This morning Everest and I took a walk and passed a sweet little cemetery in downtown Palm Springs. He immediately scrambled up the stone wall that surrounds the cemetery, positioned himself to hop down, and declared his intention to pick a flower for me. A flower from a grave.
He’s never seen a cemetery before, so he didn’t know. I shouted “No no no no no!” Then I explained to him what this place is, and how we respect the dead. We don’t touch monuments or headstones. We don’t stand on a burial place. And we never, ever pick the flowers.
He climbed off the wall and ran to my side.
“There are dead people there?”
Yes, I said. He and I talk about death a lot, which I didn’t expect to do with a preschooler. But our cat died a couple years ago, and Ev always has questions about that, and we talk about my mom, who is dead.
I try to be very clear and straightforward about this: There is no rainbow bridge in our conversations. I don’t use any euphemisms or evasive language. And I don’t promise him an afterlife. There is simply the body, which is buried or cremated, and the memories, which live on.
He asked more questions about the cemetery: Who are the people buried there? Will I be buried there? Will he be buried there? Why are they under the ground? And as I answered him, I mentally congratulated myself on this healthy conversation about death and dying and how well I had explained everything.
“It’s just weird,” Ev said as we walked away.
“What is, baby?”
“How all those people died right there. And in a line too.”
Ever had one of those conversations in which you know you’re saying the wrong thing — you feel yourself saying the absolute worst words — but you can’t stop yourself? It’s like when you’re headed for a car crash and time becomes stretchy and slow, but it’s too late. You’re already on a trajectory.
That’s what happened recently when I watched Coco with my 4-year-old son, Everest. We’ve seen the movie before, but this was the first time that he fully realized the skeletons were dead people. Of course he had questions — and that’s when a car crash spilled out of my mouth.
E: Are they really dead? Like dead dead?
ME: Oh, yes. Dead like our cat.
E: Dead like Kung Pao? … Why did they die?
ME: Well, everybody dies.
E: EVERYBODY DIES?
ME: Yes.
E: Even me?
ME: Yes, even you. But don’t worry. I’ll probably die a long time before you.
I can’t even count the number of therapy appointments Everest will eventually have based on that one conversation.
It didn’t phase him too much in the moment, but he’s 4. Sometimes it takes him days to process something, and then seemingly out of nowhere he’ll say, “Wait. So tigers DON’T lay eggs?” So I fully expect him to circle back to this at a very inappropriate time: “What do you mean I’m going to die like my cat?!?”
These days my 3-year-old son, Everest, is totally into letters, words, and writing. But yesterday he took this to a whole new level, and I’ve never been so proud.
My focus word for 2017 was “abundance,” and I spent all year trying my darnedest to cultivate that.
And failing. I failed so hard, you guys. My failures were abundant.
Financially, it was one of my driest years since I started freelancing. There were long and seemingly endless spans of time where nothing was accepted or published, even though I wrote, pitched, queried, and followed up obsessively. At one point I read an article that advised writers to aim for 100 rejections per year, and I cackled like a mad woman in a Brontë novel — I was hitting about 100 rejections (or non-responses) per month.
It was depressing. It felt like I was trying to climb a mountain, and even though I was doing my part, I couldn’t quite get there. I researched the trail, I showed up in hiking boots, I carried all the right gear, I had the motivation and desire to put in the work. Then mere steps from the top, I toppled for whatever reason, forcing me to start all over again.
Just when I considered calling it quits, I attended the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop in magical Granada, Spain. It helped recharge my batteries on just about every level, from inspiring me to write new things and look at my work in a different way to satisfying my itchy feet and proving I can still travel solo.
Soon after, I placed some of my favorite pieces, like this essay for LitHub about Silent Book Club, a piece about wildflowers and making my own roots in the desert for Palm Springs Life (the online version is a little wonky with some repeated paragraphs, but you can see it here anyway), and a funny/sad essay about a rat for Mutha Magazine.
I also started hosting a radio show about books with Tod Goldberg. I received an acceptance from an outlet that has been on my byline bucket list for decades. I registered for the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop, because I want to find my way toward humor writing again. I read 51 books.
Other good things happened: A road trip to Vegas, a quick jaunt to Portland, a terrific visit with my sister. I reconnected with old friends and made some new ones. As a family, Jason, Everest, and I slept in a tipi under the stars in Pioneertown, hiked through a couple of Canada’s spectacular national parks, and explored Vancouver, now one of our favorite cities.
Also Everest turned 3, and he has grown into someone I genuinely love to hang out with. He’s funny and weird and makes me laugh until I wheeze. We have dance parties, take silly selfies, and haven’t found a trail yet that we don’t want to explore.
In November Everest and I hiked 30 miles together, and most of those were quiet morning jaunts, clambering over rocks, scraping up knees, and listening to birdsong. I cherish every one of those miles.
Now we’re ending on a high note. We just finished a family road trip that was just about as perfect as those things get. We started by seeing the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at The Broad in Los Angeles, and stayed the night in Solvang, a quirky Danish-themed town. Then we spent a few easy days at Morro Bay, listening to seals bark, running on the beach, and sipping hot cocoa as the sun sank.
Our last morning in Morro Bay is a memory that I hope lasts, as it seems to sum up the whole year for me. It’s Everest, barreling down the pastel beach, gathering sand dollars by the handful. He carries them to me, holds these urchins to his chest, makes careful piles of them. He tosses some into the ocean; the rest he tucks into the pockets of my old college sweatshirt.
This is abundance. My pockets hang heavy with sand and salt and shells, and my heart is so full it’s buoyant. I am sand dollar rich, and I have all the things that matter.
It’s New Year’s Eve 2016. I’m freshly showered, about to get ready to go out.
I’m sitting in my bathrobe when my son, Everest, notices a cut on my leg. First, he crouches down to examine it. Then he kisses it, because that’s how health and wellness works for 2-year-olds. Find the hurt, press lips to it, make it better.
A minute later he carries a pillow over, carefully places it on my leg and says, “Right here. Hold it right here.”
“Why?”
“So you won’t get hurt again,” he says.
It is a fragile thing, this love. Sometimes I don’t want to move for fear of crushing it.
I hold the pillow to my leg for a long time, afraid to let the moment go. When I finally do, I tell my son that I’m all better, and it’s true. The cut is minimal, unremarkable. It will not leave a scar. But I want my child to know that what he did matters. I want him to know that tenderness has the capacity to heal. That his love is momentous even in its smallness.
Too often it feels like the world is whooshing past, like I’ve been plunged into a loud and rushing river, and this — this tangle of love — is the knotted rope that gives me something to hold on to. It’s pure and precious and good.
We are just a few hours into the new year now, and the future is too far away for any of us to see. It will certainly bring battles and wounds. Some of us will carry scars. Some will never heal.
My hope for 2017 is that as we move forward, we find ways to protect rather than inflict. That in the face of fear, confusion, blind panic, and downright evil, we move from arguments into action. That we find a pillow and apply it liberally.
