First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Every Beautiful Thing

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Are you prepared for Rosh Hashanah this year?

Less than I ever was. This year I stand before you in the throes of everything I did not have time to fix, and somehow scared of everything. This year I return home covered in construction dust. This year I stand before you exactly as I am.

The ceiling is still broken, exposing all the wires and rubble. I had hoped, by Rosh Hashanah, the ceiling would be fixed. I had hoped a lot of things would be neatly tidied up, and I would not have to relearn to tie the ribbon of my nicest dress while sweeping up the shards of things.

There are special prayers that we say for healing. For years I said these prayers with specific names, friends or friends of friends or requests from strangers. Now I say them with my mother’s name. Every single time.

Here is a story about my mother’s diagnosis. My siblings and I all travelled home for her birthday, converging in Houston from three separate cities. She fell, my father told us. What do you mean she fell? She fainted and split her head open. Why?

We learned that “why” meant stage four cancer. I went to the rabbi’s grave and asked for something big.

I did not have time to polish up the edges.

So my ceiling fell.

So the façade came undone and exposed everything.

Are you prepared for Rosh Hasahanah this year?

More than I ever was.

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I have doubts, my mother writes. I didn’t know she wrote that piece until after she published it. Until I showed up at shul wearing yesterday’s dress – and don’t ever tell her I wore yesterday’s clothing – because the roof fell in and I didn’t know where else to go. I’ve been living there a week now.

I have no doubts at all, I tell her from the fire escape. Not a single one. And I know that this is true because I’m shit at lying, but when I get off the phone I’m crying anyway.

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It’s a few hours before Yom Kippur. My mother went to chemo, and I went to the mikveh to pray for her there.

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It’s erev sukkot and I’m on a plane to Texas. I’ve booked so many flights I lose track of them all.

The doctors said she could drink Smirnoff Ice. My siblings reprimand her, they say she cannot drink from my glass. So she drinks from my glass when they aren’t looking.

Her tumors are shrinking.

We spend the holiday drinking together.

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It’s my birthday and I’m watching planes from an old hotel in Nashville, with every single pair of clean underwear I own in a different city. In two different cities. No, I tell my sister. I don’t think one can request underwear at the front desk. But I should probably go ask for a tube of toothpaste.

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I call a couple friends.

I’m doing something crazy. I’m going to Queens. Right now, to the rabbi’s grave. To my grandparents’ graves. Do you want to come with me?

Why are you wearing that? they ask when I get in their car on their crowded street in the middle of the city. “That,” is a cashmere sweater, a brown mini skirt and black leather boots that were a birthday gift. We told you to dress for rain.

It’s my cemetery outfit.

I have an outfit that I wear to cemeteries. I have a collection of letters that I wrote. Dear Diary. Dear Rabbi. I always hold on to them just a little bit too long, standing by those graves. There are hundreds of letters there, and suddenly when I hear their pages wisping in the winds, I’m not ready to let mine go.

I’ll bring you an umbrella. It is, to my friends, the most logical thing that we’re driving out into a rainstorm with no warning and I have an outfit that I wear to cemeteries.

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I call my mother and we talk about shoes. Our new favorite running shoes, which ones are the lightest and which ones come in purple. It seems like forever since we talked about running shoes. We each buy the same new pair. Like we’ve been doing for the last ten years.

We are running a race on Thanksgiving. I tell my siblings I’ll bring us waterproof markers if they help me get ready.

My stomach is going to say: My mom has stage four colon cancer.

My back is going to say: AND WE’RE IN THIS RACE TOGETHER!

My whole family will run together, share a Thanksgiving meal together. We’ve all dubbed this project Kicking Cancer’s Ass, a clever slogan that my dad devised.

Because we will.

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