Day 27.

i feel more than a little uncomfortable posting these. my writing has never been more personal than it is here, but at the same time, it's personal about other people, people i don't know if i have ...a right to share. do you know what i mean? it feels almost like i'm using them. but what zay says, is that there is fact, and truth, and writing is about getting at the truth of something. i don't know if that makes it better...

the assignment: write a letter to, or a scene about, someone you loved who is gone.
to give you an idea of what it's like here, people's responses included incredibly moving essays about a father who died in a car crash, cousins who had died in the israeli army......and then a hamster with ginormous testicles who died.


I didn't get a goodbye from you. Probably no one did: they said you had died quietly in your sleep. I didn't like that. The best ways to die, i thought, are executions: public, memorable. I'd rather be hung than drift off to sleep, and I'd rather be guillotined than die by the hands of some guy with a syringe, who goes home without washing his hands. But it was not me, it was you. My dad, with tears running into where his glasses met his nose, told me that it was your time. What did I know about time? I was, I am, the youngest. I knew you by stories, jokes, arguments, your stubbly, wet kisses on my forehead. I was in the shower when my grandmother called my father, and even through the hissing steam, I heard, ran out begging my dad: What happened? What happened?
You had gone. Your tiny bottles of "travel liquor" sat on the shelf above your desk, alongside half-finished Post-its to your daughter and son about books they'd like. Your garden left untended--what did we know about planting times, harvesting times? When you tried to show my sister and me, we were too busy swinging from your arms to watch what they were doing, pulling up potatoes and showing us how to tell when the pineapples from Hawaii were ready. maybe you were thinking about if you'd see us have children of our own as you patted down the soil for us.
Weeks later, we had your ashes, and we took them to the closest place you loved most. You were there, I know it: I think you are in Yosemite often now, not in afterlife but in some kind of spiritual freeze frame. I stood on the rail of the bridge over the Merced River, unsteady but determined; my aunt beside me. To see her toss your ashes into the river dissected my heart and pinned the pieces where the whole had been. Her red hair's careful nest disintegrated into the swirl of the wind, and her eyes were bright, impulsive, grieving. Then, a wind swept the black flakes up, exploding in the sky, blowing past my summer-stubbly legs. Your ashes crisscrossed my calves, fell into the cracks between my toes. First, for a second, I felt horror. Next, a strange guilt that they had not found their place, in the river's rocks. It's funny to me now, some combination of absurd and sad. I got off the bridge, feeling light, and waded into the river and floated, looking up at the sky and wondering about you.
Remember those last few years? It was like you were growing limbs and losing them all at once. The doctors gave you a cane, an oxygen tank. There was no hand left for a shovel or a trowel, but you were out in your garden nonetheless. I imagine that once, we were plants too. A long time back, in some bizarre trick, our legs, our roots, were pulled out of the ground, and we were placed upon the very tips, our feet. These ache for soil most. With your tomatoes, your peppers, your pumpkins, you grew and grew, into the ground of your garden, into the sky above. Sending roots deep.
In the months after you died, I started walking to places, walking for its own sake. Someday soon I will walk to the school you taught at, and the faraway places where you took the photos I saw in a thousand family slideshows. I want to stretch my roots through the world. I'll bring the travel-size liquor bottles that you loved, but I don't need to forget and I don't need to be encouraged by their warmth. I asked for a goodbye-- you gave me your legs.