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Linda Button| Longreads | July 4, 2023 | 15 minutes (3,167 words)
Momo
She filled our lives with good food,
chutzpah, laughter, and love.
Enh. I could sense Momo looking over my shoulder as I typed, her head wrapped in a bright coral scarf. I was relieved she had put on weight since death. The final month her skin had hung on her, a size too big. She was back to her firm, long-legged self, her dark eyes bright with interest.
“Enh?!” I said.
I like where you’re going, but the words aren’t right.
This was what we had always done for each other—poked and questioned and haggled over art. Still, I felt the pressure of the deadline. “Your husband needs this in four days. I‘ve got to get the ball rolling.”
Momo shrugged. You’re the writer.
What did she know? Inside I harbored a delicious fantasy that my words would cause the audience—Momo’s friends and sisters, her husband, Marty, and their daughter—to ooooh at how I had captured her gusto on a tombstone.
For most of my career I have written ad copy. The work suits me. Constraints. The single page of paper. Brevity. Choose as few words as possible. Let the visuals tell the story. Conjure emotion in compressed space and time. Here, then, was the perfect writing assignment for me. A three- by two-foot billboard. Thirty words, max. My business partner’s epitaph.
But unlike advertising, lofted into the airwaves to evaporate, this project would be carved into granite for eternity. I yearned to create a gravestone that would sing through the ages, that would capture the joie de vivre that was my partner. One year later, Momo’s death still had me reeling. I had worked with her for two decades. I loved her. I considered Marty, her husband of only a few years, a latecomer to the Momo party. Now, for this assignment, he was also the client. He had final say, after all: When it comes to customs of death, spouses top all others. According to Jewish tradition, the time had come to inscribe the grave marker. A literal deadline.
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Marty had procrastinated for months. So, at the request of friends, I was pitching in. The final words were due by the end of the week. Could I deliver genius in five days?
Momo was right. The copy was “enh.” I emailed the lines to Marty anyway—She filled our lives with good food, chutzpah, laughter, and love—and hoped he would embrace it.
Momo and I had run an ad agency together. She was a seize-the-day daughter of Holocaust survivors; I was bred from stoic Yankee stock. When our agency dwindled to two, we embraced our differences and renamed the business Tooth and Nail. She, the smile. Me, driving home the point. We spread out giant sheets of paper on her dining room floor for brainstorms, plotted campaigns on her sofa, pilfered images off the internet, fought, competed, stepped over each other’s words, slashed ideas, fretted over stubborn, uninspired clients, and laughed about our men.
In the early days, on train rides home from New York to Boston, Momo would find a table for four and unfurl her coat onto the adjoining seat so no one would join us, while I tucked my backpack around my shoes, not wanting to take an inch more than I had paid for. The coastline scrolled by. She counseled me on my imploding marriage; I marveled over her athletic dating. “Who should I choose?” she asked. “The heart surgeon who’s analytical, or the brain expert who’s all heart?”
“Which one brings you joy?” I knew enough to ask that question. Momo chased pleasure, splurging on business class and nice hotels. She spent far more energy on my happiness than I did. She gifted me photographs of tulips exploding in red and orange, a painting of a woman treading a gray ocean, her nose barely above the surface, as if Momo saw beauty in me but also my struggles. She extended a life raft. She cooked homemade matzoh ball soup steaming with ginger and fennel, she listened deeply, as the best therapists do. I left our conversations feeling both filled and emptied, cleansed and heard.
Finally, she chose Marty, the psychiatrist who strummed classical guitar and wrote her love letters from his neglected house near the shore.
Then, the mammogram revealed a 2.2-centimeter lump. Cue the mastectomies, chemo and radiation, wigs and thinning eyebrows. Momo rejected that as her entire story. For seven years after her diagnosis, Momo made even cancer an adventure. She wrote a blog.
Am I upset over the possibility of losing a breast? Not really. I’ve had a terrific pair for 48 years. My girls have given me and many boys great pleasure.
She treated loss as a punch line, no topic too intimate.
On Monday I took a shower and quickly realized that I won’t be scheduling any bikini waxes in the near future.
In advertising we start with the audience and consider how we want to make them feel. Who would trudge the slope to visit Momo’s gravesite each year? Her loyal circle of friends, surely. Her three older sisters, each a variation of Momo: artistic, smart, empathetic. And, of course, her 13-year-old daughter and round-shouldered Marty, his AirPods filled with classical guitar. I imagined her quiet, sarcastic daughter cresting the hill and I wanted to reward her with a smile, to feel the warmth, sechel, and humor of her mom embracing her.
Amazingly, when I look back, I did not follow my own best practices. I did no research on tombstones, threw out no wide net. I suffered from tunnel vision—exactly what I warn young writers never to do—and got stuck on a single idea. Had I bothered, I would have discovered a wide field of possibilities; it turns out that epitaphs trace the arc of history with tales of society, legacies, and stories of power and love.
From traditional Jewish blessings . . .
“May her soul be bound in the binding of life.”
and Japanese poetry . . .
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
. . . to good old sardonic American.
Here lies Butch, we planted him raw,
he was quick on the trigger, but slow on the draw.
We could have honored Momo’s philosophy, She was bubbles in the champagne of life, or captured her perseverance: Grit and Grace, or something risqué, pulled from her own blog. “I won’t be scheduling any bikini waxes in the near future.”
I could have offered Marty an array of choices, mocked up what the stone would look like, handed him a scotch, and nudged him in the right direction. Instead, I worried and clung to one idea. Grief stuffed me into a small, hardened box.
I was thinking of something more inspiring.
Marty’s response waited for me the next morning. In advertising, where writing is a team sport, my ego had long ago shrunk to a chickpea. Still. Ouch. He sent examples of quotes he considered inspiring.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” —Dr. Seuss
“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” —Abraham Lincoln
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
My stomach curdled with disappointment. I hated when clients reached for clichés. Also, I was pretty sure Old Abe never said that. Momo leaned across and squinted at the text. She turned to me with a look between constipation and impatience: What do these dead white guys have to do with a hot, middle-aged diva?
“Right?!” I nodded even though I got where Marty was coming from. When a star collapses and sucks up light and life you need big mother constellations like Abe Lincoln and Dr. Seuss on your side. Marty was crazy in love with Momo. He proposed in her throes of dying and adopted her daughter. Not so crazy.
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But he wasn’t there when Momo first brought her daughter home from China, the same year I gave birth to my youngest child. He hadn’t watched our kids grow up to be best friends. He wasn’t with us, looking down on giant sheets of paper, pulling ideas from the air, creating a company while taking turns with after-school pickup. Where was he when we got The History Channel clients snockered on vodka at a creative presentation on Russian tzars, or when Momo snored through a conference call, and we claimed it was a leaf blower?
My hand hovered over the keyboard. Momo was still making that face. I marshaled my diplomacy and shot a note back to Marty.
The Renoir quote is lovely—haven’t heard it before. How about this:
Momo
She filled our lives with chutzpah, laughter, and love.
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
Marty didn’t respond. The day ticked by.
In her last month I had wheeled Momo around the block, past her front yard where a gardener friend had fashioned a river of smooth stones. Momo did not admire the curving white through her lawn, or the blaze of yellow leaves outside her windows. She curled inward with pain. Now that it was my turn to lavish her with support and comfort, I had no words. I spoke to her as if to a child. “Isn’t that tree beautiful!”
“Take me home,” she said.
Her office had been turned into a sickroom, a large bed and TV at one end. Her sisters had arrived from Israel, Dominica, and Maine and tightened around her. They filled the kitchen with music, took turns dressing her, served up platters of hummus and opinions. They, and her other friends, somehow understood the rituals of grief, care, and mitzvah. Their religion was seeped in loss and optimism. They practiced simple, concrete gestures. But I didn’t even know what to do with my hands. I felt useless, as if I had gone from insider to outsider. I’ve been here all along, I wanted to say to them. Momo and I, we helped each other. She offered me refuge from my unraveling marriage. I gave her purpose.
The night she passed, I left my phone in the living room. When I woke, messages from her friends and sisters spilled down my screen. Voice mails. Texts. “Come to the hospital!” “Hurry!” I had slept while my friend died.
Another day, nothing.
“He hates it,” I said.
Oh, you know Marty. Momo waved her hand. He’s a BFD at the hospital. He’s probably curing ADHD and seasonal depression.
“After years of pounding me on deadlines, you’re giving him a pass?”
He’s a genius, they need more time.
Ouch, I thought. Double whammy.
The morning of the deadline, my email dinged.
This is what I woke up with at 4 AM:
Mother, wife, negotiator, artist, cook, adventurer.
Forever bold, stylish, and brave.
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
Thoughts? Marty.
Lists. The final refuge of the desperate, the last gasp of clients when they’d run out of ideas or lacked imagination. Marty had reduced Momo to a string of nouns, adjectives, and commas, as if that defined her. Plus, Wife was the second word?
Momo beamed. Stylish. Adventurer! Marty’s so good with words, isn’t he?
That’s what love does, I muttered to myself. It infuses mediocre writing with sentiment. “He left off sister. Friend!”
Momo frowned. Gotta include them. Maybe we need an extra tall slab. Fit everything in.
I pounded a response on the keyboard.
Oh, those 4am thoughts!
I would add friend, sister, businesswoman . . . and the list gets long. Maybe focus on how she made us feel? xoxo
How did Momo make me feel? She had taught me that moments live in the flickering gold light of a beech tree and a bowl of warm soup. That loss waits for all of us, so we’d better wring happiness from every second. Death had robbed me of my witness, my confidant, the most honest friend I ever had. She never lied to me about my situation. Or herself. How many lovers have you had? I had asked her when I started dating again. She looked off to the corner of the restaurant, counting. “Sixty? Eighty? I had fun.” Would I ever squeeze so much out of life? She left nothing on the table.
What did I give her? My doggedness. My drive. My craving for partnership, as if I was born incomplete. I gave her my standing in the industry. My fierce competitiveness. My soundless, grateful love.
I went to make coffee. Marty’s response waited in my inbox.
It doesn’t work to say how she made us feel. We need to convey who she was. Funny, I left off sister and friend as her middle sister thought that it would be unnecessary, but it’s a key part of who Momo was. I was hoping that negotiator and artist would cover who she was as a businessperson.
Off to the eye doctor.
Ah, he was pulling in Momo’s sisters. A classic zone defense move by the client. I poured contempt onto the page.
New glasses? Hope you’re seeing more clearly now. Give me a call . . .
What do you think, Momo? I looked around the room and discovered her missing. Marty never responded either. But a tombstone deadline does not melt away like some canceled ad campaign.
The morning of the unveiling broke crisp and bright, the kind of April day we long for after the gray length of winter. A brightly colored square, rippling in the sunlight, waited for us. Someone had swathed the tombstone in scarves. The wind lifted the corners, flirting and winking, to reveal edges of letters. What was written there? When I had asked Marty the night before at a gathering in their home, he shrugged and said, “Something like in the email.”
Momo had handpicked her site. Even the year before, as we tipped clumps of earth onto her casket, weeping, we admired the location. It faced a protected edge of the graveyard.
Now, a year later, grass had grown over the mound. The trees plumped with buds and sunlight flickered through new green leaves. The rabbi, a short, bearded man, gestured for us to draw close. Marty stood with their daughter, his arm around her. I expected Momo to leap out from behind the stone and join us.
We each read something. I had to borrow a quote that morning, too overwhelmed to think. Words. All my life I have wrestled with, debated, and polished them. But how much had they ever mattered? Momo’s sisters approached the stone and unfastened the tape that secured the scarves. My shoulders tensed and my hand squeezed a damp Kleenex in my pocket. As the coral silks pulled away, the epitaph revealed itself from the bottom up. The words were indistinct, unreadable, and I cursed the stonecutter. Then I pushed the tears from my eyes and read the final, stubborn, unfixable inscription.
Momo
Mother. Wife. Sister. Friend.
Negotiator. Artist. Cook. Adventurer.
Forever Bold, Stylish, and Brave.
“The pain passes. The Beauty remains” —Renoir.
November 4, 1958–October 25, 2013
Every word rang true, but they read like a catalog. Writing, I have realized, reflects the writer, not the subject. The tombstone embodied Marty: conflict-averse, hoping to placate everyone. The list did not add up to Momo. I had yearned for bolder art, and my failure said something about me too. I deferred to Marty instead of seizing the moment and creating art worthy of this woman, if that was even possible.
Loss had yawned over me the past year with daily reminders of my friend. The plants she had bequeathed to me, now gasping for water, hung from my ceiling; my phone became a minefield of photos and buried emails. I would rifle through contracts or sort through our old projects and feel fresh pinpricks of grief. I turned funny tales from our partnership over until they became smooth, comforting stones in my palm.
I had tried to find another business partner. I needed someone else, I knew that, to keep me from spinning tighter into self-criticism, to slow down and let my feelings catch up, to find happiness for myself, as she had taught me. I even met with a consultant who listened carefully over bad hotel coffee and said “You’re lucky if you get one or two partners like that in a lifetime. Don’t try to replace her—go out and seek many people.” So I found designers, producers, and accountants to help me run the business. I began a relationship with a kind man. Each person filled a hole in my life but, like the litany on the tombstone, couldn’t capture what I had lost. Death had rubbed its heel squarely on what vibrated and flourished between us, ending the world Momo lived in, of possibility, her quicksilver wit, the warmth that rose from her, her push to seek out new adventures.
I closed my eyes and imagined going home and calling Momo and telling her about this day, where we sang songs and prayed and grieved both privately and as a chorus. The group murmured on either side of me. The edge of a cold breeze snuck down my collar. I folded my arms and held myself tighter.
Ach!
“Momo?”
What’s with the waterworks? Life is waiting for you down the hill, my dear.
I never visit Momo’s gravesite, nor do I want to. She sits next to me when I labor over a script or edit a commercial, and even now, as I try to craft this memory of her. I did not have the right words to say to her in her final weeks. I could not conjure poetry for her at her service. My words failed me then, they fail me still, and I keep trying. I want to breathe life back into the shining energy that filled my days. I want to make Momo alive for you on this simple piece of paper.
Do words matter? I visit Momo’s blog and linger over her final post, written weeks before she died. The stamp of that last date floats farther away from me, but the words still leave fresh yearning.
Seven years of debilitating treatments, anxious scan results, and the occasional self-diagnosis. It’s a lot to go through to drop a few pounds. Seven very precious years spent with my magnificent husband, my daughter and stellar friends. Seven years going on eight years with nine years in reach and ten years hardly a stretch.
Knowing all that and still, I live like there is no tomorrow.
Linda Button is a storyteller and writer for a large non-profit. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Magazine, PBS, and elsewhere. Her memoir-in-progress, Fight Song, explores mental illness, martial arts and learning to let go, despite love.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin
Kimberly Garza grew up going to the river, which depending on the day and her family’s mood could have meant the banks of one of a few bodies of water: the Frio, the Sabinal, or the Neuces. All three rivers are in close proximity to Garza’s hometown of Uvalde, Texas:
RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.
The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.
The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”
UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.
But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.
I hope the healing is coming, too.
A woman prayed among flowers left at a memorial at the entrance to the Covenant School in Nashville.
In this interview, Amanda Petrusich talks with Nick Cave about grief, resilience, religion, music, and Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book based on his conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan. Sure, these are topics you’d expect in a Q&A with the Australian singer-songwriter, but that doesn’t make it any less rich or moving. I like their exchange about channeling spirituality or some kind of “enigmatic otherness” when making music, and dealing with loss over time, which Cave says gives us a deeper understanding of being human. His thoughts on AI, ChatGPT, and art also bring music to my ears.
Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human. A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone.
Imagine Toad of Toad Hall escapes from prison disguised not as a washerwoman but as a jazz-funk bass guitarist. Hang on. Don't. No one wants to imagine that.
I freakin love this. And it was the first thing that summon the Grief, who (it is a who, I feel), the being I call "The Inner Bodyworker" in The Stuff of Life.
So much that it's made it into my memoir with humans in it, Escape from the Morgue. I've written 55,000 words in six days!
See, if you want to cry, always use the major key like the medievals say.
By the time Barbara holds up the sign that says "MUSIC" I belong hopelessly to this video with the ocean coming out of my eyes. Erm, that's in the first frame :))))
Just to make it much "worse" listen to the albeit bad recording of Allan Holdsworth does to this when he's their guitarist for a couple of glorious years (below).
If you want to add to crying thing, just play that keyboard riff so that it's now in the major. Nice one Allan, understated Tim. Then slide it Latin-ly under the tune, a gentle caress. Really really nice one, Allan.
Which enables him and King to have the most wonderful conversation in the last chorus and a new coda...Good Grief indeed.
CBS Sunday Morning shares an unusual and heartwarming story of love lost, and found:
— Read the restLast August, Blossom the goose lost her mate, Bud. They'd lived on a pond at Riverside Cemetery in Marshalltown, Iowa. Blossom's grief was evident to the cemetery's staff, and so general manager Dorie Tammen decided to post a personal ad for Blossom.
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Maria Zorn | Longreads | March 7, 2023 | 3,373 words (12 minutes)
In middle school, I would hide behind a giant oleander bush when it was time for the bus to leave for track and field meets and then, once it left without me, I’d walk to Panda Express and eat chow mein in blissful peace. This was also my strategy for grieving you. I thought I could, like a rapacious vole, burrow myself into the branches of the quotidian and the bus of mourning would pass me by altogether.
This is not to say that I didn’t ever experience a sense of loss. It was always there, a constant drip. Sometimes I’d think about the scene Mom came upon when the locksmith finally got your apartment door open and feel as though my kneecaps were going to crumble into ash beneath me. I wondered if there were claw marks on the floor from where you tried to stay as you felt your heart stop beating, or if you slid easily away like a clump of lint and dog hair into a Roomba. In these moments I wished to be vacuumed whole.
* Name and location have been changed for privacy.
Sophie works at the post office in Saanichton, British Columbia.* She is tall and sinewy with thin, bony shoulders. Her body could be drawn using only straight lines, just like yours. Her hair is jet black and always pulled back into a low ponytail that nestles into the nape of her neck. She appears to be more at ease when she is behind the counter than when she is in front of it, exposed. Her voice is low and quiet and when she gets flustered she holds her elbows close to her rib cage and her hands near her shoulders like an adorable T. rex. Her mannerisms are what initially drew Mom to her, what first reminded her of you. But then she saw her protruding clavicle and her thick top lip and her round doe eyes and she couldn’t unsee the physical resemblance. She wants me to help her think of a way to befriend Sophie that doesn’t begin with: You remind me of my dead son and I would do anything to spend time with you. I just don’t know what to tell her.
Perhaps the better metaphor is that my grief for you stalked me like those ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man. I was chasing dots with my mouth wide open, trying to outrun you. The dots were moments I still felt some semblance of myself in a world without you in it, they were anyone and anything that could drain me of all of my energy and attention, they were being able to feel light enough to giggle, they were attempting to Irish dance while waiting for my tea kettle to whistle. The ghosts were you, at 8, declining to go on a playdate because you were afraid I wouldn’t have anyone to play with; you, at 16, threatening to hit the boy who broke my heart with your car; you, at 22, telling me we were soulmates with tears in your eyes at the Molly Wee pub; the ghosts were you, you, you, you with pastel sheets over your head, cutouts for your big Bambi eyes.
Mom gets butterflies in her stomach before she goes to the post office. She’s glad for once that she has a P.O. box, that the mail carrier doesn’t come to her mossy, rural strip of the Saanich Peninsula. She blow-dries her light blonde hair until it falls in cascading curls around her face and blinks on mascara. She pulls on her stylish brown leather boots and steals one last look at herself in the mirror. She takes a deep inhale that tickles the pain in her chest. Mom wants to be more than friends with Sophie, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. I loved you like a soulmate, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. These loves are fluid, these loves are nonbinary.
* Name has been changed for privacy.
The dots I chased were Chris, because every emotion I felt with him was neon.* We slept glued together like spider monkeys, and when I woke up before him I would be completely still and study him worshipfully — his toffee-colored skin that was softer than a kitten’s ear, his charcoal ringlets. We watched videos of Thom Yorke dancing for hours at a time, we did a special little jig when we bought a bottle of puttanesca sauce. When I was sad, he’d get out a Japanese sword that was left at the bar where he worked and throw watermelons in the air for me to slice like a fruit ninja. He could make anything fun, could make anything a game — but he was always the team captain. I was never certain whether it was our 14-year age gap or simply his personality, but he felt as much like a coach as he did a boyfriend. I thought he shut me down when I disagreed with him and I knew he blew his nose in our dirty laundry, and these things both made me furious. Two years passed and we morphed into ever uglier versions of ourselves. We yelled at each other outside of Joe’s Pizza by the Slice, he was a gargoyle and I was a swamp lizard and then we were two terribly sad people who didn’t talk anymore. For months after we broke up, I lay in bed every night, crusty with dried tears and snot, and my ribs felt loose. I imagined Chris playing Radiohead songs on them like they were piano keys while I tried and failed to fall asleep. I was convinced that if I concentrated hard enough on my heartache for him that I would not notice how hollow I felt from your goneness.
You wore six-inch platform creepers and voluptuous shaggy Mongolian lamb coats, Rick Owens pencil skirts and black leather fingerless gloves. You ordered a floor-length sheer dressing gown with sleeves trimmed in feathers. When Mom said she liked it but it looked like something one would wear over a négligée, you earnestly replied: But I don’t have a négligée yet! Before I moved to New York with you, I came to visit and had to use my tube top as a pillowcase since you owned only one. I cleaned your apartment while you scoured town for a fake ID for me, an even trade. After sweeping the 600-square-foot space I had a chinchilla-sized pile of dust and boa fragments and sequins and dirt and I felt like Cruella de Vil’s housekeeper. You made a fool of the words “feminine” and “masculine” — you were neither, you were both. You called yourself an alien frequently, and even got one tattooed on your right arm. You felt like you were so different from other humans that you were extraterrestrial. No one we knew used they/them pronouns, no one we knew used terms like “nonbinary,” like “gender-fluid.” You knew you didn’t identify with other men, but you also knew you didn’t feel like other women. I wonder if you would have felt like such an alien if you knew you didn’t have to choose. I wonder if you would have tried snorting heroin that night if you didn’t feel like such an alien.
My dots were my budding career at a tech startup that I thought was so much more impressive than it actually was. I worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. then came home, ate noodles, propped my laptop on the pudge of my lower belly, and kept working in bed until I fell asleep. I tried dating during this phase, but I got more pleasure from telling men I was busy and then later breaking things off than I did from going to dinner with them.
My eyes began to tolerate all of the computer work I was doing less and less until it felt like all that occupied my sockets were two purple bruises covered in fire ants. After trips to six different ophthalmologists, I was diagnosed with non-length dependent small fiber polyneuropathy and ocular rosacea and told that a career that involved “excessive screen time” was probably not in the cards for me. The doctor looked at me with a very serious expression that was made less serious by a small piece of avocado that clung to his mustache. I was such a people pleaser that in this moment all I could think of was making this a smooth experience for him so that he didn’t go look in the mirror after our conversation and feel like an idiot for having a dirty ’stache. This was a time in my life when if someone gave me a ride, I’d offer them a kidney. I jammed the shock and anguish I felt into the depths of my pockets alongside pennies and crescent-shaped nail fragments, I arranged my face into an awkward smile and said: No worries!
I wonder if you would have felt like such an alien if you knew you didn’t have to choose.
I quit my job and the online college courses I was taking and returned to bartending with the enthusiasm of a wet tube sock. An overly cheerful woman with a hair growing from the mole on her chin asked me to surprise her with a drink and I poured well rum and apple juice into a pint glass with no ice then charged her $13 for it. I didn’t talk to my friends who were graduating and starting careers, I stopped dating. I closed in on myself and got smaller and smaller until, like a Shrinky Dink, I could be pierced and worn on a string as a hideous pendant.
I had moved back home to Arizona after you died because I couldn’t stay in New York City without you. The ghosts were too speedy there, but the dots were too far apart in Phoenix. I needed to get out. I applied for a sales position in Denver that promised not to involve the computer, packed my belongings into my beat-up red hatchback and took myself to Colorado. Driving through mountain passes, I felt an indelible sense of hope that this change of scenery would make me better, whatever that meant.
I watched the video you recorded six months before you died yesterday, the one where you’re drinking Veuve with your friend Michelle and explaining what you want done with your ashes if anything ever happens to you. You throw your head back to cackle between your outlandish requests and I stare at your pale throat. Some ashes stored in a Ming vase, some made into diamonds, some shot out of a cannon with glitter. Mom and I looked into the cannon, but all we could find was some silly handheld thing called the “Loved One Launcher” that appeared to be used primarily at memorial services held next to creeks and swamps, judging from their marketing material. It definitely wasn’t the right fit.
We didn’t know how to “memorialize” someone who felt as essential as a limb. In our indecision, we landed on taking a trip someplace beautiful every year on the anniversary of your death. We’ve been to Cabo San Lucas, Aspen, Copenhagen, Sooke. We split a bottle of rosé and hold hands and your absence is outlined in chalk on the picnic blanket we sit on. Once, we hiked 13 miles to a beautiful alpine lake to scatter some of your ashes and I carried them on my back. I had only your remains and a bottle of wine in my pack but the straps dug into my shoulders until they were pink as salmon. We sang “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” by the Hollies and laughed and cried at the same time. When we dumped your ashes in the water they shimmered in the sun like the glitter you wore on your eyelids and cheeks during your teen raver years. I wanted so badly to look up at the sky that was the same blue as your eyes and feel unadulterated solace, but instead I felt nothing at all.
This year on May 30, I think Mom is going to take me to the post office.
My dots were jobs, jobs, new jobs every few months. I worked as a kiosk wench for HelloFresh, a sales manager for StretchLab, a preschool teacher at a country day school, a fitness instructor at Life Time, at a physical therapy clinic, at a Pilates studio. I went back to school to become an art teacher, then quit that and took a yearlong nutrition course, then decided I never actually want to talk to anyone about what they eat. I remembered once hearing the phrase “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks” and I imagined myself doing parkour off the furniture at each of my jobs, shooting noodles and marinara out of my fingertips and watching the pasta bounce off of the reformers, the little children, the clinic walls like rubber. I had eaten all of the dots in the maze and was left aimlessly bumping into its corners with a jaw ache, desperately trying to avoid a ghost pileup.
I had a dream that I was walking around a city map, but the map wasn’t made of paper — it was a black iPhone, the glass so shattered it looked like it was filled with streets and boulevards. All the roads filled with white powder until I couldn’t move my legs anymore. The phone was yours, and it sat next to a full pour of wine, murky reddish-black like blood. You died sitting up — bony ass on the floor, back against the side of your bed, pale slim fingers wrapped around your glass. How did you manage not to spill one drop? Why did you think heroin was a suitable nightcap after cocaine, Adderall, alcohol?
I remember sitting on the back porch of Mom’s house with you every night one summer, talking and smoking hookah for hours until the metal patio chairs branded the back of our sweaty legs with checkers. Even at 10 p.m. it was over 100 degrees in Phoenix. I’d feel droplets of sweat crawl from my armpits down my sides and settle into the waistband of my boxer shorts. We’d put a splash of milk in the water pipe because you were convinced that would make the smoke cloudier, more fun to blow O rings with. You confessed one of these nights to smoking black tar heroin once during your sophomore year of high school, when you were a self-proclaimed “mall goth.” I whapped you with the wooden hookah mouthpiece, hard, right in the solar plexus. I thought about the time we gobbled up so many of Dad’s prescription drugs and drank so much prosecco that we blacked out an entire journey from Amsterdam to Phoenix, including a three-hour layover that was apparently in Detroit, judging from the translucent blue lighter we bought that said Motown City and the greasy Little Caesar’s receipt that sat cross-legged in the bottom of my purse. I was not prudish about getting fucked up, but with this anecdote you crossed a threshold into territory that scared me. You took a sharp inhale and raised your dark eyebrows, fighting back a laugh. You said: Obviously that was dumb and I’ll never try it again. I made you promise with a pinkie, even though you were 19 and I was 17. Your recklessness with your life produced in me a worry that sat like a small, hard stone in my belly.
You’d hate the way dying from a heroin overdose sounds. You’d have me let everyone know that you were “trying to buy opium.” That you were supposed to go to a wedding in Greece in two months, New York Fashion Week in three. That you didn’t mean for it to happen this way.
The dots were gone, but I became so adroit at ghost evasion I no longer needed them — I was eating strawberries, oranges, bananas, cherries. I found a drug that makes my eye condition more tolerable, a job I like well enough, a dog who constantly wants to shake my hand. I found a partner with Reptar green and caramel eyes who gives me grace like a daily train ticket, who calls you Tomm, not “your brother,” whose calm demeanor lowers my blood pressure and provides a certitude that life is allowed to feel good. I thought Jack’s love was a fuzzy sweater I could don and become whole. I saw no portents of a more substantial ghost, one that could swallow me entirely. I fell into the mouth of a ghost as though it was a shoddy manhole cover; it took me by surprise and then devoured me until I was wholly in its maw and could not see a single shred of light through its incisors. My grief developed its own physical presence, its own pulse. I feared that it was going to burst through my bones like the Kool-Aid man at any moment and take me over completely. My first instinct was to wrestle it to the ground, to mash my teeth into its ears and give it a noogie, since I was always the brute of the family. I knew you’d try to reason with it, to write it a letter using your shiniest vocabulary like the ones you’d send to Mom and Dad to convince them to raise our allowance, to get a pet sugar glider, to let you get your ears pierced, to legally change the “Jr.” that follows your name to the more sophisticated and chic “II.” You’d arrange all of your best arguments like toy soldiers followed by rebuttals of anticipated counter-arguments, then sign: Please don’t be mad at me. As a card-carrying atheist I didn’t know who to write a letter to. The universe? You?
I loved you like a soulmate, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase.
My therapist recommended I try ketamine for treatment-resistant depression and I had my first session this week. I thought of you because the first time I heard the word “ketamine” was when you snorted it in ninth grade and then came out to Mom, and the first time I heard the term “treatment-resistant depression” was after I talked about you to my therapist, seven years after you died. I filled out a questionnaire that tests for suicidality and it was only then that I realized my sadness had become life-threatening. I had a primordial urge to go wherever it is that you are. I’d sign my note to Mom and Jack: Please don’t be mad at me.
The nurse anesthetist injected the drug into my shoulder and it felt like a gentle bee sting. There were colors and textures and sounds that I can’t explain, but what I remember most of all was you. Your hair was dyed platinum blonde and a thin white shirt hugged your angular frame. You were resplendent. You were laughing and reaching out for my hand, and I chased you across tiles that lit up under our feet as we stepped on them. We knew you were not alive but we also knew that you were not gone. Looking at you, for the first time in seven years, didn’t feel like gazing directly into a car’s headlights at night; you didn’t singe my delicate eyes with your brightness. You hugged me the way you always did, so tightly that your upper ribs jabbed into my torso with a titty-puncturing ferocity, like you were holding on for dear life, and I felt an ineffable sense of something inside me being cauterized. Later I’d recall a mathematical concept from high school in which two lines get very, very close together but never actually end up touching and wonder if, for me, this would be the closest I’d ever get to feeling peace about your death. As I began to regain consciousness, your face became pixelated and the crinkles around your eyes started to smoothen and fade. The first part of my body that woke up was my mouth, and I could feel my chapped lips pressing together with alacrity to form a small smile. Before you disappeared completely, you said: What if it’s all true at once? You held those words up like a trophy and I unzipped my chest and put them inside.
Maria Zorn is a writer and visual artist currently living in Denver, Colorado.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens
Seamen believe in luck, because they never know what the vast sea has in store for them, what blessings or disasters wait for them.
Few entities in the world’s literature are as written about as the sea. From the works of Homer to Robert Louis Stevenson to Annie Proulx, the mystery and might of the sea invites narratives about people with salt-hardened palms and the strange, iridescent beauty that lurks just beyond the depths of human senses. The obscurity of the sea’s downward expanse reflects the murky nature of human complexity, draws questions about what lies beneath, and pushes human beings to their physical and mental limits. Like life itself, the sea is a turbulent, fickle mistress that rewards those who learn to swim between its unstable waves. It is in these liminal crashes of seawater that Zülfü Livaneli’s novel The Fisherman and His Son homes in on the measured devastations and triumphs that come with sea life on the Aegean, bringing to earth the romanticism of Western writers who tend to forget that the sea, while a stunning component of natural aestheticism, is also a border—a border with all the complications of contemporary sociopolitical tensions.
The Fisherman and the Sea begins by inviting comparison to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, from the title to its opening with a short memoir detailing Livaneli’s intimate relationship with that novel. It was through reading Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning book that Livaneli learned about how to push the limits of human endurance on the page, and through reading the novel for a radio adaptation that he learned to write dialogue. It was Hemingway whose work Livaneli read as a child, hiding under his bed with a flashlight to escape the punishing eye of his father. But this is where Hemingway ends and Livaneli begins.
In the opening moments of the novel, when a tourist relates the plot of The Old Man and the Sea, the narrator reminds us that the fisherman of Livaneli’s novel is young and that the titular old man of Hemingway’s novel was stupid for holding onto the fish. The fisherman remarks to the tourist that he believes the massive marlin of Hemingway’s novel should have been granted the opportunity to remain free:
If that fish was so wonderful, if it struggled for its life for days, he should have cut the line and said, Go, my lion, you deserve to live, may the sea bless you. Sometimes you catch a huge fish, sir, you come eye to eye with it as you pull it into the boat, and it looks at you so pitifully you can’t bear to kill it, so you throw it back into the sea.
Creatures who fight so hard for their freedom should be permitted to remain free. The novel then proceeds to place distance between itself and Hemingway’s work in order to present a story bathed in Aegean saltwater and soaked in Aegean concerns.
The novel centers around a couple living on a Turkish coastal village in the Aegean Sea. The wife, Mesude, of Cretan descent, and the husband Mustafa, a Turkish fisherman, represent both sides of a porous border. They lose their only son, Deniz, to the sea when the boy is only seven, and their relationship has soured as a result. When Mustafa finds a baby, pushed to him by a dolphin, amongst the floating bodies of refugees who had been on a capsized boat during their flight to Greece, he seizes on the opportunity to fill in the space of his marriage that had been lost upon Deniz’s death. The sea had taken his son from him, but now it supplies him with a new child. The rest of the novel follows the relationship between Mesude and Mustafa as authorities grow suspicious about a child reported missing from the boat’s wreckage. The child’s mother, it seems, has survived. In order to retain possession of the child they have nursed back to health, they hatch a plan to fool the authorities, one that involves Mustafa’s pregnant sister.
The backdrop of this narrative is one of modernization, gentrification, and international political upheaval. Of industrialism disrupting an agrarian working class. Of nature corrupted by an intrusive capitalism. Mining and fish farms have changed the landscape quite literally, resorts have brought in the bustle of tourists who fetishize local fishermen, and poisonous, invasive fish species eat through fishing nets and devour the local fish populations. The government sends a university scholar to explain how to combat these invasive species, but his advice only serves to contextualize a destruction that seems inevitable. Further, a refugee crisis has arisen, and more than sixteen thousand refugees—from Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and other places—have drowned during transport across the Aegean. International governments and corporations, just as invasive as the fish species, have poisoned Mustafa’s coastal village and its people by rejecting human decency in favor of bureaucratic brutality and corporate profit.
This is a novel in conversation with Hemingway, one that grounds Hemingway’s seagoing theme of resilience with threads of pragmatism and an understanding of the larger consequences of conflict on individuals. Mustafa and Mesude represent both sides of a maritime border that blends with multicultural concerns instead of dividing along constructed definitions of national identity. The surge in refugees fleeing across the Aegean from Turkey to Greece has only grown since the 2016 deployment of a NATO fleet to the region to address the crisis and has led to the building of fences across the land border between the two nations, and even threats of war. Livaneli touches on this tension and the bureaucratic tension created by water crossings throughout the novel.
Livaneli’s inclusion of the true story of a British-built Greek destroyer, the Adrias, arriving half-obliterated in the harbor during World War II highlights the bureaucratic failures of Western administration in the Aegean. The British military returns the mauled destroyer to Greece, leaving behind one very distraught Greek sailor. While the Turkish residents of the World War II-era port community took in the Greek sailor as one of their own, the contemporary Turkish population feels this same mercy is not given to refugees attempting to enter Europe through Crete and the Aegean. Instead of caring for refugees whose boats are disintegrating in the high waves, Turkey and Greece have decided to return these refugees to countries where they face penalties for attempting to flee. The flashback acts as a historical referent to demonstrate the kindness inherent in a Turkish culture that embraces hospitality, even when acting as a neutral power uninvolved in the conflicts of other countries. The refugees of the contemporary Aegean Sea are people fleeing conflicts in countries such Syria and Afghanistan, yet they are not often afforded the same sort of asylum that even Western belligerents were given during World War II.
When Mesude meets the baby’s mother, she is forced into a dilemma echoing that of the port community and the Greek ship during World War II—should she provide a safe home for the baby or will the baby be left wailing in a cemetery (like the Greek sailor after the ship leaves) when the mother is punished for the abandonment of their Afghan home? Mustafa and Mesude must make a choice to carry on in the ill-fated pursuit of replacing their drowned son with the baby gifted them by the ocean—a pursuit that will surely land them in prison—or hand the baby over in an act that will likely result in the baby’s demise. In the process of making this choice, they realize people do not fight their battles in isolation between mountains of seawater or in a vacuum of hypermasculine idealism; they suffer together and sometimes apart with a thin connective tissue strung between them.
At his core, Livaneli is an activist. Through a career that spans twenty books, several literary awards, forty music albums, and a term in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, he has elevated issues that impact the Turkish people. This novel carries on that trend by focusing on the deaths of refugees crossing into Greece from Turkey through the Aegean, refugees who have come from Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It seeks to explore and amplify the impact on the border that is the Aegean Sea as it struggles with a refugee crisis, one brought on by international conflict and not by anything the local population has done. As the narrator points out, “the villagers could nothing but watch their sea die a slow death.”
The translator is Brendan Freely, a Turkish resident who previously translated Two Girls by Perihan Mağden, The Gaze by Elif Şafak, and Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan. Here, he has translated the spirit of Livaneli’s activism into a smooth prose unafraid of the complicated metaphors contained within the novel. In reference to the rumors surrounding the temporary separation of Mustafa and Mesude, the village is compared to “the sponges that divers brought up from the depths. It absorbed and digested pain, sorrow, delight, and disaster,” giving readers a gateway into the culture of small-town Turkish maritime communities. When Mustafa enters into a deep depression and considers fleeing his home, the narrator asks, “Could someone who knew how to swim succeed at drowning himself? Even if he made the decision, would his body obey?” In Mustafa’s pain and brief desire to share in his birth son’s death, Freely translates the emotional response present in the prose that reminds us that Mustafa has the resilience and competence to move beyond his agony. While at times these metaphors become a touch heavy-handed, I believe such metaphors help to direct readers to the urgency of the matters touched on in the work.
As a whole, The Fisherman and His Son tackles a big subject—the braiding of international conflict with familial desire—and lands in a moment of optimism for Mustafa and his wife, despite larger systemic pressures that threaten their livelihood. This is a novel in line with the sort of compassionate revolution that Livaneli himself espouses: one in which love and solidarity lays the groundwork for survival in the tumult of modern life. The focus on working-class characters caught in a larger sea of international discord juxtaposed with a backdrop of the corporate consolidation of local life helps highlight why human compassion is so revolutionary in the contemporary world. In the face of an encroaching capitalism that threatens the livelihoods of fisherman navigating the Aegean in small boats, even as his friends look to sabotage the corporate fish farms taking on what was once their economic contribution, Mustafa remembers that human life is what remains most sacred to him and to his culture. It is in the sea-soaked bundle of a child’s life that the sustainability of his village truly lies, where the refusal to succumb to autocratic dictates of who lives and who dies generates resistance. When Mustafa is told that the future of the village is “something that concerns us all,” and chooses to care for the child he has found, we, as readers, are reminded of our own individual calls to compassion and activism. This novel further proves Livaneli is an artist, one who understands how a single compassionate act by one or two people can resist the grinding wheels of international politics and invasive capitalism. And it is in this resistance, in this struggle, that Livaneli’s fisherman finds a way to help a child lost among the waves become free.
***
Is finding closure via grueling through-hike a new idea? Not even a little bit. But that doesn’t mean that Gunnar Lundberg’s account of remembrance and renewal isn’t a compelling read. It might just make you want to grab a map and some moleskin.
For me, to “finish” grieving meant making a choice. So many of my choices since his death were rooted in penance and shame: guilt for planning our hiking trip to Isle Royale, for swimming in Temperance River, for not jumping back in. Finishing grieving meant finally choosing to forgive myself and to celebrate, rather than mourn, his life. Those 144 days taught me to carry only the things I needed most and to leave behind what weighed me down.
In 2013, Matthew Greene went missing while climbing in California. In researching the story of his disappearance, Jason Nark attempts to come to terms with his own grief over a dear friend’s suicide. This is a moving and ruminative piece on what it feels like to mourn after an event you’re powerless to prevent, and what it feels like as you give yourself permission to begin healing.
He didn’t tell anyone where he was going that day and never returned.
Anthony died on September 23, 2013, a few months after Matthew Greene disappeared.
Grief, we’re told, has distinct stages. We expect to pass through each one, like a doorway, from denial all the way to acceptance. I expected that too. As the months wore on, a sense of guilt metastasized inside me. Friends and family said I tried my best with him. I had no special power, they said, to keep him alive. I rejected those words and turned inward. Grief warped my ability to love, and to accept it, too. I spent a lot of time in bed, barely present with my kids. I sobbed in my car during commutes.
The flower I took from the Minaret trail was wilting on my hat. The colors still blazed burnt orange but it would never be this bright, this beautiful, again. So I left it there, draping it over the post at Matthew Greene’s campsite, and said goodbye.
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