly told a story about myself in any cohesive way, I wrote poems instead, and the process felt vital in a way that sticks with me, even years later. 

The process was the part that mattered most

When I think of that summer, I think of that feeling among many particular images that stand out, like a poured out jigsaw puzzle where a few pieces are neon bright. I think of the quiet calm of birdwatching out of the kitchen window. I think of the coffee grounds we put in a bowl under my grandma’s hospital bed a few days before she died, because she was already unresponsive and her legs were starting to decay before the rest of her gave out, trying our best to mask the sour-sweet scent of rot that felt as sharp as knives. 

I think of the night death finally happened, the way my mom collapsed in the hallway and sobbed so hard that I wonder if the sound embedded itself into the foundation of the walls, like the real ghosts are the ones left alive. I think of staring at the flowers on my wall in the dark, piecing together the words I’d tap out on my phone, the way each letter felt like oxygen finally finding purchase in my blood. I remember the process making me believe I really was okay after all, even when I felt the hurt of how we had to talk my grandma down from cutting open a pillow case because her delusions convinced her she’d baked a cake inside of it. 

The process of creating something was my own way of… well, processing. And honestly, even though I am proud of some of the poems I wrote, I think they’ll always be more to me than just the product because of how much I needed the process of making them in the first place. 

So for me, what did I do when I had no words to convey what was going on in my heart? I took the time to get those feelings out in other ways. For me, incidentally, they ended up being words, but poetry can be interesting in that I could string together a bunch of images that spoke to me without necessarily having to explain them, and somehow in lining those up together, I felt like I explained it to myself anyway. 

What do you like to do to create? Are you a fellow wordsmith, or maybe a painter? A programmer, a gardener, a musician? What is the process of creating like for you, and how have you turned towards it in difficult times as a way of saying something that you otherwise couldn’t? How can you start turning towards it more? 

I’d very much love to hear your stories, and maybe even be a place where you can share those creations. In the spirit of sharing, I’ll attach the poem I wrote about that summer while I was living in it, and hopefully it will bring you some of the peace that it brought me. 

Thank you for sticking with me through this long blog post. To be honest, writing down a story about this was harder than I thought it would be, and I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if I was saying enough, or too much, or if the things I chose to include were the right things. Telling our stories can be an intense experience. I hope you know that in our work together, that is never a fact that I take for granted as you journey through telling your stories to me. 

Now, as promised, with no more stalling, here is the poem I wrote. 

1935-2021

In between the open doors

Of my grandmother’s old house,

Folded up somewhere between her hospital bed, 

And all her cherished pottery, gathering dust on the shelves,

It feels like I’m finding that I am made of porcelain, too

Fired in the kiln of long summer days, 

And the heat that pours out of the oxygen machine.

Shaped by my mother’s cheeks, as she presses her face against me

The wet spots left behind like a glaze of deep, dark blue.

The coffee of our morning routine is as bittersweet as the days that follow, 

And I could swear I’m seeing a line forming inside my mug, 

right where I like to leave space for cream. 

Like the ceramic is memorizing me.

I wonder if there are marks on me in the same way, 

Like years from now I could still find fingerprints etched against me, 

And have something else as solid as 

her name pressed into a headstone. 

I spend my time collecting tissues for everyone else,

Holding them in my hands like coal mine canaries 

When they are gone, I’ll know it’s time to go.

“Gone” seems to be the name of the season, 

A feeling as turbulent as the weather,

With rain falling outside in fitful bursts, 

Clouds gathering in shades of stay,

But the sun keeps coming back to dry it all away,

Until we are as brittle as old bones. 

As weak as my grandmother while she sags between us, our arms hoisting her up like we are borrowed legs,

Sweating, swiveling, 

Swallowing down whatever comes bubbling up our throats as we lift.

I wonder if I am as full of shards as the pot I broke on the stove, popping loudly under pressure and heat, like it couldn’t handle its purpose anymore

Sometimes I think that I am as fragile as an eggshell, giving way to sharp taps and spilling open.

Yet eggs are easy to break with a crack, but turn into something resilient and unyielding if you squeeze with your whole fist.

And maybe this is that, for me, 

Pressure from so many places, all at once, 

That I can find myself unbroken in the middle of it. 

I can bury everything I’ve lost,

Count the calluses on my fingers,

Measure the drops our eyes have spilled,

And mark the mercies I’ve built up like lines immortalizing growth spurts on a door frame.

I’m stronger now, I’m sure.

My legs have become the stretcher for a fall risk, 

My arms are respite care.

And I don’t mean to celebrate it all, like I’m a bereavement achievement

But I am a girl reforged, 

Baptized in the holy water of tear stained shoulders and spoonfuls of morphine.

Tomorrow will be a hundred degrees of encroaching change, 

But flowers are still blooming, 

And won’t they look lovely at the cemetery? 

Maybe their roots will find her hands, 

and prove, just one last time

That those old fingers can guide something beautiful

To grow.