I was very fortunate to receive my copy of Tarn Wilson’s new book, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, a Memoir in Essays the day before I left for 11 days of wandering beaches along the Oregon Coast. On the road with my husband driving to the next beach town, I thought about the chapter of Tarn’s book that I had read the night before. Tarn’s essays are full of balance between the gifts we have and the gifts that are hard to see as gifts, between finding meaning and merely drifting, between our deeply earned boundaries as adults and our attempts as children to please our parents to “save” them. I believe most readers will recognize themselves in Tarn’s journey because it is about growing by examining who we have been no matter how our outer experiences may have differed. Her stories of relationships to others are hypnotic and real, her investigations of obsessions amidst fears moving. It is with great pleasure that I introduce you to Tarn Wilson, author of In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, a Memoir in Essays, and of the previously published book The Slow Farm.  She has numbered the questions I asked of her and offered so very much to us in answer following the Q&A with an excerpted essay from the book.

1. So you think you have changed in some ways having written the essays? Or had you changed in order to write them? Or a mix?

Sheila, I love this question. And I love thinking about the relationship between writing and personal growth. In many ways, I think that relationship is mysterious—and miraculous— and can’t easily be translated into neat cause and effect. But that won’t stop me from giving you a big speech about it!

I do think we have to grow into readiness to approach certain material. For example, I was completely surprised by my essay “Loveland” about my stepfather. After my mother and stepfather divorced, I’d pushed him out of my mind. As I say in the essay, I told myself he wasn’t my “real” father, the marriage only lasted two years, I was already in high school, etc. He was just a blip. But decades later, one writing session, with no warning and no external trigger I could recognize, intense memories flooded me, pages and pages. Grief and gratitude, anger and shame. Long forgotten details.

Did I need to change before I could write that essay? Probably. I probably needed time, distance, and more maturity. Maybe I needed to be in a safe place in my life so I could stay steady as I was washed in waves of memory and emotion. Maybe my current life needed some wisdom the past now had to offer.

I think some personal growth is cultivated through intention—through our willingness to look bravely at ourselves, have difficult conversations, challenge our beliefs and thinking patterns, etc. And some growth is just natural, grace. I’m a high school teacher, and the other day, looking out over my students, who are just beginning their first weeks of school, I remembered a quote from the Talmud: “Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers. ‘Grow, grow.’” We are all that blade of grass.

And yes, yes, yes. The writing changes me. I believe the desire to write our story is always a call to personal growth. We don’t always know that: I’ve mentored many writers who think they want to write a memoir for their grandchildren, record a historical moment, or be published, rich, and admired. But those are surface reasons. Always, those writers have something unresolved that needs attention and care, often some knot of shame that needs unraveling. Memoir writing asks us to see our history with more context and objectivity—and tugs us toward integrity, understanding, and often forgiveness of ourselves and others.

To me, this poem by Matthew Arnold speaks to memoir writers and journal keepers:

Below the surface stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say and feel—below the stream
As light, of what we think we feel—there flows
With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

Writing, over time, moves us from the surface stream—the preoccupations and distractions in our busy lives—to the noiseless current, to what we feel indeed. I believe we can trust that noiseless current to pull us toward healing and wholeness.

2. Some readers might, although admiring of your ability to be revealing, feel they never could do that. What would you answer about the value of this to the writer and the writing?

I have a lot to say about this topic, Sheila. You might be sorry you asked!

You used the lovely word “revealing.” I think the best writing is revealing, but that doesn’t mean it has to be confessional. By revealing, I mean that the writing embodies our values, captures the unique shape of our minds in the process of making connections and is in generous, authentic conversation with readers. An environmental essay or a young adult novel can be revealing.

This collection happens to be confessional, but in a cultural moment where “vulnerability” is all the rage, I don’t think writers need to feel pressured into sharing highly personal life events or emotions if they don’t feel called or ready.

That being said, if your writing seems to be missing some vitality, there may be something necessary you are writing around—maybe that very thing you swore you’d never write.

When I was in my early twenties and trying to teach myself to write, I started with regular freewriting, using prompts: no matter where I began—whether a prompt about dogs or disappointment—the writing always led to the same place, my early childhood years on a remote Canadian island with my hippie parents. Soon, I had enough vignettes, I thought I would assemble a memoir. I thought (ha ha) the focus of the book would be the tensions between American hippies and Canadian loggers. Eventually, I realized the story was—surprise!—really about my painful relationship with my idealistic and flawed father.

Had I known the emotional wrestling required to finish and publish The Slow Farm, I may not have begun. I needed the “surface and light” reason to get me to the page, all the while the “noiseless current” was pulling me toward my true story. We have to be brave enough to keep going when the writing starts leading us in frightening directions, into the fog of confusion and uncertainty. We do this gently, with self-compassion, respecting our timing, knowing the noiseless current has our best interest in mind. (Writers may look meek, quiet and curled over computer keyboards, but we are actually warriors.)

Don’t I sound wise? Ha ha. I wasn’t wise just a few months ago when the book was about to be published. I was just plain, wiggle-out-of-my-skin, terrified: My friends, acquaintances, and colleagues were all going to know the most difficult, exposing moments of my life. This was my mantra, “You’re not going to die. You’re not going to die.”

What has it been like having the book in the world? Not only did I live, but the experience has been extraordinarily sweet. Readers have treated me with such kindness and appreciation—and most beautifully—have shared with me their own closest-to-the-bone stories. I’ve had such meaningful, heart-filling, surprising conversations. I keep being touched, over and over, by readers’ open-hearted generosity and their goodness and courage.

I don’t think we can write with the motive of receiving affirmation—as neediness can be off-putting and we have no guarantees about how readers will respond. But a healthy vulnerability opens the possibility of more trust, more connection—can make us all feel less lonely.

3. Your beautiful book weaves your life events past and present with inquiry and self-reflection.  It often breaks into address to the reader by taking a turn or admitting a secret never told before. We are your intimates as the page has been. Can you comment on this approach–how you came to it (organically, I imagine) and how you accepted it as a worthwhile technique?

What a good eye you have! In the essays, moments where there is a turn are often moments where I surprised myself in the process of writing. In the essay “Why We Don’t Have Children,” you can see the moment I move from surface reasons to the deeper current: “Maybe you’ve guessed I’ve left some things unsaid. I’ve kept some secrets. All my prattling about fate and freewill, mutterings over money and time have, hiding under them, a simpler truth. I spent the length of my childbearing years in a bad marriage.” As I wrote that, I saw that my tendency to intellectualize was often an effort to avoid a simple emotional pain.

I believe, at the time, I was reading the essays of Brenda Miller and Judith Kitchen, who effectively use second person and address the reader. Creative nonfiction is an extraordinarily flexible genre; reading those who experiment with the form can open our sense of possibility.

4. This is a powerful body of work. Over how much time did you write the essays? Tell us about the idea of writing a memoir in essays.

I wrote these essays over a decade. After many of them had found homes in literary journals, I thought I might assemble a collection. I knew publishers prefer essay collections with a unifying theme or structure, and I feared mine were too disjointed: my time soldering keyboards, my anxiety about my teeth, a friendship with an elderly neighbor, my obsession with mountain lions. However, as I read the essays as a whole, I saw, to my surprise, that the majority of the essays explored how we move through trauma and grief and assemble and then disassemble the story of our lives. So I cut any pieces that didn’t fit those themes. I spent countless hours arranging and rearranging the essays to find the most effective order and revising the work to cut repetition and emphasize the recurring themes. The book benefitted from one last revision, guided by Wandering Aengus’ skillful editor Julie Riddle.

At the time I was doing that last revision, I’d just written a book review for Rebecca McClanahan’s memoir in essays In the Key of New York. Was my book an essay collection or a memoir in essays? I wasn’t sure. So I poked around and discovered that the definition of memoir in essays is in flux (a dynamic conversation for nonfiction enthusiasts!). Here’s what I decided: the individual chapters, heavy on reflection and organized around a driving question, are clearly personal essay. But like memoir, they also depend on life stories, recounted in narrative scenes, viewed through the lens of memory. How handy that this new category is evolving just in time for me to claim it!

5. Tell us about the contest you entered for publication and about the press.

The book is the winner of the 2021 Wandering Aengus Book Award. Wandering Aengus is a wonderful independent press, founded by Jill Johnson and based on Orcas Island. Their mission is to “bring the joys as well as the injustices of the human experience into vivid focus.” The press also has another imprint, Trail to Table, that “seeks literary works that connect us to the earth and to each other.” I have so much respect for their vision, the quality of their books, and the integrity and care they bring to their relationships.

Currently, large publishers are often profit-motivated and risk-averse, so independent and university presses are a treasure to the literary community, championing beautiful, innovative books that might not otherwise find homes. Support independent presses!

6. Thank you so very much, Tarn, for your thoughts and experiences and for a most wonderful book. I love having the Tarn Wilson set, The Slow Farm and In Praise of Inadequate Gifts. I hope to add a third book of yours to my set one day soon. Next up: your excerpted essay for Writing It Real members:

Hide and Seek with the Dead

by Tarn Wilson

 You didn’t believe in life after death, but I think you visited me the night you died.

You’d been ill for seven years, such a long stretch beyond the few years the doctors had granted you. So when my sister Rima called to say she thought you were dying, I wasn’t ready. I raced to book the early morning flight from California to British Columbia and finish the work necessary to exit life-as-I-knew it: find teachers to cover my classes, throw substitute plans together, cancel appointments, pack.

Around nine that night, most of the tasks done, I entered the bathroom, tight with fear and exhaustion. I’d just finished peeing and was pulling up my jeans when I heard your voice. Loud. Clear. Unmistakably you.

One short sentence that muted all the other chatter in my mind. “I’m okay,” you said.

I breathed—I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding my breath—and felt the tension drain from my body. You were okay. You weren’t dying after all. My sister had misunderstood.

When I could hear my own thoughts again, I was suddenly embarrassed: You’d come to speak to me and I’d been peeing! Then I felt you say, this time not in a clear sentence, more a feeling, but an unmistakable message: “Don’t be ridiculous. I took care of you when you were small. I changed your diapers. I bathed you. . .” From you, my former-hippie father who thought I was too proper, this comment was part rebuke, part comfort, part laughing at me.

And then you were gone.

By the time I arrived in Canada, you’d already died, probably around four in the morning. My sister said you’d slipped into a coma at nine the night before, the very moment you’d spoken to me in the bathroom. I told my sister about the timing of your visit, and we stared at each other, speechless.

When I was a child, I wanted to be as smart and scientific as you. I believed and was happy to tell anyone who asked: “When you’re dead, you’re dead. You’re in the ground and that’s that.” I was mature, able to face the facts better than grownups.

I don’t know when exactly my beliefs started to change, or why, but by the time I was in the middle of my teenage years, I was certain of continued existence—I couldn’t say what that existence might be, but I felt surer of it than some of the facts in my textbooks.

Toward the end of college, long before anyone I loved had died, I was obsessed by books about life-after-death experiences. Stories of those who floated peacefully above their bodies while doctors tried to resuscitate them and relatives held their hands. Sometimes, the dead would think of someone they loved, and, regardless of distance, instantly appear by their side. Most saw a tunnel with a white light at the end. Some passed through waves of exquisite music or fields of wildflowers. When they reached the light, some saw a figure they thought was Jesus. Others were bathed in warmth and love. Most returned with the same message: The purpose of life is to love and to learn. Yes, I was embarrassed by the cheesy book covers with glowing angels—and suspicious of writers who seemed to have a hidden, denominational agenda—but still, I couldn’t stop reading.

Once, I shared some stories with you. Trained as a mathematician and scientist, you didn’t deny the experiences must have felt real, but they were, you insisted, merely the pyrotechnics of a dying brain. I told you a story about a man who’d gone into a coma and died. He’d floated above his body and then down the hallway, where he listened to the doctors talking below him. When he was resuscitated, he reported exact lines of their conversation and even described the clothes the doctors were wearing.

You paused. The writer, you said, was making it up.

I wish I could talk to you about the night you died and the “I’m okay” you spoke in the bathroom. The living you would have laughed at me for creating meaning from coincidence and imagination. I’d argue back that if I were inventing words, I’d have chosen different ones, a longer sentence perhaps. The word love in there somewhere. I’d have picked a different time—even twenty seconds later when my pants were up.

I want to disagree with you, but I don’t know where to find you.

When I landed in Seattle to change planes, I listened to the phone message telling me you’d died. I called my sister, and after we cried, she asked, “Do you, you know, want to see the body?”

The question surprised me, so I was silent.

She was apologetic, “’Cause I have to tell the people. When they should come get him. Do you want us to wait?”

“No, thank you for asking. But, no.”

Her tone was almost desperate: “I needed it, for closure. It’s very helpful.”  She feared I was making a decision I’d regret.

In this airport conversation, with the loud flight announcements in the background, there was no space for conversation about our decisions, about why she wanted to see your body and I didn’t. I didn’t tell her I’m highly susceptible to images; they burn into me. I didn’t want your dead body to be the picture that overrode all my other memories. I didn’t think I could find you in your body.

Several months after your cremation, your wife, Prairie, sent me a padded envelope. I assumed it was a memento, some little object you’d loved. I opened a black velvet box to find a pretty pendant on a chain, a small silver canister etched with graceful curlicues. Only when I saw the canister partially twisted open and the dusting of powder against black velvet, did I realize what it was.

Then I saw the note: Prairie and Rima had purchased five pendants—one for Prairie and one for each of your four daughters; you were the link between your far-flung children from three marriages. Maybe Prairie and Rima hoped if we each carried a bit of your body, you’d link us still. To them, those ashes must be, in some form, the man they loved. To me, they are like ashes in a fireplace, too far removed from log and fire to hold the shape of you.

What, then, do I do with my pendant? I won’t wear it around my neck.

“Nice necklace.”

“Thanks, it’s my dead dad.”

I don’t want to hang it on my bulletin board with my other happy souvenirs on strings. For a day, I stored it in my desk drawer, but every time I opened it to get my scissors or stapler, there it was: “Your dad is dead. Dead. Dead. Death. Die. Loss. Disease. Gone gone gone.”

But now that it’s in the house—like a curmudgeonly stray cat—I can’t cast it out.

On my desk, I keep a small box with drawers. On the top, I’ve arranged objects that inspire me. Only now do I recognize that most of them remind me of you. An owl feather, bright marbles, a stuffed meadowlark that sings a meadowlark song when I squeeze him, rocks from the Canadian Island where we lived in my early childhood. A soapstone carving of a Japanese lady a missionary gave to your mother just after WWII, which you presented to me not long before you died. A photograph of me holding a baby in a red dress and a white sunhat, a baby named after me. My goddaughter, Baby Tarn.

You named me. A name that carries what you valued. A mountain lake. A geological term. A crossword puzzle word. Now a baby you have never met carries the name you loved. I see more of you, then, in that name, in that baby’s face, than in that black velvet box I finally tuck behind the photograph: still with my special objects, but where I can’t see it.

Years ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, we met again after a four-year estrangement. Do you remember? You and my mother had scratched your way through several court cases about back child support, woven with convoluted lies on both sides. I grieved the childhood years we didn’t see you and you didn’t contact us, the way my sister and I went without so much when you had enough to share. But my longing for you hadn’t eased. I lived in California, but that summer I was a counselor at a Canadian camp only a few ferry rides from you. I had a rare day off, so we met on an island in-between, a restaurant on a harbor, overlooking a bay. We’d reserved an afternoon and evening for each other.

I was writing a memoir about my early childhood, and I intended to interview you. Even more, although I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, I wanted to find my way back to you. I didn’t know how to begin, so I opened my little journal to ask you questions.

As we ate, I jotted down a few of your memories. Talking about the past made you restless, so halfway through the meal, you changed the subject.

“So, why are you a vegetarian?”

I paused. My decision was largely intuitive, not political or intellectual, so it was hard to translate into words. I smoothed my napkin on my lap. “I think it’s a peaceful way to live. I don’t like to kill animals . . . I don’t like the way animals are treated.”

You answered with one of your scientific lectures, the kind I remembered from childhood. “Energy moves in a closed system. When you eat animals, you keep the energy moving through the system. It’s necessary.”

I thought you were enjoying the conversation, the rub of mind against mind. I thought we were disagreeing for fun, like we did when I was a kid. I mulled over your point.

“That’s assuming it’s a closed system.” I was talking about God, of course. Or whatever name you might give the force from which life and energy might originate. But I would never use that word with you, my atheist father.

You didn’t miss the allusion. You raised your voice—you rarely raised your voice—and sputtered, “You can’t just say that. You can’t just make up the rules. We have to agree on certain basic premises or nobody can talk to anyone!” You yelled and threw up your hands: “You might as well just make up anything you want!”

I was silent, watching you. I’d be hurt and confused later, but then I was only stunned.

You balled up your napkin and threw it on your seat. “I have to go to the bathroom.” When you returned, you didn’t sit back down: “This dinner is over.”

We didn’t talk again for several years.

I could understand your argument, but I didn’t understand your anger, especially from a man whose emotions were usually so even, and hidden. Were you actually hurt about the years of silence between us? Maybe your anger was less about me and more about your beliefs about women, those former wives who frustrated you with their lack of logic and big emotions. Did you think my spiritual beliefs had somehow separated me from you? Maybe my interview had agitated you, my probing about those years before my mother left you, asking questions you didn’t know how to answer.

Or was it something else I can’t guess?

Over time, we cautiously connected again, but I no longer spoke to you of mysteries.

I never told you that before my boss Helen died, the photographs of her on the school wall started glowing. Helen was the counselor and a founder of a small alternative high school where I taught in my twenties. A life-changing mentor. After my first two years in the job, Helen retired. Not long after, we learned she’d been sick, but she’d hidden from the teachers just how ill she was. One afternoon after the students had gone, I walked down the hallway where we’d posted photographs of student activities: a college field trip; a team-building exercise; service projects cleaning a creek and painting over graffiti.

In the photographs, Helen was glowing. All the other faces were two-dimensional, dull, but Helen looked bathed in a spotlight. No, more as if she’d been lit from within. She was carved of light—her lion face, her fuzzy gold hair, her strong arms.

I couldn’t tell anyone, “Helen is glowing!” and maintain the appearance of public-school-teacher sanity, so I just stuck my head in the principal’s office.

“Is Helen alright?”

The principal looked at me, and I knew she wasn’t.

All week, Helen-in-the-photographs glowed for me, startling me every time I passed. And then she died.

After her death, the photographs were dull again.

In the years following our dinner in the restaurant, I learned to give up my efforts to encourage you to talk about your past, hopes, regrets, my childhood, or our relationship. Instead, I’d sit with you in silence and listen, without interruption, to whatever anecdotes you offered. And with my new slowness, you began to tell me stories I’d never heard.

The year before your death, I visited you for a week. On my last night, you offered to take me out to dinner. You were frail by then. For most of my life you’d been a workaholic—most recently in your venture as the owner of a used books/local art/coffee shop—so it was odd to see you working only half days and taking long naps every afternoon. By this time, even one block’s walk was difficult, so I felt especially honored you’d asked me to dinner. I thought you might have a message for me.

You dressed up in a dusty tweed jacket. I wore the one skirt I brought, a black T-shirt, and some flip-flops. The Inglenook, a German restaurant, was an old three-story house tucked in a grove of cedars. Our walk to the stairs was slow. I waited for you, the same father who used to race me down the beach, shirtless and in bare feet, then throw me in the air. It was just after five and the restaurant was almost empty. The owners chatted with you—they hadn’t seen you around lately. You didn’t tell them about your illness. You asked them to make a vegetarian meal for me.

We looked shyly at each other over the white tablecloth and hearty water glasses filled with ice. I stared out the window at the line of tall cedars. The light was British Columbia gray-white, the light of my childhood. Our food came: your pile of sausages, my cabbage and sweet noodles. You asked if I liked my dinner and seemed pleased when I answered yes.

I let you lead the discussion so I could leave plenty of space for whatever you might want to say. You updated me on the shop. You asked about my mother. I gave you honest but vague answers—wanting to tell the truth, but wanting to protect her privacy. Was it my mother you wanted to talk about? You didn’t follow up. We contemplated dessert.

I concluded you didn’t have a message for me, but just wanted some time together. I didn’t mind. The rare sweetness of being together was enough. I looked through the menu. I predicted you would order the apple pie. You ordered the apple pie. I smiled to myself. Nice some things didn’t change.

Then you surprised me with a story about your mother. The winter before I was born, when you lived with my mother in a cabin on Sugarloaf Mountain above Boulder, your mother caught a flight from Philadelphia, an expensive and uncharacteristic trip.

Your mother was a proper East Coast lady: an amateur historian, a collector of dolls and antiques, a devoted member of the Episcopal church, and a member of the Lee Society for descendants of Robert E. Lee. She wore seersucker suits. She kept her house spotless; served soft-boiled eggs in egg cups; corrected pronunciation, manners, and posture, and did not discuss personal feelings: all negative emotions and bad dreams could be blamed on indigestion. You and your friends had devoted most of your energy to rebelling against her formality. So her trip, her urgency and emotion, was unlike her.

She had a story for you: When she was giving birth to you, the doctors gave her too much ether. She separated from her body, rose above her bed, and then out of the hospital. In the sky, she saw a black hole the size of the moon. On the other side of that hole was purity, beauty, light. But she’d have to die to get there. She longed for that light. But now she was a mother, so she decided not to go.

That’s all you gave me. You didn’t tell me how you reacted to the story—what you said back to her. That you shared the story with me felt like an offering, but I didn’t know what it meant. Was it an apology for our arguments? An acknowledgment of the possibility of life after death? Or merely an unselfish gift to your mother and me—to pass along her story without insult or interpretation? Why hadn’t you told me years ago, when we discussed life-after-death experiences? I knew from the past I couldn’t ask any clarifying questions without muddling you, diminishing your gift. So driving home from Inglebrook, I didn’t ask you what I most wanted to know: How does it feel to be close to death? How does it feel to look back over a life? In the end, what really matters?

The details from your life at that time yielded no answers. You were still legally married to your wife, but lived separately, in a relationship that was neither married nor unmarried. You’d settled in a small, half-finished industrial loft on the docks with your cat Calvin and your dog Hobbes. The walls were half-painted a mustard color with a few swipes of teal. Your plywood floor was covered in great balls of dog hair that floated around in the drafts. Your bed was in the corner, piled with a dirty plaid comforter, grimy sheets, and a child’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pillowcase. Your armchair and table faced the window overlooking the docks, the bay, and your eagles, gulls, and kingfishers. Your table was stacked with bird guides and aids to help you with your daily New York Times crossword puzzle: an atlas, a large dictionary, a book of classical mythology, The New York Public Library Desk Reference, and The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words. I knew only that you were a man who likes water and boats and birds and puzzles and learning and time to be quiet.

Driving home from the Inglenook, I couldn’t ask my questions, but my heart was welling up and I wanted to give you something—something true. And recently, I’d had a falling away of hurts, a clarity about what you had given me. My voice sounded full of water when I told you that you had given me one of my life’s greatest gifts: “You gave me a love of reading and treated my questions with respect. You made me love learning.”

You were silent, looking at the highway, as if you were thinking.

“I didn’t try to give you that . . . It’s just me.”

“It’s a gift anyway,” I said, “one too few children have.” It could hardly hold all I wanted to say, but it would have to do.

The night before your memorial, I couldn’t sleep. I was stiff and restless. I tried to read an inspirational book. Then a novel. Finally, I pulled out the manila envelopes I’d gathered of your old letters to your mother you’d inherited when she died. I read and sorted them—a record of an earnest, cocky college student first touching the edges of the counterculture. Then, around two or three in the morning, I began to feel suffocated by guilt for all the years after college I hadn’t seen or talked to you.

Suddenly, I felt you again.

I’m not as certain of your presence as I was of the moment in the bathroom, when your words blasted all my other thoughts, but you seemed to say, “You needed time away to find your own sense of identity. I understand.”

I had three responses:

First: relief—you weren’t bitter; your words were generous.

Second: frustration. That wasn’t the reason I didn’t talk to you; that was your reason for your estrangement from your parents.

Third: resignation. You didn’t get it, but at least you weren’t mad. Some things never change, and that was annoying and comforting. I slept through the rest of the night.

When my sister found out she was pregnant, she asked Prairie and you what you wanted her son to call you. Prairie chose “Granny.” You answered, “Flash,” I assume for Flash Gordon, your childhood hero.

Tenzin was only two and knew nothing of death when he and his dad arrived for your memorial. “Where Grandpa Flash?” he asked over and over.

My sister was too stunned and grief-stricken to decide how to explain death. For the moment, she settled on, “He’s gone away.” She’d figure out later what to tell him.

Not long after she’d returned home, she emailed this conversation she’d had with Tenzin in the car:

Tenzin: Mommy, I saw Flash.

Me: You did? Where?

Tenzin: In a BIG boat. He was going on a BIG trip.

Me: Did he say anything?

Tenzin: No, he’s gone now.

            Pause

Tenzin: He’s safe for me.

Me: He’s safe for you?

Tenzin: Yeah.

I wish I could debate with you now in the language of science. I’d say, “We think of ourselves as distinct and singular. But we are full of holes. The molecules that build our bodies are ninety-nine percent empty space. With the right compactor, we could squeeze ourselves down to the size of a marble. Solidity is an illusion. We picture our skin as an impermeable layer between ourselves and the outside world, but water wrinkles our fingertips. Our skin exhales nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Our body we call “one” is really an ecosystem of millions—50 million bacteria per square inch on our skin alone. We are not singular, but many, with no clear edges.” I’d argue that science proves that the walls that separate us from the dead aren’t as solid as we think.

On the day of your memorial, Prairie asked me to read at the service “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” a silly poem you’d loved about two prospectors in the Yukon. When Sam realizes he’s going to freeze to death, he makes the narrator swear to cremate him. After days of mushing, and lugging the corpse, the narrator finds an old shipwreck, throws Sam in the boiler, and lights the coal. Soon he can’t resist peeking. I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked. When he opens the door, Sam sits bolt upright and says, Please close that door. It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm—Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm. Although I’m shy and grieving and know the ridiculous poem will offend some of the traditional locals, I tell Prairie I will—it’s the least I could do for you whose greatest gift to me had been reading.

All day, the town members, family, and friends hustled around, buying food and cleaning up the small boat museum at the end of the dock where we would hold the memorial. I scrubbed the floors, set up tables, moved boats and old diving equipment. Then I went home and changed. When I returned, the room had been transformed. Someone had brought large bouquets of lilies. The tables were lined with hors d’oeuvres. Rima and my other sisters had assembled photographs from all eras of your life on poster boards.

The black and white portraits of you as a child and teenager shocked me. Your same far-apart eyes, but your face so smooth and gentle and bright. All fears and self-invention and accomplishments and disappointments and secrets and shame and the long decay of illness stripped away. Like Helen, your photographs were glowing. All of them. You were beautiful and radiant. I started to cry and couldn’t stop until I was heaving. The reserved Canadian townspeople looked at me with pity and a little fear. I snuck out to the deck and then up some stairs to a private, hidden deck where I could fall apart in private.

A friend came to find me and whispered, “It’s starting, people are asking for you.” He put an arm around me and led me to the front row, to a chair reserved for me. People stared and I looked down. I looked up at the photographs and started to cry and couldn’t look at you again. I cried until I stood up to read. To still myself, I pretended I was reading to my students, focused on the rhythm and silly rhyme.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold . . .

You are gone. But now you are in the words to “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” You are in my name. You are in your name. Jack. Jack Wilson. John Arnold Wilson, Junior. You are in your photographs. In your handwriting. In the names of the places you loved: Sugarloaf Mountain, Texada Island, Vancouver Island. You are in what you loved as a child: transistor radios, Pogo comics, The Lone Ranger, and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. You are in what we all loved together when Rima and I were children: big dogs, B.C. ferries, games of Monopoly, Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge comics, and the books you read aloud. You are in those things you never stopped loving for your whole life: ravens, gargoyles, harmonicas, the game Go, graph paper, crossword puzzles, mint chocolate chip ice cream, the Adventures of TinTin, the Art of M.C. Escher, The Lord of the Rings—especially the wizard Gandalf, who was the man you wanted to be in your old age. Maybe that-which-you-loved are beams of light—tunnels, or strings—that link us in this world to you in yours. Maybe the system is closed, but bigger than we ever imagined.

Now that you are gone, two voices joust in my mind. A childlike voice insists photos glow for me and the dead have spoken to me. I can, in rare moments—it’s happened other times, too—glimpse into the veil between worlds. But an adult voice, with your reasonable tone, argues back: You’re a woman in denial who will not face death, who will not look at dead bodies or the invisible ashes of mortality hanging around all our necks. You’ve borrowed the voices of the dead to tell yourself what you needed to hear.

I want this story to come to a neat conclusion. I want to echo the messages of the life-after-death books, that the purpose of life is to love and learn. I want to conclude that, although I can’t be sure where you’ve gone, I can find you in that which you have loved. That’s the lesson for us all: love well, love broadly, leave little bits of ourselves behind—tucked into whatever it is we have loved.

But there is something else.

I thought I’d made progress in letting go of my hungry curiosity about you—and I have—but here I am again, making the same mistake I did when you were alive, badgering you in my search for messages and meaning.

Now, Jack Arnold Wilson, it is time for me to set aside questing for what I will never find, asking for what is not mine to know, hoping for what you cannot give, and trying to make your story mine. You have told me exactly what you want me to know. “I’m okay.”

It’s time for me to leave you in peace.