Reading the Waves: A Memoir

My job is to go to Subway to secure some sandwiches for us. I’m absolutely pretending everything is fine even though my heart feels like it is dropping out of my vagina. This is the actual cleaving. Miles is leaving home. Miles is inventing his own idea of home. Our triad is dissolving. Or that’s what it feels like.

Not to rehash, but to reshape.

I’ve had to repress what I feel with great force.

What’s the use of returning to the story of a dead love? Not to find “what happened,” but why it matters. To find matter—that place where love and death kiss, that place of creation and destruction. To find the glimpses of art and heart in my own story, the small sediments that arrange and settle, then again rise and rearrange.

I can’t believe I was worried if I was fat in that moment. That I was self-conscious about my American flab, my pendulous tits, my too-blond stand-out-everywhere-we-went hair, my transparent blue eyes, my I am not a young hottie with insufferable perky titties and a high-up ass like all the other dark-haired women Devin’s eyes were drawn to. I look

Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography, “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality…. One can’t possess reality, one can possess images—one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.” If only the past would hold still.

The moment death shot into me, which is to say the moment of my daughter Lily’s death, narrative and time distorted. Beginnings and endings no longer sat in their assigned positions, nor in my body. A kind of circle emerged in my imagination, which is likely why I am so drawn to stories where time and experience and storytelling lose their linear m

I never meant to become any kind of grief or death ambassador. I just wrote about my experience when my baby girl died, and then the deaths piled up over the years, and more and more people brought their death stories to me, so exploring the space of death has taken up a lot of my adult life and my writing. It’s true that I don’t flinch when someon

We story our way through our lives. Might the stories loosen, lift, change?