the misfit west

Tag: grief

  • death feelings

    The gloves smell like old water.

    I don’t notice it right away. I’m already up to my elbows in the sink, hot water running hard enough to turn the room to fog, a narrow winter sun flattening itself against the kitchen window. The gloves are a cloudy blue, rubber gone soft and thin at the fingertips. I bought them after the skin on my hands split open from the dry air and the heat and the soap. Little red mouths along my knuckles. So now I slide into these damp sleeves that hold the memory of every other sink of dishes I’ve washed in this house. The inside smell is stale and sour and faintly sweet, like a mop bucket forgotten in the corner of a church basement.

    I turn the plate under the stream until the last streak of oil dissolves. The sound of the water swallows everything—the wind outside, the heater kicking on, the small elastic pop of my dog’s joints as she shifts on her bed behind me.

    This is usually when it starts.

    I look at the plate, then at the rest of the sink: the chipped mug, the spoon with yogurt clinging to the bowl, the glass that held last night’s Advil. Then I look past the dishes to the counter, to the mail stacked in its half-hearted tower, to the notebook splayed open with a pen bleeding through the page, to the bowl of shriveled limes I keep forgetting to throw out. My eyes keep moving, hooking on each object: the bookshelf, the crooked lamp, the blanket slumped over the arm of the chair, the dog’s toys, the stack of folders with my uncle’s name printed in careful black letters at the top.

    I picture all of it without me.

    Will it be easy to get rid of? That’s the question that runs underneath the hot water, under the smell of rubber and detergent. Has it always been this easy to clear me out? A few boxes. A phone call. An estate sale on a Saturday.

    When my uncle died, it took less time than I expected. I kept waiting for a secret to emerge—some hidden compartment, a false bottom, a letter taped under a drawer. He had spent his whole life guarding things, smoothing the surface, protecting the story. When I walked through his house after they carried him out, the carpet smelled like dust and old coffee and a man who had tried very hard not to leave a mess. The blue-green of it was already fading in the high-traffic places. The trash cans were mostly empty. The bathroom cabinet held three half-used bottles of aftershave and the razor he’d used that morning. His closet looked like a store display: shirts organized, shoes paired by the door. I remember standing there, thinking: That’s all. That’s really it.

    And then my sister took charge and whatever he’d been trying to keep contained blew wide open. Bank accounts, loans, mortgages he’d kept current by some quiet miracle. The money he’d stacked with the same care he used to fold his shirts, now shuffling out of the accounts like it had been waiting for her hand. It wasn’t the spending itself that made me dizzy—it was the echo of my mother in it, the old QVC boxes piling up on the porch, the way she would buy and buy and then sit us down and lecture us about how we never had anything. We were always broke, she assured us, as a new package arrived. It is a particular form of madness, being told you are poor by someone who will not stop consuming.

    I rinse the plate until my fingers go numb inside the gloves. Outside, a gust of wind slaps the siding, a hollow sound, like a hand hitting a bare back.

    I think about death most days. It’s not dramatic; it’s logistical. Each cough, for example. I feel the rasp in my throat and immediately picture a shadow on an X-ray, the white smear of something that will not respond to treatment. On days when my lungs behave, my brain rewrites the script: early-onset dementia, little holes in the gray matter that will quietly empty me out until nothing is left but reflex. I misplace a word and feel the edge of it—the possibility that this is the beginning of the end and I will never again trust my own sentences.

    They say there’s a name for this—the way the mind circles death after enough blows, rehearsing it, tracing the routes by which you might leave. Someone wrote that people who have watched a parent die, or disappear, often live with death seated just offstage. Not a fear, exactly. An assumption. A constant readiness.

    I call mine the death feelings, but lately it feels more honest to call it being awake.

    I scrub the fork, working the sponge between the tines. The motion is small but aggressive. My hands ache inside the gloves. The eczema—or whatever it is—has left my skin thin and itchy. The gloves let me turn the water up hotter than is strictly necessary. I like the burn. I like the way it makes my fingers feel separate from the rest of my body, like I could peel them off and set them on the counter when they get too loud.

    My mother used to stand at the sink, too. I can see her there if I close my eyes: cigarette balanced in the corner of her mouth, ash growing too long over the basin, late-night infomercials chattering from the living room. The counter behind her was often lined with cardboard boxes—beauty kits, vacuum-sealed containers, a sequined top she’d ordered at three in the morning. She would tear into them with an eagerness that embarrassed me, then stack the contents neatly while complaining about how we never had anything. We were always broke, she reminded us, as if the evidence on the counter were proof of our ingratitude.

    She hated being seen, my mother. She hated her own reflection, the way the overhead light made her skin look sallow. She hated her body, her marriage, the town, herself. I know these things because she made sure I knew. I also know what it looks like when someone cannot metabolize their suffering, when it curdles and pours out sideways onto the nearest person. I know how it feels to have a parent who would rather die than admit she was hurting.

    I turn off the water. The house exhales with me.

    The quiet is a physical thing. It lays across my shoulders, settles over the dog, seeps into the cracks along the windowsill. There is no radio. No one calling to ask how I’m holding up. The phone, when it rings, usually brings obligation, not comfort. I have become careful about what I share with the people who are left. I have learned that certain sentences trigger a kind of arms race of suffering: I say, “I’m having a hard time,” and someone responds, “You think you have it bad?” I say, “I’m scared,” and someone answers with a catalogue of their own emergencies. By the end of the call, I’m apologizing for opening my mouth.

    I read once that there’s a term for this, too—the way some people respond to another’s pain by immediately asserting their own. It’s not evil. It’s a learned survival strategy. A way of saying, “Don’t forget me. I hurt, too.” In families like mine, where violence and scarcity were the wallpaper, it became a reflex. Whoever bled loudest got the bandages.

    I never did learn to bleed loudly enough.

    Instead, I wrote.

    At first, I did what I was supposed to: framed my pain with quotes from other, more acceptable women. I lined the pages with Toni and Maya and Margaret and Annie, letting their words rinse mine until the whole thing felt more palatable. I wanted their sentences to bless my own, to make them less embarrassing, less ugly. I wanted to be the kind of person whose suffering made her wise.

    But the more I wrote, the less that approach worked. The quotations began to feel like apologies. Like I was saying, “Don’t worry, I know my life is too much; here’s someone more important to make it go down easier.” I began to resent the way my paragraphs yearned toward a lesson. It felt like lying. There is no moral to having your mother’s voice in your head telling you you’re ungrateful from beyond the grave. There is no clean takeaway to realizing your uncle—the one person who loved you without trying to reshape you—saved every penny only for it to be siphoned away into someone else’s account.

    He used to say my stories were dark. “So dark,” he’d say, half admiring, half uneasy, his mouth tugging to the side in that way it did when he was trying to be gentle. I didn’t know how to explain that darkness was the only honest tone I had. That I wasn’t writing to shock anyone. I was writing to keep myself from disappearing. There are people whose families frame their work on the walls, put clippings on the fridge. Mine reads and looks away, then tells me I have the wrong idea about what happened.

    I pull the plug. The water circles the drain, taking foam and crumbs and the last heat with it. The gloves drip on the edge of the sink, little pale hands empty of bones.

    This is where the death feelings settle, once the task is done: in the space between the routine and the void. I picture my belongings being sorted: notebooks opened then closed, dog toys tossed into a bag, the lamp unplugged, the books divided into keep and donate. My writing reduced to a stack of paper someone will skim at most. I picture the ease with which someone could erase me—how quickly the narrative could tighten around the absence.

    Nothing resolves. No lesson arrives. The death feelings settle back into their usual place behind my ribs, an extra organ, humming.

  • the roads that raised me

    The house I lived in then was barely five hundred square feet, and most days I could feel every inch of it. The narrowness wasn’t just architectural; it was the intimacy of a space that holds only what you need and very little extra. There was a comfort in that kind of minimalism, the way it forced an honesty about my life. I had enough plates for one person and maybe two. A coffee maker that sputtered like it was remembering something. My uncle’s television and a couch the color of a sunrise someone turned up too bright. And in the back room, the silhouettes of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother hung in a row, their profiles quiet and observing, like they were keeping a ledger only they knew how to read.

    That Thanksgiving morning was bright but cold, a typical Laramie contradiction. The walls hummed with the faint memory of warmth. My dog shifted in her sleep, three-legged and stubborn, her breathing soft enough to blend with the refrigerator. I had no intention of cooking. The holiday had become less about food and more about the stillness it allowed. For once, the world expected nothing from me.

    Despite the holiday, the house felt like an ordinary day — but the memories arrived anyway. They came in slow, not as ambushes but as invitations. I could open them without collapsing. That still surprised me.

    That day, the roads came back first.

    There were the roads to Burns, the long stretch from wherever I was living at the time — Cheyenne, Laramie, no fixed point — to that small house my grandparents occupied like it was a final frontier. Burns never asked for much. A few blocks of houses, plain and sturdy. A water tower. A horizon that pressed right up against the town’s edge as if daring someone to leave. But the house itself held enough texture to shape my memory.

    I think most about the times my dad drove me, especially the one where he let me take the wheel of my mother’s Buick. It was a rare permission. I had wanted to drive that car for so long, watching my mother grip its wheel like it was the only thing she trusted. The car smelled faintly of her: powder, gum wrappers, something else I can’t quite name anymore. Dad’s voice came casually from the passenger seat — go ahead, take it — and in that moment I was suspended between elation and terror.

    The sky that morning was split in two, one half blue, the other gray. It had just rained, the kind where the air feels rinsed, and every puddle on the pavement mirrored the sky. The Buick was heavier than anything I had driven before, and I could feel the suspension in my bones as I steered around the first curve.

    That’s when the hydroplaning happened — quick, slippery, a moment that lifted me out of certainty. The wheels lost their grip, just a fraction of a second, but enough that time stretched. I felt the car rise slightly, the steering wheel loosening in my hands. My breath caught. The interior lit up with morning light bouncing off the puddles, too bright for such a quiet scare.

    I didn’t say anything.

    I didn’t want to lose the privilege of driving.

    I didn’t know if my dad felt it too.

    He didn’t look at me, or if he did, I didn’t see it. He was staring ahead, trusting me more than I trusted myself. Eventually the tires found the road again, and I pretended nothing had happened. My heart took longer to land.

    That stretch of road — wet, shimmering, quiet — became part of my internal map. When I think of Burns now, I think of that sky, that split between blue and gray, the brief sense that the car and I had become unmoored.

    The actual house in Burns was its own character. There was the odd bathroom where the washer lived, with a hose snaking into the toilet because that’s how the plumbing made sense. Above it hung classic car calendars, the kinds with old muscle cars and women posed on their hoods. My grandpa didn’t care what month or year it was; the calendars stayed even when their dates no longer applied to anything. They were decorations of a sort, reminders of a world that made him laugh or dream or simply pass the time.

    His desk was the sacred part of the house for me. It was the only place I knew where every pen worked. Every marker, every calculator. Nothing scratched or stuttered. He valued function and he valued humor; The Far Side comics he tacked up or collected felt like extensions of him — absurd, dry, unexpectedly wise. I learned to see the world through those cartoons: cows with opinions, scientists in trouble, spiders having existential questions. The humor made room for my own quiet oddities.

    The basement, though, was the heart. It smelled faintly of dust and old paper, cool even in summer. The typewriter sat like a relic, heavy and sure of itself. My grandpa would sit down there and type letters to us, the keys clacking in rhythms that felt both chaotic and comforting. Sometimes insects got caught in the process — a deaf bumblebee, a squished spider — pressed into the margins like unintended punctuation marks. Those tiny marks of the basement accompanied his words across miles. They were not mistakes. They were signatures of the room itself.

    When I was driving to college with my dad and the Buick moment happened, I was leaving one life and entering another without knowing it. Burns stayed the same, though — watching from the edges of my adolescence with a quiet, steady love.

    The Vedauwoo dreams came later, threaded through the years when everything felt precarious. In the dreams, I was driving over the pass, the one between Laramie and Cheyenne, the granite formations rising like ancient teeth on either side. But the weather was always impossibly snowy, steeper than real life. The road would disappear beneath me, and suddenly I wasn’t driving anymore — I was sledding down the pass, sliding uncontrollably, the world tilting at an angle that made my stomach drop. The dream didn’t end in a crash or death. It just ended in motion, a sense of descent without resolution.

    Looking back, it wasn’t a dream about dying. It was a dream about losing control, about being pulled into adulthood faster than I could stabilize myself. It was the hydroplaning moment magnified and stretched into a landscape. Even in sleep, my body remembered that sensation of the ground slipping out from under me, the way fear can arrive without warning and then vanish without explanation. Those dreams always left me waking with the taste of snow in my mouth, as if fear had a texture.

    The roads to Gillette were their own education.

    Denver to Laramie to Casper to Buffalo to Gillette — each stretch with its own temperament. Some parts were monotonous, endless prairie that lulled me into thinking I knew what was coming. Other parts were violent in their weather changes, the wind pushing the car sideways, the snow hiding the ditches.

    There was one year when a storm hit hard enough that I couldn’t make it past Cheyenne. The snow was coming down in sheets, sideways, the kind of storm that feels personal. I turned the car around and ended up staying with my grandparents again. They opened the door like they always did — delighted, relieved, unguarded. It didn’t matter that the roads had forced me into their home. They acted like I had come intentionally, as if I had remembered something important about where I belonged.

    The house was warm in that familiar, slightly stale way that belongs to older homes — the furnace blasting, the air thick with old carpet and whatever had been cooked hours earlier. My grandma fussed over where to put my bag. My grandpa was already pulling on his heavy coat because storms always made him antsy, and he needed to walk a bit before bed.

    He had always been a walker. Even in his later years, when his steps had grown shorter and his back curved into its own quiet question mark, he insisted on walking the small blocks of Burns as if they were a duty he owed the world. By then, he wore Depends tucked under his jeans. Sometimes they sagged a little. Sometimes there was the faint smell of urine or worse — a smell he couldn’t entirely help anymore. It didn’t embarrass me. If anything, it made me love him more. It was proof of how hard he was trying to stay himself even as his body betrayed him. Proof that he still wanted to move through the world under his own power.

    I told him I wanted to stretch my legs after the drive, and he brightened. Really brightened. His whole face opened the way it used to when we were little and he’d say, “Let’s go get the mail,” like it was a grand outing.

    So we walked — slowly, carefully — into the kind of snow that makes all sound disappear. The storm had quieted for a moment, just long enough for us to step outside. Streetlights cast wide cones of light that caught the snowflakes in yellow halos. Our breath rose thick and white in front of us. The houses were dark except for a few porch lights left on as a kind of prayer for anyone still on the road.

    He waddled a bit, the way older men do when they’re trying not to slip, trying not to let their dignity fall out of their pockets. I matched my pace to his. Neither of us said much. We didn’t need to. His presence was enough — solid, gentle, aging but still unmistakably him.

    We didn’t walk long — maybe one block up and one block back — because the wind picked up again and the snow started needling our faces. But in that short stretch, something in me settled. I felt wanted. I felt chosen. Not for what I could offer, not for what I could perform, but simply because he was happy I was there.

    Back inside, he stomped snow off his shoes in the entryway and laughed at himself for being “too old for this.” My grandma handed him a towel. He took it with a seriousness that bordered on ceremonial, like drying off after walking me through a storm was the last important job he’d ever needed to do.

    Later, in the small bedroom where I slept under a quilt that smelled faintly of their detergent, I listened to the storm reassert itself. The wind pushed against the siding. Snow slapped the windows. But inside, I felt held in a way I hadn’t felt in years — not rescued, not fixed, just sheltered.

    That’s what comes back when I think of that storm — not the fear of the roads or the whiteout conditions or the way the car fishtailed on the exit ramp.

    I remember the walk.

    I remember his pace.

    I remember how deeply I loved him.

    I remember how safe I felt next to a man who smelled a little like aging and diapers and winter air — and who, without saying a word, made me feel like I was worth coming in from the storm for.

    I think sometimes about the night before I left home for college. I was in the basement room, the one with the waterbed that sloshed whenever I shifted, the one that always felt a little humid no matter the season. I had packed most of my things into boxes I wasn’t sure would fit into the car. The room felt smaller that night, like the walls were aware I was leaving and wanted one last chance to close in on me.

    The basement had always been my refuge and my exile — the place I could disappear into, away from the tension that lived upstairs. It was where I learned to stay small, where I tried to make myself into someone my mother might like more, or at least dislike less. But that night, with the boxes lining the floor and the waterbed gently shifting under me, I wondered how often I would come back. I wondered what would happen to the version of myself that had grown up in that dark, low-ceilinged room.

    I fell asleep knowing everything was about to change, though I didn’t have the vocabulary for it. Growing up is a slow burn until suddenly it’s a door you’ve walked through without realizing it.

    When I returned that first Thanksgiving, everything looked the same but felt different. I remember coming in through the garage and touching the gray carpet in the hallway — a carpet I’d walked on thousands of times — and feeling a jolt of recognition that didn’t settle into comfort. The hall felt narrower, the ceiling lower, the air denser. It was my house, technically, but it wasn’t mine anymore. Something in me had already shifted, and the familiar space didn’t know how to hold it.

    I don’t remember how I got home that year. Maybe I had a car. Maybe I carpooled. The details blur except for that moment touching the carpet, realizing I was returning to a version of home that had already begun to recede.

    But I do remember the food. I remember standing in the kitchen doorway, watching my mother move with a competence that seemed ancient, older than her dislike of me, older than all the years we’d spent misunderstanding one another. The smell of Thanksgiving — her Thanksgiving — filled the house: potatoes, rolls, something sweet in the oven. For a brief moment, I let myself feel like a kid again, safe in the certainty of a holiday meal that tasted the same every year.

    I sat at the table and ate without thinking about how the house had changed shape around me. I let my body believe, just for that weekend, that home was still a place I could return to. It didn’t last, of course, but the moment was real — the kind of small mercy memory keeps alive even after everything else breaks.

    My grandparents’ house and my childhood home stand at opposite ends of what “family” has meant to me. One held gentleness. The other held survival. And somewhere in between was the house of my uncle — the one I cared for long after he was gone, the one that still feels like an unclaimed inheritance of the heart.

    When my uncle died, another kind of road opened — the road back to Long Circle. I stayed in that house for him, because it felt like the last place where love had lived in my adult life without causing harm. I cleaned. I paid what I could. I tended the yard. I tended his memory. I tended the grief that had nowhere else to go.

    Even in that small Laramie house, I kept pieces of him scattered like small shrines: a television too large for the living room, a few objects I didn’t part with, the echoes of conversations we never got to finish. I regret the things I gave away — shirts, old papers, mugs — not because they were valuable but because they held the textures of him. Absence is loud in hindsight.

    The legal battles, the trust documents, the accusations — those came later, unwanted and cruel. They tried to rewrite the story. Tried to paint me as a trespasser in a house I had protected. That betrayal still lives somewhere in my ribcage, an ache I touch sometimes when I’m tired. But even that story doesn’t erase the real one — the love he gave freely, without spectacle, without condition.

    I have left that small Laramie house now. The pink couch came with me. So did the dog, still stubborn, still three-legged. So did the silhouettes of the women on the wall, quiet and watchful as ever. Some things you carry not because they are easy but because they are yours.

    That Thanksgiving morning — the light through the windows, the half-blue half-gray sky, the dog sighing into the silence — I didn’t know yet how many more roads were still ahead. I only knew that I had survived the ones behind me.

    The truth is simple:

    I survived because the roads raised me.

    Because the houses taught me what love is and isn’t.

    Because the people who opened their doors — my grandparents, my uncle — left ways of being in the world that still guide me.

    Wyoming gave me the shape of myself.

    And wherever I go next, I’m taking all of it with me.