Deborah A. Miranda

Maybe all losses before this one are practice: maybe all grief that comes after her death seems tame. I wish I knew how to make dying simple, wish our mother’s last week were not constructed of clear plastic tubing, IVs, oxygen hiss, cough medicine, morphine patches, radiation tattoos, the useless burn on her chest. I’m still the incurable optimist, she whispers, you’re still the eternal pessimist. My sister sleeps on a sofa; our brother, exhausted, rolls up in a blanket on the hard floor. Curled in a rented white bed, our mother’s body races to catch up with her driven, nomadic soul. Those nights alone, foster care, empty beer bottles taught us she was always already vanishing.

You plan an uncomplicated path through Colorado’s red dust, around the caustic edge of Utah’s salt flats a single night at a hotel in the Idaho panhandle. Our plans change. It’s spring, we are two Indian women along together and the days open: sunrise on a fine long road, antelope against dry hills, heron emerging from dim fields. You tell me this is a journey you’ve always wanted to take. You ask me to tell you what I want. I want my longing to miraculously bring you through the barrier of your skin into my blood so that I can possess you entirely and yet be entirely possessed. You say no, your face tight with pain, tears burning your eyes, hands clenching the steering wheel. I believe you. We drive hundreds of miles across deserts sculpted by wind and story, and I learn distance from my hand to your thigh, your mouth to my mouth, the curve of a collar along a warm, smooth neck. You grin as if no one has ever seen you thus: naked, savage, happy. That is the beginning of yes. Ghosts are everywhere. We hear them singing on that mountain in Ute country, the cries of your flute pleasuring old spirits. Like those people whose land we cross, we don’t live by lines drawn on paper. Instead, we mark the waterfall of shy kisses, a dry windy town where we exchange secrets in whispers, the high cliff hollow that shelters us on the edge of the Uinta forest. Wildflowers bend beneath our bodies, cup the trembling weight of touch. We wander for awhile in a place vast enough to contain all possibilities. After twelve hundred miles together we enter green forest thick along a fearless river. This dense topography we can’t see through, can’t find the horizon to judge distances or the arc of the sun to know east from west. There at last you clasp my hand, guide it to a place beyond maps, no universe I have ever known. It is a raw landscape; we are the sojourners overcome by the perilous shock of arrival. We stop the car, walk by the river, clumsy, frightened by desire. I wish for more than body or soul can bear. Sweet, these are the maps we made together, territories we foolishly vowed to own. Here, the place we wandered off the map, moved deep into a land without scars where every direction took us home but no place could give us shelter. I don’t know how to survive awakening in a woman’s body with a child’s broken heart. I fall on my knees, our love a bare stone on the windowsill between us. How can I learn this trick, will your body back to the other side of my skin? Help me translate loss the way this land does— flood, earthquake, landslide— terrible, and alive.

This is how it is with me: so strong, I want to draw the egg from your womb and nourish it in my own. I want to mother your child made only of us, of me, you: no borrowed seed from any man. I want to re-fashion the matrix of creation, make a human being from the human love that passes between our bodies. Sweetheart, this is how it is: when you emerge from the bedroom in a clean cotton shirt, sleeves pushed back over forearms, scented with cologne from an amber bottle—I want to open my heart, the brightest aching slit of my soul, receive your pearl. I watch your hands, wait for the sign that means you’ll touch me, open me, fill me; wait for that moment when your desire leaps inside me.

—a found poem Each grief has its unique side. Choose the one that appeals to you. Go gently. Your body needs energy to repair the amputation. Humor phantom pain. Your brain cells are soaked with salt; connections fail unexpectedly and often. Ask for help. Accept help. Read your grief like the daily newspaper: headlines may have information you need. Scream. Drop-kick the garbage can across the street. Don’t feel guilty if you have a good time. Don’t act as if you haven’t been hit by a Mack Truck. Do things a little differently but don’t make a lot of changes. Revel in contradiction. Talk to the person who died. Give her a piece of your mind. Try to touch someone at least once a day. Approach grief with determination. Pretend the finish line doesn’t keep receding. Lean into the pain. You can’t outrun it.