SO LONG: Short Memoirs of Loss and Remembrance

By CoCo Harris

A heartfelt collection of narratives of various forms and shapes on grief, loss and remembrance.
The following authors and titles are featured: MEGHAN K. BARNES Mad World; MARY CARPENTER Longing; FREDDA DURANDO My Fathers Hands; PAMELA GAY The Family Funeral;KELSEY GILMAN Forgiving Maren; JO GOING Stones and Roses; SUSAN GORDON Stars; NANCY GUSTAFSON Visiting Martha; PATRICIA GUZMAN About a Guy Named J* ;KRISTIN HERREN A Letter to My Sister; MARY POTTER KENYON My Winter of Discontent; MICHAL MAHGEREFTEH Things She Left Behind; LINDSEY MEAD Four Corners of the Tent; AMANDA MILLER One Breath, Then Another; PATRICIA O'DONNELL Translation; CARL PALMER Her Candle; and CHRISTOPHER WOODS The Light You Made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Telling Our Stories Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452406169

CoCo Harris

CoCo Harris is constantly exploring the notion of how we tell the stories of our lives.

Book preview

So Long

Short Memoirs of Loss and Remembrance

Edited by CoCo Harris

Telling Our Stories Press

Also from Telling Our Stories Press

IMPACT: An Anthology of Short Memoirs

ROLL: A Collection of Personal Narratives

SURVIVE: A Collection of Short Memoirs

TURNS: A Collection of Memoir Chapbooks

THE BRIDGE: A Companion Journal for Unearthing

Personal Narratives and Memoir

RESURRECTING PROUST: Unearthing Personal

Narratives through Journaling

MY CIA: A Memoir

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by CoCo Harris

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011943518

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-09829228-8-0

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Requests for information should be forwarded to:

Telling Our Stories Press

Visit www.TellingOurStoriesPress.com

Cover Photograph: Lotus Lilies on an Adirondack Lake

by CoCo Harris

Cover Design: Chris Schramm, Michael Milliken & CoCo Harris

eBook Layout: L.K. Campbell

UltraShort Memoir™ is a trademark of Telling Our Stories Press

eBook Digital Edition ISBN: 9781452406169

Praise for SO LONG

"Editor CoCo Harris has gathered together a number of gifted writers and poets who take us through their personal assortment of memoirs. Reading these accounts is somewhat like window peeking into private lives. These fertile and varied collections of remembrances are unique in demonstrating how stories, vigorously written and connected by a common theme, can become compulsive page turners. The stories speak to the power and poignancy of everyday people living through extreme circumstances. They ignite memories not thought about for years of family, friends, coworkers and incidences struggling to be re remembered. So Long: Short Memoirs of Loss and Remembrance will travel from the night stand to the coffee table and recliner. It will be handed off from neighbor to neighbor and read at house parties as are all the best poems and stories of our personal histories."

—Gerald A. McBreen, Poet Laureate Pacific Washington

"So Long: Short Memoirs of Loss and Remembrance poignantly bears witness to the impact and transformative power of death on our lives. It offers open and intimate views of some of the many ways people cope with loss—from heartache and anger to love and understanding, and affirms that it is possible to grow from even the most painful experience and go on with life. As the title implies, these are the kind of goodbyes that take 'so long', they can last forever. It is a collection that can touch and move the reader and perhaps most importantly, it can inform how we face loss in our own lives."

—Janet Amalia Weinberg, author of

Still Going Strong: Memoirs, Stories, and Poems

About Great Older Women

"This collection is full of the bittersweet echoes of lives - and innocence - lost. Quirky and vulnerable, the voices in SO LONG testify to the endurance of human love and the uniqueness of each loss."

—Eleanor Vincent, author of

Swimming with Maya: A Mother's Story

"The poems and memoirs in SO LONG reveal the complexity of love, anguish, loss, and yearning. Not speaking with one voice, but instead, shedding light on hidden facets of the human experience, the authors in SO LONG mine the rich territory of childhood: the school bus ride, the memory of an important mother figure, or the childhood friendship turned sour. In addition to looking back at younger selves, these courageous testaments document the transitions in later life: what to do with the family house or the grueling, final days of a parent’s life."

—Marylee MacDonald, author of

Traveling with Baggage

"It is crucial to be in touch with our mortality to be able to embrace the value of our remaining days. Sometimes access to the themes of death comes in the form of short verses imprinted over images or lines of prose detailing a funeral of a young man. In this surprisingly triumphant anthology, readers can delve into the howl of loss and the echoes of loved ones who will never return home. But more importantly, the essays, letters, and poems in SO LONG will remind you of a parent, a friend, a lover whose death left an imperfect and necessary mark on your timeline of significant events. Many times during the reading, you will have to put the book down to cry, to take a deep breath, and sometimes to just take in the delineated, gorgeous lines of sorrow and grieving. I found myself folding over certain pages that held phrases worth jotting down in a journal or sharing with a friend. With each reading, I have found (as many others will too), that examining the articulated stories of deep longing shakes the trappings of complacency and apathy loose. Can a book save your life? Yes in a small way; a versatile and empathic collection built around stories of death can awaken your courage to truly live before you too are a story for someone else to tell."

—Soo Young Lee, Skirt Magazine; and Radar Redux

Showcasing the Art of Literary Personal Narratives

Published by Telling Our Stories Press

The independent literary imprint with a focus on

the art of short memoir and

personal narratives.

"Details, stories, remind us of the particular loved body and being of X and Y or –say it—W. Even photos, after a while lend themselves to speculation….Although we had names for them, and faces, they had lost their particular humanness when we no longer had their stories."

—Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast

To

LIFE

and

for

Elijah Otis Brock

Acknowledgements

Deep thanks go to Meghan K. Barnes, Mary Carpenter, Fredda Durando, Pamela Gay, Kelsey Gilman, Jo Going, Susan Gordon, Nancy Gustafson, Patricia Guzman, Kristin Herren, Mary Potter Kenyon, Michal Mahgerefteh, Lindsey Mead, Amanda Miller, Patricia O’Donnell, Carl Palmer, and Christopher Woods for remembering, and sharing…

Special thanks to the deep reads, feedback and sweat by the TOSP Advisories and the Galley Reviewers including George Shields, Janis Blauer-Chima, Mary Carpenter, Susan Meyn, Mary Potter Kenyon, Nancy Prothro Arbuthnot, Susan Gordon, Peg Shields and Meghan Barnes.

CONTENTS

So Long's UltraShort Introduction

Stars

Susan Gordon

Mad World

Meghan K. Barnes

Whenever I Hear

Carl Palmer

Four Corners of the Tent

Lindsey Mead

A Letter to My Sister

Kristin Herren

The Light You Made

Christopher Woods

About a Guy Named J*

Patricia Guzman

Longing

Mary Carpenter

Translation

Patricia O’Donnell

My Father's Hands

Fredda Durando

Visiting Martha

Nancy Gustafason

The Things She Left Behind

Michal Mahgerefteh

Stones and Roses

Jo Going

One Breath, Then Another

Amanda Miller

Forgiving Maren

Kelsey Gilman

My Winter of Discontent

Mary Potter Kenyon

The Family Funeral

Pamela Gay

CONTRIBUTORS

ABOUT THE EDITOR

So Long’s UltraShort Introduction

How we bid our farewells is a part of our story. This collection is as much about who we have to say goodbye to, as it is how we say it. These pieces explore closure by way of short memoirs, as we look at departure and grieving through personal narratives. There’s mercy, healing, self-discovery, longing, strong bonds, weak bonds, love, family, friendship, and more, carried in these works. Ranging from a few lines to the chapbook length, with and without images, these narratives embody our loss and remembrance through story.

Stars

Susan Gordon

Miriam is having stars tattooed onto her shoulder blade today. They will be unseen at work but stark, a telling statement in any sundress.

She says there will be 5 stars, each star a reminder, a memory, a mark of loss for someone she fiercely loved. She says they will be simple, each star a dark, dark purple.

There is one for her Dad, one for her sister, Liz, one for her dog, the half pit-bull Star, one for Cosmo, the black and white Jack Russell, Liz’s wild companion and then Miriam’s beloved city dog. The last star is for her friend, Jonathan, who took his life.

The stars are a pantheon, her pantheon, her history with death. A simple cluster with room to add one; I’m just being realistic, she says when I say, O.

She tells me of five stars to be needled, inked in deep purple. She says she has been thinking of this for a while.

But yesterday’s e-mail, from someone she does not even know, calling her father Ralph and me, Sue, inquiring about her dead sister, seemed to be the tipping point. She posted a statement on facebook asking that no one e-mail comments about dead family members between the hours of 9 to 5. She says she doesn’t want to burst into tears at work.

And now, even though she usually won’t say anything about these deaths, she is having them marked as deep in her scapula as they are in her heart.

I don’t know if she knows that today is Yom Kippur and that the prayers for the dead will be chanted in every synagogue.

She is chanting her own prayers, making them indelible, making a firmament of loss.

Mad World

Meghan K. Barnes

Three weeks after he died, Blake casually walked past me, opened the door of a blue hatchback and drove away. It was far from the beat up clunker he drove when we started college, and I wondered how he was able to afford it. Nonetheless, I quickly slid my car into drive and pulled out behind him.

His hair was longer than I remembered, and he had put on some weight, but I was excited to see him. I wanted to tell him how everyone thought he was dead, and that I was sorry I didn’t make it to the funeral.

But he didn’t slow down at the sight of me like I thought he would. He wove through the rows of cars, putting yards between us before merging on to the highway. I wasn’t sure why he was fleeing, but assumed it had something to do with falsifying his death.

So I kept it to myself.

The doctors call it night terrors, and the sleepless nights that come after insomnia. They say they can fix it with little pills that I take with dinner, or in the middle of the night when I wake up crying, but they don’t work. They say that sleeping in a room with a machine hooked up to my chest and head to monitor me might find the problem, but when I sleep in the white room hooked up to all the machines I find the humming of the florescent lights comforting. It’s only in the dark that I scream. It’s only in the dark that I see the shadows dance across my eyes, or my room, or my brain. But the worst is when I don’t wake myself up screaming. The worst is when I stay asleep throughout the night.

When I was little Mom kept her collection of antique dolls in my room because she thought I liked to play with them. She would come into my room in the morning and rearrange them so they were straight on the shelf that I could only reach if I stood on my tippy toes on a chair. What she didn’t know is that every night for years after everyone went to sleep my sister, Colleen, would sneak into my room and pull the dolls down, arranging them around my bed.

Colleen would tell me stories about dolls coming to life at night, and said that’s why these dolls had moving eyes and my Barbie’s didn’t. She said they moved in the night because they were going to get me, and if I slept for too long, eventually they would. I made Dad leave the hall light on for me, and Mom got me a night light, but every night the dolls kept coming back. They would reach their little porcelain hands at my face, and sometimes they would even crawl into my bed. I could feel their cold skin against my own when I would wake up in the middle of the night, and I would sit perfectly still under the covers until the sun came up, because I knew when the sun came up I would be safe. Scary things only happened in the dark, when there wasn’t enough light around to save you.

I started falling asleep in class, and asking Mom if I could nap during the day instead of going to swim practice. She took me to the doctor and had him run tests to see if anything was wrong, but everything came back normal. I was afraid to tell her about the things I saw in the night, afraid that she would be upset that I thought her dolls were out to get me, but eventually when I refused to sleep in my room anymore she packed up the dolls and stored them in the attic. Colleen never admitted what she did to anyone except to me one night in the middle of a fight. She called me a baby and a bed wetter, even though I hadn’t wet the bed in years. She made fun of me for sleeping with the light on, and turned it off in the middle of the night so I wouldn’t be able to use the bathroom. She knew that I would never venture into the dark alone, even if I really had to go, and eventually I learned to hold it all night long.

After that it was the lawn gnomes. Colleen got me a copy of the book Afternoon of the Elves for my eighth birthday even though the reading level was three years ahead of where I was in school. But Dad had always read to me, and had me read to him, and I tested two levels higher than I should have in school. I didn’t understand all of the words but the ones I didn’t get, Dad would look up for me in our big red dictionary and read me the definitions. Sometimes I didn’t even understand those, so he would have to make up a story to make it easier for me.

The elves in those books were nice; they built little houses in the backyard of this girl and helped her make friends when her mother got sick. But Colleen kept telling me that they were only nice because this was the first book, and she didn’t want to get me the second book because it was based on real life. In the second book, she said, the elves turned on the little girls and decided they wanted to take over their houses, so they killed everyone on their block and started their own neighborhood. Colleen said that gnomes and elves were pretty much the same thing, and that I should be scared.

She asked me if I ever noticed that Mom kept gnomes in her garden, and I told her yes. I told her that Mom put them there to keep animals from eating her flowers. Colleen said that I was wrong. Mom never put them there, they just showed up one day, and every time she took the time to look at them, she could see that they were moving closer to the house. Colleen said that Mom and Dad would probably be fine, and that she was always out with her friends so she probably wouldn’t be there when they attacked, but that I should be worried because I was just the right size.

According to Colleen my thin frame would easily be carried by three or four gnomes, especially if they had the coordination to carry me on their heads. She pointed to the dead patches in the garden when they sat last year and said, see look, they are moving. She would pick them up when I was playing in the garden and sneak them behind me to see how loud I’d scream. She always swore up and down that she didn’t move them and that they did it themselves and, since she was my big sister, I believed her.

I started keeping sketches in my closet as to how far they were and in what gardens, and it seemed like they only moved once or twice a year. But one night when my sister came home later after a party, a lawn gnome followed her into our house. It might have been more than one but I only caught one early the next morning, frozen in place outside my bedroom door. It was light outside, so I knew he would be frozen for the day, but I was afraid that more of them had followed her in. I knew my mom loved the gnomes but I didn’t want them to take me away from her, or kill our neighborhood and start their own, so I devised a plan.

After Mom and Dad went out to eat on Friday and Colleen invited her friends who she wasn’t supposed to invite over, I was going to go out back and bury them in a ditch by the back fence. I figured that was as far away from the house as I could get at that point in time, and if they dug their way out I would just have to bury them in someone else’s backyard. I couldn’t take the chance that any more gnomes got into my house, but in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but ask why Colleen hadn’t thought to do this first.

Mom wasn’t mad when she couldn’t find the lawn gnomes; she blamed it on one of the kids in the neighborhood and had a talk with their mother. None of the blame was put on me, but I think she understood that I might be frightened of them when she took me to the garden store to buy more and I begged and pleaded that we get a birdbath instead. Just anything without eyes or a face, I whimpered, and she said that was fine, and asked me if I was really the one who took the old lawn gnomes. When I cried in response she got her answer, and never brought it up again.

Four months after he died, Blake’s eyes peered over the gray print of a newspaper as I walked out of class. I was getting used to running into him in public places, but still hadn’t managed to get to him in time to speak to him. Before I could run to him, he quickly folded his paper, placed it under his arm and boarded the bus. He was holding a coffee and smoking with the wrong hand, but I was sure it was him by the way he walked. No matter how hard they tried, no one was ever able to imitate his angled, bow-legged stride, or endure the pain that came with walking on the edges of their feet.

Even though he wasn’t able to talk to me, I was still glad to see him. I was used to him slipping away, and imagined he worked for the government, or was hiding from them. That he was putting himself at risk to make sure that I was all right. I imagined that he could be working for the SBI like my Godfather had when I was a child. I remember how my Godfather wasn’t able to contact his wife or children for years. How he would walk past them in the grocery store, and mumble a quick hello, buy something, and leave— just so they would know that he was alive. How