*The excerpts below are writing segments that will be included in an upcoming book project – they are excerpted from a larger work-in-progress. The final form will be a combination of text and images. Each segment is separated by an ellipsis.. The spacing is essential to the overall work.
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forgotten in word
below some surface
seeped from saliva
carried by kin
caught in invisible bodies –
a poem unpaid for –
long lain buried
a grief unobserved –
exceeding measure
deep calling to deep
I wait while she, dying, heaves, breathes –
a song slips, drips from her mouth
leave me alone
let me go
I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright
and just like that –
against stability
without sense, or shame
she
now disinterred, emerges
while she, who was vessel, sleeps
leaving me, shadow seeking flesh –
womb-water leaking toward a guiding hand
tell me your stories
I’ll sing your fragments –
here, I’ll circulate you
. . .
In her book Woman, Native, Other, Trinh T. Minh-ha states, “Patiently transmitted from mouth to ear, body to body, hand to hand… The world’s earliest archives or libraries were the memories of women…speech is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. It destroys, brings into life, nurtures.”
. . .
Hovering above Loch Lomond, I sunk into the space around me, sitting on a hill overlooking the continental divide.
Separation became not only impossible, but irreconcilable. How does one know one is home?
Echoes of an ancient story swept through my bones, and trees grew up wild and towering around me. How did I know this place?
. . .
I don’t remember your face.
I’m on the side of the bed, all pastels, soft, and faded white.
The yellow carpet, the textured wall, the bedside table with clutter and a box of Kleenex. The faint smell of cheap perfume long worn and the sound of you…sniffling.
What does it mean to survive but not heal? How does one move on! without telling the whole truth?
Something wells up in the breath space/breathe space.
. . .
Several years ago my granny gave me her family archive –photographs, letters, land deeds, newspaper articles, birth/death records, and other ephemera.
The photographs hold the most. The photographs are mute.
. . .
Just the day before I had helped her move from the bed to the bedside toilet to pee. Dad was at her back and I was at her front. The humiliating and forced vulnerability of dying-induced weakness. I don’t think she had to strength to care anymore. Those were our last moments. I was willing to hold that holy mundane grotesque with a future recognition that I too will return to dust, turned to compost.
When we finally fidgeted her back in the hospice bed – the one placed beside her own bed – she threw her arms straight out toward me as far as they would stretch inviting a hug. I leaned myself into her chest lifting her weakened body toward mine while she exclaimed “we did it!” I appreciated her genuine expression of relief. That night she decided she was ready to die. And every day after that was anger and confusion - blaming us for keeping her alive.
. . .
For years I rummaged through her old images. What was I looking for? Most of these ancestors were nameless. Over time I noticed I paused on the same ones over and over.
I think about the re-telling of histories – the endless mythologizing. The tendency to form heroics around one’s narrative past. Focus on the good. Leave the bad bits out. Here I had a stack of the bad bits. The un-memorialized, un-albumed, shoe-box-stored discards.
I’ve hardly been able to look at any other images. Just, looking. Beyond their haunting quality – with which I have an uncontainable fascination – were many I kept returning to for their eerily compelling markings found intersecting landscapes and family photo ops. Some were clearly light leaks that took on bizarre, if banal, forms – while others felt wholly transforming - entire heads cut off, dark forms bursting into the image from the sides, gooey streaks dripping down the middle, dusty lens residue, sepia build-ups, all mysteries demanding attention.
Voids containing unutterabilities. Interrupting intensions. Accidental analog bruising.
. . .
New patterns emerged, new questions. What did these image-bodies contain? Could space be made for the undesired stories? A flattened, mute surface generating affective speculation.
True myth exists in densities. Inter-dwelling of the underbelly and the stars.
. . .
There’s an old Celtic tradition where women were hired to lament for the dead – weeping and reciting epic poems about the life lost. This practice provided the community a great service by embodying collective grief.
As Celtic lands were colonized, this practice became increasingly rare - the women, slowly, silenced.
Where does the grief go?
. . .
Administering the morphine and anxiety meds through the plastic syringe became the preferred method. The measuring marks kept rubbing off, so we used a sharpie to mark the shaft - .5, 1, 1.5. Crush half of the large Ambien, a whole one of the small. Suck the morphine up the syringe, mix with Ambien, suck it up again. Since she struggled to swallow the nurse explained that the drugs would absorb into her blood stream if we just pressed them through the tip into her cheek or below her tongue. If her head was too far back, she would choke. If too forward the liquid would drip slowly out of the corner of her mouth. We became good at arranging pillows that allowed just the right amount of tilt to her head so that the drugs pooled inside her mouth before seeping in.
. . .
Here’s a fact: I was never taught the stories of my people. For this reason, I find it difficult to connect with the notion of ancestors.
Here’s another fact: my ancestors bought land in Hemmingford, Quebec in 1804. Much of the land in that area was sold to white settlers illegally by Jesuit missionaries. By treaty the lands were stewarded by branches of the Iroquois and Mohawk Nations.
Stolen land. Borrowed time. Warnings made visible.
. . .
How do I steward these personal traces? What fullness bursts forth in the voids between evidences? From image to image, apertures regulating blurring and bringing into focus. How does one shape meaningful fiction from fragmented facts?
. . .
Ours was a chosen erasure. A deliberate forgetting. What does it mean to choose to disconnect from one’s own past? What does it mean to collectively forget?
Nostalgia sought sentimentality. It should have sought care.
. . .
Two weeks before our thesis install began in February of 2022, I decided to leave Columbus, Ohio to go see her. My mom was confident she wouldn’t last the week. She had contracted covid-19 on top of pneumonia, and I knew this was probably it.
My thesis was about processing her trauma – particularly multiple incidences of sexual assault when she was a child, and a story about her mother threatening suicide on the banks of the quarry near her childhood home. Her father had left them to start another family – her being the oldest, she took on the burden of her mother’s abandonment, as well as her own.
. . .
I wonder if she ever had a moment in life – just one – that made her feel whole.
. . .
Like crawling into a candle-lit womb, drenched by the humidity of her pain – I felt everything. No stories were to accompany the tears. Only fear. Only terror…of being alone. The residual trauma leaking out of every untended wound.
. . .
Administer
: to manage or supervise the execution, use, or conduct of
: to provide or apply: DISPENSE
: to give officially or as part of a ritual
: to give remedially // administer a dose of medicine
We described what we were doing as administering morphine. What we were really doing was administering her death.
Is this dying well?
. . .
New information pulsing, historic events untreated, pressing on. Traces of felt incidence, embedded in bodies unaware. Like a shoe box of forgotten photos, some lingering signal flashes silently tucked away in a dark recess of bloody organs – the lid neatly folded shut.
Do we dare unleash the unharnessed, unexamined? Dare to ask the body what it archived through the generations.
What untold libraries needn’t burn?
. . .
For a while I sat alone with her talking about everything. I recorded myself talking and that felt strangely disconnected, maybe even disrespectful. Convincing myself that it was okay and maybe in service of the work her and I had done together – the recordings we had made and archived – I did it anyway. I mentioned to her that it was Thursday night, February 10th, and that I’d be leaving on Saturday morning to go back to Ohio.
Friday night I said more goodbyes, administered more morphine and went upstairs to shower and pack. Earlier that day I had taken a couple of shirts and dresses from her closet, thinking about what I should wear for my performance. I turned on the shower to heat up and was in front of the mirror trying on her clothes when my mom knocked on the door. “We think she’s going,” she said. “Right now.” I said okay, put my own clothes back on, and went downstairs.
. . .
They thought maybe she would take another breath, but she never did. My parents, whom she’d been living with for 15 years, and who took care of her during her sickness, were both in the room when she passed. I was upstairs, wearing a red cotton dress of hers, looking in the mirror.
. . .
Among family in her own room, she faded with fight and slowly curled fetal. She was dead before her limbs began purpling.
My father prayed next to her body as I watched and listened. My mother called my sisters one by one in order of birth and put them on speaker mode. Summer, being the youngest of us, was last. Her cries came loudest.
. . .
After funeral services were called, I wiped down her face and limbs. What is the impulse to clean a body emptied of its source? What does the body contain after being abandoned by its ghost?
Then it overcame me. An ancient welling up, deep source of sorrow. Salt-tears landing on freshly cold skin, grooving between loose wrinkles and cellular indentations. Body heaving, snot slipping, I felt my mom’s hands gentle on my back.
. . .
I photographed her corpse. Just her hands and feet. I couldn’t bring myself to photograph her face. The camera sensor, sense organ of imaging, pressed by light, relieved by shadow, absorbed, and fixed her lines and curves.
. . .
Tell me your stories. I’ll tell your fragments. Here, I’ll circulate you.