“Don’t say mourning. It’s too analytical. I’m suffering.” —Roland Barthes, from a journal kept after his mother’s death…
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Ma, it’s been a while since we’ve talked, really talked. I’m not sure of the last time we had a conversation that we both wanted to be in, of the…
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I scrawl snippets of my life onto scraps of paper and tuck them between the covers of my unwritten books. How will I spin these muddled bits of memory into…
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I wouldn’t walk away from my mother’s dead body. After my sisters and I had washed her breasts, belly, arms, and smoothed scented cream over her soft, soft papery skin,…
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Under the scratchy polyester quilt in our rented trailer I listened to the volley of insults grow thick and loud on the other side of the wall. Cabinet doors slammed,…
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If you run my mother’s name through a search engine, the third or fourth spot down is an article about something good she may have done. After that it’s all…
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WOVEN is an Entropy series and dedicated safe space for essays by persons who engage with #MeToo, sexual assault and harassment, and #DomesticViolence, as well as their intersections with mental…
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In sixth grade, my family’s brand-new minivan exploded. The smell of burning rubber blotted out the smell of concession stand burgers that evening from its parking spot across the street…
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Image Credit: Bailey Pennington In that very moment—hearing the doctor strip his hands free of the latex gloves he had just used in the examination room—my worst nightmare was…
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Image Credit: Ally Sobola My son wears the word “visible,” tattooed in Times Roman, on his left arm. The tattoo was a present from me for his 18th birthday. A…
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After my mother didn’t wake up; after the snow drifted down to mix with dirt like cream as the gravediggers heaped earth atop her casket; after the drive home to…
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Image Credit: Margarita Kochneva I wanted to get married in a sari but my mother wouldn’t let me. She wanted me to wear a wedding gown. “It’s universal,” she…
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Image Credit: Uyamt’s Memo In the weeks before you died, we caught flashes of blue outside your bedroom window. Jays appeared everywhere: in the woods behind the house, on…
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Prologue: It’s important to travel after a death, they say, to help process loss from a new vantage point. A month before my wedding in 2016, my mother passed away…
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