Danna, “seven and a half tablespoons” gives grief a measurable weight while every ritual you imagine reveals how impossible it is to contain a mother inside one vessel, one story, or one ending. The airport bin, porcelain doll, wishbones, and cremains become containers for inheritance, abandonment, anger, love, and the unfinished work of release. Your final image of the womb bone allows estrangement and kinship to remain physically present in the same hand. Thank you for entrusting readers with a mother-daughter story whose honesty gives vengeance, virtue, ritual, and forgiveness room to coexist.
"Abandonment is the bone we have chewed on since that first day of relinquishment, and abandonment is the bone the morticians will have to pry from our mouths upon death."
I deeply appreciate the depiction of your many inner children, spread out across a room at choice time, the varying forms of art and healing and play and fight each one is drawn to. What a gift to let them each be themselves in their grief, to hand them each their materials and to listen as they paint their grief in their own ways.
Alcoholism has also dissolved the bones of those I have loved in complicated and painful ways. Those whose bones are also my bones. Your words pierced past my flesh and into those deep marrows. Thank you for sharing your story.
A stunning, evocative read! Every metaphor and poetic turn of phrase resonates with a sorrowful beauty, one that often goes unacknowledged. I’m going to be chewing on the bones of this piece for a while.
Extraordinary, Danna! There is such fragility and grit in your words, I'm going to be unpacking this piece for a while. Thank you for such powerful images and vessels and molds held in this fraught tension of child, daughter, mother and self. My mother has COPD, her oxygen is depleting, so her words are thus measured out, held back and constrained–the limiting of language's capacity to speak truths. Your essay makes me want to explore that...Haunting.
'microchimerism' so brilliant, as is the entirety of this piece as you hold all of it, walk all of it, not relinquishing any of the complex mosaic pieces within you. Thank you Danna.
Danna, “seven and a half tablespoons” gives grief a measurable weight while every ritual you imagine reveals how impossible it is to contain a mother inside one vessel, one story, or one ending. The airport bin, porcelain doll, wishbones, and cremains become containers for inheritance, abandonment, anger, love, and the unfinished work of release. Your final image of the womb bone allows estrangement and kinship to remain physically present in the same hand. Thank you for entrusting readers with a mother-daughter story whose honesty gives vengeance, virtue, ritual, and forgiveness room to coexist.
This speaks, shouts, whispers, to the abandoned child in me. Absolutely beautiful writing.
Gorgeous, gorgeous essay that chilled me to my own mother bones!
"Abandonment is the bone we have chewed on since that first day of relinquishment, and abandonment is the bone the morticians will have to pry from our mouths upon death."
What a line!
I deeply appreciate the depiction of your many inner children, spread out across a room at choice time, the varying forms of art and healing and play and fight each one is drawn to. What a gift to let them each be themselves in their grief, to hand them each their materials and to listen as they paint their grief in their own ways.
Alcoholism has also dissolved the bones of those I have loved in complicated and painful ways. Those whose bones are also my bones. Your words pierced past my flesh and into those deep marrows. Thank you for sharing your story.
gorgeous, raw writihng. Thanks.
A stunning, evocative read! Every metaphor and poetic turn of phrase resonates with a sorrowful beauty, one that often goes unacknowledged. I’m going to be chewing on the bones of this piece for a while.
Extraordinary, Danna! There is such fragility and grit in your words, I'm going to be unpacking this piece for a while. Thank you for such powerful images and vessels and molds held in this fraught tension of child, daughter, mother and self. My mother has COPD, her oxygen is depleting, so her words are thus measured out, held back and constrained–the limiting of language's capacity to speak truths. Your essay makes me want to explore that...Haunting.
Congratulations! It’s a brilliant piece. Well deserved. ❤️
'microchimerism' so brilliant, as is the entirety of this piece as you hold all of it, walk all of it, not relinquishing any of the complex mosaic pieces within you. Thank you Danna.
Exquisite 🔥 🙏🏼
Holy calcium phosphate.
Gorgeous. I’m sorry for the pain you endured to get to it. Grateful you made something so beautiful from it.
beautiful.
Glimpses of understanding, waves of the ineffable, images indelible—this reader is awestruck!
Oh…my heart is speechless after reading this….feeling so grateful that yours is not❤️