Mary Tabor invites you aboard her Lifeboat
Grief has its own voice
"The splash, instead of a return to surface calm, stays open and splayed. That open water with risen water all around the fallen place is an open hand and palm that takes in the wounded and the lost."
Mary Tabor - author (Re)Making Love: A Memoir, The Woman Who Never Cooked, Who by Fire, Lifeboat
For this very special episode of Unfixed Interviews, I’m honored to be joined by three of my favorite writers,
and Veronika , in a deeply moving conversation with . Together, we explore Mary’s essay Lifeboat, where she reflects on grieving her son, Benjamin, and the journey of relearning to live through the act of writing. In sharing her story, she found that the responses she received became a line cast across the sea of loss—reaching her in ways simple condolences can’t. It’s a reminder that sometimes the most meaningful support goes beyond “Sorry for your loss” to a more personal, reflective response that embraces the full complexity of grief.Mary’s essay is an extraordinary work born from her profound gifts as a writer and the deep despair of loss. Through her words, she channels raw, primal hurt into something staggeringly beautiful, creating a lifeline not just for herself, but for all who read it. Her readers have described Lifeboat as a refuge crafted from the very wreckage of language and memory, each sentence woven from every nerve, muscle fiber, blood, and bone. As one reader put it, “If the heart that breaks open contains the whole universe, you are the revealer of the universe, sharing a way to fly our own grief on fires in the sky.” Her essay embodies the powerful truth that grief itself can be a lifeboat—a profound, often difficult-to-grasp insight she conveys with both clarity and courage. Mary’s work reminds us that allowing pain to buoy us and joining in the shared human experience of loss can indeed become our salvation.
As we navigate the paradoxes of grief, creativity, and connection, the conversation dives into the ocean-like depths of mourning and the buoyancy found in vulnerability. Although Veronika could only join us briefly due to a fickle internet connection, her presence and later reflections are woven into the transcript, adding an essential layer of empathy and insight. This episode is an invitation to sit with us in Mary’s lifeboat, where the raw, messy, broken beauty of grief can become a lifeline—as long as we remember to reach across the chasm of pain to pull one another close and befriend the paradoxes of this uncertain life.
Please enjoy this conversation and then head over to Mary’s page to read Lifeboat and share with your community.
Transcript:
Kimberly
So we have a really special day today. This is special for me.
and are joining me today for an Unfixed Interview as we dive deeply into ‘s exquisite piece that she shared recently about her son’s death. And this piece, swirling around in her own life for years, took quite a lot to bring it forth into the Substack community. And I feel the vulnerability of that. And so I thought, instead of sharing a conversation with just me and Mary, how about we open up a warm hearth. And through the comments that were shared, the abundance of comments that were shared, after Mary opened the story to Substack, it was clear that Alisa and Veronika needed to be part of this.So welcome everyone. I'm so happy that you're here. Mary, can you begin just by telling us what that was like for you to share this on Monday of this week? I know that there was some tentativeness around opening it up and what was that like for you?
Mary
The response was so extraordinary and the way my heart has already opened from the writing of it, it expanded exponentially with every comment and every like and I didn't expect any of this to happen because of—if you haven't read the essay, the format of the essay is notes and it seems fragmented. And even though it is fragmented, it does form, well, I guess you guys will tell me, but I think it forms a whole out of these notes that I was taking like a child in school. And so to have this be out in the world let me honor my son and feel as if my creativity had come back to me.
Kimberly
What a powerful experience. And you took a dive into the darkness, not knowing if it would be received. And you did that also with publishers.
Mary
I tried, I tried, I tried, actually it took me five years to write. My son died at age 46 in 2017. And so I tried—since I come out of the world of the literary magazine, I've believed in it, and so I tried, but all I ever got was the form. And the form means “No thank you,” essentially. No comment, nothing. And I thought, well, I guess it's, I guess that's not worthy. Cause I did so many. And then as the anniversary of his death, which is November 4th, came upon me, I withdrew it from wherever it was. And I put it up on Only Connect on Substack. And the reaction was mind-blowingly empathic and detailed in terms of what I say in the essay, details on passages. It gave me a sense that the grief has indeed been a lifeboat.
Kimberly
Yes, so I want to get into that. Veronika and Alisa, do you have in your reading of this, do you have moments or passages that really spoke to you or questions that you have about those?
Alisa
I loved the form that you chose.I think it was wonderful how you placed yourself, I think, as that child. And again, as that child at the fore. When I was listening to you read it, I think that really came out for me for the first time. Because I had focused on the lifeboat image and being sort of without a mooring on the sea and casting around for a mooring in this sort of sea of grief that would also hold you, but at the same time, in its its roiling way, tear you apart.
And that being a paradox of itself, but then also when I was listening to it again, being this small child at the door, making those sort of quiet notes about This is what I know. This is what I know. This is how I hold this. And so that structure, it's almost like a child standing before a red schoolhouse, but also a child standing before an ocean for the first time and regarding the ocean for the first time. And the first time a child holds a shell to their ear. And so I started thinking about that and you hear the ocean, which is really in the shell, and how that becomes a whole sensory diving off point that you then carry into these images of how he haunts you or how he comes to you.
Mary
Yes. That's a perfect description actually of the process, because the process was one of individual notes that I wrote during the most severe period of the grieving…by the way, grief has its own voice. That's the one thing I learned about all of this. It has its own voice. And also that it doesn't go away. I haven't gotten better. I’ve changed. The force of the rolling sea of grief, because I keep using water as a way to describe what this has been like, including the floating and including the sense of drowning. Both. That paradox operates all through, I think it operates all through the essay—and that expression of how the notes were separate. And then one day at some point I sat down and looked at the notes and thought, I think they can be put together, but the only way they can be put together is as the notes of a child, as just as Alisa has just expressed, so beautifully, by the way.
Kimberly
I agree with you, Mary. Alisa, that was a beautiful metaphor for the holding and also the chaos. And Mary, you do an incredible job of allowing both of those seemingly opposite forces to coexist. And that's hard for humans to do, to know that they can coexist.
Veronika
What I found most unbelievable in your story, Mary, is that literary magazines rejected the piece, or didn’t even respond, or demanded a rewrite in a more ‘narrative format’. As a reader I knew from the opening paragraph that the notes were the perfect format. Having picked up some of the things you shared in this conversation (luckily I will be able to listen to the recording) my understanding of your choice of this format has deepened. It is the perfect form for this piece.
Kimberly
I'm wondering if you, do you have your piece in front of you because I would love for you to—
Mary
I do. I do. So I can read a piece of it or whichever note you would like me to read.
Kimberly
Well, I was thinking in particular note number three. Let's start with that.
Mary
Okay, okay.
His death brought me to my knees. Every time I thought I could get up, I saw his body, clothed in a non-Jewish funeral home on a gurney. His plaid flannel sports shirt, his blue jeans. They dressed him, something we Jews do not do. I expected to see him in a shroud with his head on a marble pedestal the way I saw my mother for the last time. But there he was, dressed as if ready to hike or do chores or sit at his laptop that I now have.
Kimberly
I mean, talk about paradox.
Alisa
The mundane with the most significant thing that you can see as a mother in your life.
Kimberly
Yeah, it guts us. How can those two things live alongside one another?
Alisa
And also this notion that life is just going to progress on at this moment and that he could just arise at any moment, but that's not going to happen.
Mary
And that comes back in the essay with my hearing him and believing that I'm hearing him on the phone, this haunting feeling. I'd like to give credit to Joan Didion for a moment. One of the things I read after he died was, well, I had read and owned her book, The Year of Magical Thinking. But she also wrote a book called Blue Nights, which followed that. And in it, she says, well “Euripides says this, ‘What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?’ Euripides said that. When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children. I said that.” And I think that's not something I would put in the essay, but it's something that I think fits with what we're saying right here now, that the responsibility of motherhood is to see our children survive and flourish.
Alisa
Yeah, I mean, there is even in the most difficult relationships between parents and their children, the complex relationships I think, and we see a lot of this in popular culture right now, especially in the current climate. There is a want, such a primal desire, to know that the kids are all right and not to make light but that they're thriving, that that persistence, that you could take whatever pain they're experiencing and return it to them as love. That you could absorb it and return it to them as love. Even if they're mad at you, even if they say, you don't understand me, even if you're having a moment.
Kimberly
And that love nourishes them and helps them thrive. And so for death to come and say, Nope, I have the upper hand here is the ultimate assault to—
Alisa
And what feels unmournable is when you can't get a why, sometimes. And that's where I think the poetry of the voice, of the haunting, of the visitation of whatever story or narrative can be almost soothing in a way, because you're reconstructing reasoning. And the moment where he says to You were terrible poker player.
Mary
Yes. Yes.
Alisa
I get that. I am a terrible poker player too. I am a crooked lot. When you said that, my whole heart went, oh!
Mary
And when he flew me to Australia where he lived, he said, You hate to travel and I beamed you. I beamed you, like Scotty. I beamed you. And he did. And he did. And the love that you're talking about, I hope that comes through in the essay because we had that and—
Kimberly
A playful love. Is that accurate?
Mary
Yes, not always, but almost always, but also the constant contact because I was in touch with him, for the last 10 years of his life he talked to me every single day and sometimes more often than once or twice. I mean, he was really in touch with me really so intimately that the loss of that voice, the loss of that phone call, the silence, well, there's a great deal of silence that surrounds death in any case, but the silence that surrounds the death of an adult child is impenetrable.
And I was trying with the essay to break through that silence also.
Kimberly
Well, I'm so glad that you use that word, Mary, because this is why it makes me so mad that the publishers didn't understand this, because you needed to work that silence in to the writing, and you did. You did it for me through the notes. The notes have pauses. They require pauses after you read each one. There's a place that I want to go to and envision and exhale and breathe with what you just shared. And if it had been anything other, there would not be that necessary silence that is part of your grieving.
Mary
That means so much to me that you say that because the fragmented style, I think, is the most challenging part of the essay. And for you to say that is such a gift. Thank you.
Kimberly
All of it works but that is what takes it to this next level for me.
Alisa
Yeah, I think the fragmented style is what enables me to actually really see it and see every frame of the film in your heart.
Veronika
I totally agree with what you said about the note-format of the essay, Kimberly and Alisa. For me the first paragraph was so powerful. “After my forty-six-year-old son died, I needed to go back to school. Not to stand at the red door of the schoolhouse with hope, but to learn how to survive."
This pulls the reader straight into the devastating experience. As a mother you identify so much with your children. They become your life. When they all of a sudden vanish, it is as if a part of yourself has gone. So this is a world-shattering experience. Especially when the relationship is as close as yours, Mary, with your beloved son Ben.
No parent expects their children to die before them. When it does happen, you have to learn to live again without the presence of the child in this life, which is virtually impossible. Because his presence is everywhere, because you carry him in your heart. Because you have lived with his presence over half of your life.
The whole format of this piece, written in memory of Ben and processing the unbearable grief, unravels from the opening paragraph. This was how you took your first steps to learn how to do life all over again, in a world where Ben was no longer around. The notes capture these excruciating and difficult steps perfectly. They show the pain and the resilience of a mother whose heart has been ripped open, who has to live with that raw open space in her chest from then onwards.
Mary
And the way the ocean calls to me too, the ocean becomes for me something that pulls me towards the close. The ocean is everything for me inside this essay. And I can't explain that except by maybe reading one of the passages. I could read the passage where the ocean speaks to me.
My grief is like the ocean. This is note number 12.
My grief is like the ocean and here is what she says. I stand on a wave above you. You see me, you hear me, you want me. But when I call to you, you don't think I know you, see you, hear you, want you, but I do. Maybe even more than you want me. I'm dressed in a chiffon dress that mirrors the sea your son loved. So, it is not sky blue, it is green blue. Some days as green as his eyes that were so sad, that saw what was coming, that couldn't overcome but tried.
Kimberly
I had a massive epiphany with this one and it was so fun and Mary you know about this but I read it, digested and then went outside and was thinking about it again and then listened to it when I was outside and all of a sudden I understood that your grief is the lifeboat sitting on top of that ocean and I thought, What an incredible thought, what an incredible concept and a message for all of humanity to understand that these dark places can save us when we allow them to. I picture like the vulnerability that you were experiencing reached outwards like a net almost across the ocean to reach all the others that we're experiencing grief.
Mary
And the very fact that you could see that, and we had a conversation before this recording in which Kimberly told me that. That she saw that the grief is the lifeboat, and that seems so paradoxical, and yet that is what I was trying to express by the time I got to the close of the essay.
And it isn't just a lifeboat for me, it’s a lifeboat for anyone who reads this. I hope.
Alisa
And I think you saw that in the comments because you saw in the comments people saying across Substack, and there were so many comments across the notes, I want to be in the lifeboat with you. And the lifeboat felt like a safe, not to use that word all the time, but safe space, but a sacred space to be with you.
And that's very meaningful right now, especially in our current zeitgeist.
Mary
My goodness, yes, yes.
Kimberly
Yeah, I think our culture wants or teaches us to isolate with the pain, isolate with the grief and that it is something to hide. It's something to process on your own because it's awkward. But when we can all go, Oh my God, I'm feeling this too. And let's all dive in together—
Mary
Yeah, so it's a way in which I was thrown a line. I'm in the sea, I'm floating in this ocean of the sea of loss and a line is thrown to me. The line that's most often thrown, and I don't mean to denigrate it in any way, but is, you know, Sorry for your loss. But in the responses to this essay, so much more was said about what is in the essay and what the feeling was in response to it.
And I say this to anyone who's to meet another person. And of course, we’ll all meet people who will lose people who are grieving and who are desolate. The way to reach out is to throw more than that line, not to denigrate that line, but to say something personal the way you react to anything that's happened to you or anything that you say that's more, throws the line to the person in the lifeboat and pulls them towards you and pulls them to Alisa’s safe place.
Kimberly
Beautifully said.
As Alisa mentioned earlier, you said you needed to go back to school. You felt this need to go back to school after your son's death in order to relearn life. And I love that contrast there, the death and the relearning life. Can you share a little bit more about what you learned? What's this relearning about? And has that transformed for you over time?
Mary
First, let me explain what happened to me when he died in the sense that everything stopped for me. So I'm a writer, I'm a painter, I play the flute. Everything stopped. And I didn't think that I could begin anything creative. It was as if my life had ended, even though I didn't die. And I actually, I almost did because I developed a condition known as heartbreak syndrome, but I'm not gonna go into that. I'm fine now, I'm fine. But you can die of heartbreak. And I was very much at that point. But what happened when I began to write the notes is that I began to come back.
I was coming back to the page through note by note, each note that I wrote, even though there are many more than are in the essay, but the notes kept coming and I kept journaling and collecting them. And then one day I sat down and I began to pull them together. There is a watercolor in the piece that I actually did when I went to Australia for his memorial. And I did a watercolor on the wrong surface, which I refer to in the essay because all that I had was A2 paper and I had a few little watercolor pieces in a little container with me.
So what I learned is that even though one doesn't recover, there is a basic foundation and that foundation is the choice to choose life. And choosing life is what we must do when we lose somebody and it's not easy to do. But it can be done. And there's a foundation that I had inside of me that held me in some paradoxical way and let me begin again.
Veronika
I was very moved by what you said about choosing life, Mary, and the condition you described as “broken heart syndrome.” One of my grandmothers “died of a broken heart”, after her eldest son did not return from the war. That's how it was called in our family. But I'd never heard that this was recognized as an actual condition.
Kimberly
Choosing life obviously involves choosing pain and madness and suffering. It’s so easy to say, “I choose life” but choosing life means inviting all the yucky horrible debilitating things along with it. So that is an incredible act.
Veronika
I also love how you shared that the grief never goes away. This is what seems to be expected of us in our society. Any painful experience is “to be gotten over”. But it doesn't work like that. From personal experience with devastating losses and other difficulties life throws at you, I know that the only way forward is through. The renewed choice to live, as you said, Mary, is such an important and powerful part of this journey. A true resource. The challenge is to live with the grief and the devastation integrated into our experience, rather that to be put behind us.
Mary
And engaging and opening my heart instead of closing it. It's so easy to shut down because shutting down is what essentially happens in the initial moments of discovery of this death that is so out of order. And I guess out of order is the main message I have. It's so out of order.
Kimberly
Alisa, you know about out of order with your own story.
Alisa
I do. I mean, I think when something happens like this, it feels like all your cells reorganize in real time in a split second. I mean, that's certainly what a seizure feels like when you've swallowed a bolt of lightning. But I think that with something like a death like this, I see reflected in the opening of the essay and relearning life is something that I also feel when I'm waking up from a seizure, which is this kind of beginning—
Mary
You should explain, because not everybody's going to know. So explain a little bit, because we know, because we've read your book and we read you and we know. But you should take some time to tell about this, because it's part of this experience, isn't it?
Alisa
Yeah, so I suffer from these grand mal seizures. They are started when I was 40. They are tonic-clonic seizures and they are gorgeous and beautiful, but also terrifying. They strike almost without warning. Usually I have a tiny bit of warning, which is the world starts to shimmer and I also hear music. And so there's a little bit of warning to get to a safe, a soft space, but when they come they are quite severe and they can cause a great deal of injury and damage and they're quite traumatic for people around me. When I wake up from them, the world is technicolor beginner's mind and what I felt in your essay of waking up when you're standing at the beginning in front of the schoolhouse is that beginner's mind of relearning life. Because when I wake up from a seizure, it's like I have to relearn how to speak again. I mean, I've suffered injuries where I have had full facial reconstruction and had to learn how to talk all over again. And but even with a seizure where that doesn't happen, you still have to get your words back and all the things. And so relearning life and feeling that beginner's mind piece is something that I identified so strongly with in your essay.
Kimberly
Wow, on a cellular level.
Alisa
On a cellular level, I was like, I have to relearn life. And it's like dying on repeat. And it's really hard to engage back and say, I choose life again. I'm going to engage with the mess again, with the riotous nature of living.
Veronika
I feel deeply honoured and grateful for you sharing your experience with seizures, Alisa. I have witnessed some similar situations that you describe during my homoeopathic training (one of my fellow students was suffering with a similar condition), and we held the space for her as best as we could when it happened, but I don't recall her describing her experience in those moments.
Mary
One of things I say is I'm turned inside out like a sweater. And you were turned inside out and I was turned inside out.
Alisa
And I love how you say, I'm turned inside out and the outside is, it's not pretty anymore. It's not perfect anymore. It's got knots and threads and all of that. And I was like, yes, that is it.
Kimberly
Yes, I love that visual so much.
Mary
The raw threads, the tied knots from the sweater I might've knitted are now on the outside. It doesn't matter what clothes I put on, how lovely the long black jacket I wear flows. The raw knots of the sweater where the end stitches tied off to begin another row to knit, purl, knit, show. I have no good side anymore.
Alisa
That is how I feel so much.
Veronika
I love how you have created a space for this conversation, Kimberly, from your own experience of loss and grief and challenging symptoms which threw your whole life as you knew it into question.
Kimberly
I dabbled in fiber arts and stuff, but for me, the inside out sweater is more inviting, more cozy. Like I want to see all those little threads, it makes me wanna like cuddle up with it. This is a terrible metaphor, but for me, that inside out sweater says vulnerability.
Alisa
I want those frayed edges.
Kimberly
In fact, I like those sweaters that are intentionally, you know, frayed and they have all that. It makes you want to go up and hug them.
Mary
You know, the two of you are like a lifeboat because you see me here in intense grief and I'm smiling. And that the two of you can do that for me by just having this conversation with me. This is what I mean by throwing a line and throwing good lines, lines that really pull one in from the paradox of all the losses that we face in existence.
Kimberly
It could be really lonely out there without someone throwing a line.
Alisa
Yeah. And we have a lot of shame, I think, across our generations about showing our pain and showing and confessional culture because it gives us the ick sometimes. But I...
Mary
Yeah, and I think, Alisa, another thing that I had to do in the, and this goes back to your question, Kimberly, about the learning. I had to realize that in order for this essay to have a creative life, in other words, to be something more than catharsis, it couldn't operate on the basis of sentimentality. It had to operate in a different way. And that's why it took so long to write, because to get from catharsis to imagistic work, which is where I hope I landed, took a while to get to that place. Although the notes came out oddly very early, imagistically, and they were all over the place. And then the organizing of them was key to the process of not only pulling him towards me, but pulling my heart both together and open. And there's paradox there too. Apart and open. As it tore apart, it was as if a lake filled inside of me for anyone who's fallen to come in.
Kimberly
Mary, you wrote about that lake in one of your notes. Can you read that one? Because the way you just described it now, it took it to another level for me.
Mary
I've learned my heart is the lake where something has fallen. A splash appears and stays. Fronds of water rise around what has fallen. The splash, instead of a return to surface calm, stays open and splayed. That open water with risen water all around the fallen place is an open hand and palm that takes in the wounded and the lost. You, my son, my love, are in that splayed and open space.
Did you know that with your loss, my heart has opened and deepened and that the place for falling remains? The falling of the fallen, the falling of the hurt, the space remains ready and waiting for any to enter. You made that place for me, an open heart that will not close, an opening whose surface is broken but not fractured. The fronds of water around the fallen are clear gray-blue. Light shines through. In the opening, you see a soft place to fall, a safe place to fall, a place that catches you, surrounds you with the waters of my tears and the water of all the seas you loved. It is a call. It is an answer. Come, my heart says. Come.
Kimberly
My goodness, Mary. An open heart that will not close. That open cupped hand, receiving the tears, receiving the water, receiving all receiving all of it. This is such an incredible story of the paradox that we all live and and pretend doesn't exist. And you had to just step right into it and then again and then again every day you wake up you still have to step into it.
Mary
Well, you know, this is not in the essay, but one of the things that's not in the essay and that I wouldn't dare put into the essay because it does fall into the area of cathartic talk, but I actually had to perform the funeral because the rabbi was not available. There wasn't anyone who could do it. And we, in my tradition, bury quickly. I closed the eulogy in addition to running the entire service, which I don't know how I ever did with A. E. Housman. And here is what A. Housman says in this very famous poem. / The time you won your town the race / We chaired you through the market-place; / Man and boy stood cheering by, / And home we brought you shoulder high. /
And I hoped when the essay came out that would be—it’s not in the essay, of course—but that would be part of the message, that is how I closed the eulogy before the coffin was taken out to take him to the burial place.
This has been such a gracious thing for the three of you to do today. I want you to know how much I thank you for it and how much it means to me to close the round in a sense in this way, to be seen by the two of you and to anyone who may be listening. To any of you I say, my heart goes out to you.
Alisa
What you've done with your essay and your experience in sharing it is such a gift. I know you've suffered so greatly for it, but it's such a gift to the community, to the literary community, to the Substack community, to the women's community. So that we have a more nuanced understanding of grief and how it manifests and how it changes and how it shapes the narratives of our lives and how we can coexist with it. It's so powerful what you've done and I just want to thank you and express my gratitude to you.
Mary
Thank you.
Kimberly
And it's a teacher for all of us that have or will or have yet to grieve to use whatever voice that is within us and for you, Mary, it was to write these notes, to use your creative expression, to navigate these dark, dark, dark waters and something in all of us, there's a way, and I even heard this yesterday, on the heels of all the election news, the artists will come forward during this time, or well, actually they'll retreat. The artists will go in and digest and somehow eventually find beauty and meaning from the pain and the loss and the devastation.
And so you, Mary, are tying these knots for us through your creative expression.
Mary
Well, that may say more than I'm worth, but I thank you from my heart for what you've just said.
Kimberly
You are absolutely doing that, I have no doubt. Veronika, welcome back. I don't know if she can hear us, but I think she's been coming in and out. I keep entering her back into the room. So I don't know how much you've been hearing, but we have a bad Wi-Fi connection, but it's lovely to see you here again.
Mary
And Veronika's comment on what I had written was so extraordinary that I actually saved it here. So, well, I have what I responded to, so I don't have her comment exactly in front of me, but it was so moving in terms of understanding what I had tried to do. It was as if she restated the essence of the essay in what she wrote.
I did say to her, My dear Veronika, your words come to me from your loss of your brother to the ocean that to me is like a sea of tears from all the losses we the living must bear. The beauty of your words, the empathy you cast on me, and this essay give me courage, courage that has been disappearing like losing my sense of being. As the notes emerged as a form I saw anew.
And that was in direct response to what Veronika wrote to me in her comment on the essay. So I feel as if I know you across the sea that we both see in so many images.
Veronika
A surprise for me was when you shared your self-doubt, Mary, in a reply to my comment:
»I thought what I’d written had no worth—even as I knew what I had done went well-beyond catharsis. But said to myself, “You must be wrong. You are not seen, will not be seen."«
I think this statement reflects the contemporary attitude of our society towards painful and challenging subjective experiences, which we have all been taught to some degree. The sense or belief that it must be "wrong" to share “negative” painful experience in public. That we should and will not be seen...
Having worked with people and small groups on occasion, guiding them through their pain and towards a transformational moment, I am very familiar with the self-doubt surrounding the sharing of deep personal pain. I also know the power and value of these moments of witnessing and being witnessed.
Kimberly
There's a profound mirroring that happens on Substack or at least within this special community that we've found—I don’t know if it's all across—but there is a profound mirroring. And I just realized that through that mirroring comes courage. I don't think I ever made that connection before, but I think mirroring emboldens us to keep going.
Mary
So well said. Perfect.
Alisa
Yeah and encourage when people are feeling exhausted and tired to the bone and and that's so important I think.
Kimberly
Yeah. Mary, I want to ask a question. This is a personal curiosity because I always like to read you with a little pipe in my mouth and a little investigators cap on because you embed so many layers of meaning in your writing. And sometimes I'm just like, OK, I have to figure this out. What does she mean? And one of your notes takes us out of this story of your son and into the book,note number 10. Can you read that and then tell us a little bit about where you were going with that?
Mary
Okay, so in note number 10, I said,
I wrote a book that closes with the story that begins. There once was a woman with 327 cookbooks who never cooked. Recipes chronicle the losses of my mother, my sister, and my father. The story opens with the Talmudic quandary. Two men are in the desert. Only one of them has water. And if the one who has the water shares it, both will die. If he drinks all the water, one will live.
The woman remembers this question. What should he do? The story closes after all have died, and she's figured out what was missing from the recipe for a lemon meringue pie that failed so many times it had become a joke in her family. At the story's end, the woman who is me figures out what was missing from the recipe. She says, I did not know what I deserved or what was just, but I knew I would make the pie, that it would be hard to make, and that it would be my favorite.
And I think you're asking me what the end of that story is, or what was missing from the recipe.
Are you asking that?
Kimberly
What was missing from the pie? I mean, I have my suspicions, but I want to hear from you.
Mary
The Woman Who Never Cooked is written like a fairy tale but is in fact memoir. This is in this book I've written and of course was written before my son died. And at the end of the story she who is me says:
She could not remember the recipe for a single dessert. She heard inside her head that one repeated word, desserts. She stared so hard, one “s” inside the titles on the binders dropped away. She saw just desserts, spelled like the place where the two men in the Talmudic question stood. What did she deserve? There she stood with her father, her mother, and her sister, gone. She believed that she had all the water. Would she drink it?
No, she thought, because suddenly she knew what was missing from the recipe, from the yellow ribbon of lemon that would not congeal. She knew that the water must go in the pie mixed first with a bit of cornstarch for the sweetness to hold firm. She did not know what she deserved or what was just. She knew only that she would make the pie, that it would be hard to make, and that it would be her favorite.
You ask, what does that mean? And I have to leave that answer to you.
Kimberly
Okay, I read this and I hear a mother who has chosen to share her water and in the sharing of that water knows that this is gonna hurt. This is gonna hurt like hell and part of me is gonna die in the doing it, but it will be my favorite pie.
That's what I read in this, the metaphor of the creation of your son and that you in the creation of this son and the love that you will offer, you are giving part of yourself, your own life away in that sharing and that it it's going to hurt, but it will always be your favorite.
Mary
The Talmudic question is a really thorny one that gets discussed in Midrash over and over again. Part of the answer is perhaps that one drinks the water and accepts that the choice is to live. I think both possibilities lie inside what I wrote there.
But it's a pretty thorny, it's a thorny problem. It's not a question of what to do if you're in the desert. Because what follows that, I think, in the essay is that I am in the desert.
I ask this question, is the desert a dusty memory, not a place? So, and then I say that I am in the desert, the search for water constant like my tears, that flow unbidden and unforgiving. They come like the tide without an ocean. I see the paradox and I live inside it.
My son like me was drawn to the water and never lived far from it. In Australia, he lived on his vineyard with an apex where he sat and could see the ocean. He kept the sea always in his view, even when he didn't dare venture into it for fear of sharks.
So the ocean is there, the water is there to drink, to not to drink, whatever. But ultimately, we choose to create, to engage, and anyone who is engaging in whatever they are doing is creating. I don't classify creativity in the small category of writing or painting, but the bricklayer builds, the accountant builds. Everyone who engages to help another person is engaged in the process of creativity and in the process of moving life forward.
Kimberly
I'm so glad that you share that. I think a lot of people feel that, “I don't have what Mary has.” “I can't put words together or I can't paint this, what I feel inside,” but I think it can be any act, any act that quiets our mind and gives voice to our heart.
Alisa
It's also the curious act of asking the question of Will I drink the water, will I give the water, will and what will I do with the water? The act of curiosity, how will I engage?
Kimberly
Exactly. Even though it's thorny, I'm gonna engage.
Alisa
Even though it's thorny, even though it's messy, even though it's gonna hurt.
[Argh!] There's the sound for the week!
Mary
And that we laugh and that here we sit four women together with smiles on our faces in the face of what I have sent to you. My heart thanks you.
Veronika
What you have written in your notes in memory of Ben, Mary, is indeed a lifeboat! It can encourage readers to connect with their own pain, to choose life after moments when all life seems lost and survival impossible. This is so valuable. It is beyond worthy. It is priceless!
And it is being seen.
Alisa
We love you.
Kimberly
Mary, I'm inspired to do this more, I feel like there are more opportunities for the courage that everyone has—and maybe we're all introverts—to gut themselves and share that publicly on Substack.
Alisa
And to engage with some literary rigor. I see that as real potential here. And I just thank you, Kimberly, for putting this together with Mary and Veronika. I just think it's so valuable.
Mary
Beautifully stated. Beautifully stated.
Kimberly
Yeah. Veronika, I wanna, I don't know if, are you able to connect here? I see you, but I don't think the audio is connecting. Okay, I just wanted to make sure we're not talking over you.
Mary
We wave across the sea to Portugal.
Kimberly
Your presence has been felt here, deeply. Veronika, you share so much about this horizontal space moving out of the Anthropocene, Anthropocenic, is that a word? Anyway, the Anthropocene where everything is hierarchical. And now we are moving potentially into the symbiotic space where human beings can recognize that the good and the bad can sit right next to each other and serve one another and hold the space for one another. So even in your silence today, Veronika, you are holding a beautiful space.
I know we have just a couple minutes, but I want to ask one last question to you, Mary, because Who knows who's gonna be reading this? Maybe someone that is in the deep early stages of their own grief. I want you to just offer something. What do you hope that your readers will take away from you as they enter into their own journeys of grief?
Mary
That you are joined with me in the lifeboat that connects us.
A little bit of paradox in that line, but I think it'll hold as the lifeboat will hold and will be pulled to you who read this. We are connected.
Kimberly
It is the necessary paradox. If anyone tries to navigate loss without the paradox, it just doesn't work. The bottom falls out, the lifeboat sinks.
Mary
You are the line that pulls me in.
And you two have been that for me today and Veronika as well. I thank you. So I cannot say it enough.
Alisa
“Only connect.”
Kimberly
Only connect. Lovely. Well, we are. I'll close this up even though Veronika just joined again. Poor sweetheart. She does not give up. Man, that woman has persistence. I think I've let her in through the waiting room, I lost count, but maybe 30 times through this meeting.
Alisa
What's Elvis Costello's song? Anyway, there's a song, “Veronica"—
Kimberly
Oh yeah! Veronica…
Mary
Well, there's another song, and that's another song in which I close the eulogy when I buried my son, that's Neil Young's “Sleeping with Angels.”
Alisa
And he's wonderful.
Mary
That's the last song that he and I, my son and I listened to before he died.
Kimberly
Oh Mary.
Mary
Yes. There's a small thing to close on.
Kimberly
There’s a small thing to close on. Thank you, beauties, for being here.
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