I moved back to Portland, OR, in late June–after threading my way across the country with beautiful stops at the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior; exploring the lakes of the Northwoods in Wisconsin; stopping on empty highways in Western South Dakota; and walking along the Columbia River in Eastern Washington.
I expected ghosts to come flying at me the moment my brain registered I would not be going to the airport to fly back to some other home. But there was no haunting. There was intermittent heat and smoke from the forest fires that have now become commonplace every summer. There was stress and anxiety from bouncing around the state sleeping in basements, in spare rooms, sometimes a couch while looking for an apartment. But the ghosts kept their distance. I’ve had plenty of therapy since the last time I lived in Portland. That must be why the ghosts are quiet, I figured.
When they didn’t come to me, I went to go find them. A drive past what used to be my middle school and is now just an empty field next to a park (torn down due to asbestos). A walk past the movie theater I used to work at downtown where I once randomly met Gus Van Sant, Keanu Reeves, and River Phoenix. A look at Escape From New York Pizza in NW Portland, where during a winter break from college I was asked out on a date by the cutest guy. I kept expecting … a pang? A twinge? Some sort of jolt? But there was no tremor. Often, I smiled. Maybe ghosts just become sweet nostalgia at some point.
Earlier today, I decided on a whim to drive up to the cemetery where my stepsister is buried. She died in 1998 at just 20 years old from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. I was 25 and living in New York City at the time and didn’t have the money to be able to make it home for the memorial service. I think maybe I’d been up to the cemetery once in the last 28 years.
The drive up to Skyline Memorial Gardens is at points stunning. You climb a two lane road up through Forest Park-one of the biggest urban forest reserves in the country. This is a green-coated world, with ferns exploding from everywhere and moss hanging from the branches of trees overlapping above you. When you emerge at the summit of the Tualitan Mountains, you can turn onto Skyline Drive, the road that threads the spine of the hills overlooking the city to the east and the suburbs to the west.
The cemetery is only a couple miles from that turn and perched on a slope toward the west, with views of the rolling hills sprawling outward below. I had looked up where Marla’s grave was and found it easily. The cemetery was nearly silent and the clouds had begun to clear. The sun already felt hot after such a cool cloudy morning.
I stared at the stone, the sun on my neck, thinking of the story of the spring Marla passed away that I have tried to write many times now. The Little Deaths book project was always going to include a story about 1998, the year I decided I was going to leave New York City and move to Los Angeles. I had had a younger boyfriend who left the East Coast to go to school in California, too. The city felt like it was standing on my chest every day. My brain and body felt as if they had splintered. Marla’s death made all the splinters smaller, sharper.
There have been several abandoned drafts of this story, which is supposed to be the next book in the series, featuring photos from around Brooklyn by my friend Sarah, whose eye always seems to capture what I wish I’d seen. When I have re-read my journal from that era, there are very few details about what happened to Marla. I wasn’t in as close of contact with my mom and stepdad then. I am sure her illness–which came on fast and didn’t last long–left them blindsided. Add to that she had an infant child when she died and the fact my dad had died only 13 years earlier, and I am sure my mom was dissociating just to get through the days.
Marla and I had a complicated relationship. We were thrown together in the house I grew up in when she and my stepdad moved in, only a couple years after my dad was gone. I was 15 and my sister and brother both didn’t live at home anymore. Marla was 10. I was bitter, to put it mildly. I did my best to not be around much. I was probably not that nice to her a lot of the time. Once I had my driver license and jobs and a car, I was never home unless I had to be.
Looking at her headstone today it was hard not to think about what our relationship would be like if she was here at 48 and I showed back up in Portland. I’m not sure I could even imagine that. But I do want to get this story about 1998 “right.” Which really means: make it honest, and understand that not being able to grieve her death in real time or in any “traditional way” is not something to be embarrassed about now. So I will finally try to write it again years after I threw away draft after draft. Being back in Oregon feels like the right catalyst. And the visit today felt like the permission to write it differently than I once thought I had to. Ghosts be damned.
Thank you, Marla.
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