Letter to Christi on December 27, 2010
In 1992, my colleague Christi Killien and I published Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down with Warner Books. It is a book of correspondence between the two of us about writing, the craft tools we’d learned and the way our ideas and words came from our personal experiences, especially those with our children. Over the years, we extended the book and published a second edition, Writing in a New Convertible with the Top Down, with Blue Heron Press. This edition is now available through Libertary.com and on Amazon.
Our writing connection and our friendship remains strong, through joyful and difficult times. The day Christi’s birthday falls on is one of great significance to me; this year, I found myself writing a letter to her as I did when we were writing our book.
I offer this letter to Writing It Real subscribers to encourage experimenting with the epistolary form, one that helps authors focus their writing’s occasion and make thoughts and descriptions specific out of a desire to share the depth of an experience with a particular person. Thinking about why that person inspires our words helps our writing flow.
Letter to Christi Killien on December 27, 2010
Dear Christi,
It’s a decade since the day I called you, forgetting it was your birthday, to tell you my son was in a coma after going airborne on his snowboard and slamming head first into a tree on a slope at Breckenridge.
After lunch in the lodge that day, Seth had gone on his own for an additional run, perhaps taking a break from being with a group, his fiancée and her family, but probably to be himself, the kind of kid who didn’t want to feel himself being lazy, who wanted to take advantage of experience, not “not do” because he failed to get up the energy. I imagine him happy, making sure he took time to take advantage of the opportunity to practice what he wanted to do well.
How different this was from the summer he was going on 13 and stayed in bed most days, watching television until I insisted on classes in windsurfing and bicycle repair. Though I believe the lounging behavior had everything to do with his body about to grow rapidly, I think going to classes he liked left him knowing we have only a short time here and if you want the most out of life, you have to put the most in. And he did, as you know, for twelve more years. I like remembering how he helped people remodel houses, designed a house, fell in love, organized the building of a bus shelter to help migrant workers in California’s Central Valley get relief from the sun as they waited for busses, backpacked in Europe, sailed his father’s boat to Canada, proposed to Kristen on deck anchored in the town his stepfather and I would come to live in.
How hard the news when I called you again the next day; we took Seth off of life support because tests showed no blood had reached his brain for over 24 hours, that despite his handsome face and the warmth of a still beating heart, no amount of energy, neither his nor ours, could bring him back.
I have gone again as we have every year on the anniversary of Seth’s death, to watch the sun rise over the Cascade mountain range across Admiralty Bay from us in Port Townsend. Town’s end. Cascade. Admiralty. I want to celebrate today by learning what these words mean to me.
Town’s end: We are surrounded on three sides by water. Each year, on the anniversary of Seth’s accident, my husband and I travel the road that goes to the end of the part we call town. We watch birds before us take flight over the water; then we travel the road back. We could keep going for miles and miles and miles. My love for my son is like this, not an island, but a peninsula. I receive help from memories of him as I travel life’s miles, connecting to others, calling his spirit home.
Cascade: From the dictionaries: To rush, to fall, to flow. A waterfall or a series of small waterfalls over steep rocks, something such as lace, thought to resemble a waterfall or series of small waterfalls, in electronics, a series of components or networks, the output of each serving as the input for the next. There is more but I stop here. Certainly my love for Seth and the void of his absence cause my tears, even ten years later, to rush, to fall, to flow. And then in the flowing they fill the void. “Mom,” I hear him say from somewhere on a bike trail urging me on, “I am here.”
I feel my sorrow at his departure as an output that is input for the rest of my life — every day, I use the energy he would have used to not “not do.” Not with mindless doing and going and spinning, but with mindful not “not doing.” Intention, observation, compassion, love, my Buddhist friends instruct. I remember my son in my actions and in my actions he lives.
When I wash and dry and put a pot away in the kitchen cabinet of the house he designed for us, when I go out into the snow to retrieve beet greens from under their cold blanket to cook for guests, when I walk on the thyme in our gravel pathway and remember how he told me to plant as much of this as I could, when I laugh with my daughter’s two boys, play the games they love to play as I did with Seth and the cars he always wanted to roll fast over linoleum floors, when I wake up useful to many and go to sleep tired from a day of right work, I unfurl into the larger life that sustains us both, my son and me, my boy, who was one of two children who made me a mother. And in sustaining him and myself, I am of use to others, alive to what is beautiful and to what is harsh in what is beautiful, to the voids between the threads in lace.
Never have dictionary definitions been as musical to me as today. My son’s life: Something such as lace. And as a verb: to pull or pass through, intertwine.
As I write to you on this birthday, I imagine your family enjoying the great present of having your daughter home from her months in New Zealand, Molly, a beautiful young woman, bringing news of a faraway world, sharing her confidence and her gratitude to the many lovely people who helped her on her way.
And now I come to admiralty, meaning “your vessel is operating in international waters.” Intergalactic waters, I find myself thinking, operating in heaven as it does on earth. When the land of our lives meets the waters of a loved one’s passing, our love both stays behind and reaches new heights. It is what I have learned and what I believe.
Recently, a line in a movie trailer jumped out at me: without love, your life goes by in a flash.
You and I learned this best when we gave birth, when we became more than ourselves. I am happy thinking of you reunited today with Molly, your oldest, listening and listening as she tells tales of her adventures. May the tales and the telling pierce any worry you have had and all of the missing you felt; may Molly’s happiness and strength intertwine with your love for her, as I know your love has intertwined with her happiness.
I have in mind my recent evening with my daughter and her two sons. Rafe sat happily at the kid’s four-piece drum set he calls his “humongo” drum set, a gift this season, and his brother Toby sat on the couch tuning it all out as he read from the fifth Harry Potter book, the biggest volume I’ve seen him read from, “humongous” in my words.
And then I thought of a note my daughter sent from a trip she took with her family:
At the Air and Space Museum, Rafe got a water snake toy. When he picked it out, I told him that I once broke one and that the inside was gross. He was very interested in that story: how did I break it, did it make a mess, what kind of gross, etc. At first I think he pictured the story as taking place when I was an adult, but as we discussed it further, and I mentioned that I thought it happened at Grandpa Jim and Grandma Ann’s old house, he realized that it was when I was little. I said something then too about Uncle Seth being there that day. This led Toby to ask about how old Uncle Seth would be now, which in turn led Rafe to muse about “things people say” about how old people are who have died. Apparently, some say you go back to zero, others say your age doesn’t change at all.
I said that no one really knows what happens to us after we die. Toby (being a smart alec) said, “Well, dead people know.” Rafe said something along the lines of, “We know you turn into a skeleton.” As we discussed this further, I said, “The basic question is whether there is some part of you that is separate from your body that makes you, you: your you, your self, your soul, your spirit.” Toby replied: “My friends. My friends make me, me.”
I know what he means as I write to you. Our essences are there but need the developing agent of our interactions and our love for others. As I think of this on the anniversary of the day you came into the world and my son exited, I cannot imagine being unable to tell you my heart.
Here’s to Seth and my memories of him that make me me, and to our friendship, Christi, which also does.
Love,
Sheila