Posts tagged grief
St. Christopher’s Failure
St. Christopher’s Failure

My daughter’s fortieth birthday is soon, and I’m looking for something special for her. It’s a tradition in our family. At particular milestones, the mother gifts the celebrant with a special piece of jewelry, other “heirloom” from her own life. I’m looking for a piece of my history—something of me to stay with her as she moves toward all she’s becoming. When I turned forty, my mother surprised me by crocheting a lovely blue throw that I still can snuggle under on cold nights. I don’t have time to create something, so I sort through my jewelry box, looking for just the right thing.

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Keep MovingKristina Buschgrief, loss, relationshipsComment
Driving Lessons
Driving Lessons

I’m seated in the passenger seat of my old gray Prius teaching Zahra how to drive. She is in the driver’s seat intently watching the traffic light, waiting for the moment it turns green. I sit quietly so I don’t disturb her concentration. She’s wearing a black blouse with long sleeves and black pants on this hot summer day; her headscarf is absent. I’ve known her long enough to know that she wears a headscarf only when she wants to. “It’s not for religion,” she’s told me before, stopping short of telling me why she sometimes wears it. I’m wearing a short skirt and a tank top in light colors. Despite our different appearances, I feel a strong emotional kinship with her.

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Keep MovingKristina Buschgrief, loss, relationshipsComment
On a Train to Nice
On a Train to Nice

I rush to the quai in the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Flinging my small case on the train, I jump on. Moments later the train pulls away along the track, heading to Nice.

Slumped in my seat, I can relax, breathe, and observe those already settled in my compartment. Business people, couples, and single travellers surround me. One small figure catches my eye—a lady in her early sixties, dressed in a double-breasted camel hair coat, green beret, and smart brown leather gloves. She is elegant, with red lipstick. The slight nervousness of her fidgeting hands is familiar.

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Second ChancesKristina Buschgrief, Mother daughter, family, immigration storiesComment
Finally, A Truth
Finally, A Truth

The two-seater Toyota truck rushed through the darkness of early morning in Fayetteville, N.C. We were on our way to the hospital on Fort Bragg’s Army base. My pain made sitting up monumental, whimpering inevitable. I was aware of every centimeter of my body and yet, somehow, also entirely outside of myself. God, it hurt.

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Thanks I GuessSelena Raygozamiscarriage, marriage, griefComment
An Uprooting
An Uprooting

“Did she really say that?” I was shocked, yet I wasn’t. There was a strange quality to my awareness those days, like the water coming to shore and retreating again. I was listening to myself through insubstantial headphones, muted and tilted slightly.

My mama nodded. She kept tinkering about the kitchen, pressing the button on the coffee machine and side-stepping back to the sink. I watched her in silence for long moments, dangling my feet from the bar stool with the nervous energy that took hold of me while I was mulling over my grandmother’s statement.

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Thanks I GuessKristina Buschfamily, grief, loss Comments
On The Water's Edge
On The Water's Edge

On the day of my best friend’s funeral, I received a friendly text from a colleague asking how I was enjoying my summer. Not knowing I was in despair, I did not want to distress them. So, I replied with a number of clichéd nautical terms. I felt like a ship without an anchor. I was lost at sea, set adrift. This proximity to water, without the sight of land, creates disorientation and resignation. My early grief came with a strange apathy born from a newfound loneliness and struggle. Will power and the habit of duty kept me tethered to the deck. I hoped I was not at risk of falling overboard. I am not a strong swimmer.

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GriefKristina Buschfriendship, grief, loss, RelationshipsComment
Karen and the Heron
Karen and the Heron

When I sent Karen the picture of the great blue heron that had sidled up to me as I sat reading on the beach, she did not yet know that she would die soon. Of course, neither did I. She was sick, and her illnesses were frequent and never satisfactorily explained, but we still believed they would be cured, that someone would figure them out and apply the right treatment.

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GriefJulia Nusbaumfriendship, grief, loss of a friendComment
Mother's Day Over Madagascar
Mother's Day Over Madagascar

Fucking first times, my therapist calls them.  First holidays, significant occasions, anniversary of the death.  The first time after you’ve lost someone, lost a child.  It caught me off guard the first year, things that I didn’t expect took me to my knees.  Easter, why did that leave me weeping, lashing out at everyone, feeling like a horrible failure?  We weren’t religious and even if we were, Nel was most certainly not.  She’d called me from prison the last Easter she was alive, Happy Easter! I tried to chirp at her.  She stopped me mid-happy.

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GriefJulia Nusbaummotherhood, Death, mother and daughter, grief Comments
Primer For One Left Behind
Primer For One Left Behind

A / Anyone

You want to become anyone, a head placed on any random body. At the county fair, faces from the crowd fill the cut-outs where heads of farmers or cows should be. The souvenir photograph, a reminder of a new identity. You want to go into witness protection, become someone else, anyone else, an image the mirror recognizes. This is normal.

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GriefKristina Buschgrief, mental health, widow Comment
What I Didn't Say When I Gave Your Eulogy
What I Didn't Say When I Gave Your Eulogy

06.25.2022

Umma understands one out of three of my poems. This is why she declares I sound like a poet. I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her before I gave up on art, small girl of ten brimming with precious audacity not yet oxidized by sharp gust of outside air; recited Jabberwocky in a basement, sang Maya Angelou over the counter of an addressless existence. As long as we had no house, I could not be contained. But I gave up on art when I got my first room, blunt molasses space concretizer of reality, snuffer of dreams. Word became flesh and I hated mine, blunt molasses block of pound. What words could soften the thud of me hitting air?

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GriefKristina Buschgrief, grandmother, poetryComment
James
James

The box from James arrived months after my birthday, tattered and misshapen. In it, a black-and-white striped purse, gray scarf, face masks, a knockoff Purple Rain CD, and two cardigans: one small yellow one for my eleven year old daughter and another for me the color of a bright orange Boston autumn leaf where James and I had gone to college together. 

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GriefJulia Nusbaumdeath of a friend, healing, griefComment
Exempt Human Specimens
Exempt Human Specimens

According to the United States Postal Service website, it’s illegal to send body parts through the mail.

“Heavily restricted,” is a better way to put it. You need the necessary permits, containers, a transport license from the American Association of Mortuary Shippers. There are rules involved, special restrictions; same goes for dry ice and lithium batteries. You can mail live bees, but not medical marijuana. Those thin, translucent lines that keep us from stuffing a toe into a manila envelope on the way to work.

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GriefJulia Nusbaumdeath and dying, grief, Family, pregnancy, motherhoodComment
Babies I'll Never Have
Babies I'll Never Have

I walk troublingly late. None of the doctors know what to make of me.

“You came out of the womb singing your ABCs, but you didn’t walk until you were two-years-old!” my mother jokes. “You were just so smart. You wouldn’t even crawl. You’d just roll everywhere, like a little log. You were very efficient.”

A very expensive doctor on the Upper West Side finally steps in and fits me for special shoes with arch support. They are pink leather and make my feet look comically large for a child so small, and I wail when they are strapped on to me, wriggling as the velcro crunches into place. I detest the process of learning to walk. I fall constantly. My little knees remain perpetually bruised.

Once I finally get the hang of it, though, I am unstoppable.

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GriefKristina Buschdisability, Infertility, griefComment
Milk Teeth
Milk Teeth

For years, I kept my children’s teeth in a drawer. Wrapped in a rainbow silk, I tucked them behind the protection of scarves and mismatched socks. In preparation for a move to a new life, our belongings would sit in the liminal land of a storage unit. It didn’t feel right to put the bundle of teeth in the cardboard box behind bars.

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GriefJulia Nusbaumgrief, childhood, growing up, motherhoodComment
The Walk
The Walk

Since the library is closed to the public due to the pandemic, I have nowhere to spend my lunch hour. On rainy days, after I wolf down my peanut butter sandwich at my desk, I cut through the woods behind my office and duck into the grocery store where I try to spend forty-five minutes buying a bottle of soda. It has become increasingly difficult to not feel like I’m doing something wrong by loitering in the greeting card section pretending like I’m looking for the perfect birthday card or killing time in the least-shopped aisle–the one with a meager offering of generic packs of underwear and cotton tube socks sandwiched between a selection of dusty light bulbs and bottles of motor oil.

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Summer DaysJulia NusbaumAlaska, Adventure, Women, Outdoor, griefComment
It Could Be Almost Paradise
It Could Be Almost Paradise

In El Dorado you drive for hours, just to feel like you’re going somewhere. Your dad tinkers with cars and he’s given you one he loves, a 280Z. It’s too fast for you. You get reckless and twist past the pines. Once, you skid in a ditch on a zigzag turn. Another time, you open the throttle on a straight highway and rear-end a brown pickup full of stoners. No damage, dude. They’re the only stoners you’ve ever seen in Arkansas, and when you drive away you start to wonder if they were even real.

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Before and AfterGuest Userwomens stories, death of a friend, griefComment