The email pops into my inbox late on a Friday evening. My dad, in matter-of-fact terms and brief, short sentences, lays out what will be my sister’s final days. While the message is out of the blue, it isn’t entirely surprising. She had been stable for years; her cancer treatment almost seemed routine at this point and without day-to-day knowledge of her condition, this email seemed a sudden turn of events.

“There’s nothing more they can do; she isn’t responding to treatment any longer. She left her appointment this afternoon and her doctor will begin arranging for hospice to start next week.”

I want to email back and ask a few clarifying questions, but I hold back. Was I allowed to know anything more than what was said? I don’t think so. Do I want to know anything more than what was said? No. Probably not.

My husband asks if I’m okay. I tell him I am and go on with my day. The truth is more complicated, however. My mind doesn’t know how to mourn someone who wasn’t really in my life, that I had no real relationship with, our estrangement having lasted years. My body doesn’t know what it’s supposed to feel the moment I read my dad’s message telling me my sister’s status has changed from sick to actively dying. I do know all I feel is a quiet numbness and very removed from the situation.

I try to remember the last time I laid eyes on my sister, felt affection for my sister, really knew my sister to any degree. I can’t recall. I don’t know if she has seen my grown child since he was a baby. I don’t know if she wishes it was all very different. I actually don’t know anything about her at all.

I didn’t attend my grandfather’s funeral. I was 14 and terrified of death. Of bodies. Of permanence. I opted to stay in my grandparents’ home, just up the street from the church that held the service. I sat in his chair, read a book, waited for my parents to collect me for lunch. I watched the cars drive slowly by the living room window on the way to the cemetery. The cemetery, situated across the dirt road from my grandparents’ farmhouse and buried beneath the tall pines, held generations of family eternally resting.

I wanted to be in different clothes instead of the dress that threatened to choke. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be curled on my discarded couch cushions, the ones tossed on my bedroom floor, reading. Listening to music. Dreaming of boys. But most of all, I wanted to hear my grandfather’s booming voice, walking in through the screen door, telling a joke to my dad. I wanted to know I would see him again. Hear him again. Instead, I shoved my feelings down and made myself quite small, trying to hide from death.

My sister is older than me by quite a bit. She was already in high school as my memories come online. Despite the age gap, she would always read to me at bedtime. The Monster at the End of This Book, complete with the requisite family voices, to start and then, later, Jenny at the Fire Station or Nancy Drew when she was home from college on break. Curled up on the big queen-sized bed where the spindles rattled brass on brass, just one more chapter, please. Can you read just one more chapter as we tighten the spindle with the hair ribbon that never did its job. I always asked. She always relented. Books, our tether across the years, never dreaming it would break.

No one tells you when you are eight years old and your older sister lays with you to read about Jenny the Cat that 40 years later you won’t know one another. No one tells you when you are six years old that people grow and change and make choices not even blood can breach. No one tells you when you are four years old that there will come a day when it will hurt to see the covers of your favorite stories as you try to work out where everything went so terribly wrong. I wonder if someone will tell me when she dies, even as I know my parents will. I wonder if I’ll hear about it soon after or maybe later, as an aside, even as I know I will hear along with everyone else. There is no reason that I won’t be told, but I still wonder. I don’t know my place. The protocol. I start. I flail.

The first funeral I attended was for my former father-in-law. My then-spouse, overcome with grief, insisted a package of Hydrox cookies go in the casket before it was closed. We stopped at Ralph’s on the way to the service, him frantic to find them among the sea of Oreos on the shelves. Only 22, I felt too young to be a comforting spot to land. Only 22, I remembered how small I made myself after my grandfather’s death and tried to take my mind there as I loaned my body to my husband’s grief. Only 22, I wanted to run back to my life, tell his family I was sorry, but I couldn’t be there, in the room, with them, with him, with this crushing anxiety, listening to them say their goodbyes.

I loved my former father-in-law, but I sat still in my chair, eyes averted, never getting close as my husband slipped that blue package of cookies alongside his father’s hand, better to grab them in the afterlife. His grief had to find its own way back to where I was focused on the corner of the room, unable to go near the casket, unable to breathe, unable to see, unable to bridge those few steps for him. To him. Paralyzed and useless and still terrified of the dead.

The only brunettes in a sea of familial redheads, I assumed I would be most like my sister. Nothing could have been further from the truth. While I always loved her as I grew into an adult, I didn’t always like her. I found her inconsistent choices frustrating. I found her problematic philosophies maddening. Time and again the friction from our basic values clashing drove a wedge deeper between us. There were times I stayed in her home and couldn’t wait to leave. There were times she gave me advice that I immediately discarded. There were times when I wondered at her inability to see our relationship for what it had become.

The last funeral I attended was my grandmother’s almost 30 years after I stood at her window watching the procession of cars crawl away from grandfather’s service. After getting the news of her passing, I immediately wondered how I could get out of going. It was in my parents’ hometown, in the middle of the school year. Could I use my child as a shield, feigning maternal labor to schedules and lunches and lost socks? Could I excuse myself away, pretend I was swamped and far busier than I was? Could I just say no, I don’t want to, I can’t, I have trouble with death so close to my face I can’t breathe?

I didn’t choose any of those options. Instead, I drove south with my sister. We stayed at my parents’ house, driving to the service the morning of, locking the front door of my childhood on our way out. We encountered a hawk, deer, elk. We scanned the horizon for javelina, for cows, for sunrise. We talked about who we might see, when we might leave. I parked in the church parking lot and walked in. I found the family gathered in a room for family prayer before the service and tried to find an escape but too late. I was sat down. I was enclosed in a row of chairs. I was within the line of sight of the open casket. I was staring at a face full of make-up that looked wholly unnatural on her. I was being talked at, to, around. I was counting down the seconds, digging fingers into palms, trying not to panic, losing my mind. I was too close. Everything was too close. That prayer lasted days. Why was no one shutting the casket, blocking death from my view? The cemetery wasn’t any better and I found myself wandering through the lots, finding relatives, my namesake, where my parents will one day rest. After far too long we were talked out, fed full, car finally pointed home.

The call comes on a Monday morning not quite weeks after she entered hospice. I debate what to do. I try to work out what my obligations were and are. I realize I’m in an impossible situation, and I take the selfish road. I choose not to attend my sister’s funeral in person, but I do tune in via livestream. It clicks on, grainy and oddly focused, minutes already into the service, as if someone had forgotten it was supposed to be streamed. I find I’m not scared of death, here. Closed casket, just out of the screen’s view, I can focus on something other than the odd permanence and pageantry. The speakers begin a barrage of tales. I remind myself that whole humans are complicated. The speakers talk of love and care. I remind myself that my relationship stands alone. Mine is mine. Theirs is theirs. Then, the speakers get specific.

“She was tirelessly selfless.”

Wait, is this the right person? I try to quiet my mind.

“She was the least judgmental person I know.”

But what about her constant judgement of me? Toward me? Shouted and whispered but mostly spat when she thought no one could see her. She never wanted anyone to see that in her.

“She was, above all, kind.”

Flashes of her calling me an abusive bitch ring in my ears. Spitting words of disdain, of hatred, of anger run circles in my head. My last memory of her suddenly comes to mind. It’s one of snarling judgment, of showing how little she knew me, of a lifetime of poor choices—surrounding herself with people who treated her poorly and somehow blaming me. Emailing me, she told me how she hated me, couldn’t stand to look at me, that I was the worst of people. While the exactness of her words has been lost to time, I still recall my confusion reading them. I felt her lashing out, never again sure of anything between us. Never again sure of what prompted them. Never again sure she hadn’t mistaken me for someone else. Never would I hear her apologize for her words. For her actions. For her part in this escalation between us.

When I was small, we had a children’s book about counting. Starting at one and marching to ten, the child counts every little thing that is needed to go to bed. When they get to the last one, they find the bed too crowded. The last line of the story is something along the lines of “...and sometimes, there isn’t room for me!” I think of this book, now, while trying to reconcile the face of martyrdom portrayed at the service and the sister I knew who would hiss insults as easy as breathing. The book was read often, referenced often, and I think of her reading it to me while looking into the crowded circle, knowing I’m on the outside, staring at the funeral over Zoom, furious at the words that don’t ring true.

I couldn’t see her for anything she might have been to others. Only for what she was and wasn’t to me. I couldn’t hear those words being spoken as the polite nuance of loved ones saying goodbye. Only feel the ones she sent before sending nothing more. Looking at the mourners, I know I made the right choice not showing up in person. There was no room for me. For my truth. For what I’ve said and not said about her. For everything I’ve held in. For my expanding complicated feelings.

I exit the service before it’s fully over. I can’t sit through the rest. Her cancer diagnosis, years prior, made clear there would be no swapping happy stories at the end. I was startled when I realized that being sick doesn’t always make people want to be nice. Or say sorry, reach out, bandage old wounds. So days passed and there was no reaching out. Months passed and the fissure split more. Years passed and there was no meeting for lunch and laughing through tears. Time stopped and there was no whispered apology.

I wonder who I’m supposed to mourn—the older sister who loved me deeply and read to me when she was home from college or the one who shot venom at me when she thought no one could see? I still don’t have an answer as I stare at the blank screen and tally what I do know: that at one time I was her favorite before I simply was not.

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Tawnya Gibson is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in TODAY online, Newsweek, Under the Gum Tree, Sky Island Journal, and Blue Mountain Review (among others). She currently writes the Substack newsletter Off The Record and lives and works in the mountains of Northern Utah.

When I was deep in grief, mornings were the worst. People think the nights must have been the real torture, alone in a quiet house, with time to think and to brood, time to feel the darkness surround me and close me in. But during my most significant loss, I had a fix for that. I stayed up late into the night—two a.m., sometimes later—until I dropped into my son Eric’s bed in total exhaustion. I’d never had a sleepless night in the months following his death. Not one.

Mornings, they were another story. I remember that first morning, coming slowly to consciousness, becoming gradually aware of the relentless cooing of a mourning dove outside my window. It eased its way into my awareness, a soothing sound, it seemed to me. A trick. My body knew before my mind did, in that odd way our cells have of knowing. My eyes filled with tears, and I began to shake; my brain struggled to catch up. What had overcome me?

Oh. That was it. My son was dead. A rising panic, one I couldn't control, a wave I had only to ride until it was done with me, then the first pang of “why?” the dangerous question I’d not allowed myself to ask in fully conscious moments. For the first time, I truly cried.

It took my devoted friend no time to move from the sofa downstairs, where she’d kept vigil on that first night of unthinkable loss, to the bed beside me. She crawled in next to me and held me, and we rocked together until the grief had let me go.

That morning was both a magnified reflection of mornings past and a foreshadowing of many to come. Other mornings of grief before that one, when wakefulness had come slowly, were also accompanied by the gradual integration of another new reality. There were all the other deaths—my parents, my brother, the aunt who’d seen me through my teens, my late mother’s best friend who’d come to stay after the birth of my first child. This child, the one no longer with me. The grief those mornings had brought faded against the backdrop of this present loss.

But after a month or so, I’d seen that there was something else, something so different from those times before that it had taken me a while to recognize the pattern. It went like this: First, the warm, contented sense of coming back into the world from the cocoon-like safety of sleep. That lasted only a few sweet moments. Then, a punch in the gut, violent in a dull, drop-to-your-knees sort of way, brought on by traitorous brain cells that insisted on telling, on winning out over the ignorant comfort of the body. He’s dead they’d inform me. This is your life now.

I’d started thinking of it as my personal Groundhog Day, like the movie where the guy finally realizes he’s doomed to repeat the same events every day for eternity. I’d felt doomed, too, to live through being told, each morning anew, of this irreversible loss.

Once a hundred mornings or so had come and gone, it was no longer with every waking that I was blown over with the seemingly brand-new knowledge that my son was dead. A vague fear of mornings persisted, yet I found some kind of peace there, too, a peace I struggled to understand. Is it, I wondered, the simplicity of knowing I’ve gotten over the worst of the day right up front, that after this, things have to get better? There was some truth to this, but it still wasn’t the whole story.

Soon I began climbing the stairs at night to crawl into a sliver of my own bed, the rest of it taken up with piles of folded clothes. It hadn’t escaped me that I was occupying as little space in the world as possible, but I gave myself permission to re-enter at my own pace. Most nights, I retrieved a piece of Eric’s clothing from under my nightstand—a t-shirt, a jacket, his soccer jersey—one of the few garments from his hamper I’d had the good sense not to wash in the days after the accident. I’d hold it close and breathe him in as I fell asleep.

Now it seemed right to take a small step forward. I began by taking down papers and pictures and mementos Eric had taped to his mirror, folding and sorting his clothes. I unearthed a stack of photos from Christmases and birthdays and sleepovers with friends.

Into the storage bin they went, Eric’s favorite pants, those sneakers with the frayed laces, strawberry candy wrappers, crumpled bits of notebook paper with “Awesome Eric!!” scrawled across them, treasures from his younger years. Photos. His yearbook. I stashed away the detritus of his life until the far-off day when deciding what to keep, what to let go, would somehow be easier. For now, it was one small step, one breath, at a time.

In coming years, when I pictured Eric’s room just off the kitchen in this house where he grew up, I’d remember the unmade bed, the soccer posters, and the drafting table that hinted at a hopeful future. What I wouldn’t allow myself to fully reinhabit until years had passed was the dead weight of learning Eric was gone.

Yet even now, even in the depths of grief, I understood it. What we all need when our time here is finished is the love and forgiveness of those who remain to keep the best of us alive. This would be my gift to my son. This one thing I could do.

There’d been days those last couple of months when, amid the grief, I’d been able to find my way back to a place of calm. I’d resisted the temptation to fall into guilt or descend back into sadness—such an effortless drop. Instead, I resolved to take every peaceful moment as the gift it clearly was.

Then one morning, a revelation. Lying in bed, resisting the day, wanting just one more moment in that warm, comfortable place, I was struck with the knowledge that in this world of sleep—the world beyond the world—none of this had happened. This process of waking felt more like a birth than a death now, and, like birth, it came with pain. It was the journey from that safe, softened place where all is well, into the bright light of the world, where there’s no avoiding the harsh truth. Yet like birth, I’d survive the process and, if I was lucky, go on to embrace my life and the world of choices I did not make but must live with all the same.

And I thought of my son, who was with me now, in wakefulness as in sleep.

Reprinted with permission from multiple sections of The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared by Casey Mulligan Walsh.

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Casey Mulligan Walsh has written for the New York Times, HuffPost, Next Avenue, Modern Loss, Hippocampus, Barren Magazine, and numerous other literary magazines. Her essay, “Still,” published in Split Lip, was nominated for Best of the Net. Her memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, was published by Motina Books on February 18, 2025. Casey lives in upstate New York with her husband, Kevin, and too many books to count. Learn more at caseymulliganwalsh.com.

About the book:

A poignant graphic memoir about the power of art to transform and heal after the death of a loved one

In April 2020, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt's partner of twenty-two years, Donimo, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life. About a month after Donimo's death, Sarah began making comics again as a way to deal with her profound sense of grief and loss. The comics started as small sketches but quickly transformed into something totally unfamiliar to her. Abstract images, textures, poetic text, layers of watercolor, ink, and colored pencil—for Sarah, the journey through grief was impossible to convey without bold formal experimentation. She spent two years creating these comics.

The result is Something, Not Nothing, an extraordinary book that delicately articulates the vagaries of grief and the sweet remembrances of enduring love. Moving and impressionistic, Something, Not Nothing shows that alongside grief, there is room for peace, joy, and new beginnings.

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Sarah Leavitt is the author of the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), which is currently in production as a feature-length animation, and the award-winning historical fiction comic Agnes, Murderess(Freehand Books, 2019). She is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at UBC in Vancouver, BC, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comics classes since 2012.

My caregiver journey began after college graduation when my mother and grandmother were diagnosed with terminal illnesses. As the only child and grandchild, I become their sole and full-time caregivers. My entire life was put on hold since there was no one else to help. From the first emergency room admission to goodbyes in the ICU three years later, I was thrown into ruin; in many ways, all our lives were over.

This is something I’m supposed to keep to myself.

Caregiving for a sick relative is an indescribable experience. There aren’t words to encompass the nix of optimism, goodwill, and, underneath it all, hopelessness. This person isn’t getting better. They’re going to die and you’re just maintaining them until their body shuts down. It’s as depressing as it is arduous, but I wasn’t supposed to be sad or angry.

I’m not allowed to be sad or angry now, almost three years later. Life is tough. I must learn to adapt.

I’m tired of being so strong all the time.

My mother battled heart failure, COPD, and diabetes, and my grandmother had Lewy body dementia. Watching my mother deteriorate was the most heartbreaking experience of my life. In less than a year, she’d lost her mobility, and was constantly in and out of the hospital for her ailments. As for my grandmother, she could be hostile before, but dementia brought it to a whole new level. She threatened to call the cops on me and would have sundown episodes— extreme episodes of confusion and erratic behavior in dementia patients at night—that would put us all in danger. Once she drove over a median in horrible traffic. A car narrowly missed us. If it’d hit our car, I would have been crushed. It took ages to get her into assisted living.

I shouldn’t talk about this. It’s family business that should stay in the family. But it’s hard to hold that belief when I dealt with all this alone.

Where was everybody else? Enjoying their lives, no doubt, and still doing so to this day, leaving me to drown in grief. There are times it’s totally overwhelming, more so now that I’m completely alone. I’m still cooking and cleaning and garnering medical appointments, but just for me. How do I live like this after taking care of others for so long? I should be “over it” by now, but I’m no closer to healing than I was in 2020.

People stop checking in after the first few months. There were no funerals, so the timeline is blurry. In fact, the last three years have been nothing more than an extended fever dream. There are days when my depression is so intense, it feels tangible, clusters of malignancies occupying my lungs and gut, days where suicide isn’t a concept, but a friend patting my hand, reassuring me. It seems ludicrous— processing death with even more death—but knowing there’s a way out is comforting on the days it’s too much.

According to some of the family, I can’t say that. I’m choosing to be sad, and could get over it if I tried hard enough because “everyone goes through loss.”

I want help, but cannot ask for it. It’s pathetic, shameful at my age to want someone to come over, help me clean, make me a warm meal and hold me while saying, “It’s okay to cry.”

I was doing these things for myself the day after my mom was gone. I was shocked to learn that it’s customary to receive meals during illness or after a loss. Most of my meals at the hospital were hodge podge snacks grabbed from Walgreens, bags of McDonald’s takeout I ate and paid for alone at night. The day after my mother died, I got a pizza from Little Caesars. Two, actually, and I ate most of both. The day after that, I made chicken nuggets and fries, and drank most of my calories in sugary sodas. My dietary habits took a turn for the worse, which has continued to this day.

All I got were comments about how I’m “getting fat.”

I want to say, What’s it to you? So what if I put on some weight? I don’t want to cook a healthy meal. Who cares? Certainly not me. The grief is hard enough; processing a caregiver’s journey and burnout is a slick icing on the cake served to me that no one else wants. I will eat because there’s no other choice.

I’m tired all the time. There aren’t words for how exhausted I am. The fatigue has crawled between my bones, achy and strained as an old wood floor. I never received grief counseling. Therapy is too expensive as it is. I’m lucky enough to have a good support system in my best friends, but they live far away. It’s just me and the cat in my house.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. My mother was initially given a prognosis of five to ten years, but passed away after two. I have no plans and no prospects. I need help—a lot of it. But I’m a grownup, and expected to figure this out on my own.

Cleaning the house is overwhelming. Paying bills drains me for the day. Looking for a full-time job is the last thing I want to do. It all feels so monotonous after such great loss. I spent years in a cycle of uncertainty, sleeping on hospital floors and comforting dying women who couldn’t be mollified.

People tell me that it’ll be okay, but it was never going to be. Caregiving only ends one of two ways: with a nursing home or a tombstone. The latter follows the former. This was the expected outcome, yet I was still unprepared.

I feel like it’s my fault, and I’ve been told as much, according to a few people. It’s my fault they got worse, and my fault that they died. To those who feel this way: if it makes you feel better, sometimes I wish it was me instead.

What life do I have at this point anyway? Most days, it’s a miracle if I get out of bed before noon. It’s been almost three years. I should get it together soon, if not now.

There are days the dishes grow mold in the basin of my sink. Laundry sits in smelly mounds; dusty sheets stay on my bed for months. My house is a mess; this is a grieving person’s home. I don’t care if the floors are vacuumed, or whether the toilet is scrubbed daily. Underneath my actions, or lack thereof, is melancholia and disinterest, a deeply hurting person who will be haunted for the rest of their life.

What no one tells you about life after caregiving: when it’s all over, and your parents are gone, you’re alone. But you need someone to take care of you all the same. A few months, preferably a few years, you need to forfeit adulthood in lieu of comfort, and someone else needs to come do the heavy lifting. Write checks for your bills, cook you warm, buttery meals, make sure you drink water and shower regularly, tuck you into a clean bed every single night.

But of course, I never had any of that. Condolence cards stopped after a week. My grief is unimportant to everyone but me. No one else can hold such a burden without getting hurt. And the hardest truth of all is that I’m angry. I’m angry and depressed and don’t care about much anymore. I haven’t dressed up in three years. I don’t wear makeup anymore. I’ve let myself rot to the point that brushing my teeth is a rarity.

Here is the most open secret:

My life is ruined.

I’m almost thirty years old with no parents, siblings, or close family. I haven’t worked in many years because I quit my job to be a caregiver. The employment gap will make me further unemployable, save for retail or food service work. The trauma of watching my mother take her last breaths keeps me up at night, and knowing there are people who think I’m to blame makes me sick, because on some level, I suspect they’re right. There’s more I could have done, but I was just far too young for the responsibility placed on me.

I’ve fallen so behind in life, I will likely never catch up.

I don’t think it’s right to feel that way. My mom and grandmother are the ones who died. I should be thankful for my life. Instead, I’m throwing it away. Caregiving should be approached with altruism and grace, but I’m angry and sad. I should be thankful for the time I had, yet I mourn all the years robbed from me. Most of all, and most regrettably, I’m resentful of my lot in life. I was there from diagnosis to hospice.

What’s a caregiver to do when their patients die? It’s a secret that nobody will tell me.

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Anastasia Jill (they/them) is a queer writer living in Central Florida. They have been nominated for Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and several other honors. Their work has been featured or is upcoming with Poets.org, Sundog Lit, Flash Fiction Online, Contemporary Verse 2, Broken Pencil, and more. 

Hear Kelli at Open Secrets Live May 3!

I’m not embarrassed by any of my tattoos even though by all rights I should be since they range in character from dubious (a combat boot-clad rabbit wielding a labrys) to nerdy (a diagrammed sentence on my forearm) to downright corny (a turquoise smiling dolphin jumping over some waves). 

The lack of embarrassment doesn’t come from misunderstanding how stereotypical it is for a middle-aged queer person to be emblazoned with a faded dolphin tattoo obtained c. 1994. But each of these tattoos tells a story of who I was at that moment. Aesthetics be damned.

Of course, I have about three different clothing items that I wash and re-wear like I’m a Catholic schoolboy with a uniform, so I suppose an argument could be made that aesthetics have never really been my strong point.

So while I won’t try to defend the dolphin on my wrist or the Tasmanian devil on my ass, the tattoo centered on my upper chest has a special place in my heart and near it. And a startlingly practical use.

In 2005, six months into a dizzying long-distance romance with Heather MacAllister, the woman I called my Queen, she had a recurrence of ovarian cancer that had nearly killed her several years before. She was living in San Francisco, and I was living in Philadelphia. Almost overnight, our relationship went from frequent visits supplemented by late-night phone sex to difficult visits supplemented by desperate late-night phone chats.

She was in pain, had restarted chemo, and had unremitting nausea for nine weeks. She had been very sick in the past and was growing weary of the hope/hopeless spirals. She began asking me questions like, “How much fighting is enough?” I knew these questions were rhetorical—or hoped they were because I had no answers. 

At one point, her somewhat socially awkward oncologist told her somewhat awkwardly that she might have just three weeks to live. My Queen’s response was to find another oncologist, one willing to take a chance and give her a more aggressive treatment. Then, she got better. Much better. It wasn’t clear how long the “much better” would last, but my Queen wanted to move to Portland, Oregon, where it was easier to be sick and broke, so I joined her.

When I mused over who would watch my cats while I lived on the West Coast, my Queen laughed and said, “Uh yeah, it’s not like I’m cured. It’s not exactly a long-term commitment.”

We had a life in Portland right then, in the shadow of her seemingly imminent death. We traveled, hosted a huge Halloween party in our barely converted Hare Krishna Temple apartment, and invited Heather’s family to celebrate an early old-fashioned Christmas where we strung cranberries and popcorn to decorate the tree. This was emotionally pleasing to me, esthetically pleasing to Heather, and gastronomically pleasing to the mice who came down from the attic at night to feast on our decorations.

At my request, my Queen began to design a tattoo that would—as we often said—leave her mark on me. In the center was a stylized letter M, which was the first letter of her last name, surrounded by stars and sprigs of Scottish Heather, which referenced a trip to Scotland we had taken the previous year and her first name. We had planned for the two of us to go together, on Valentine’s Day, to the artist she had chosen, a woman who worked at the combination tattoo shop/coffee shop (it was Portland, after all) down the street from our home.

On February 13, Heather used Oregon’s medical aid in dying law to end her life before ovarian cancer could take it from her. She gathered 30 of her nearest and queerest around for a day-long goodbye event involving people of all genders and states of dress—men in fairy wings, women wearing leather chaps, a genderqueer bagpiper playing Catholic hymns and almost everyone donning a feather boa at some point in the festivities.

Then she ate a bowl full of chocolate pudding laced with seconal. Then she died.

On February 14, Heather’s sisters went with me to the tattoo place. The artist finished the sketch of a large crown surrounded by stars, and we did that tattoo in one sitting, the artist’s assistant awkwardly handing me tissue after tissue so my tears wouldn’t run down my neck and contaminate the site.

Three weeks later, when we got Heather’s ashes from the funeral home, we opened the cardboard box while a friend with tattooing equipment prepared black ink. A few of Heather’s closest gathered and we each received a fill-in of a pre-existing tattoo, the black ink swirled with Heather’s ashes. For me, it was the stars around the M that Heather had designed.

I always said I would never love anyone like Heather again, and that was true. A few years later, I met someone very unlike Heather. Cheryl was a hard-working, introverted performance poet with razor-sharp humor.

She asked about my tattoo during our first sexual encounter while she was touching my chest.

Feeling that it was perhaps bad manners to let someone stroke an area of one’s body with cremains inserted under the skin, without sharing the information, I told her an abbreviated version of the story. 

“So,” she said, not moving away from me, “the tattoo itself is filled with a dead person’s ashes?”

I nodded, frozen with anxiety.

“Does that weird you out?”

She thought for a moment.

“I mean…um, why? Is it unsanitary or something?”

And then we both started laughing and couldn’t stop.

“Is it unsanitary or something,” became our shorthand for casual acceptance of difficulties or complications either of us was bringing to the relationship and extended to bouts with depression, unannounced visits from angry parents, underemployment, and differing housecleaning priorities. 

I called Cheryl my “miracle love.” But a year and a half after we started dating, Cheryl was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 85 percent of people who develop Hodgkin’s are cured by the standard chemotherapy. Cheryl died six months later, not from the cancer but from a pulmonary reaction to the usually life-saving chemo.

Although I was (and am) extremely grateful for the joy our relationship brought both of us, the ending seemed rather like the opposite of a miracle.

The good thing about two partners in a row dying? You get, well, a little better at it. You know what helps. I surrounded myself with the love of friends. I joined a grief group. I wrote dubious stand-up comedy about death.

Several years later, I felt ready to start dating again. It seemed, however, that the Queer Women of Brooklyn might not have been ready for me. I didn’t include The Great Ash Story in my Lex (or Feeld or Fetlife) profile, and I didn’t chat about it, for example, as I would sit down to dinner on a first date. But when the time for potential nakedness (physical and apparently metaphorical) and the sacred queer dating ritual of the Tattoo Story Exchange approached, I participated by offering an accurate, if abbreviated, summary.

When I shared my recollections with some folks, it renewed their memories: cats that needed urgent diabetes medicine, roommates locked out of apartments, or emergency dry cleaning runs.

I can’t say I didn’t understand. I lost two partners under 40 in less than five years. I wouldn’t blame anyone who didn’t want to stand next to me in a lightning storm. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not emotional cowardice; it’s good sense.

But when the woman who would become my current partner first heard the Great Tattoo Ash Story, she smiled and patted my chest tenderly.

“That is terrible and beautiful,” she said, “and I’m so glad you have been loved so well.”

Later, I referred to her “kind acceptance” of my tattoo. She looked at me sideways with just a touch of a frown.

“Is that what you think?” she continued, demonstrating her rightful place as the CEO of the Coalition of Matter-of-Fact Femmes. “Nope, darlin’, we all have the ashes of something we’ve suffered right under our skin. The fact that you weren’t ashamed of yours helped me believe you’d be gentle with mine.”

I vacillate; sometimes my tattoo feels like a beautiful commemoration of a love lost but always present. At other times it feels like a slightly absurd but dramatic demonstration of the importance of not making permanent decisions in early grief. Perhaps both things can be true.

But I’ve felt so no such confusion about my tattoo’s place as a shield from a potential partner who couldn’t handle the weight of my historic grief, or who thought my emotional baggage was too battered and mismatched to take on their trip. Perhaps this is the truth I should have been questioning. For the right person, having a chest full of your dead lover’s ashes apparently doesn’t have to be a barrier to overcome, especially if they see it as a bridge.

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Open Secrets Live is May 3 in NYC

Kelli Dunham is the nonbinary ex-nun nurse storyteller comedian so common in modern Brooklyn. Kelli has appeared on the Moth Mainstage, Showtime’s Penn & Teller Bulls**t, BBC’s Religious and Ethics Hour, the Discovery Channel and is the author of seven hilarious nonfiction books about extremely non-humorous subjects.

Kelli is touring her latest show, Second Helping: Two Dead Lovers Dead Funny, to colleges, theaters, nursing conferences and even a livestock auction or two.

On September 11, 2001, I arrived at a staff meeting, after driving across town listening to “Head Like a Hole” by Nine Inch Nails at full volume. I’d slept through my alarm and barely managed to microwave a leftover Starbucks latte before dashing out the door, missing what I assumed would be a banal celebrity interview on the Today Show. My co-workers’ faces were grey, and the supervisor, bleary-eyed, recounted the morning’s events for our small group. It was nine a.m. in Seattle, and everything had already fallen apart, while I was sleeping and rushing and driving, listening to Trent Reznor.

But my clearest memory of the day begins on Sunday, September 16th, when NPR began to read the names of the victims. I was pouring my first cup of coffee, and only half-listening when I heard the name of my dear, estranged friend.

***

I’m not going to lie. Some of my memories are as cloudy as a cataract, filtered through the lens of alcohol and benzodiazepines that I would quit for good a few years later. But in the final months of 1999, my best friend of 30 years finally gave up on me and disappeared from my decimated life on a Delta flight to Vermont.

We spent the bulk of our thirties living in Seattle, with her brother Rich, stationed four hours away in Salem Oregon. On weekends, we would make the four-hour drive down I-5 to visit him, stopping midway at the Chehalis McDonald’s for a Filet-O-Fish, as excited as though we were 10 years old again and getting milkshakes after Sunday Mass. Rich, who was three years younger than my friend, managed a wildlife refuge, a job he was probably assigned at birth. In grade school, he was my best friend’s annoying little brother, fond of frogs and worms and anything dirty that moved in muck and sludge. Theirs was the standard issue antagonistic sibling relationship. But that changed as we all grappled with young adulthood, the scars of our shared childhood experiences and the challenges of growing up in the turbulent 1970s cementing our bond.

Rich, the man, was hilariously cynical, given to rants about the young thugs who partied on the refuge lands at night, leaving empty beer cans and debris behind. He was rough and unshaven, preferring to hunt deer for dinner and grow his own peppers and tomatoes. We harvested pecans from his grove and sat around the giant stone fireplace, picking meaty nut shards from our teeth. Wild haired and bearded, in flannel and torn Levis, he strummed his acoustic guitar, playing Dylan or the Indigo Girls. The juxtaposition was like a mountain of evergreens and a desert full of cactus.

It was inevitable that I would fall for him. I had been alone a long time and he was so lush and full of depth, so familiar and untouchable. When I told my best friend about my feelings, she was horrified, and rejected my plan to pursue a romantic relationship with him. It was a friendship deal breaker, she said. I wasn’t worthy of her brother’s affection. Don’t speak of it again, she said.

It wasn’t the most difficult decision I had to make, although it felt like that at the time. Our friendship weighed more than whatever hormonal tonnage was driving my attraction to her beloved baby brother. We were best friends, in that obliterating, totalizing way that girls are when they fuse together in childhood. My love for her felt euphoric and terrifying simultaneously, with my voracious neediness aggravated by her emotional frigidity. Her implied ultimatum left me anxious, made me worry about the imbalance in our friendship. I knew she idolized Rich and thought everyone was unworthy of him. I just assumed I was exempt since she loved me.

We continued to visit Rich, me pushing all my feelings down while playing my part, her edgy and uncertain, him clueless to the rupture in our delicate little crew. I eventually met someone else and effectively redirected my romantic affection. Ironically, she didn’t like the new guy—said he wasn’t good enough for me. It turned out she was right, although it took me more than a year to accept that his tendency to show up at my apartment with a gallon of vodka and Xanax was not thoughtfulness at all.

By the time I realized in January of 2000 that the brick wall at the end of my fifteen-year collision course was within sight, she was finished with me. My calls went unanswered, her door remained closed, her silence weaponized. Crippling shame prevented me from pushing harder and I let her go. A mutual friend told me she had packed up and moved to Vermont, with no forwarding address. I reached out to Rich, and he was kind and accommodating, without telling me much. As far as I knew, he was still unaware of my past infatuation and if she did tell him, he spared me from knowing.

I quarantined myself one last time in rehab and moved to a new home, changing my life. It was the early days of social media, so I stayed in touch with Rich through letters and occasional phone calls. He had a girlfriend. Things were going well. He issued multiple citations to the beer drinking thugs on the refuge, joyfully seizing every opportunity to whip out his law enforcement badge. He missed our visits, the gourmet meals. He was surprised I quit drinking and didn’t realize I had a problem. In time, the calls and letters became infrequent, and finally ceased; mine being the last bit of unanswered correspondence.

I messaged her once on Facebook, after scouring her timeline for any trace of regret or mention of the friend she left behind. As I recall, she messaged back “leave me alone.”

The NPR reporter announced that Rich was a passenger on United 93, the flight that crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about 240 miles west of Trenton, New Jersey, where we all grew up. On that day, there was still so much unknown about what happened on that plane. From the human remains, this list of passenger names had materialized, and, in Rich’s case, his wallet and badge were all that was left to identify him. I didn’t know that until months later, when I began collecting every article written about United 93, looking for any scrap of information about him and his sister.

A mutual friend told me she was bereft, the family decimated. There were plans for a memorial service, details to come. I sat surrounded by my photo albums, overstuffed and bursting, and created a collage of our little trio on the oak floor of my apartment. We were laughing in the wheat fields, huddled around an aggressive fire, watching, enthralled, as Rich shook a wok and sent veggies into airborne somersaults. I picked through over 70 pictures to find those without me.

I sent an anodyne sympathy card to the family home, addressed to her and her parents and enclosed three photos of the two of them. Possibly, they were pictures she had never seen, and would either comfort or wreck her. In either case, they were of no use to me, since I knew I had no right and was unworthy to grieve him. I had no claim, despite the closeness of our relationship, the potential it might have had, the longevity of our bond. I couldn’t cry for many months. It felt performative and fake, without her approval. Several weeks later, I received a beautiful thank you package, with commemorative items from Rich’s memorial. The card was signed only by her parents.

***

I learned to grieve by imagining her. In the last 22 years, a great trove of documentation has been written about Flight 93. She is featured in countless documentaries, interviews, and articles. Each anniversary, I usually find her in the crowd of families gathered on TV to commemorate the heroes in Shanksville. In interviews, I hear her speak and my tears flow. They’re mixed up in a viscous soup of empathy, regret, rage, and despair. All these years later, I can’t extricate my love for her from my grief for him.

Every year I attempt to write some paean to Rich, something that will memorialize our friendship and pay homage to the selfless and complex man he was. The passengers on Flight 93 whose names we all learned in the months that followed were lauded for their heroism. We knew their names because they called their loved ones, sharing with them and, unwittingly, with us, their terror and conviction. Rich didn’t make any calls. It’s completely plausible he didn’t have a phone, being a man grounded more in the earth than the air.

But it’s not my place, even after all this time, to claim him. He was once my friend, but he was her brother, our national hero, and for me, finally, always just out of reach.

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Trisha Kostis lives in Seattle and her work has appeared in the Independent, Seattle Magazine, The Counter, Points in Case, and others. A born and raised Jersey girl, she has opinions.

B E | S T

F R I | E N D S

I lost my childhood best friend twice. 

We met in the third grade and became instant friends.

We grew up alongside Bridge to Terabithia. I remember how tragic it was when (spoiler alert) Leslie dies. I remember urgently flipping to the back of the book to read the ending, and then, line by line, skimming the pages backwards to find out how she died.

I didn’t lose my best friend that way.

We used to sit and play in front of my house on the sidewalk, our goldenrod-walled elementary school in view, the din of the after-school program vibrating up the hill. We were always listening to a hand-me-down stereo, tuned into the local short-lived radio station dedicated to “today’s hit music.” If we were lucky, we would hear the fruits of our labor, of repeated phone calls to the DJ to request the Dawson’s Creek theme song, and would get to sing along.

Occasionally, a sliver of sun would slice and then retreat through the fog. We would eagerly snack on chocolate-enrobed marshmallow pinwheels, the milk chocolate melting into a pool of pure oily sugar in our mouths. The afternoons stretched endlessly, chased by bubbly orange soda.

We loved to talk on the phone, hogging the phone line so much that my siblings nicknamed her “Duck Girl” behind her back. It didn’t help she had gifted me a singing duck with a minute-long tune in different gradations of quacks.

Her mom, a teller at the local bank, knew my mom. She and her mom weren’t that close. One time, she got into an earthquake-erupting fight with her mom and called me, asking if she could come over. It didn’t matter that we lived a half mile apart and it was night. She walked over by herself.

She let me in on one of her deepest secrets: she was born with a congenital heart issue and had had surgery to correct it when she was younger. She hid the scar beneath the gold pendant necklace she always wore. The height of her neckline always glazed above the pendant, the scar a zipper of flesh that jutted from her light tan skin tone. 

She was protected. She was precious. She was loved. Affirmations.

I dared not tell a soul about her fragile heart. If we talked about it, it was always in hushed tones, like trading stickers from our sticker books during silent sustained reading. 

***

When we were old enough to go out alone, we took the bus to the mall and of course went to Claire’s. Over a mandatory store soundtrack of the Backstreet Boys, we splurged our allowance money on those split-heart best friend necklaces with the nickel ball chains, the type you couldn’t read unless you meshed the hearts together. I took the left half while she took the right.

Upon reaching middle school, however, I began to crave the need for space. By the time I learned to use my voice, it croaked like a hoarse frog when the teacher would call on me. I don’t know if it was about the weather, or what another friend said, or about borrowing money for the bus. I don’t think there was really even an argument, or even a non-argument, but suddenly we weren’t talking anymore.

Over Lisa Frank stationery, I probably scrawled out her name and then etched a big “x” over it. I probably scribbled, in cruel curled cursive, how I hated her. The rainbow bright ombre of cushy blue, idyllic magenta, and sunset yellow, sweetened by the golden retriever puppies peeking out of a violet-softened sand castle, juxtaposed the heartless discontents of the letter.

One day at the bank, her mom asked my mom what had happened. Maybe we’d drifted apart and were on separate paths, my mom offered simply. I’m sure that was an awkward conversation for my mom to have while discussing her financial information.

I snapped off the necklace and chucked it away in the closet. I pried away the sticky pics we took from those novelty photo booths. I tossed the annoying singing duck that was her nickname-sake into the donation box.

It was really over. 

We went through middle and high school ignoring each other, averting eyes if we even happened to catch one another’s gaze. I probably took a different route to class avoid her, even if it meant zig-zagging out of breath through the entire school. I probably pretended she was a vacuum of dust if we happened to fall into conversation with the same social group. Because I didn’t dare look at her, I could only see this blank stare in my periphery. I was unapologetic, a reed as hollow outside as inside.

***

After college, we both moved home. I wondered if maybe we would somehow understand each other now, after college, with a little more life experience. I changed, and I’m sure she changed. Knowing we still had mutual friends, I had the inkling in my heart that I should reach out.

One morning, I woke to a buzz from the nightstand. I fumbled with the sticky hinge of my flip phone to a text from a mutual friend:

I don’t know if 

you heard, but 

she passed 

away yesterday

:( 

Her heart.

The scar she hid on her chest, behind the golden pendant. Her heart hid behind that scar. Her emotional core. The beating of her being. Her heart, and soul.

I found out that she passed away during a routine heart surgery. It was supposed to be routine, normal. But something happened during the surgery that wasn’t normal. It suddenly became the opposite of routine. A mistake had been made. She was gone.

Quietly, I attended her funeral. What right did I have to be there, as her former best friend? How could I reconcile with her now, with her passed on?

As it turns out, all the stories her family shared about her reminded me that even though we’d drifted on our separate paths, we were still at our cores the same people. They talked about her love for singing and expression, her love and compassion for the world and helping others. Elementally, we were still the same. 

Still the same even though I hurt her feelings, still the same as our 11-year-old selves.

Her family closed the service with a recording of her playing the piano while singing the aria from Phantom of the Opera. Her soprano voice, so delicate, so kind, her voice closing out her own funeral. The last time we would hear her, singing, full of life. A beat. Her image dissolved into forever black. Silence.

Nervously, I waited in line to pay my respects to her family, wanting to shrink into a breathless void. What would I say once I saw her parents? What could I even say?

I’m sorry?

I’m sorry… for breaking her heart?

I’m sorry, but “I’m sorry” wouldn’t be good enough.

When it came to my turn to pay respects to her family, it just took one look at her parents, and we all started to cry.

***

Ten years after her death, I still have survivor’s guilt. I still feel bad that I lived, and continue to live, knowing she may have never forgiven me for what I did and said.

Recently, her mom asked about me. My mom told her that I had gotten married, moved away, had a kid. I’m sure it was hard for her mom to silently admit her daughter would never get to do the same.

I recently found my half of the friendship necklace. The metal is almost rusty, faded with 20 years’ time. The chalky purple inlay is dull gray, but I can still read the tarnished letters:

                           B E    |

                           F R I  |

If extrapolating the vowels, the message from my half of the necklace could be read as bē freē. I didn’t know it at that age, but maybe that was all I really wanted. Freedom to express my own individuality.

In tweenhood, you’re discovering who you are. Your sense of self is yanked into a turbine of social pressures and hormones. The only way I knew I could express my freedom—and set boundaries—was to split apart.

Yeah, it was ugly, and awkward, but so is the era of catchy boy bands, of girls growing up a little too quickly.

It would never be enough to tell her that I’m sorry. I have to forgive myself, too.

Ten years after her death and twenty years after our friendship, I simmer with all that has transpired, the shifts and sands of the fog.

In my heart and the stars, I hope we could still be friends.

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Diann Leo-Omine (she/her) is a creative nonfiction writer born and raised in San Francisco (Ramaytush Ohlone land) and the colorfully boisterous Southern Chinese-Toisanese diaspora. To combat the recent swell of hate crimes against Asian Americans, she co-curated and edited the charity food zine Lunchbox Moments. Her essay “The Hawk,” published in Yellow Arrow Journal’s Peregrine edition, has been nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. A grateful alum of Tin House and Rooted & Written, she is currently devising a manuscript centering her maternal grandmother. Instagram/Twitter: @sweetleoomine | sweetleoomine.com