Since You're Gone

Honestly, the first thought that enters my mind when I begin a post about my Aunt Sherrie - nearing the third anniversary of her death - is if there’s been enough of a buffer since I posted about the suicide of my grandfather, her father — If I’ve shared enough photos of sunsets and oceans and my smiling children, if I’ve cracked enough jokes, thrown enough heart emojis into the air, to earn a space between writing about his suicide and hers.

And, then driving home this morning, the ocean to my left, the tall Eucalyptus trees and sparkling lakes in Golden Gate Park ahead of me, I remembered this comic strip I used to read in the Sunday Funnies as a kid: Cathy. (Who remembers Cathy?) And how she’d say “Love me, Love my mess!”

And this is my mess.

When I fill out the intake form with a new therapist I check so many boxes under family history that it feels like a strange type of bragging.

But the thing is — this mess is so tangled in beauty and love (and of course the prophecy of hindsight: regret) that even without sandwiching their deaths between blue birds and lemon trees and the surf at high tide — on its own, this story still contains joy and tenderness alongside the sadness.

Even laughter — like in the parking lot of Sherrie’s apartment getting ready to enter, when my mother - a speech therapist turned shaman - pulled out her sound-bowl and incense and chimes - instructing me and my older brother, Evan, on how we’d need to cleanse the air before entering her younger sister’s home, because death was still so present there.

And she was right, but I turned to Evan, the two of us approaching middle-age, and thought of what Sherrie would think of this, and felt like I was in some absurd Wes Anderson film, and started laughing so hard I doubled-over, tears streamed down my face and the bottle of seltzer I was holding exploded into fizz on my legs and leather boots. It was just the type of moment we’d enjoyed so many times, Sherrie at our side, her generous laugh, her relentless hiccups, my entire Matriarch line not knowing how to open a Vintage plastic bottle of seltzer without a small flood at our feet.

I know we all have the quarantine hobbies that we share with each other: Knitting and Candy Crush and Bread Baking and Puppy-Adoption and Long Exploratory Walks and Books on Tape. But I also know there are the ones that we keep to ourselves.

Here’s one that I haven’t shared yet: I’ll sometimes light a cotton-candy-scented candle and play The Cars song Since You’re Gone on repeat and click on my dead Aunt Sherrie’s Facebook Page Photos and study the hundreds of photographs that she took in the months and weeks leading up to her death.

The photographs that most capture my imagination are dozens of Philadelphia murals taken on February 24th 2018, two week’s before she died. This date stands out because Dan and I were in California that weekend, having traveled from New York to interview for a pulpit opening in San Francisco. 

I see our lives criss-crossing the cosmos at that exact moment — she already determined to end hers, and mine unfurling across the country, a brand new landscape spread out before me.

I’m sharing some of these photographs here with you. When I witness my Aunt Sherrie’s artistry and how she saw the vibrancy and grit and truth painted on the walls of her city, it is both a source consolation and inspiration.

Sending you all continued strength and love.

Prayer + Action: Photography was a hobby that Sherrie dreamt of turning into a profession, lugging her camera and video equipment to Bar Mitzvahs and weddings. Mostly, she chronicled the lives our large family for free. I’ve been researching grants dedicated to women artists over 40 in her honor.

A selection of Philadelphia Murals February 24, 2018, Photographs by Sherrie Harrison Waters

Photograph, Philadelphia Mural, Sherrie Harrison Waters, July 31, 2017

Sherrie college era, always with her camera

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A few of my favorite things

Lighting the candle that smells like coffee.

Transferring the bruised apples to a glass bowl.

Letting my son pick out the tulips.

Surrounding myself with a pile of poetry books.

I’ll tell you this: I know that I’m not alone in needing to pull out my favorite things in February. What Eliot said about April, I think he meant February.

We’re all in it, right?

But it is possible - and probably essential for some of us - to make a small corner of beauty in the middle of this mess. And it is a mess: the sink full of dishes, the car full of sand, the side mirror affixed by duct tape; the birthday card I hope to put in the mail on time and the card that will never make it in the mail, despite my best intentions.

And that’s pulling from the list of the mundane, what I try to explain to my kids, driving in circles re-routed from a street closure: an annoyance, an inconvenience — opposed to an actual emergency, a disaster — the daily toll of this pandemic, the continued distance, what pops up in my newsfeed before bed: the DoorDash driver who’s van was carjacked with his toddlers inside, and not being able to sleep until I know his kids are safe (his kids are safe).

So where’s the consolation this week?

It’s in this candle that smells like a long-shuttered coffee-bean shop in Brooklyn. In its inhale I am twenty-eight.

It’s in this bushel of bargain apples I didn’t realize were bruised, and cutting past the holes to discover their crisp sweetness.

It’s in these tulips my six-year-old son picked out (which match the apples) -- their pinks and yellows.

It’s in this stack of poetry books, some of them written by friends, my name even in the acknowledgements.

And that’s where we’re at today.

Find what you love and bring it extra close in this last stretch of winter.

Also. though it feels natural to turn inwards, reach out to a friend.

Sending warmth and strength on this February day.

Prayer + Action I’ve just learned about this organization, Worth Rises, whose vision inspires me:

We envision a society in which no entity or individual relies on human caging or control for their wealth, operation, or livelihood.

Tu BiShvat, birthday of the trees

I planted a tree for my grandfather in the Jerusalem forest the Summer before my sixteenth birthday. I found out from a call home, on a yellow payphone outside the Wailing Wall, that he had taken his life.

The soldier in line behind me offered water from his canteen as I wept into the receiver.

I was on a summer arts program filled with angsty American teens, and we were visiting the Old City — our first trip to the Kotel.

Even our just-post-college-grad counselors had held an air of jadedness, and warned us that we’d most likely feel nothing visiting this remnant of the ancient temple: It’s just a wall, they told us, a bunch of stones that had outlasted other stones, where people crammed their prayers, tiny folds of paper into the cracks.

I didn’t tell anyone. Not until decades later did I tell anyone, and then just my husband and one trusted friend: I felt something that day, moments after finding out my grandfather died, when I pushed my hands onto the smooth wall, wet with tears.

I felt the wall push back.

And even if I never feel God that physically again, I felt it then — as real as anything — those stones, as if alive, pressing back into my palms.

I said the Mourners Kaddish the best I could with my limited Hebrew from a prayer book with no transliteration. And then someone, a couple of days later — I can’t recall who (but I hope I thanked them) took me — alone — to the hills of the Jerusalem forest to plant a tree.

And it’s still there. Though I have no idea where, exactly, and I could never point out which one, I know it's there - somewhere in that forest- this tree I planted with my hands, and it’s the height of over twenty-five years. Happy birthday tree.

This morning I thought, which California tree will I use to illustrate Tu BiShvat, the birthday of the trees, which begins tomorrow night: Cypress, Redwood, Eucalyptus?

But just now, a blue bird perched right outside my window in front of the bare Apple tree.

And, yes, of course, that’s the tree.

The one I’d overlooked because of its empty branches. The one that will blossom again in Spring and bear fruit by Fall. This tree that on either coast looks like Winter.

Thank you blue bird for reminding me of this consolation, of the thing we can’t quite see but is here, and will again come alive.

Wishing you all a connection to our trees and forests and each other.

Prayer + Action: There are a staggering number of people - including the very young - taking their own lives during this pandemic. Please help spread awareness: Suicide Prevention Lifeline