Eulogy

Note: My grandmother passed away around the middle of the day today. I had orginally wanted to find a quote to post on my Facebook page, but couldn't find something that fit. Posted here because it's a bit more personal & accessible than my dA account. Haven't edited yet, but I want to post it before I go to bed - will clean it up a bit & add the text/note after I get some sleep. Tbh I'd rather talk politics or the weather than hear any condolences -- this is intended as a tribute, please please please do not read it as anything but a tribute -- but I'm posting it for the public to comment on, so I'm resigned to people expressing their support regardless (please please please, ask me about recent legislature or something instead).

--

When my father told me that my grandmother was dead, I did not cry. We are not criers, my family: but my father had been perilously close often over the last few weeks. I nodded, asked a few quiet questions about funeral procedures, and turned back to my laptop.

(This was on Saturday. Her deadline had been shortened on Tuesday, from two to six months to two to five days.)

Intermittently, during the empty spaces that dotted the week before her death, I had listened to the saddest music I knew, trying to find the right quote for the way I loved her, the way I would miss her. I kept wondering, Am I going to cry now? On Tuesday night, I felt a hollowness at the back of my throat and a warmth behind my eyes, but no tears came to crystallize the kitchen lamp and banish the weight in my gut. I am a writer: loss comes not in emotive expression but in the empty spaces that no words can express.


--

A week before Saturday, my grandmother read my writing for the first time in years -- perhaps the first time ever. I emailed my father a number of my stories so he could show her while he was in Kentucky. My father called and told me that he thought she'd read one, my final assignment for my fiction class the year before; he said he could hear her laugh while she read it. Later she texted me: [Text.]

She was always proud of her grandchildren, by virtue of their existence as her grandchildren. I have never seen a smile so generous or so genuine at good news from family, and even at twenty-one I have met many generous and genuine people.

That was the last thing I heard from her.

--

Three weeks before, my father brought and with my two siblings me to visit her in Kentucky. We left home at four in the afternoon and so arrived in the early hours of the morning, but my grandmother was awake. She was too thin. I leaned over her bed near the living room window and hugged her, careful not to touch her left leg, trying not to be alarmed or upset. My father asked about the shades across one window -- didn't she want to see her birds at the feeder? -- and my grandmother answered that the morning sun woke her too early.

For the first time since my mid-teens, I was kept awake that night by an urge to capture a particular image into words. I wrote a poem about the songbirds' cousin, caged by tubes, and knew it was cliche, and knew that it wasn't true to her spirit, and knew that nothing else could capture the visceral fragility of her bones in my arms.

--

The in-home care my father had hired was doing an excellent job. The hospice medical care was not. My father is a manager. When I was younger I cringed in embarrassment at his stubborn insistence on excellent service (What is this? Put me on the phone with your boss) but now I felt fiercely proud, because this was my grandmother and he was making absolute certain that she would get the best care.

(The next weekend, at my siblings' graduation, my aunt would mention that he called her and yelled. He replied that he was ranting, not yelling. I informed them that this sounded eerily like a conversation I might have with my own brother.)

My father made sure to get the life story of each and every person who came to care for my grandmother, "because they should be like family," he said, and because he wanted to be sure they would give good care. My interactions were more sporadic: the travel and experiences and dreams of one (her year in Alaska, my semester in England; my degree as a creative writer, her desire to go into diesel engineering); another's new puppies; the Spongebob scrubs and bibliophilia of a third. They cleaned and cooked excellent food. The last person to stay with my grandmother had left her sun room a mess: grass seed and birdseed spilled, mouse droppings all over. My sister and I cleaned.

At first, my grandmother slept a lot. It was hard for me to tell whether she wanted company or silence, and I was cagey, uncertain which words were safe and which perilous. The last afternoon, while my father was discussing improved care with hospice, I sat in a chair in the living room for lunch. The nurse, my grandmother's favorite, promptly ordered me onto the seat beside the bed. "Sit up here and talk to your Grandma," she told me.

So here was the thing I had secretly been dreading; but I was at once intimidated and comforted by the nurse's brisk cheerfulness, and so I hesitantly took the seat. The nurse had made stew and cornbread, and this was a few minutes' occupation. I said the food was very good -- I said this often, as I always did when we came south -- and then, because my grandmother was looking at me with her honest, delighted smile, I said everything that came to mind. I told her about college and my friends back home. I passed a message from one friend, whom she ordered to visit.

(Two weeks before that Saturday in July, because my friend was up for a road trip, we made plans to visit at the beginning of August.)

The anxiety slipped away from me as we spoke, because she was still the same woman, with her straightforward answers to complicated questions and affectionate stories about people I'd never met. A hardness began to settle in my gut, because of the reality of her and because I'd already gotten used to her thinness.

I decided I would visit at least once more before the summer was out, since I would probably be in England when she passed, and left a note for the nurses to add me on Facebook. So you can show her pictures of England, I wrote, the same way she said Six months when asked how long it would take her leg to heal.

--

I had taken to carrying the afghan my grandmother had made for me around everywhere I went. My Grandma made it for my thirteenth birthday. It is yellow with peach, lavender, and pastel green stripes. She wrote on a note when she gave it to me: Note. I kept the note in a jewelry box when I was younger, in a folder with other memorabilia when I grew old enough to accumulate such things.


It was something of an in-joke in the family that I took the afghan wherever I traveled -- and I did, as if this possession made with love could carry family wherever I went and perhaps absorb a bit of the places I visited. Usually, when I was home, it sat on my bed at one of two houses. It was loosely crocheted and a bit too small to be comfortable to curl up in. But now it went with me from house to house, from room to room. It was born of a superstitious urge, not to preserve her life, but to remind some invisible watcher that I was thinking of her and cared.

--

My grandmother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in October of 2011. I think I knew when I first heard -- that this was the beginning of a slow downslide, that there would be no recovery or that recovery would be a few years' brief gift -- but I chose not to think about it. No point in worrying about a future I could not predict or control.

My great-uncle had passed away that February. 2011 was a difficult year for me, but I was troubled more by the future I was falling into than the spectre of a generation passing.

--

The summer of 2010, at my request, my father took us to visit family across the south. By blood I have two aunts, one uncle, and three first cousins, but my father has more cousins than I can count. I wanted to see this elusive extended family before I left my immediate family for college.

My father spent part of his childhood in Michigan, and my grandmother lived in small but relatively developed Somerset, but my family is rooted in Leslie County, Appalachia. It's a rough country. Its people take pride in common sense, independence, and family loyalty. They say all European-Americans are immigrants, and I suppose it's true, but somewhere along the six generations buried in a tiny cemetery in Leslie County, enough Appalachia got into our blood for me to recognize home when I encountered it: the soft green mountains against the blue sky, the dropped 'g's and euphemisms my father still falls into when talking to family, the plain, straightforward speak, and the honest delight to see a long-lost splinter of the far-flung family.

We spent a few days at my Grandma's, a few at my aunt's in Tennessee, a few at my uncle's in North Carolina. On the day we went to Leslie County, we stopped for lunch at a town perched between two hills. The main street was only a handful of buildings long, empty enough that I thought it was just a waystation between more populous areas until my father and grandmother indicated otherwise; I remember being deeply confused by the lack of citizens or houses, but looking back I assume the houses were set further back -- hollows between the hills.

(Later, after lunch, my father would carefully navigate the hillside hairpins to our cousins' house and explain how his own father would make him sick, he went around the curves so fast. He would explain about hollows and kudzu. I assumed kudzu was a strange Southern word like the hollow-holler, an oddly spelled idiom with a straightforward etymology. It was such an established part of the landscape that I was surprised to find it was, in fact, an invasive weed from Japan.)

While we were eating lunch, my grandmother pointed up the hill and told us that the best friend of her childhood used to live up there. Storytelling, like Southern accents and good food and long car rides, was a staple of family visits: A mere hour's visit is an insult to the host, and stories fill up the time and catch up on years of news in a diverting way. I was used to stories about my grandmother's youth, about the grandfather I never knew, about the Cherokee princess said to have married my great-great-grandfather, who turned her back on her people and was never again permitted to speak her own name. These stories wove themselves into the fabric of my personal history, of half-imagined places and times I could never experience.

Adults of my father's generation often grew impatient with my grandmother, because she was hard of hearing and didn't answer questions in ways they found useful. I was annoyed by their impatience, by their suggestions that perhaps she was a bit slow sometimes; clearly they did not understand her properly. She was my Grandma, and she had a beautiful wisdom born of common sense and years' experience. I loved her stories, the earnest and intent way she spoke to me of her youth and advised me to do what I loved, to take care of my body, to keep money in savings and a second name on my bank account.

I don't think I could see the house on the hill: maybe I was at the wrong angle to see out the restaurant window, or maybe she wasn't talking about a real house but its echo, the memory of a building that had long since been torn down. I don't remember. I remember realizing that I hadn't known my Grandma grew up in this very town. I tried to picture the school she attended with that best friend I didn't know, but all I could see was the Subway, commercially and stiflingly identical to every other Subway I had ever been to.

(When I asked about the funeral procedures, my father mentioned in passing that a man would give a eulogy. It seems strange to me that this man probably has more true stories to tell about my grandmother's life than I do.)

--

I do not cry for the same reason I do not write autobiographically: because the dark currents in me elude control, defy expression, slide sideways in a mercurial dance rather than risk being understood. I am a writer, and I am reticent by nature, and I am a proud and stubborn daughter of Appalachia. Sobs do not lurk in my chest waiting to be released; tears can be ripped out of me, but they come not from grief, but from frustration that I am expected to offer a response I do not own. I cannot express my most intimate feelings in a foreign medium.

But grief demands an outlet, my grandmother's memory a tithe, and here I offer what I have.

Happy 4th & updates

To any and all Americans: Happy Fireworks Day!

I am still alive, as it happens, and the novel is still kicking. I am about 10k into a second draft with an actual, real, honest (maybe not alive but still an) outline. It is helping muchly.

I have a great big long to-do list of things that must be completed before travels at the end of summer, but I do have a certain amount of free time on my hands. (Always assuming I don't waste hours researching bizarre and impossible details like how Ancient Roman ships docked...) I think I might try to do a weekly blog post type deal? And maybe see what I can do about the fact that this isn't a blog of interest for anyone anyway. People reading might make it worth writing, yanno.

Also: Hid all the posts from when this was a daily log back in October '11-December '12. I don't really like having all the random snippets up for the public eye, and anyway, they're not interesting enough to be worth the clutter.

Sorry-in-the-Vale meets Potsdam, NY

Well hello there. Pardon me while I wipe the dust off this blog. I have a couple of posts upcoming - an update and some other things. This is something else.

-

So Sarah Rees Brennan is hosting a contest for an ARC of her upcoming book, Untold. One of the categories for this contest is to take a picture of yourself reading Unspoken in a weird place.

Naturally I translated this to “PHOTOSHOOT ALL OVER POTSDAM!” and recruited two lovely friends (Debbie Scharbach and Maria Gonzalez, they are wonderful!) to take pictures of me. So here is a tour of my much-beloved college town with the premise, “How many parallels can I possibly find between Potsdam, NY and Sorry-in-the-Vale?”


Attempting to mimic the cover at the gates of Bayside Cemetery.





Old Snell Hall is a part of Clarkson College. It is a very creepy, most probably haunted old building DESPERATELY in need of rennovation. It’s not *quite* a Gothic manor, but I think it does almost as good a job as the old Sisson mansions, which are now frat houses – I didn’t know how to find them or get into them.

The Sissons are one of the old families of Potsdam – along with the Clarksons, the Snells, and probably some other names that adorn the buildings of the local colleges. There are lots of stories about their nefarious schemes to keep money in the family and the bizarre things they did in their mansions. One of the popular legends is that they have tunnels connecting their mansions under all of town, and some of these tunnels are blocked off from the current owners until the last living Sisson dies.
In lieu of a proper Sisson mansion picture, have a ghost story here: The Sisson Haunted Mansion. True story: Three of my sorority sisters got a tour of this house. It has at least one secret staircase.


Inside Old Snell.





They went over the wooden bridge over the Sorrier River, stands of bright red wolfberries waving at them from the bank.
“The Sorrier River?” Jared asked when he saw the sign by the bridge.
“It’s haunted,” Kami said with some pride.
– p. 102. Taken by the Racquette River, which is not haunted (by bells or otherwise).





Bayside Cemetery is a gorgeous, old riverside cemetery that contains the mausoleums of most of those old families I mentioned before.





Potsdam, like Sorry-in-the-Vale, has its very own sandstone. It is red and called Potsdam sandstone. I find this vastly less interesting than Cotswold sandstone, whether you consider it the color of honey or of pee.





Obligatory hole in which a person might be buried alive. This picture was taken by Samantha Fay on an oboe studio hike (Mt Arab for those who know the area). I was DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED to have neither a camera nor Unspoken when we came across this hole and demanded that somebody take a picture for me.

--

That’s it for the parallels, but here are some other fun pictures we took:




Believe it or not, this is a roof. The Crane School of Music is built into a hill and most of it is underground.




Cassie’s Harp – a wind harp dedicated to a student who died before finishing her degree. A beautiful spot, and haunting when the wind makes the harp sing.




I have no idea why this is not behind the construction fence.

Fun things!

Over the weekend, I hit 50,000 words and an ending. Now I get to go back and restructure the novel so that there is the appropriate amount of story between beginning & ending. Exciting but bewildering, because it does not at all end where I thought it would. This "book" appears to be the trilogy that I had originally wanted to AVOID (because honestly, wouldn't it be nice to be able to read a book and have it be a stand-alone now and again?)

On another note, I'm sick. YAAAAY BRONCHITIS. Since I'm a resident student and have no doctor up here, and since our student health isn't super reliable about respiratory stuff, I had a two-hour wait in the afterhours clinic for a ten-minute appointment. I brought some Neil Gaiman with me to read, but there was a radio playing, so I couldn't concentrate. And I have this thing where I find offices/places-of-business weirdly inspiring to write? I dunno. Anyway, I started scribbling on the back of an envelope because it was what I had at hand, and I felt very writer-y about it. Have a snippet:

"How are you?"

The pause of someone deciding whether or not to admit how shitty he feels, and then Rinehart answered, "I'm all right."

"No, you're not," Sophie said matter-of-factly. "You're miserable. Why do we say that, anyway, how-are-you-i'm-all-right, when nobody cares if you're all right and you don't want them to know you're not?"

The next pause was the sort that always followed Sophie's being honest. "It's nice to know you're concerned," Rhinehart said at last, tartly.

"I didn't say I wasn't concerned." Sophie swung herself up onto a fallen trunk and sat by the roots, heels kicking. "When people say 'nobody cares,' they mean 'everybody-doesn't-care.' I'm not part of everybody, so I'm not part of nobody when nobody really means everybody-doesn't."

"I see." Rinehart's lips quirked up - despite his best efforts, Sophie was sure. "And if you're not part of everybody-doesn't, what are you part of?"

"Well, everybody-not, of course. But everybody-not isn't a thing you're part of -- either you're everybody-not, or you aren't. It's a title, not a group."

Rinehart was silent so long Sophie almost started to worry he was having a true sourpuss day. Then he said, "I can't imagine how you must confound your teachers at school."

"I am a very smart individual," Sophie quoted, "who consistently fails to apply my talents to the proper avenues of study."

Sophie is a very smart, very weird, and slightly obnoxious girl. She happens to be able to see fairies, but this is not what makes her smart, or weird, or obnoxious. She also happens to not give a shit about whether people understand her 90% of the time, and it is beautiful. She's going to have her turn in the spotlight whenever I finish Ker's story.

Quick update

Words: 32,490 and counting. I'm supposed to be at 100 pages (approx. 50k with this font size) in two weeks.

So this book. I 100% intended it to be a standalone, because I didn't want to be tied to the first world I ever worked in (given that I am sure my writing will improve MASSIVELY over the first few years I'm writing). And then I started plotting and realized I had too much material for one book - it needs to be two, at least. And now I'm realizing that the world I've invented is simply too large to be explored fully in one story (or set of stories). Originally, the story was going to gallivant about from the city of Quorina to at least two or three other cultures. Now it's looking like the entire first novel is likely to take place in Quorina. This makes me sad, because it is SO MUCH FUN to explore the fruits of my worldbuilding.

So I suppose I will have to write some short stories or novellas or whatnot in addition to this. Who am I kidding? I would love to write an entire novel about a child growing up in Elatxaia.

I need to get back to my writing. I want to get another 2 pages written in the next hour. Here, have some snippets I had to excise:

She could see now that Keranos’ fists were clenched; his perpetual scowl had deepened, if possible.

“If you two could postpone this argument until we’re in the sewer,” Luxinus added, crouching down on the floor and pulling some sort of grass blade out of a container, “that would be excellent. You’re raising your voices again.” He stuck his arm through the grate hole and wiggled the grass blade back and forth.

“You’re not the only one ever used,” Keranos said to Eritsena, and if his voice was softer, it was twice as vicious. “Do not say, northerner, just because you – because you…” He trailed off, his face twisting. Then he spat something in an unfamiliar language and snapped, “Your words are not good.”

Luxinus paused in his magic and blinked at Keranos, apparently befuddled by the comment. The sentiment was so familiar to Eritsena that she nearly laughed. She controlled herself before the prickly northerner could take offense, and said, “They’re his words, not mine.” She jabbed a thumb at Luxinus. “I only speak Imperial because it’s what most people understand. It has all the wrong words for all the wrong things.”

-

She took a few moments to slip into a clean dress and neaten her mussed hair. She did not bring a lamp with her to the garden. The halls of her childhood home were as familiar to her as the soles of her sandals, and anyway there seemed to be a great deal of moonlight tonight; she could see grey, shifting shadows on the corridor walls.

She realized that the spirit was still with her when she reached the garden. Scent hit her strongly as soon as she stepped through the doorway: flower and leaf, marble and dirt, sweat and skin and the overpowering perfume used to cover such odors. The garden was shaded in deep greens and greys, and its beauty in this altered state nearly took her breath away.

Oh hi I exist.

Hello, lovely people!

Quick update since I haven't been around lately. My first draft/first-chapter revision is OFFICIALLY my project for my capstone course at college. I am SUPER EXCITED for this largely because it means this novel will have to stop acting like a constipated lump in the back of my head. I have 17,073 words and counting. :D

Anywho, have a nice long snippet from a scene that went VERY QUICKLY AWRY and is being scrapped and completely rewritten. Actually I'm not sure how I feel about even this part, but at least it's not all plot-awkward and Totally Not Following The Purpose Of The Scene.

“Ladies, meet Eritsena Kingsbrother of Senxal. She’s from Elatxaia, and a princess on her father’s side.”

Clotea, the slave who had handed Eritsena sandals, advanced with a jar of oil and a metal tool that reminded Eritsena of a small scythe. Never having quite understood Quorian bathing practices, Eritsena had always brought her own supplies to the bathhouse and used them as she best saw fit, to the occasional dismay of proprietors; now, she held very, very still in the hopes that the slave woman was not about to murder her.

Meanwhile, the aristocrats broke out into another series of exclamations at Anticia’s introduction. “How exotic!” one woman, Eritsena’s age, beamed. There had been a brief flash of dismay on her face, one Eritsena had not missed, before she noticed that her compatriots were smiling. “What brings you this far south, Eritsena?”

“Travel,” Eritsena answered cautiously. “My people often travel the world in their early twenties. It’s said to bring wisdom.”

Clotea had poured the oil over Eritsena’s left shoulder. Now she began to scrape it away with the scythelike tool. The woman who had spoken before remarked, “How strange! I’ve never seen an Elatxaian before.”

“It’s unlikely you’d see a woman,” Eritsena allowed. “Few of us come this far south.” In recent years, more and more women were restricting their years of wandering to Elatxaia itself. With Quorian ideals seeping outward to the fringes of the Empire, fewer and fewer territories were interested in entertaining a horsewoman or a female messenger. The road was more dangerous for a lone woman than it once had been, as well. “It may be they were dressed as locals, if you saw one – our dress isn’t really…seasonal in this weather.”

“Charming,” the older woman said. She was squinting shortsightedly at Eritsena’s torso. “But you have children, I see, or your stomach says so. Surely they miss their mother?”

Eritsena felt a slow, dark flush creeping up her neck and into her cheekbones. She wished, fervently, that she were stranded on a rock in the ocean, being picked at by vultures; it would have been less excruciating. “I was very young when my son was born. He didn’t survive.” It was a half-truth made mostly by omission, but it was more than she wanted these strangers to know.

Several of the aristocrats made apologetic noises, but the older woman clucked her tongue and looked away, as if Eritsena had killed a child simply by being away from home. A brief silence fell, into which Eritsena clearly heard the younger woman whisper to another, “She hardly has an accent! Do you think she’s really…”

Oh, and if I seem not to exist, this novel is why. So I guess I'll see y'all sometime in March when I have break.

Here, have a snippet.

Instead of doing my proper novel-writing today I did some ventwork. It's a beginning which could possibly be a novel if the story decided to behave. It's about a snarky psychic named Melanie Shefford and Brian, her ex-fiance. This is how it starts:

I didn’t go to work on Friday. I spent the morning curled up next to the window with a cup of tea and a book. The tea was chammomile, which is good for the stomach and the nerves, and which I occasionally forget to despise. I was wearing my warmest sweater and fuzzy slippers and a blanket around my shoulders. The blanket was for comfort, mostly.

When I didn’t turn up to work and I didn’t answer my phone, which was dead, again, Brian showed up to check on me. Either he predicted my response or he was really worried, because he poked his head around the door before I could answer his knock. “Mel, you really can’t just skip –” he began when he saw me, then took another look and stopped. “What – ”

“I’m fine.” I tugged the blanket tighter around my shoulders. “Kettle’s on the stove if you want tea.”

“Are you sick? Why didn’t you call in?”

“Phone’s dead. Can’t find it,” I lied. “I’m not sick.”

“It’s not like you to just…not show up.”

“Felt like being spontaneous.”

He gave my very settled position a very pointed look. “You know Carl’s the sort of guy who’ll get you fired for spontaneity. He’s being nice because we’re worried. You’ve been different since – ”

He stopped, bit his tongue as if he’d almost spit poison. I wished he’d just say the goddamn word. Dancing around a thing, refusing to take it head-on, you have to judge it by its shadow – and the shadow’s always been a hell of a lot bigger for me than the thing I’m scared of.

“We all want you to be okay and to take your time to be okay,” Brian resumed, trying and failing not to sound like a TV commercial for counseling. “But you gotta call us and let us know if you’re not coming in. Use the neighbor’s phone or something. Carl would definitely fire you if you gave him a heart attack.”

I had nothing to say to that. Silence fell, awkward enough that Brian checked his phone to give his eyes something to do. On a bad impulse I asked, “How long have you got till he expects you back?”

“Depends on how you’re feeling.”

“Tell him I tripped down the stairs and had a concussion and you had to take me to the hospital.”

That startled a laugh out of him, like a flash flood crashing over a desert. He went to make himself some tea.

I've stuck the two of them in a situation which may or may not be melodramatic, but which is terrible for them both. I love Melanie more but I think I feel worse for Brian, who's actually a geniunely nice guy.