Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Resenting Gravity” by Honor Giardini. Honor is a student and writer living in rural California. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award for Emerging Young Artists. Her work has been published in Cultural Daily and is forthcoming in Orca Literary Journal.
It happens slowly; so slow most don’t notice. First the udders of your goats dry up, and now you drink soy milk with your cereal. Then the refrigerator dies and must be replaced. The chickens are killed, one by one. You get new chickens. They're given new names. The dogs become old and hunched and one day incontinent. One stops barking in the backyard, the other stops running towards the car when you get home. The turkey that used to roost behind your bedroom lives across the street now. You are in fourth grade. Mommy J has a new car—she buys one every time the cancer treatment works. A change of seats, a change of bullies, a change of plans, and now you are in 11th grade. It happens slowly.
In the summers between third and sixth grade, Mommy J delivered summer school lectures on the back porch. Devon and I sat on the porch, me miserable, her ecstatic, and listened to a spiel about how the world is round before doing some cool-ish shit with evaporation and mason jars. During these lectures, I didn’t sit down long enough to hear anything much, and when I did sit down I was too focused on sitting to listen to anything my detestably brilliant family members said.
One of these lessons was about gravity. Mommy J began with a description of the discovery: Issac Newton sitting under an apple tree, wondering why apples fall.
Mommy J, as she spoke, probably sat next to Devon in some Hawaiian shirt. She probably asked questions in her low and quiet voice. She smelled like the laundry cabinet, which sometimes I’d crawl into and inhale on my way down the hall. I don’t remember what she actually said about centrifugal force, and I still don’t know how to explain gravity. Devon, grinning in her pixie cut, the more mature, as in the more articulate, as in gifted, always had answers to the questions posed after our lessons. I did not. I hated gravity in that I hated sitting still. I hated, and still hate, being forced. I hated something I couldn’t define, and that is an impossible cage to escape.
NOVEMBER 1-7TH 2020
The sun heats up the windshield. The air is on; it is hot. When she stops the car, I'm alone. I look at a fat woman walking up the ramp, and I lay on the floor in the backseat of the Prius because I have an irrational fear of being shot in parking lots, and I do all this silently because I feel very little—and what I do is delicate and measured. Like when you break a bone and find a position that doesn’t hurt—and stay still so as not to ruin it. I’m like a 16 year old who’s about to lose her Mom, in that I am exactly like a 16 year old laying under the car because that’s all I am—a 16 year old—and I wish I was more than that.
Loss in any form—large or small, minuscule like the loss of a sock, the loss of time, the loss of a math sheet, or large like Mommy J—comes in tolerable increments; time is the most forgiving of destroyers. It takes your Moment, crushes it into a fine powder. And then it gives you another. It breaks the only thing you have and then replaces it.
The week before Mommy J died was the first week of November. The grass outside my house was green—and the sky became the awful combination that is gray and bright. Mel and Dan, Mommy J's kids from her previous marriage, flew in from Florida and Nevada respectively. Mommy J was moved from her armchair to a hospice bed. She was organizing a zoom meeting with my Mom to say goodbye to friends and family who couldn’t travel because of the pandemic. I live in the living room, only leaving to pee, sleep or get another book.
Everyone in the room was relieved. It’s the relief that comes with knowing that the act is more bearable than the idea. That the particulars are less grand than the gestalt; and although everyone in the room had at some point wished for the gestalt, we were grateful for the lowly particulars. We were grateful for the cooking of curried carrots in the kitchen and the bird feeders that need filling and the fact that election day was tomorrow and that sometimes Mommy J still neededto eat. We were grateful for the fact that in the mornings we washed our faces and in the evenings we undressed ourselves, and we are grateful for the showers we take and how badly we smell and the pads we put on loudly in public bathrooms at the hospital, and we are grateful for these awful particulars. Each of them is remarkably easy to live through. Fuck the gestalt. Fuck the annihilation that is the glimmering idea of someone, and then the glimmering idea of them gone.
NOVEMBER 10TH 2020
A social worker came the day before she died and tried to talk to me, the first of many social workers. This one didn’t come just for me though, as the others would. I told her to get out of my house. I hated the idea that this was her job—that she thought I was some stupid kid. This was my first experience with a mental health professional who thought they knew something about me they didn’t. She held an awful condescension that comes with the thinly veiled questions and sympathetic nods of adults who forget they’re people.
NOVEMBER 11TH 2020
The woman writes down the time of death as 3:02am. When she came in, I couldn't talk to her—even though she asked me questions. The woman wore all khaki, was gorgeous in a hot park ranger kind of way. I couldn't answer her because I was gawking at the said hotness. I remember thinking this was an odd thing to think about while holding your dead mother.
The morticians came in leather jackets. They had east coast accents and took their shoes off before they came into the house. They spoke in short sentences, referring to my mother as ma'am. They walked out with the body, and Mom and I sat on the porch, watching.
“Those men are sweet” Mom said. “They look like Italian gangsters. Like their names are Vinny or Hank or something.” After that, Devon said that Death's name was Vinny, and I snorted.
DECEMBER 1ST 2020
A few weeks after she died, I lay in bed in third person. It was in third person: Honor was in her bed, sitting there thinking about how she was, and she woke up. She was reading at night and the nights are always the most personal, like opening someone’s shirt and sleeping under it. Then I was I and woke up from some dream. I saw her in the corner of my room, by my keyboard, by the turquoise dresser, and I saw her and I cried like you cry when someone comes back from the airport you didn't think would come back or how you cry when the bad thing didn't happen.
When I woke up, I had to learn to live in a different timeline. A world in which the past, present, and future are one object——so I could exist with this person I can’t exist without. I don’t mean emotionally. I mean it in that she can't be gone because she was here. She has existed in the flesh, and as some who has lived, I know that Being haunts you like gravity does.
NOVEMBER 11TH 2020
When Mommy J died, I became a larger fraction of the family. It wasn’t my job to exist but my job to remain upright, to work, to do the laundry and make grocery lists and not fail. It was my job to comfort my mom when she cried, and make sure I did my homework on time, and call the lost and found. It was my job to hug myself when I was sad, and my job to decide if I wanted to live. It was my job not to fall, and if I did, it was my job to fix myself. It was my job to decide what I should and shouldn’t watch and read and if I should leave in the middle of the night, and it was my job to take my credit card away, and I was mine.
FEBRUARY 2023
I think the first time I wanted to die, I was in tenth grade. It started with sleeplessness. I went two weeks with two hours of sleep per night. I felt like I was being attacked by bees. Like if I sat down, they’d sting me. I got caught in this cycle. At some point in the year, I began to fail my classes, had panic attacks almost daily; I regularly went to school in my pajamas, was often found crying or panting in a corner. One day I sat down and didn’t get up. I lay crying in the corner until my English teacher dragged me to my feet, and I hugged him and cried until I got picked up from school. I didn't sleep that day and couldn’t sit still. Like I was on a motor that couldn’t stop, rapidly accelerating towards a hill I knew it would kill me to hit.
I won’t go into too much detail; I don’t want to. All of it was humiliating. I don’t feel sorry. I felt forced into a life I had been told was mine. I didn’t want my days all over me. And there they were—I was slathered in them.
I didn’t think, at the time, that any of my mood issues were related to Mommy J’s death, because I didn’t think. I was sent home from school for 15 days and put on meds that made me too dumb to try anything.
APRIL 2023
I take a walk down the driveway—it's spring break. Everything other than the sheep is obnoxiously green; the escaped, stoned meat rabbits from our weed-growing neighbors farm had begun to proliferate. It was a perfect temperature, and I had my audio recording next to me, which I chatted to—-this is how I outline essays. Halfway through the walk, I clicked on a link to a podcast my Moms had recorded when my sister and I were toddlers.
ALYSON GIARDINI AND JACKIE STANFILL
MARCH 12TH 2011
00:03 I'm Jackie Stanfill. I'm 51 years old. This is March 12th, 2011. I'm in Oroville, California with Alyson, my wife.
00:14 I'm Alyson Giardini. I can't remember how old I am.
I laughed, like you laugh at your own baby videos. With a distant affection, the kind you can only have for someone you can’t see but know better than anyone. I thought I was fine with the fact that Mommy J was gone. I didn’t realize what it would be like to hear her voice again. As I settled myself into the grass, I started to cry, quietly, peacefully—like something wet and newly born—a vulnerability I hate but can’t get rid of.
Jackie 45:14 “But there's so many wounded people. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. People have been wounded and serious ways emotionally so that they aren't really able to be the kind of parent that kids need and so, you know, when I when I am seeing that I'm surrounded by that in the job that I do and then coming home and having these perfectly normal regular girls and perfectly normal regular wife.”
I wanted her words to hug me like the laundry cabinet. As I listened, the grass was so brilliantly green, and I couldn’t help but feel it was another sign at how awful I'd gotten after she left. How out of balance, and erratic, impossible, not perfectly normal. We didn't talk much, not ever.
and cried softly, briefly, because she was incapable of doing anything loudly. Her mouth was small and I couldn't stand the order in it. I was disgusted with myself for living in this awful green world that screamed and ashamed that I never learned to whisper.
OCTOBER 17 2023
I worry that Mommy J wouldn't like me if she were alive. I know she’d love me. But I’m not perfectly normal—I keep secrets. I feel awful sometimes. I hate the idea of her finding out that I ever wanted to die. I don’t want her to think she wasn’t worth it. I hope dead people don’t know what we’re doing because I don’t want her to see me like this.
NOVEMBER 7TH-11TH 2020
While Mommy J was in hospice, Emilymia, the family cat, jumped onto her stomach and hit her tumor, which provoked a yelp from Mommy J, a confused cat, and several extra morphine tablets. Emmy didn’t know what was wrong. I felt a little like I imagined our cat felt while listening to her talk about her perfectly normal regular girls. Confused, sad, angry at this sudden dismissal. I lived in the world which is at once past-present and future—and the timeline didn’t seem to matter to me. When I heard her say this, I thought about the times I was little, the hours I spent in occupational therapy—the number of times she tried to tell me I wasn’t different—which to her meant wasn’t worse. But overall, I wanted her to like me when I heard her say that, and I thought I’ll do it. I’ll do everything right. ll do my laundry, I’ll look people in the eye, I’ll make friends, I'll be perfectly normal, I’ll write sane things, I don’t care I’ll do it.
///
I’m terrified of getting in trouble and adverse to doing anything I’m told to do. This has caused problems. I still work through these problems through a committee of characters I speak to every night, like an office meeting, or committee, if you had office meetings in bed. There is kind me who never wants to say anything mean, there is sardonic me who doesn’t give a shit, there is the strict moralist, the ethically dubious creative, and then some fucker who sits in the back saying ‘well actually’ to everyone. I hesitate to call the committee dysfunctional, because the matter we work with, time, is so explosive. I talk to them all the time, and they understand and they maneuver through a world in which the enemies know the future better than I do. The separation a name gives to these otherwise sprawling concepts in my head helps me to function, and by function I mean feel real enough to brush my teeth in the morning.
Another way I do this is by making things. Creating is the dissection of something and the re-assemblage of it into something foreign. It’s hostile, engaging, and comforting. The first thing I ever made was mold. When I was seven, I spit into two glasses of water and let them sit on the windowsill—and watched the mold grow. Then I dumped it out and started again. This was my way of reconciling with the unholiness of facts. The spit grew, and every week, I dumped it out. I still can’t define gravity in a way I feel is true. I have nothing else to compare it to. However, losing Mommy J gave me an idea of what an alternative might be like—taught me what it meant to be relieved of an essential burden.
I wonder if living people are like words. If they put a body to an otherwise nameless concept—-if through living, each person is their own definition, the content of which exists with or without them on earth, but their language disappears after death. This might be what grief is—-the expansion of someone's past recognition. Someone like Mommy J, whose definition has shaped and influenced me like a first language, a mother tongue. I think that's what the morgue men did with her and why they were so kind as they did it. They cleaned up her words. They go from house to house, take the shell of some definition, and put it in a fire. They take our warm, familiar bodies and deconstruct them. And then, they start again.
Completely blown away by this. 🙏
This is fabulous! Thank you.
Like Em Lovett, I read and reread it.