Hey—hi … I’m back. If you perceived a decline in connections over the last four weeks or so, it wasn’t just your imagination. If you didn’t notice - well, maybe that’s because you were as caught up as I was in the spicy and vaguely thrilling end-of- summer yang. Pretty soon here I will report on the grief-related project that captured 92% of my energy in late Aug/early Sept, but for now, let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Maybe I’ve told you this before, but I almost called this newsletter, “Dead Parents’ Society.”
Of all grief’s machinations, of all the ways death shows up across a lifetime, I’m personally most attuned to the process of losing one’s parents.
After all, they give birth to us and we can—in some manner, in some way—“give” death to them. Of course, there are a million variations on this theme.
Still, even people I know whose parents died when they were young talk about an eventual active release—or, at least, the desire to get there. And even people I know who were not raised by their parent(s), or who had contentious and unloving relationships with one or the other, sometimes (and sure, only sometimes) report harboring an ache to find them or connect with them before they leave the earth—usually to extend a version of clemency designed to heal all parties.
While there will always be cases in which the harm done seems to preclude the possibility of grace extended, some version of radical acceptance/active allowing—on some timeline, in some realm—seems like an important way to participate in the earth’s natural lifecycles.
We cycle in, we cycle out; this year’s stalks cut short to create the most energy for what will bloom in the coming seasons. Life contains the seeds of death; death contains the seeds of life. And so forth and so on.
As it turned out, four of the very best narratives I took in this summer were part and parcel with the push/pull of complicated familial relations, and the complex grief that expresses before, during, and maybe especially after any parental figure’s season in the sun.
Offered for your consideration:
MONICA (film)
Italian screenwriter and director Andrea Pallaoro’s 2022 drama, which hangs on the title character’s return home to be with a dying mother who could never really be there for her, was recommended to me by two queer/trans friends, who said it avoided the usual queer/trans tropes and almost transcended plot. They called it exceptionally quiet, languid, and full of shadows—literally and figuratively. They said it felt like one of those French films where you find yourself just barely following each slow scene—but in a good way, like how you can just barely follow a foreign map in a foreign place. But you stay with it anyway, trusting yourself and the common ground under your feet.WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS (book)
This was actually my second time reading essayist and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams’ account of receiving her mother’s journals after her death by cancer, which was caused by nuclear testing near their home. "I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone,” the author’s mother had told her. I’m not giving anything away when I tell you that, when discovered, the journals are blank, empty, devoid of even a single word. That discovery happens early in the memoir, and then Tempest Williams meters out 54 small, oddly and provocatively structured and saturated chapters in an effort to hear the message in her mother’s absence, to reckon with what feels like a great mystery, and to reflect on women’s voices, environmental justice, and all the strange and beautiful noises and silences of life on this planet.FOSTER (novella)
Some of what has been said about Irish writer Claire Keegan’s 2010 release is almost as long as the book itself. Foster is one of those small things that takes up a lot of space so that your active time with it—the time it takes to actually read the small number of small-format pages—feels inconsequential compared to the ongoing feeling you’re left with. And I’ll say now that it’s connection to the theme I’m collating here isn’t exactly straightforward. The young narrator’s parents aren’t dead, but they’ve temporarily unburdened themselves of her and the couple she finds herself with, it soon becomes clear, are moving through a devastating but quieted loss of their own. I’m going to resist saying much more—other than if any part of you is drawn to empathize with the kind of elegant and extravagant sadness that exists in stories of children, set aside a Sunday for this one.THE ANTELOPE WIFE (book)
In the same instant that I read Louise Erdrich’s name on the spine of this battered paperback on my library’s free shelf, it was in my hand. And in the next, tucked into my tote bag. She’s one of those writers where it doesn’t matter what she’s writing about; you know you want and need to read it. As it turns out, this novel from 1998 is about so many things—maybe all the things. With pools of wavy time, an abundance of magical realism, and plenty of POV switches, the story spans history and generations, taking mothers, fathers, children, grandmothers, siblings, and a few four-legged ones along for the ride. It’s about beadwork, and baking, and personal and political violence, and sudden deaths and long, drawn out deaths. And it’s about falling in love and staying in love, and belonging—wherever and with whomever feels right. I savored every word and slept with this book next to my head. I envy everyone who gets to encounter it for the first time.