…to bring you a quick update on my family’s Leukemia and Lymphoma Society campaign and to tell you about an amazing new children’s book you just might love. (Keep reading.)
First things first: if you don’t know what campaign I’m referring to, you can click here for the full story. But briefly, my cousin Meredith has been nominated for LLS’ Woman of the Year, and I’m on her team to help her raise half a million dollars to help fund innovative new treatments and the hopeful eradication of a bunch of different types of cancers. We’re doing it this year because it’s the 35th anniversary of her brother Chuck’s death at age 12 from Acute Monocytic Leukemia. Chuck lived for only 48 hours after his diagnosis, and this tragedy has left a profound impact on our family. My hope is that by raising money to help prevent other families from experiencing this horror, I can finally lay my own grief to rest.
My personal goal is to raise $5,000 before the start of June. Dear reader, I am almost halfway there!!! Thank you so much to everyone who has already contributed! It means the world to me and to my family.
You’ll get one chance to win for every $25 you donate! (I’ve included in the raffle previous donors at the $25 level and above to show my gratitude for their jumping into our campaign right away.)
Jayne Pillemer’s new book, Still Mine, is an absolute treasure. I wish I’d had a copy of it when I was young. Here’s a sample of the extraordinary artwork on the inside by illustrator Sheryl Murray.
And here’s the blurb from publisher HarperCollins:
Our hands around a cup of hot chocolate, sweet and warm. Our boots splashing in puddles. The song you sing to me when the sun comes up. This is how we say “I love you” every day.
But what happens when the person you love is gone? Your heart hurts and you miss them, but even though your eyes can’t see them anymore and your arms can’t hug them, they are still there, still yours to love . . . just in a different way.
Jayne Pillemer’s lyrical story and Sheryl Murray’s sweet illustrations offer gentle comfort and reassurance to anyone who has experienced loss that you still carry those you love with you in the smallest things—and in your heart—forever.
STILL MINE is a timely and evocative picture book that provides comfort for anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one. Targeted for ages 4 -8, STILL MINE is a gentle way to approach the difficult topics of illness and death with children and offer them a sense of hope and peace.
Believe me when I tell you Jayne’s book healed my inner child, just a little bit. Her book gives us a perfect way to approach the subjects of loss and grief with young people in a way that is both clear and uplifting, which allows for sadness as a natural human emotion but helps us to understand that the sadness, and even the loss, aren’t the end of the story.
So join our fight to eradicate cancer and be entered to win a personalized and signed copy of Jayne’s book! You can donate at this link. And thank you, thank you, so very much.
I received the gift of Tova Hinda Siegel’s Uncertain Resident in the mail during this year’s PoetrySuperHighway Great Poetry Exchange, and Siegel has graciously agreed to let me feature some of her work on my blog during National Poetry Month.
As for her poem “Dishes of Life,” all I can say is that the humor and poignancy blend perfectly, and I totally feel seen.
Dishes of Life
The kitchen is now clean. I gird myself for the inevitable battle that I do constantly with my husband and my children. How many times have I explained the importance – no – the virtue of placing the bowls in the back left of the dishwasher first? Then and only then, any overflow will go into the front left. Unless of course the surplus of plates has to go there when the front right side is filled. Plates must be lined up, one per slot, barely needing a rinse because of my foresight in buying a dishwasher which rinses first. But it may still have the odor of old food, so I insist on the door closed. The glasses must be placed between the pegs, not on them. Again, efficiency in mind and use of space maximized. I’ve repeated this important lesson so many times but it goes unheeded. The deep bowls are perfectly suited for the back right where the slots are much wider. They do not go on the top shelf which is where not only glasses go but also anything plastic because you know the plastic will melt if placed on the bottom near the heating coil.
But you don’t know And I’m always moving the stuff around because you’ve all refused to take that extra minute to keep it organized and moving smoothly. So I do. And then I feel accomplished as if I have just completed a vital task which will keep me and my family in shape for at least another day, maybe two because there’s never enough dishes to run the dishwasher every day. But they never learn the lesson no matter how often I teach it. And the dishes lay at odds with each other in total disarray, disharmony and disgust and I am the only one who cares about the order of life.
***
Tova Hinda Siegel, a writer/poet, is a midwife, cellist, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of many children living around the world. After earning a BA from Antioch and an MS from USC, she began writing and has studied with Jack Grapes, Tresha Faye Haefner, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, among others. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, I’ll Take Wednesdays, On The Bus, MacQueens’s Quinterly, Gyroscope Review, PoetrySuperHighway, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Better than Starbucks, and several anthologies. Her first collection, Uncertain Resident, was published recently. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.
Many of you who know me well are aware that I always have a bunch of projects going on. One of the things I’ve been working on lately — one quite near and dear to my heart — is a very special undertaking my cousin Meredith asked me to do with her. She’s calling it Charlie’s Angels.
Not the kind with Bosley. I’ll explain. (TW: death)
As a writer, I find myself revisiting certain events in my life through my creative work. These include growing up in my family’s legendary grocery store, laboring with my classmates in tenth grade to free a trapped deer from a barbed wire fence on the side of a highway, the unexpected death of my cousin Chuck when we were in middle school.
This was Chuck’s last school picture, taken in 6th grade, less than two months before he died.
These events that had such a profound effect on me during my formative years keep coming back, in various ways, in my writing, as I continually try to parse out their meaning and effect on my life.
You’ll see from the following post by Meredith, Chuck’s younger sister, that his death was quick and shocking. Meredith was nine, I was thirteen, and Chuck was twelve when he suddenly passed away from what my mother had called “acute adult leukemia.” Meredith and Chuck were my primary social circle at that time in my life, and my ensuing grief was transformative: I retreated; I quit playing the piano; I cried myself to sleep every night for six weeks. The adults around me, also spiraling in their shock and sorrow, had no way to help me, and so I kept my sadness as far inside me as I could. But later, when I had children of my own, I found that the normal fears involved in parenting had become compounded with my buried grief, so that every unusual headache and every unexplained bump or bruise had me calling our pediatrician for reassurance.
My cousin’s faith sustains her. I admire this kind of strength, but I have found in my own life that action is the surest way to dispel my own anxiety. Meredith has brought our shared trauma back to me in a way that allows me to act, and so I have joined her campaign to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society this spring. (There are more details in her post; I hope you will give it a quick read.)
This October it will have been thirty-five years since Chuck died. This spring’s campaign feels like a powerful way to acknowledge the raw sadness we’ve all carried around with us for so long.
My own personal goal is to raise $5,000 over ten weeks (starting today), so that other families will avoid the loss and pain that ours has known, so that other critically ill children will benefit from the newest, life-saving treatments being developed even now to fight these horrible cancers. No donation is too small or too large, so if you are able to contribute and feel motivated to do so, please follow that impulse, because action dispels anxiety.
If you feel encouraged to contribute to our campaign, you can do so by clicking here to visit my personal fundraising page. On that page you can also see an absosmurfly ADORABLE picture of us when we were little kids.
The campaign launches today, and any team (such as Charlie’s Angels) that raises the most money by 5:00 p.m. today gets an additional $2,500.00 to add to their total from a dedicated fund meant to bolster our efforts.
Without further ado, here’s Meredith’s post, which also contains exciting information about advances being made even now in the field of cancer eradication. Thank you for reading it, and thank you for reading about my own part in this story.
***
from Meredith:
My family and our entire community were changed forever on Saturday, October 31, 1987. That was the day my 12-year-old brother, Charles Joseph Jamail (better known to friends and family as Chuck), was called home by our Lord.
It all started just a few days earlier. Chuck was complaining of headaches after having played soccer. They continued with no relief, so Mom took him to the doctor. They ran some bloodwork, and after getting the results, my mom was told he needed to go to the hospital immediately. He was admitted to Texas Children’s Hospital on Thursday, diagnosed with Acute Monocytic Leukemia, coma-induced on Friday, and brain dead on Saturday.
I was just nine years old when Dad delivered the news. I had just arrived home from being at the museum’s Halloween carnival with a friend. There was an overwhelming number of people scurrying around my house, inside and out. Having been at the hospital just the day before and seeing Chuck in the ICU, my heart leapt for joy at the thought of him already being home! When my dad knelt down to greet me in the front yard and told me that Chuck had passed away, I only felt one thing…absolute disbelief. I can’t recall how long it took for me to realize this was our reality.
Since then, I periodically ask my parents to share with me their recollection of the details of that week, although, my questions for them have changed over the years. Recently, I asked my mom how in the world she was able to turn off the life support. Her response? The Holy Spirit. Wow! My mother, an absolute pillar of strength. As a mother, I have tried to imagine myself in the same situation. I can’t.
My own memories are spotty, the details fuzzy – after all, 35 years is a long time passed. The loss of my perfect brother, the one frequently mistaken for my twin, has shaped me maybe more than anything else in my life. My prayer, my hope has always been that no other mother, father, sibling, son, daughter, cousin, aunt, uncle, grandparent, or friend will have to experience what our community experienced. But what could I do to make an impact?
Chuck and Meredith together, probably in the late 1970s.
A wonderful opportunity finally presented itself: I have been nominated by a childhood friend to be a candidate for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) Man & Woman of the Year “MWOY” campaign. Seems to me like the perfect way to make an impact!! When asked to do this, I felt excited, but also overwhelmed and nervous. This is a huge task, and an even bigger honor!
Since 2000, 40% of all new cancer therapies approved by the U.S. FDA are blood cancer therapies. Breakthrough advances in blood cancer research are now helping patients with other diseases, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis, as well as non-blood cancers, including breast, pancreatic, brain, bone, liver, lung, kidney, ovarian, prostate, skin, stomach, melanoma, and lupus nephritis. You don’t have to look far to find someone you know who has been impacted.
With the mission and work of LLS, prayers are being answered. From the efforts of MWOY candidates who have come before me, LLS has been able to provide financial assistance for travel and medical costs for local patients, fund research, and provide general information, education, and support for patients and family members (including identifying clinical trials, support groups, etc.).
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is also reimagining pediatric blood cancer care with the LLS Children’s Initiative. LLS is striving to make children’s treatments safer, less toxic, and more effective—and ultimately, they will find better treatments and cures. While many children survive acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type of pediatric blood cancer, the treatments are harsh and outdated. The long-term effects of current therapies can create severe life-threatening complications. And survival rates for children with other high-risk types of leukemia, such as acute myeloid leukemia, are very poor.
LLS Children’s Initiative is investing over $100 million over the next five years toward global, groundbreaking children’s blood cancer research and patient support. They are tackling pediatric blood cancers from every angle as they are the leader in a global pediatric master clinical trial and they continue to offer a wide range of free education, 1:1 support services, financial assistance, and advocacy on behalf of all young patients and their families.
LLS Children’s Initiative is investing over $100 million over the next five years toward global, groundbreaking children’s blood cancer research and patient support. They are tackling pediatric blood cancers from every angle as they are the leader in a global pediatric master clinical trial and they continue to offer a wide range of free education, 1:1 support services, financial assistance, and advocacy on behalf of all young patients and their families.
I am so excited about this opportunity to make, what I intend to be, a significant impact in the cancer community! I would love your partnership in doing so. My personal goal for our team, Charlie’s Angels, is to raise $500,000. Please know any amount you give could mean the gift of life, to a stranger or a friend.
There have been times in my life when I have pulled my car hastily into a parking lot and yanked napkins and a pencil from the glovebox to scribble a poem down before it evaporated from my head. The ten weeks between my taita’s diagnosis and her passing come to mind: a whole series of lamentations was conceived on the well-traveled streets between my aunt’s house and my apartment.
My elder child turns sixteen this weekend. My younger is a teenager now, too. I try not to get nostalgic about the days when they were small enough to fall asleep in my lap. I was exhausted then and could just as easily fall asleep with them, weighted down by their milky warmth. I’m exhausted now, too, and only a little bit from missing the time when it was easy to solve their problems for them just by meeting their basic needs.
I love the adolescents they’ve become as much as I loved the babies they were. But parenting is like one long series of fleeting moments dragging you through their timeline, alternately endless and the length of a blink, a chronology of fatigue punctuated by bliss and terror.
I can’t imagine I would ever trade it.
Tonight’s poem, “For Little Hawk” by Pat Anthony, reminds me of the holiness of ephemeral moments and of how much we miss when something larger than ourselves interrupts them. I hope, fervently, that we will reach some comfortable medium of immunity and stability by later this year. My ambitions are not grand, but sometimes, honestly, when I look at the world around me, they feel immense.
For Little Hawk
I stop the car to write how it’s been six months now arms aching from the weight your sleeping little boy body this cradle of absence
my shoulder bowed yet from the curve of your head my lap waiting for the spill of your blanketed legs
Then we breathed each other my quick inhales fragrant with your milky exhales your gentle settling into sleep
Now I press my fingers against glass this air between us laden green walnuts chattering squirrels
the lot of us at risk of losing so much
we mask squares of cloth straining cataracts threatening to breach
larval we twist inside colorful chrysalises suspended by a single strand from which we thought to anchor before the dizzying spinning thinned the sheath translucent the struggle within you trying out first words today me holding back my own love across an unsocial distance
But here along this road where I’ve stopped beside melons split open their bloody hearts raw and dying
I just wanted you to know how much I miss.
***
Pat Anthony writes the backroads, often using land as lens to heal, survive, and thrive while living with bi-polar disorder as she mines characters, relationships, and herself. A recently retired educator, she holds an MA in Humanities, poems daily, edits furiously and scrabbles for honesty no matter the cost. She has work published or forthcoming in multiple journals, including The Avocet, The Awakenings, The Blue Nib, Haunted Waters, Orchard Street, and more. Her latest chapbook, Between Two Cities on a Greyhound Bus, was recently published by Cholla Needles Press, CA. She blogs at middlecreekcurrents.com.
During first period on Thursday, March 12, 2020, one of the sophomores in my English II class looked up from his phone and said, “They just closed.”
He was referring to one of our peer schools, an institution with whom our school shares a lot of cues – such as when to close down during a global pandemic.
Over the previous couple of weeks, all of my classes had begun with an anxious conversation with my students about Covid-19. They were the ones anxiously asking questions, and I was the one doing my best to answer them in a reassuring way, debunking myths and providing the best information I had about the virus and what we knew and what we still didn’t. Oddly, I was not, myself, feeling their same sense of worry. Yes, I knew things were serious, and yes, I was fairly well informed of the news (the accurate variety), but also? I have a brother who lives in Hong Kong, and so I’d already Continue reading “The Year of Living Pandemically”→
Today was Christmas, and it was good. Mellow and relaxing, for the most part. Fun, at times. Most of my favorite aspects of Christmas — the Lebanese food, giving my loved ones gifts, not doing any work — were all in effect. There were video calls with my family members I couldn’t see in person. There was some socially distant and masked-up visiting from across the yard for a few minutes with others. It was, on balance, a good day.
But I cannot deny that it was weird.
The weirdness comes from not having the usual big to-do for the holiday with my enormous extended family and a generous cadre of friends dropping by throughout the afternoon or evening, all full of laughing and telling stories and eating and drinking together. Nope, that’s not really happening this year. But it’s okay. Subdued, but not bad. This way is necessary, and it’s also temporary. I think, I hope, next year will be different.
Some of my friends and cousins who work in the medical industry have already gotten their first doses of the covid vaccine, so that’s good. And while there’s nothing but absolutely bonkers nonsense bordering on mildly terroristic narcissism coming out of the upper reaches of the government, the larger horizon still provokes optimism.
Like most people, I had to put a pause on so many of my usual holiday traditions this year. But not all of them. The 12 Days of Holiday Music here, for example, is something I love doing and had no reason to halt. And just as I begin the series each year with The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” for its personal significance to me and for the comforting sense of routine (or ritual?), I think I’m going to end the series with a repeat song that I first included here in December of 2014, because it’s special to me.
“The Week Between” by John Roderick and Jonathan Coulton is one of my favorite holiday songs ever. It’s mellow and sweet and a little melancholy all at the same time.
When I was a child, Christmas was everything. Toys, delicious food, the end of my father’s unbearably long working hours until the next holiday season, and a party with my extended family, which meant cousins to play with as far as the eye could see. A very special tradition we had was that we always spent the night at each other’s houses on Christmas night, thereby extending our holiday for yet another day. We would stay up late and tiptoe into the kitchen after our parents went to bed for a “midnight snack” — usually cheddar sliced off an enormous block of cheese and Coke in six-ounce glass bottles. We played board games. We told each other scandalously funny jokes. We played with toys and watched movies and tried to see how late we could stay up. We almost never made it to actual midnight at that age. I lived for these times.
But once all of that was over, and we all went back to our own houses, to play with our own toys and siblings only, with no more excited wrapping of gifts, no more days spent cooking food in preparation for the holiday, no more anything much to look forward to until my birthday in March…
Well, I would inevitably fall into low spirits. One year my dad explained to me that I had the “Christmas blues,” the let-down once all the festivities were over. And this persisted for several years until I was old enough to start insisting my family do something, anything, to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
So. Flash forward a few decades. The time between Christmas and New Year’s is now, honestly, just about one of my very favorite weeks of the year. I have some time off before school starts up again, and the hustle and bustle of orchestrating a holiday for my family has also been accomplished. Everyone is home and just hanging out. People drop by for little visits, maybe, something low-key, or they wait until our annual New Year’s Eve bash (which also will not be happening this year).
I can devote time to creative projects and reading for fun and watching movies and sleeping in and whatever else. It’s one of the very few truly relaxed, free times I have as we put the subconscious stress of the holidays behind us and look forward to new beginnings.
The line in this song that has always resonated with me the most, that made me love this song so much, is in the chorus: “In the week between, all your drunken uncles and cousins’ cousins are on the scene…” (Not that I’m a fan of drunken people in general.) Ever since I was a child and all the way until just last year, that special time with my cousins is so much of what I love about life.
And then there’s the next line: “The week between, New Year’s resolutions in conversation with last year’s dreams.” I mean, that’s just poetry. And it’s exactly how my mind pivots from one year’s ambitions to the next, and that, too, is comforting to me, a far horizon folding itself toward me as I stand on an ever-hopeful shore.
So. Enough rambling for one night. I’m going to go fix myself a snack of very soft pita bread, hot enough to melt the butter I spread across the inside of its pocket. Maybe some sliced cheddar, maybe share a Coke with my husband. Text back and forth with my cousins, pictures of our kids. (They miss each other, too.) Then get into bed and read a new book.
I hope your winter holidays, if you celebrate any, have been just what you needed this year, or that you at least have had a moment to enjoy the calm, that you’ve had some calm to enjoy.
Okay, I get it. Not everyone loves the holidays. Not everyone enjoys hanging out with their family. In fact, some people cannot even with the holidays because they’ve successfully managed to more or less escape the pandemonium and strife of the families they came from, and having to go back during the holidays is stressful.
Friends, I see you — and your relative nightmare. This mildly inappropriate earworm is for you.
Monday Earworm has returned! I don’t know about you, but I had a kinda tough September. Between work and school stress and a hip flexor injury, I’ve had a somewhat hectic time of things. But that’s okay! Because things are finally starting to feel a little less bonkers. So here! Have an earworm!
So today is my mom’s birthday. One song I always associate with my childhood is “Right Down the Line” by Gerry Raffery because I knew from a young age it was a song that was really special to my parents. They’re still going strong at 46 years of marriage (well, 46 years as of October 6th), and since I know my mom loves this song because it reminds her of my dad, and I’ve always loved this song because it reminds me of my parents’ happy marriage, well. If I were musically coordinated enough to play the piano and sing at the same time, this song would be high up on the list along with almost everything from Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes and Fiona Apple’s Tidal.
This is just a quick announcement to say that my flash fiction story “Mother” has been published! It earned an Honorable Mention this year in the Spider Road Press Annual Flash Fiction Contest. If you’d like to read it, please click this link.
In related news, I’m super happy right now! Wheee!
Sappho's Torque 