Tag: grief

When You Were
Grief & Loss · Nostalgic Posts · Poetry

When You Were

Beth DeFries5 Comments

You were pine scented card stock

dangling from the rearview mirror on elastic string,

packs of tissues strapped to the visor, 

and a little American flag fixed to the rear antenna-

when you were.

You were cans of Pepsi, 

cigarette butts in ashtrays all around,

and sweatshirts printed with cutesy cats, bears, and flowers.

You were snores on the sofa with the TV on loud-

true crime stories,

Irish folk songs, 

and the turn-dial TV,

bright white sneakers with shamrock laces

or American flags.

You were transitional lenses slow to adjust,

hair mousse, painted nails,

and yellow American cheese wrapped in paper and plastic from Acme.

You were egg drop soup, custard cups, and the corner store.

You were microwaved mugs of Lipton black tea, 

Oh When the Saints Go Marching In blaring on your hip,

God Bless America in light snow that February.

I can hear it now.

You were popular, authentic, and distinct.

I still remember the smell of your house,

that shelter for wayfaring family and friends, decade after decade.

It’s someone esle’s home now.

I wonder if you visit.

I still feel the icy shock of the kitchen tiles on bare feet in the mornings,

the twinge of fourteen years gone by with no new memories of you.

Still, we were lucky.

You were here for a while.

You were ours

and you loved us

when you were.

Cozy Posts · Nostalgic Posts

Good Bones

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

The heart of the shore house beats with the influx of familiar faces after the renting geese who flocked here for a change of scenery migrate home. The stairs creak in welcome at the sound of our identifiable steps and the walls sigh with relief as we walk through the front door and exchange warm greetings amongst family. The smiles, raised glasses, wagging tails, and toddler hugs refuel our tired spirits and remind us that although we share this place with so many, it is ultimately ours and together, we are home.

The shore house, though never my primary residence, is the home that I remember best from my childhood. It is where I spent my summers with my Nana and my Aunt Arlene. It is where I learned to cook with way too much butter and salt which I’ve since learned to remediate. It is where I learned the manners of a lady and sometimes defied that lesson by channeling a hereditary instinct to be wild thanks to the generation before me (though it is now impossible to mislay the cup, napkin, knife, and fork in a table setting).

The shore house has seen me shattered, coming back to a gloom within its walls that seemed they’d never feel full again the day my Aunt Arlene lost her battle with pancreatic cancer. The shore house helped me to start the healing process in the days that followed. It is where I learned the benefits of solitude, self-reflection, and the great company and support that you can find on the pages of a book.

The shore house, along with my Nana and Aunt Arlene, is why I know my family so well, why my cousins are more like sisters to me and my sister, and why I feel a need to spend so much effort nurturing a building, these days, despite the fact that doing so can push me to my stress limits better than anything else can.

With the shore house, my Nana and her sister created a home for all of the family to feel is ours. Nurturing the space reciprocates a respect for the value that it adds and has added to our family’s shared experience. In our shared home, we strive for functionality and something that is easier to care for, for the benefit of our migrating guests, but we also make sure that there is an abundance of coziness for ourselves as well.

Coziness, to me, is a combination of functionality, minimalism, and personal identity. Sometimes coziness seems like something else entirely to other members of my family. We make it work, though I can’t fully say I understand how.

Conch shells, Bananagrams tiles, paintings of ships in storms, lighthouse figurines, and donation bags coexist.

Sisters, cousins, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, husbands, fiancées, Daisy (and Dixie), and friends coexist.

Someone always has to sleep in Room 6 and wake up with a head bruise or two, courtesy of the steeply sloped ceiling.

There are often more than twenty-five pairs of shoes by the front door. The TV volume always fuels debate for what is to be considered a reasonable volume, as my Nana used to say. It takes hours to settle on a movie to watch and then someone inevitably leaves the room just after we hit play.

At the shore house, we drink way too much whiskey, too much wine, and just enough beer. Cheese and See’s Candies are considered reasonable meals. We stay up too late talking and laughing on the porch. We wake up to Daisy sniffing at the bedroom door and come downstairs to the perfume of coffee, the sound of cartoons, and a chorus of good mornings in the living room with each new entrant.

There are porch people and couch people and beach people.

The showers are usually taken.

The showers are cold when it’s finally your turn.

The kitchen is stifling in the evening no matter what setting the ceiling fan is on.

Eggs, oatmeal, bacon, and Del Ponte’s treats nourish us in the mornings – and coffee, of course. “I could do another cup,” sings the chorus of porch people.

We smell like sunscreen and the ocean. We are fiercely competitive at Five Crowns and The Fishbowl Game. Our shoulders sparkle with dried, Atlantic salt. We find sand in unexpected places. We could write an encyclopedia of inside jokes at the end of each summer, but sometimes forget how they originated.

We welcome, we nurture, we work hard and together. We keep the dream going for another year and another year and another year, thinking it’s getting easier until something hard happens. And then we remind ourselves that despite occasional stress fractures, it’s possible to heal, and our house has good bones.

Grief & Loss · Health & Lifestyle · Mental Health

Star Matter to Dark Matter and Back

Beth DeFries1 Comment

I began to minimize my faith in religion back in 2012. It was a very confusing and draining time in my life, brought on by my great aunt’s losing battle with pancreatic cancer a year earlier.

After her death, I was not the same person and I felt the cavity of her absence to my core. In attempts to be happy again, I talked to Mike almost every day, despite living in different cities. I watched dozens of DVDs from my university’s library, escaping into Singin’ in the Rain, Finding Neverland, and Ever After, to name a few. I bottled up my grief – wrote stories and essays about loss for class assignments, and pulled myself up from piles of blankets and sweatshirts on my dorm room bed. I took a trip to Florida and met Mike’s aunt and uncle for the first time and they took us to Disney World. It all helped a little, bit by bit, but I still felt lost. I prayed to God and to my aunt each night, longing to be heard. I cried till my nose grew raw with the salt of grief each time there was no response, and after a year – I stopped praying all together.

I slowly came to terms with an understanding that she was gone permanently and I that couldn’t talk with her anymore, only to her memory. I rationalized the unlikelihood that there was really a heaven, to the point where such a concept did not make sense to me anymore. I began to view Jesus as a good, self-sacrificing, historical figure who lived by contagious ethical values and began to realize that his mother, Mary, may have just been a young girl, newly married, and uneducated in matters of sexuality.

I began to stumble across my aunt in dreams, but she was different – not the person I had known. Something was always off about her. I’d be dreaming that I was walking around the corner in our family shore house and happen upon her standing there, wordless, in the middle of the kitchen, lit only by the bulb inside the refrigerator, her back to me. She never spoke to me in these early dreams. She was child-like, but looked even older than she did just before she died. She seemed happy in the dreams, but always with an air of infantile innocence about her, as though she were a newborn old person.

To not be able to speak with her was painful, and to fear her was worse, because at the time, all I needed to know was that she was still there if I needed her, that I could somehow break through the curtain between the realm of the dead and the living. I just didn’t know how yet.

I gained more of an interest in the science of the how the universe works and an appreciation for quantum theory a few years later, recognizing in them new ways to describe what I once called faith. I marveled in the idea that most of the elements in human bodies were formed in stars and gained an appreciation for the existence of humanity as we know it. I grew fascinated by the concept of time and how it works differently in the vastness of space than on Earth. At one point, I felt overwhelmingly small and helpless, a miniscule person, afraid, on a miniscule rock in an infinite stretch of something my brain will never fully comprehend. I learned about energy, the duality of electrons, and Schroedinger’s theory and wondered how many versions of each of us exist in infinite alternate realities, if at all. I wondered if my aunt was still alive in one. Or if I was dead in another. I began to appreciate my reality more and was fascinated by the mystery and possibility of it all. I started to feel comfortable with the unknown again. I still feel small, but also part of it all, and not alone. I am but one compilation of star matter trying to make sense of dark matter(s) and accepting that it’s ok if I can’t.

Grief & Loss · Health & Lifestyle

Turn, turn, turn

Beth DeFries3 Comments

Where to begin. We lost my Nana at 11:58PM on St. Patrick’s Day; my dad’s birthday, her dad’s birthday, and one of our family’s most appreciated holidays. We toasted with Chivas and an Irish blessing and recounted old stories and even some long suppressed confessions that had us reeling and telling each other, “Shh, people are sleeping,” through hysteric laughter (without any enforced change in volume at all).

Collected from her final party once it started to die down, its attendees gone home for a night’s rest to prepare for another day of uncertainty, she left us wrapped in the warmth of her family’s love, snapshots of her incredible life flashing before her – the memories jogged by recounted stories as best could be remembered and shared by her children, children in law, and granddaughters. She held hands with her youngest son and my younger cousin on all of our behalf before going off to hitch a ride home with her sister, her neighbor, and her father. That’s how I choose to think of it, anyway, the idea presented by my aunt and cousin… and I thought I didn’t even believe in that sort of thing anymore. I’ll make the exception for this.

We spent her final day surrounding her in her small, yellow room in suburban Pennsylvania, seated on assorted chairs and stools borrowed from the facility’s communal areas. We were watched over with care by images frozen in the blissful timeline of our own happy family memories captured and command stripped or taped to the walls. We rotated frequently and each held her hands. Some flew from the west, racing against an unknown deadline with all their might, and some said goodbye through others and through phone calls and videos. We all made it in time in that she knew we were each thinking of her. Of that I am absolutely certain.

We told her we loved her so much and that we knew she loved us too even though she couldn’t say it with words. So powerful was our matriarch, even in her final days that she drew us to her like moths to her sheltered flame. Wordless, her energy’s container frail, our need to be near her was so strong. We let her know she made us who we were- members of a family, a close knit tribe unlike any I’ve ever heard of – despite living on split coasts and across different states.

The grief comes in salty Atlantic waves with foamy Pacific crests and words get crumpled up like moist Kleenex sometimes. Tomorrow will be easier and each tomorrow after.

There is a season.

Turn, turn, turn.