August 8th rolled around again this year, as it does — a battering ram of intense heat, like living in a furnace, with no respite from rain in sight. I’ve been recovering from Covid, so having a fever and congestion in the midst of the longest stretch of days over 100 degrees feels especially heavy. I’m staying inside, hiding out in front to the fan on high blast in my dark, cave-like living room. I gave myself permission to take it easy yesterday, rest as much as possible, and not push the inspiration for this writing.

Some years, I have a clear sense of what I want to say and convey — and others, like this one, remain more oblique. I took space and quiet to just let myself feel, reading old letters my mom wrote to my grandparents years ago — thick sheaves of lined notepad paper, filled with her even, meticulous hand detailing accounts of car trouble, money worries, bad colds, inclement weather, and promises that she had stopped smoking grass. I thumbed through her gorgeous scrapbooks, perfect time capsules of the 1970s, her friendships, interests, and a document of her falling in love (and shacking up) with my dad.

I’m 44 this 8/8, and in my sickened state have been musing on various threads of thought around aging, the halving and doubling of significant numbers, and the meanings we attach to them. My mom died at 38, which has always seemed impossibly young, but especially now that I find myself firmly ensconced in a version of middle age that she never got to experience. I’ve written before about her fixation on Hank Williams and John Keats — on all the starry-eyed, haunted troubadours who died young (and stayed pretty), and who became legends, through not only their genius, but their tragedy. They never got the opportunity to become mediocre, boring, or saddled with extra weight, debt, and ignominy.

I’m starting to fully recognize that aging truly is a privilege, though — and all its heartbreaks and challenges are infinitely preferable to dying at 25 of tuberculosis in Rome, or of an overdose in the backseat of a Cadillac in the early hours of New Year’s day at age 29, or wasting away from cancer at only 38 in your grandmother’s old house in a ghost town (which is the way my mother went).

My grandmother was 40 years old when she had my mother, her first of four children. I think there was a lot about the times they were living through, and the cultural divides of the 1960s and 70s that probably made my grandparents seem even older than they were, being country people, who though were very open-minded, never got especially “groovy”. The last time they might’ve seemed young, color film hadn’t yet been invented, so all the images of their (hard-bitten Great Depression era) youths were in black and white.

My mom never got to see them become truly old, though — her parents both outlived her, doubling her lifespan and living into their 90s. Their care fell to my Aunt Ruth, my mom’s sister — who I’m now (blessedly) getting to see age and become the beautiful crone my mother never got to be. There’s something about the changing relationships when your parents become true elders, and you are truly no longer a child, or even really young. It seems the natural way, painful as it is, for children to grow up, and come to bury their parents one day. No child should have to bury a parent, and it’s such a terrible grief for any parent to have to bury their child.

As I have worked on healing my wounded inner child over the years, I find myself softening — especially in relationship to my parents. I was more hard-edged and raw in lots of ways, even a year ago. My body is softening (despite my half-hearted efforts to firm and tone it), and my heart is gentling slowly — melting into the places that were scarred over with grief, rage, blame, and shame, for far too long. It just started feeling too heavy to hang on to, to carry. I am trying to feed and nurture that softness in me, because it makes me more available for connection. For love.

Becoming more available and present for the relationships in my life matters to me more and more, as the sand in the invisible hourglasses we all have floating over our heads seems to fall faster and faster.

Most of us don’t have much of a choice of when, where, or how we finally cross our finish line — and it could always be the day after tomorrow, or decades from now. But as we get older, it starts feeling closer, and more inevitable. Not only that, but the mortality of our living parents and elder relatives looms in an uncomfortable way. I still lay awake at night, consumed with anxiety at the idea of my folks passing — and know that I have to prepare for everything that will mean. I hope it’s a long, long time from now — but none of us have forever.

All my elder relatives managed to avoid becoming seriously ill or dying from Covid, thank goodness —though the past few years have been riddled with terror for me, at the thought of any of them on ventilators. I’ve lost two uncles in unexpected and terrible ways, and my stepmom has been struggling with serious health issues this year. It’s been really scary, and I’m not even in a caretaker role for anyone I love, currently.

————

Since I began writing this piece (which I had to put on hiatus while I recovered from Covid), my stepmomma Karen went into the hospital with breathing issues, and has since entered home hospice care. The reality of losing her is devastating to me, for everyone in our little family — and most especially to my dad, who has already experienced the loss of a partner decades ago (and can still barely talk about that). We’re all just trying to make every moment we have with Karen count, because we don’t know how much longer we’ll have her here with us.

The other evening, my dad gathered us together at Karen’s bedside to share a story of how they met — which weaves into the story of how my dad and mom met, too. I’ll do my best to braid them together here, but there are a lot of timelines that keep getting tangled up and bleeding into one another. But perhaps that’s just part of the complex nature of time and destiny…

It all makes me think of a quote from the novel Mating by Norman Rush, where the narrator is discussing a Russian way of thinking about fate, and time:

“He said, There is a school of thought, a heresy from the madhouse of heresies in the ninth century, that says God is good and is in control of every individual thing that happens, every event, but that unfortunately the devil is in control of timing. Hence, gaffes. Hence, the actually existing world.”

In many ways, it seems the devil was on our side — because there are so many aspects to the way our lives all became connected and intertwined that I just cannot explain. I owe my very life to that mysterious timing.

To tell the story properly, I’ll have to back up, to a few months ago…I was driving with my dad, taking him on some errands to get prescriptions filled and such, when we started talking about the nature of fate, and whether believed in it.

My father has been expressing to me over the past years that he believes strongly that we are being divinely guided — that nothing is an accident or coincidence. He told me the story of how he came to meet my mother, all the (seemingly) random events that had to come together for them to cross paths. My own existence is wrapped up in that story — because would I even be here if none of this had happened in exactly the way that it did?

The story goes something like this (I’m retelling from the memory of what he told me, so I may get some details wrong, but I’ll give it my best shot)…

One bright day, sometime after the heyday of the Summer of Love, on the streets of San Francisco, my dad was busking with his folk trio, “Old Scratch and His Hard Times String Band”. It was him, Mark Ross, and Clarke Buehling — but beyond playing music with my dad that day, they’re not part of this story. Just down the road, another folk musician was set up on a street corner — but despite being both extremely talented and totally gorgeous, no one was listening to Natalie Zoe. Her block was a ghost-town, which was unusual for that area, normally a great spot for busking.

After awhile, she decided to pack it in, and go see where everyone was — and once she could hear the jangle of a banjo and saw the audience forming around my dad’s band, she figured it out. Old Scratch had been stealing her crowd! But she had to give them credit — they were pretty darn good, and she stood watching them until they took a break. Nat struck up a conversation with my dad about them being her competition, and my father (bold as brass) flirted it up with her, and got her phone number. He says this normally wasn’t his move, but I’m not sure I believe him! He’s always had a predilection for folk-music playing women, and I exist because of at least two of them he was enchanted by (spoiler alert, for those who don’t already know, Natalie Zoe is not my mom!)

Long story longer, they hit it off, jammed together, and decided to travel around the country in Natalie’s Volkswagen Bus, playing music for tips as they went. The hippie pair ended up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin of all places (oddly, my paternal grandfather’s birthplace), staying with some friends and trying to plot their next move. It was starting to get colder, and that year’s version of the Summer of Love was fading fast. The van wasn’t going to be fun to live in through an icy northern winter, and after weeks on the road, the relationship was beginning to fray at the edges.

Some friends of friends they were hanging out with mentioned they’d heard that Austin, Texas was a really happening place, where the winters were mild, everybody was turned on, and jam sessions and buskers could be found on every corner. That checked all of their boxes, so they pointed the VW bus southward, and eventually Natalie Zoe and my dad were wandering around the streets of Austin, exploring the head shops and coffeehouses around the University of Texas campus.

One afternoon, towards the end of June, Natalie Zoe wanted to pop in a funky vintage store on San Antonio Street in an old house called The Wizard’s Jar. My dad had no interest in vintage clothing or curios, and though he and Natalie were pretty much on the outs when it came to their romantic association, he humored her and came inside to look around while she delved into the racks of old dresses and fringed frippery.

One of the owners of The Wizard’s Jar was Sarah Green, one of my mom’s dear friends, who later became my godmother.

Beckoned by an old-time tune being played, my dad turned a corner and found a strange red-haired woman playing autoharp in an old rocking chair. He had been lured by a freckled hillbilly hippie’s siren call! Another moment of blessed boldness had them exchanging phone numbers, and the rest was history. Was it love at first sight?

My parents were very much one another’s “type” at the time (my dad’s type is lovely women who play music, and my mom’s type was definitely hairy hippies with a love for stringed instruments!). Maggie and Dave definitely had an affinity and deep appreciation for one another, and a deep love developed. They moved in together, got married, and eventually — I made an appearance on their scene.

If one thing had been different, if this choice that led to that choice had somehow been altered — could it all still have happened in just that way? Would my dad have decided to leave California and come to Texas without that spontaneous trip with Natalie Zoe? And if he had, would he have run into my mother somewhere else (at the right place, right time — when ideally they were both more or less free to pursue one another?)

What an odd twist of fate that Natalie Zoe would bring my New Yorker (by way of Los Angeles and San Francisco) dad to Austin, Texas — of all places? And that they would just happen to bop into the shop where my mom was hanging out that day? They all remained friends after this loverly switcheroo, and my mom and dad later attended Natalie’s wedding to a hippie dude named “Aumla”, which I don’t think lasted very long — but the photos are quite epic!

It warms my heart that my mom put these photos in her scrapbook — and that she and my dad were invited to the wedding of his ex-girlfriend and her new man, which took place under a patchwork chuppah, on the banks of the Pedernales River.

Here are my folks busking on The Drag (the strip of businesses across from UT that used to be bustling with vibrant street culture, music, and an artist’s market). Busking was the thread that indirectly brought my parents together, and playing music together was a huge part of my dad’s relationships with both my mom and stepmom.

I’m not exactly sure why my mom ripped away parts of her own face in these photos, but still liked them enough to glue in her scrapbook. Probably because she hated her nose — which was sort of a square Irish “potato nose” that some folks in our lineage inherited from one ancestor or another. Later in her life, she saved up for a nose job and got it “fixed”, which I think made her happy enough with her appearance to stop shredding up photos of herself.

I do still like these, though. It was from a happy time in the beginning of my parents’ relationship, when they were wild and free and horny and living in Austin, Texas at the absolute height of its heyday as a counterculture paradise — long before they got married, had to get real jobs, accrued bills and debt, and way before I was ever a twinkle in their eyes.

It’s possible that that particular twinkle was kindled the afternoon they dropped LSD together. The acid was just starting to kick in when a frantic knocking at their door revealed two of their friends (a married couple) with their toddlers in tow. The couple needed an emergency babysitter for a few hours, and asked my folks if they’d be willing to watch the kids for a bit. Not knowing how to explain that they were high as all hell, they agreed — because, 1. It’s really impossible for some reason to explain to people who are not tripping that you are tripping, and B. How hard could babysitting (on acid) be? Luckily, the afternoon was a lot of fun for everyone involved, and everybody remained safe and sane. A starry-eyed Maggie and Dave took the kids to Shipe Park down the road, and played on the swingset until sunset — and I’m sure giggled at everything a LOT.

I have a theory that all children are naturally tripping all the time anyway, so I think it makes sense that they got along so well. Later, when the parents came to retrieve their progeny, my future parents looked at one another and said, “Having kids could be really fun! We should think about doing that one day!” I’ve always imagined that I was conceived that very evening — but my father says otherwise. Regardless, it does make sense that the inspiration for my creation was psychedelically influenced (which explains a lot). Unfortunately, it turns out that parenting is a lot more difficult when you’re not having a perpetual daytrip, and where you’re relieved of your responsibilities at the end of the day.

The strains of their responsibilities (me among them), definitely took a toll on my parent’s marriage, and they started to have problems as the golden glow of the 1970s waned, and the crushing reality of the 1980s recession bulldozed Eden (and put up a parking lot). I honestly don’t know if they would have stayed together, had my mother survived cancer. She was threatening to leave (and take me with her), before she got too sick, and they slept in separate rooms, towards the end (I was told it was because my dad snored.) Maybe they weren’t one another’s true soulmates — but I’m grateful for the sweet times they had together, and the DNA they blended up to make into me.

———-

Now here comes the rest of the story — the one that was related to me the other night. We gathered at Karen’s bedside — she’s grown very weak, and is having a hard time projecting her voice, but despite being pretty high on morphine, she was able to help my father tell this tale…

While I was at my parents’ house, I was looking through old family photo albums, hoping to find some photos of Karen from the 70s, to share in this writing, but most of the ones from that era seem to have been sadly lost in a fire. The images I have of her are from after our family joined together, or from when she was a little child. Neither of the photographs I have from the era I’m writing about here really do justice to how beautiful she was (and is), but I want to share them here.

A photobooth snapshot of Karen, probably from just after high school. I love this one, and have it framed by my bedside. I love her smile.

Karen as “Libra” in college play or production of some kind. She was a total babe (and didn’t really know it).

During the same time that my parents first met, Maggie (my mother) and Karen (who would later become my stepmother) were good friends at the Craft Center in the Student Union at the University of Texas, where they were both studying art. My mom made jewelry there, while Karen made ceramics on the pottery wheel. One day, Karen remembers Maggie coming in and telling her, “I met someone really special! His name is David — I think this could be a thing…”

I’m grateful to have these images of Karen from around that era, too. Isn’t she absolutely gorgeous?

Another page from my mother’s scrapbook, with my godmother Sarah playing dress up at The Wizard’s Jar, and a doodle from Marvin, who would later become Karen’s first husband. How did my mom end up with this scrap of paper, and why did she decide to save it like this? I imagine maybe Marvin was visiting Karen at the Craft Center, and sketched her. My mom was a magpie collager — collecting friends and images she found intriguing and beautiful. I think it’s a pretty incredible synchronicity that this snippet ended up glued into her book.

A few months later, Karen married Marvin. She invited Maggie (and her new fella Dave), and asked if they would come play some music for the wedding. The celebration was out by the lake at their house, but my folks arrived late — after everyone was filing out, post ceremony. Maggie takes Dave in to meet Karen, and as their eyes met for the first time, something unusual occurred… It had never happened to either of them before (or since) — but my dad describes it as a bolt of energy that passed between their gaze. Both their eyes got really big, and it felt like a jolt of electricity – a kind of recognition. Neither of them said anything about it to anyone at the time, it being, of course pretty awkward timing to experience such a thing! It was Karen’s wedding day, and Maggie and Dave (though not married yet), were in a serious relationship. Karen says now that she knew already that her marriage was doomed, and that she was marrying the wrong person for her — and their union was very much a tumultuous one. But if they hadn’t gotten together, my stepbrother Ian wouldn’t exist, or his daughter, my niece Connie.

Many years later, after my mom had died, and Karen and Marvin had divorced, my dad and I were living in Austin again. This one morning, Karen and Marvin’s son Ian (who would later become my stepbrother), burst into Karen’s bedroom, wearing a bright red shirt and sweatpants and shouting that a cardinal was flinging itself against the window in the living room. Incidentally, after my mother’s death, I always associated sightings of cardinals with her spirit, visiting me.

If Ian hadn’t woken her up yelling about the cardinal (while dressed like a rowdy cardinal!), she would have slept in — but since she was up, she remembered that she was supposed to call in to KUT (a local radio station) to ask John Aielli (a famed radio host and Austin cult figure) to make an announcement for the Native American Student Coalition event that was happening in a month. Karen was the contact and point person, so her number was announced for anyone to call, wanting more information.

Meanwhile, my dad was driving to work with the radio on, (tuned in to KUT, of course) and heard the announcement where they mentioned Karen’s name. They had run into one another several months before, but he hadn’t gotten her contact information. This was long before the internet and social media made it easy to track someone down and reach out, and not everyone wanted to be listed in the phone book. Dad managed to memorize her number and called later to invite her to a special event.

My father has always been a spiritual seeker, but he was baptized in the Episcopalian faith when he was with my mother. That path brought him a lot of comfort (and still does), but for a time, he was trying to discern at that time whether he had a calling to become an Episcopal priest. Dad wrote a liturgy to request divine guidance to help him know his true path, and he shared it at the church we went to at the time, St. Michael’s. For some reason, he decided that he wanted her to be there, and to support him in prayer.

Laughing now, all these decades later, he tells me, “Well, obviously, the guidance was: NO! Not a good idea!”. Instead, he ended up marrying Karen, at that very church (though their first wedding ceremony was on the sacred grounds in Brackettville, in a traditional Native American Medicine Wheel ceremony).

So to sum up (because I realize this might be kind of a confusing story!): if the cardinal hadn’t been knocking, Ian wouldn’t have woken Karen up, she would have overslept, and wouldn’t have remembered to make the radio announcement in time, and my Dad wouldn’t have gotten her number, memorized it, and wouldn’t have invited her to what was really quite an intense first date. After that event, Karen started journaling after they reconnected, and wrote, “This is the man I’m going to marry”. And so she did.

A while after they started dating, my dad brought up their first meeting, and told Karen what he’d experienced when their eyes met — and she said, “I know. I felt it too.”

When I asked Dad if he thought it they had know one another before in past lives, he said, “It’s just as likely than any other explanation, and probably more likely than most!”

————

Our blended family was one marked by trauma and grief, from the beginning. My dad was a widower, raising a little girl on his own. He dated a bit before finally reconnecting with Karen, but nothing really clicked. Not long after they married, Marvin, Karen’s first husband and Ian’s father, killed himself. I remember hearing Karen wailing with sorrow, from behind my parents’ closed door. Suddenly we had a household with two shattered pre-teens who only wanted the parent they’d lost to come back, and for everything that they had once known to go back to normal. But our new normal was a huge struggle, and one that Ian and I were in deep resistance to. Neither of us really wanted they new family structure that had been thrust upon us — but our parents really loved one another, immensely. So, despite the emotional dysfunction, massive tragedy — and a fairly incompetent family therapist (who often just made matters worse), there was a big love glueing all our broken pieces together.

For years, I stubbornly resented my dad for choosing his own happiness and destiny over my comfort. There are a lot of things that could have gone differently in how our families came together, and though a lot of that really fucked me up — I also know that my parents were absolutely doing the very best they could, with the tools they had. I’ve grown a lot, healed a lot, and forgiven a lot. At a certain point, you just have to let that shit go — or it will eat you alive.

Forgiving myself is harder. I was just a little kid, but my god — I was SO hurt and angry, for so long. All Karen wanted to do was cover me with her love, but I was a prickly little pain-beast, unused to being loved on by a mother-figure (my mom was not really the super affectionate, demonstrative, touchy-feely kind), and so I rejected and pushed her away, again and again.

It took a long time before I was able to heal enough to work on repairing our relationship. And now it all feels like it’s too late — to have the kind of time with her that I wish I could get back. I’m losing my mother all over again, and I can’t stop crying — thinking about how she’s truly the mortar that holds us all together. I’m afraid our fractured, wounded little family will implode and disintegrate without her here to hold us together.

All I want is to treasure every moment I still have with her — knowing she could slip away at any moment. There are still so many questions I want to ask, stories I want to hear. Things I wish we could go do together. And all I can really do is try to be present, love on her and give her all the kisses and hugs now that I wish I’d let myself melt into more when I was little, especially back when I needed them most…

My dad and I were messaging on my mom’s death day, and I was asking him questions about the details of this story, and about fate, or destiny — which he says he believes in more and more, the older he gets. He also shared this wisdom, which I’m trying to take to heart:

“Is regret a useful emotion? But really, could we have acted differently than the way we did in a given situation? After all, we are who we are. The Cosmos is unfolding as it is and not otherwise and we are part of that unfolding. A parent gives a child a choice rather than impose a decision, but the choice is always constructed in such a way that the outcome is inevitable.”

And when I asked him if he had regrets, he said:

“Yes. A million things really, to change in hindsight — but it is all a fantasy. What we have done is what we felt we had to do.”

It’s somewhat ironic that even though I make my living as a tarot reader, who people seek out specifically to inquire about finding their “person”, I have no idea how all that really works. Some days, I think it must be truly rare, to find the person meant for you, who truly compliments you, and with whom you can create a harmonious life. Or, maybe you found that person, but then they get sick and die — or the connection sours. People change, grow apart. Every day, I’m getting older — and I hope, in some ways, wiser. But I don’t feel any closer to finding the person I’m “meant” to be with. All I can hope is that the blessing of my ancestors’ love will guide us towards one another — because I sure would love to meet them, one day.

I’m grateful to have been able to witness these two unions — of the people who created me, raised me, cared for me… All of whom were lucky enough to be at the right places, at the right times, and knew to act on their instincts, and desires. Or were patient enough to wait for one another, when the lives they built with their first partners crumbled. I do think all my parents (my dad, and my mom, and my stepmom) were in some ways divinely appointed to be with one another. And I believe that my dad and Karen found in one another each other’s bashert (or soulmate, in Yiddish). I kind of stopped believing in soul-mates for awhile, but after really sitting with these stories, I think I can’t NOT believe in them.

It’s so complicated though, in these modern times — where we have a myriad of technological ways to connect, and yet, seem more disconnected from one another (in some ways) than ever. How do people even meet and fall in love now? If you’re not on the apps, you just have to wait and hope you run into one another — maybe at the vintage shop your girlfriend dragged you into, or while you’re in the middle of getting married to someone else, or because you happened to live in a small enough town, where everyone knew one another. My aunt Ruth (my mom’s sister) met my uncle Jimbo because of my dad — because my dad was giving Jimbo banjo lessons, which Ruthie happened to be over visiting my mom. Perhaps divine interventions were simpler in the 1970s, when everyone was just more tuned in and available — hanging out playing music all the time, or smoking weed at each other’s houses.

I think the main thing is that you have to be open to it — to the risk of heartbreak and ruination that falling in love with another human might bring you. You can’t protect yourself from it, and get to experience that intimacy and sweetness at the same time. And you must be bold — ask for that phone number (or memorize it off the radio), and take a leap.

You’ve got to trust that you’ll be guided to the right places, at the right times — but in order to do that, you actually have to leave your house and go out and be around people sometimes. You’ve got to put yourself in The Wizard’s Jar — which is not just a long-gone funky shop in an old house, but a container for possibility, filled with a potion made of hopes and dreams and longing, and stirred up by the wizards (or is it the devil — always in charge of timing?). Maybe it’s our ancestors, our past life selves, our highest healing teams. Maybe it’s the spirit of my mother, in the form of a bright red cardinal, knocking at the window. I like to believe we each have a posse of protectors, guardian angels or whatever you want to call them — who are guiding us towards the people we’re meant to be, and those we’re meant to be with.

It’s said (in Irish proverbs) that those who sing, pray twice — so perhaps one way to entreat those beings to assist you on your path in to raise your voice in song, on a regular basis? It seemed to work for my parents (all three of them), anyway. I’ve tried most everything else — meditation, candle spells, dating apps, to no avail, so far. Maybe I just need to sing more, and my beloved, my bashert will hear me from far away, and come running. I pray my mother, and all my well and vibrant ancestors will help give us a little nudge in the right direction, towards each other.

The poet Maggie Smith said, “Why worry about being alone? Maybe love is making its way toward you right now, but from a great distance. You don’t know how quickly it’s moving, how circuitous the route might be. It could arrive next week or years from now. Be patient. Keep moving.”

and

“Know that the only way to avoid pain is to opt out—to refuse to invest in your work or your relationships, to avoid loving anything you could lose. When you show up, you show up for all of it—the joy and the pain. As you reach for one, you risk the other. But reach. Keep moving.”

And the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

I hold these sentiments very dearly, as I stand as the precipice of another enormous loss. But I have to trust that love (romantic love, mother love, all the love) doesn’t end when the relationships and bodies hold them transforms. That it’s possible for all this love to expand, and radiate. That it’s vast enough to hold us always, to guide us, and to continue teaching us all the best ways to be human, on this earth.

That is my prayer, here, in Austin, Texas — at the end of this grief-filled August. I pray that my family will be held and supported as Karen makes her journey across the river, and that she will be rejoined with her loved ones who have passed on, and hopefully greeted also by Maggie, her old friend, with whom she shared a beloved.

I like to imagine my mothers, who will at some point be together once more — watching over my dad, our family, and me.

I inherited my love for collage making from my mama. I have been encouraged as an artist and writer constantly by my stepmomma. There are so many ways to create altars for honoring and remembrance, for grieving and healing — this writing, and these images are shrines of love.

For the woman who left this earth through the lion’s gate, and the one who waits on the shores for her boat to arrive.
Honey heart, hummingbird sweetness. Turtle woman, owl grandmother.
I surround them with flowers, with jewels, with nature’s mysteries — for spirit feeds on beauty.

If you’d like to read more about this journey
of grieving, honoring, and remembering
my mother on her death day,
here is an archive of my writings about her:

HAZY WINDOWS
THE AUGUST RITUAL
FALLING STARS + CACTUS FLOWERS
DOUBLE ETERNITY
MY ANGELIC INHERITANCE / THE HOLOGRAPHIC WILL
38 ON AUGUST THE 8TH
30 YEARS – SEIZURES
888 – HONEY BABE, I’M BOUND TO RIDE – DON’T YOU WANNA GO?
WILD BLUE YONDER
NO ROOM IN MY HEART FOR THE BLUES
FAMILY VACATION – HANK WILLIAMS’ GRAVE
STAR-CROSSED TROUBADOURS
Foxes in the Rain
Triumvirate Lemniscate
Gustav + Mama – August 8th