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What we try to remember, most of all, is that grief slips into every part of your life, every day, every minute.
“But Grief Life? That’s forever.
But you don’t realize what it feels like, this hole, this missing, until it happens to you.
Maybe this time, I just want to float, and see what happens.
“And sometimes the lights just go out. And we don’t know why, because as much as we study and study and study, the universe is always smarter than we are. There will always be unknowable things and we have to make peace with that.”
The walls of the small house are closing in on you. You’re being crushed.
On the last day of your mother’s life, you had not been there for her.
It is dark outside, and dark in the house, just like it must have been when she died. Dark in her head. Dark in her heart.
My mom died now what I wish I had that on a T-shirt: My Mom Died Now What. Maybe if I wore it long enough, someone would give me the answer.
“There’s so much about me he’ll never know,” she says softly. “That’s the hardest.”
Someday, when people ask us about high school, and dances, and kisses, and all that stuff, I know that what we’ll remember most of all is how normal was stolen from us.
A messy life leads to messy decisions.”
Forget the mistake. Remember the lesson.
If it doesn’t open, it’s not your door.
Open your mind, ope...
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“Then don’t. From now on in life, ask yourself, would this make my mama happy? And think real hard about it. Because if the answer is no? Then don’t do it.”
“The weird thing is how attached everyone gets to Teddy. I mean, girls get let out and reoffend just hoping they’ll get sent back here, you know? Fucked up.”
My sister hugs me long and hard.
Oh im so glad she came back
“Blessings. All who come and go from this house receive blessings on their life. This feather can change things.”
“Sometimes you need to open yourself to the possibility of the miraculous, Tiger Tolliver. Sometimes you just do.”
I thought I was done with death, at least a little bit, but death wasn’t done with me. I thought I was done with the details of grief, like viewings, and services, and caskets and songs to say goodbye, and which clothes to keep and which to give away. I’ve started packing for a new life in a new city. I shouldn’t have any more last details.
“Things get away from you sometimes, and you can’t get them back.”
I know he’s done bad things. Hurt people. Messed up a lot. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t matter to me, to the puzzle of my life. He has a place somewhere with me and within me, he’s a piece.
And when I press the white arrow, my mother floods back to life.
When people die, it’s like they kind of take your ability to form words with them. You come up empty a lot of the time.
“Words come when words come,”
I’m writing this down because someday I will be Alice, with a whole lifetime spent without a mother, a lifetime of walking around with a Grand Canyon of grief in my heart, and people should know what that feels like.
My sister and I, we can be quiet together, eating, and it feels okay. It’s a little family, but it’s ours.
Parents shouldn’t die before their kids get old, but they do.
I think about what those two odd guys said. You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. Because what other choice is there, really? You have to make friends with the dark.
I feel like I was one girl before my mother died, and another girl after, and now, at the end of this story, still another girl, crawling out of the jar, but keeping her wings close. There’s so much I wish I didn’t have to know about living.
And I do find it comforting that maybe when you die you get back all the things you’ve lost, like your legs, or your parents, or your daughters, or even your mom, and you get to eat all the ice cream you want, finally, and it doesn’t hurt one bit.
No one really knows the story of their parents.
“It’s very hard to think of your parents as people, full of bad checks and bad decisions, fistfights and broken hearts, all of it.”
Our parents pick and choose what to tell us about how they grew up and became, well, those people telling us what time to go to bed, or when to ...
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You quilt the story of your parents through small patches of memory, some bright and hot, some so faded the truth of them is almost invisible. Maybe in the end, through photographs, you finally have a semblan...
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But what if your parent’s whole life fits into one shoebox? What if there are trem...
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do you only realize how many broken lives are around you when you have a broken life of your own?
No one story can encompass all the experiences and minute details of foster care and juvenile detention. Or even grief. In this book, I’ve tried to tell a story about lost kids. Kids who have found themselves without parents, or family, for a variety of reasons: death, addiction, neglect, abuse.
there’s no blueprint for grief. What there is, is a lot of stumbling around in the dark, looking for a warm hand to hold on to.
