Dear Barbara,
The anniversary of your death snuck up on me quietly this
year. I didn’t feel it as consciously as I did last September, but when I
suddenly remembered two days ago what was looming ahead of me, I had an aha moment. Although I can pinpoint many
of the reasons this week has felt tough, there was something else that I
couldn’t pinpoint, and it was you: it was remembering you – what little time I knew you – at some sort of cellular level.
Eighty dollars. Five whole pies from the Stehekin bakery,
plus tax. Two round trip tickets to Stehekin. A tank and a half of gas.
Eighty dollars was all that it took to throw away the rest
of my cookbook stock this week. I loaded it into the back of a friend’s truck,
took it to a transfer station, and hurled the boxes from my knees from the back
of the truck into a huge pile of refuse.
Eighty dollars was not enough. It did not accurately portray
the massive amounts of time and energy that I poured into creating those
cookbooks, nor the subsequent hours of trying to sell them, nor the muscle it
took to move them from place to place as I myself moved locations. It was not
enough to encompass all the work of creating my first published books, even if they weren’t what I had
first set out to publish. It was not enough to give credence to the hours, days
and months of researching to get them made. It was not enough to show both the
victory and the defeat in a writer’s first venture into publishing.
Eighty dollars is much less than the storage fees I paid on
them; much less than the cost to insure them. Eighty dollars is less than I’ve
paid to have Amazon keep them in their warehouse so they’d be an item that
qualified for free shipping.
Eighty dollars brought me to tears over chicken
strips and French fries after I had made it out of the transfer station without
a backward glance, as if what I had done had not felt like it nearly ripped my
heart in two.
Even before you died, Barbara, I wanted those fucking
cookbooks to disappear. I wanted them to sell on their own. I did not want to
have to push them into the faces of tourists for them to fly off the shelves. I did what I have been dreaming about since
before I left Panama, but it still hurts, and it represents a death of another
sort this week, besides the anniversary of your passing. They were certainly
not the same sort of death, but their loss is still important. Getting rid of
the weight of those books meant the death of old me that holds on even when
everything in me is screaming to let go – and the growth of a new me that knows
that that in letting go, I will find more freedom than in holding on.
I told someone what I had done later that day. I tried to
name all the reasons why it was a good thing as my voice cracked and my hands
shook. She nodded and smiled and said, “All that can be true Morgan, but it’s
also ok to just admit that it was a really shitty moment.”
I’ve given up over and over again, Barbara, and each time I
give up it becomes easier. I give up worrying about what people think on a
daily basis. I gave up on trying to fulfill every role that someone put in
front of me because I very simply could not handle them all, and very few of
them are actually me. And I gave up
on my cookbooks because it was time, because I hated them more than I loved
them, because it is much harder to hold on than it is to let go, even if the
process of letting go is painful.
It reminds me of my last minutes with you, actually. Anyone
I spoke to who had any sort of spiritual awareness after you died told me that
they could feel how ecstatic you were
having left your body behind. All I could see, though, was your last struggle
for breath – your attempt to stay in your body, how you didn’t want to let go.
Even right after it happened I marveled at the soul’s connection to this life, which is where my thoughts always turn when I’m faced with death. Why do we
hold on so hard if so many traditions teach us that what’s on the other side is
so much better?
Perhaps it’s just human nature – perhaps it is just the
human side of me that wants to hold on for dear life when the rest of me is
begging me to let go. Perhaps in those moments the fear overtakes the peace.
Perhaps it is just one more piece we’re supposed to learn.
Or perhaps, as you
most likely know by now, the struggle is just a small one in comparison to the rewards
reaped on the other side.
Perhaps letting go includes releasing the tears that have to be shed to complete the process.
Love and released kisses
Morgan
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