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Grief is a Story I Was Told on Rosary Beads
by Electra Rhodes ~ Mam was laid out cotton-starched on the bed. The stillest I’d ever seen her. She’d not like to be known this way so I made a bit of busy noise at the door. As if I’d only just arrived. She struggled and gained no real purchase against the slip of the sheets, so she glared at me instead. Her life was eking round the tubes Sister Mary-Joseph had tucked discreetly under the blankets.
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Electra Rhodes’ Reflection on Writing
When I’m writing about caring I’ve found that I come at the narratives in one of two ways. This means that I usually lean into either “just because it isn’t real doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” or, “just because it isn’t true doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
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The Miracle Jar
by Thad DeVassie ~ Arriving at a time my father isn’t home, I decide to clean out the refrigerator – not in the same way I did as a teenager with a voracious appetite, but as the adult child concerned for his aging parent, alone. I go about my business, tossing out salad dressings, things that appear overly pickled, and bags of store-bought shredded cheese nearly a decade old, barely showing the white, fleck-fuzz of decay. Half of the items resting at a comfortable thirty-seven degrees have to go.
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Thad DeVassie’s Reflection on Writing
In documenting my mother’s dementia, the last thing I expected to be writing about was my father’s bizarre forgetfulness as well. It had that stranger-than-fiction quality to it requiring no embellishment, no overthinking. The elements of sad truth were enough, giving me a heads up that dementia and Alzheimer’s are indeed sneaky. Fool me once, but not twice.
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Loss Loop
by Tara Campbell ~ One of my plants, a philodendron, drops leaves every spring. Just when she should be happy, sprawling into the light of longer days, a string of leaves begins to yellow. One after another, the leaves lose their green and shrivel, like they’re finally deciding that what they’ve been trying to do all winter isn’t going to work. Despairing just when things are getting better.
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Tara Campbell’s Reflection on Writing
This piece began in two different places. One part was a prompt in a Kathy Fish class to write about a dream, quickly, without thinking about it too much and without trying to make it “mean” something. The telephone dreams in the piece represent a real recurring dream I used to have about needing to call someone right away, but screwing up the number or getting disconnected again and again.
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Jamy Bond’s Reflection on Writing
I find that writing about darker subjects is a rewarding way to contain my own difficult experience. Many of the details in Morphine are fiction, but the situation is very true. My sister and I fought at our father’s bedside over how much morphine to give him.
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Morphine
by Jamy Bond ~ As our father lay dying, I fought with my sister over morphine. I wanted to give him as much as possible, as much as the hospice nurse said that we could, and so, every two hours, at the chime of his Westminster mantel clock, I’d push a thin syringe between his lips and let the liquid slowly bleed across his blackened gums.
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Sue Mell’s Reflection on Writing
This piece details a particular recurring struggle in caregiving, and the challenge lay in my finding a way to communicate that daily experience of intense conflicting emotions, and to capture the weight of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, in a single passing moment.
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Interval
by Sue Mell ~ Nine seconds to warm the applesauce for my mother’s morning medication. To wrestle my fury, replace it with a light-hearted care. Even as a kid I shied away from her clinging hand; now her need for me is bottomless.
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ONE WILD RIDE 