I lost my father-in-law during the advent season in 2023. His absence from our life is still poignant. There are times when my husband and I look at one another and say “I wish Ron was still alive.” A man like my father-in-law leaves a huge hole when he is gone, one that is hard to smooth over, like the places across the Western Front of the First World War, where even now, a century later, you can still see the old lines of the trenches and the where the shells fell. And so this advent, as I think of hope, peace, joy and love, I can’t help put them beside grief. Grief, after all, is just love with nowhere to go.
They will tell you that it will never hurt less
It will only hurt less often.
That one day you will stop seeing them everywhere
And your life will grow bigger around the hole they left
So that the hole will seem smaller
Less maw-like when it yawns at unexpected times.
And perhaps they are correct
The well wishers who have no clue
And the travelled stained who already walked the road
And your own mother who still keeps living
Despite not having her mother for the last two decades.
Yes, it will hurt less often
But when it hurts it will still come like a fire
All the love you have and all the words still left to say
Days came and went. Months came and went. Summer came and went. The start of school came and went. Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, came and went. Steven and I heard nothing from David and Marian. Despite invitations to barbeques, birthdays, holidays and celebrations. Their silence was a cold stone in my belly.
I blamed myself for caring too much about a bowl. For asking too often, when I clearly was not going to get it back from it. For being willing to sever our family ties over something that held such little importance in the grand scheme of things.
On New Year’s Day, Steven and I were sitting in the living room together, separately scrolling on our phones through Instagram, Blue Sky and Facebook, when Steven raised his eyes from his screen and asked me, “Do you really think he took it?”
“What?” I asked, drawn from my doom scrolling about the presidential election’s aftermath. “Who took what?”
“Do you think David really took that bowl?”
“Of course he took it. What else might have happened to it?”
Steven put his phone down, chewing on the inside of his cheek in thought for a moment before he said, “He never admitted that he has it. He always maintained he didn’t know what you were talking about.”
He was irritating me with these questions, but I tried not to take it out on him. “‘Cause he didn’t want to get caught,” I said coolly.
“That’s not like him,” Steven said.
He had a half-baked theory, I could tell by his line of questioning. “What do you think happened?”
“There was a crack in it, right?” he asked.
“A hairline crack, yes,” I said. I put my phone down on the arm of the couch, trying not to scowl. We had been over this before. If he had thrown it away, then why didn’t he just tell me?
“That day that we loaded up the pod for the final time…that was the day that Ann Marie was helping us?”
Ann Marie, our first cousin once removed. Her grandmother and Mom were sisters. There were things in the house that we thought Ann Marie might want. She had been home from college for the week on spring break (she wasn’t a party kid, she always came home instead of going to Daytona or Destin or Myrtle Beach).
“You think Ann Marie took it?” I asked. “What would a college girl want with a huge mixing bowl like that?”
“No, I’m just remembering, that she was in charge of tidying up the kitchen that day. And I just wonder if she saw that it was damaged, or if she accidently made that crack worse when she was shuffling dishes around, and so she tossed it out.”
It had been more than a year since the bowl went missing, and I had never considered that there was another explanation for its disappearance. I suddenly felt small; it wasn’t me who had been betrayed. I had assumed the worst about my brother. I was not a victim. I was the injuring party.
Without hesitation, I picked up my phone and texted my cousin.
Hey Ann Marie! This is Jenny. Quick question for you- when you came home last spring to help us clean out Mom’s house, do you remember seeing a large, ceramic mixing bowl in the kitchen cabinets? It would have been on the bottom shelf of the cabinet next to the sink.
I watched three dots appear and disappear about three times before her reply came through.
I’m so sorry, Jenny. I didn’t think to tell anybody at the time, everyone was so busy. I broke the bowl when I was rearranging the cabinet. I think it must have already had a crack in it, and it just split right in two when I banged it against the side of the cabinet. I threw it out with the trash.
I stared at the message, my guilt now causing a rising panic that made my head spin. Steven noticed.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“You were right,” I said. “How did we not think of this? How did all of us miss this really simple explanation?”
“We all just see what we want to see,” he said.
Oh that’s okay, Ann Marie! We were just curious what had happened to it. I hope you’re having a good winter break!
I sat with my disbelief and my shame for who knows how long. Then I picked up my phone again and called my brother. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t answer.
I texted him instead. Hey, David. I just wanted to wish you a Happy New Year. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t have the words just yet to say anything about the bowl and the arguments over it. About the hurt I felt, about the hurt I had caused. I put the phone down.
“Did you just text David?” Steven asked.
“I wished him a Happy New Year,” I said, chewing on my thumbnail.
“I’m sure that will help,” Steven said wryly.
I threw a throw pillow at him, and continued to stew in embarrassment and confusion.
The next day, a package arrived addressed to me. It was big, and heavy and square. It was from an eBay seller, but I hadn’t ordered anything from eBay.
“Did you get something for me?” I asked Steven, placing the package on the table where he was currently reading the news on his phone while he ate pretzel sticks.
“No,” he said, without looking up from the article. He shoved three pretzels into his mouth and crunched without interest for what was in the box.
I sliced open the tape and began unpacking the box. It was something roundish, and wrapped in bubble wrap. As I peeled back the layers of bubble wrap, I had a nagging suspicion of what I would find. When it finally emerged, I gasped so loudly, that Steven jumped. I almost dropped it on the floor in my disbelief.
It was the bowl. Or, at least, it was one just like it.
There was a note included in the box. It was a single sheet of paper taped shut, and it read
Your brother wanted to make sure that you knew he hunted this down for months for you. I hope you enjoy this vintage Pyrex bowl. He must love you a lot to keep up the search for so long! -Judith
“What is it?” Steven asked. I passed him the note, and I watched his eyes scan the words. “What?” he asked the letter, in just as much shock as I was.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and called David. This time, he did answer.
“Hello?” he said, as if he didn’t know who was on the other end of the call.
“David,” I whispered. I paused, unable to think for a moment. “I…I got your package,” I managed.
“Yeah? I got your text yesterday. I thought it might have gotten to you.”
“I just…I mean…David…why?” I was a mess of emotions. I had spent so long being angry with him, and all the time, he was trying to find the one thing that he knew would appease that anger.
“Well, Marian and I figured that if we could just give you what you wanted, despite having it ourselves, that it would somehow make you less mad at us, and then we could actually be a family again.”
He sounded curt. He had every right to be. “But…David, look, I know you didn’t take it.”
“Oh, really?” he asked.
“Ann Marie broke it,” I said, tears now stinging my eyes. “And she threw it away without telling anyone.”
Silence. “Well, that’s a theory that Marian and I had, but we didn’t think you’d listen to it, so we never brought it up.”
“David, I’m sorry,” I started, fully intending to spill my guts to him.
He interrupted me before I could say more. “Yeah. Yeah, I bet you are.”
Again, it sounded curt, but not rude. He was hurt; I had blamed and maligned him, misunderstood him, believed the worst about him. Why would he want anything to do with me?
“Listen,” David said through the thick air that had surrounded me. “We can work this out.” His words were slow, deliberate, an invitation to continue the conversation at another time.
“I’d like that,” I said. “I never intended all this.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up without another word.
As I looked down at the mixing bowl, I realized all that pain was never really about Mom’s mixing bowl. The anger I had felt towards my brother was another form of grief. I had wanted something so badly for my whole life, and when I lost it along with my mom, that pain had to go somewhere. I was ashamed that the pain and the loss had hurt someone I had cared about so much.
“You gonna keep it?” Steven asked.
“Yeah. I think I’ll set it where I can see it, to remind myself not to make assumptions.” I rubbed a hand over my face and then wiped the few tears that had leaked from my eyes.
“Good idea,” Steven said. He picked up the bowl, and headed towards the sink to wash it.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
In 2022, my friend Issa Brown peer pressured me into publishing a book of poetry with the phrase, “If you ever write a poetry book, I’ll illustrate it for you.” Okay, girl. Twist my arm, why don’t you? The results of our efforts was the short collection of poetry titled “The Circle,” a book which I advertise as a “raw, honest book of poetry about love in all its shapes.” It is filled with poems about romantic love, love gone wrong, the (estranged) love between friends, loving the wrong person, self love, love of family, nostalgia, needing to feel loved, and being loved by other people. The title poem, “The Circle,” speaks about the people who come to your rescue when you are utterly broken. Sometimes, you know exactly who will come to stand in that circle around you when you are completely shattered. Other times, who comes to stand in the circle of protection is surprising. And sometimes, the people who you expect to be in the circle aren’t there at all. When this happens, it brings with it a deep pain that only adds to the pain of what you are going through in the first place. It is a kind of second shattering, an abandonment that feels like betrayal. I wrote the following poem with the original poem “The Circle” in mind, while wishing that someone whom I had expected to see in my circle forever had actually showed up for me.
I looked up from my place on the ground
Where I had sat down once again to grieve,
Scanning, my eyes searching everywhere
And yet
You had not come.
You were not there.
I had thought you would always be there
When I fell apart
Just as you had a thousand times before
Through the end of eras, and through the pain of death
Telling me, when all the world around me seemed to
Shrink until I was trapped
That I had the power to burst free.
“You are the most capable person I have ever met”
Your words,
Ringing like a clear bell on a clear day
Sounding through my addled thoughts as I tried
And tried and tried and tried
To pick up my pieces
And go forward even though
I barely understood how to move my feet.
You were always in the circle.
Always offering an outstretched hand
When you saw my tears,
Reaching toward me, reaching for me
Reaching me
With your kindness and your encouragement
And your confirmation that
“Yes, this is difficult.”
“Yes, you can do this.”
Because in many ways, you, too, were there
Or you had been there
Your wisdom and your honesty
A great comfort to me
When I could not get myself together
To feel human.
You made me feel like I had wings again
When I was plucked apart.
So when I looked up from the ground
When I was once again sitting in the dust
Where life had put me
Searching, searching, searching for you
And you were
Not
There
I felt a piece of myself wither
Perhaps forever
Because when I needed you
You did not come.
You can order a copy of “The Circle” through my Published Works page.
The Quick and the Dead 