I am on fire.

On Lamictal, controlled burns, Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery, and small deaths.

"Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened." - Rainer Maria Rilke

This feels like a metaphor, I write my friend L. I am on fire. 

The tips of my fingers are red and raw and stinging from Lamictal, and I–red and raw and stinging–am googling images of people with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a rare and potentially fatal side effect of the drug, one that my psychiatrist did not warn me of when she sang "Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Lamictal" while I sat crying in a Publix parking lot.

Now I text my friends from my bed in a panic, all while watching a video of an LA teen whose face "melts off" due to a severe reaction to the drug. 

Eventually steadying myself enough to get up with Aoife, I walk to the kitchen and reveal to M my hands are burning, then spread out my fire engine-red fingertips like the tips of a vulture’s wings, lifting them higher and higher and higher as if the higher I raise them, the more visible the blood and the more proof I have: I am alive, yes. But, also dying. 

M confirms the redness is there and the burning could be the medication. Or, that it could just have been the cold. 

Not only are my hands on fire, our home is freezing. 

The day prior, we had contacted our landlord, who contacted a technician to check on our furnace, heat.  

The technician determined our house was once zoned and that someone has ripped a thermostat from the wall. 

After this determination, he—a man in his 70s—crawled unwillingly under the home’s crawlspace, only to find we did not have an electric heater as our landlord (who bought the house) supposed, but a gas heater, and that the gas heater was not only not hooked up to a gas line but some parts—the pipes and hoses and ducts and valves, an amalgamation of rubber and steel—were simply missing. 

"Uninstalled," he said before turning to leave. 

That night, four space heaters arrive on our porch like four wicked crows. Black and accordioned. 

The heat: not the first death experienced this year. 

This year there has been the death of good housing, the death of reasonably priced eggs, the death of a nation understanding of the meaning of genocide, the death of infinite small towns washed away by flooding, the death of proposals and projects and budgets, the death of souls posting soullessly on LinkedIn, the small deaths of my friends who rise again and again to work, marching off to cubicles or their home office— their own personal deathscapes—all in the name of money, which is in turn a byproduct of greed, which is in turn a kind of death. 

As a new mom, there has been the death of the extra hour of sleep, the death of a well-Swiffered floor, the death of beautiful plating, the sinking death of a pumpkin purchased but never carved.

These deaths go unnoticed, slipping silently from the table of living as though a blanket tugged off a sofa in centimeters by the teeth of a small dog. 

Instead of editing manuscripts, I play with my child. 

Instead of playing my child, I decided to make a lemon pasta, zesting a thick-skinned lemon into a white porcelain bowl.  

Instead of sending the lemon pasta recipe to family, I share photos of women smoking to my feed. 

The editing a death and the playtime a death and the concession a death. 

And, yet, in my feed: an image of a very alive Kate Moss, her eyes rounded in sunglasses, her wrist braceleted, a single finger ringed–ashing a cigarette outside the backseat of a car. 

Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, walking a brick path in her 18-century pink satin dress and powdered wig—a large pink plume in her hair, a cigarette to her mouth. 

Tippi Hedren with perfectly quaffed hair having her cigarette lit by a crow on the set of The Birds.

Joan Didion in a long-sleeved dress and sandals, standing hunched against a Corvette Stingray— left arm tucked under, a cigarette strangled in her right.

Life’s disappointment tapered to a point. 

How can one speak to everything being lost and the losing happening so rapidly and at once as to be undocumentable. To feel so alive and joyful and yet swallowed limb by limb. First, a leg. Then, two fingers, a wrist, an arm. Even, the ballet slipper-pink polish of one’s nails. 

When I was sick I used to bargain with a God I no longer believed in. I would give away my hand, I told him, if he could excise my illness, unfreeze my stomach, make me well.  

Now, as a mother, who is still very much sick and also losing, I only want to be Betty Draper ashing into an ash tray, then abruptly loading her son’s BB gun, shooting the neighbor’s pigeons from the sky for a moment of peace.  

Hope is surely a thing with feathers, but then there is also Chekhov's Gun.

A few weeks ago, I found myself (regrettably) on the Fort Moore Spouses Facebook group, asking for help in finding Stride Rite shoes, which I’ve been promised has something special called Soft Motion Technology. (The loss of decent shoe stores when we moved to western Georgia also a kind of death.) After posing my question, I watched it tumble down, down, down in a spiral of death, another post—focused on fearmongering—bubbling to the top. In the post, a woman warned the other spouses (mostly women) of local predators. The woman insisted a man followed her in the local Walmart aisle to aisle, that the man snapped photos of her, her children, that she reported it to the staff—who (gasp!) refused to help her. The other women write in: this has happened to them. In Walmart. In Publix. In Target. At Dillards in the mall. The other women write in: it’s time for her to get her carry license. Their husbands have guns. They have guns. Their children know how to use guns. There must be a gun. 

Safety or perceived safety: a death. Trust in fellow man: a death, too.  

In my favorite John Wieners’ poem “Not Complete Enough,” he writes of his mother and the cigarette he’d find so often in her hand, which he refers to as the “red spot” in her hand or the “red thing” in her hand. A mother whom he, in turn, mirrors—red: 

…I would open the door at night
And see the red thing in her hands,
And now a man
I have the red thing
And it is the last thing 
I do. 

I think now of a cigarette I once held, a woman I—at one time—was. 

That quiet moment when it was just her, an ember ringed in ash, and everything being quietly carried away. 

A minor breath, contained release.

Reverie and reverie’s lingering. 

Just the smoke and the smoke going. 

The last cigarette I smoked was my last year in Western Massachusetts. The bar’s window wreathed in icy fractals, as if spread by a hot breath, D and A and I pulling our jumbled coats from the stools, covering our glasses with coasters, flagging Bowen the bartender we would be stepping outside. 

The night then was a blue-black dissolve and flurries floated down like stars, peppering our sight. The red-brown of the nearby church, its spotlit sign and rectory path, our favorite boxelder and its wild hair: blurred. Once outside, someone found their lighter, and our dispersed bodies caked. One by one, we hovered mammoth moths over the rasping flame—drawn to the rub of the wheel, the momentary spark. Our free hands try to capture it, cupping and raw.

I wonder how I put that cigarette out. I assume I dropped it on the flurry-dusted cement, smiled at A or D, then twisted my leathered foot over it to ensure it was dead. 

I earn now for the space those hands were holding. 

Brackets around silence.

Walled nothing. 

While attending school then I had lost something I would never get back: my health. Then: I had said, Fuck it. What else is there to lose. 

What did Nietzche say? "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering."

Also: "One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while still alive."

Last month, M and I perused the gift store for tchotchkes–stuffed koalas, necklaces harboring brass dragonflies, and oddly, ash trays of amber color—at a “Safari’ in the middle of Alabama. The “Safari” involved us being strapped to our vehicles and our windows being rolled halfway down and us holding out buckets of grain pellets and flowering lettuce to a series of equine-like animals. As we fed the animals—terrified of their tongues and teeth, Aoife smudged her nose against the car’s windows, confused by the oxen, camels, the blue-tongued giraffe. 

Afterward, I could only think about the blue of the tongues, the amber of the trays. 

Afterward, I made a list of famous scenes, photos of people smoking. 

Marilyn Monroe lighting up in The Seven Year Itch, the embodiment of glamor.

Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction smoking while quizzing Vincent Vega about his life. Mia exuding nonchalance, coolness, Magnetic and dangerous at once.

James Dean through the rain in New York City, collar upturned, cigarette hanging from his mouth. 

I think these instances: also a death. 

At one time alluring. At one time magnetically dangerous. At one time: the image of youth.

Recently, a fellow workshopper wrote that my latest essay on maternal ambivalence failed to manage a complex landing, left her feeling adrift. 

In writing, we are told the point is to take your life’s mess and taper, which makes life no less messy. 

I think a coffin is an acceptable form of a conclusion.

I think a cigarette is an acceptable form of a conclusion, too. Good enough for Betty Draper’s season curtain call, the cigarette: a perfect substitute for what has been lost, or the very act of losing. 

Slow, methodical—a controlled burn. Dying: an art, like everything else. 

But, oh, as a mother, how quick the artful, considered parts go.

I hoard recipes and then not use them. 

I buy books and then not read them. A Pillow Book, Calamities, The Italy Letters littering my desk like a graveyard.

In the cold of our rental, my red fingers tax my wool throws and cashmere wraps, once beautiful things that now smell unworn, stale. 

Three weeks ago, our family stepped into Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery—dripping in Spanish moss and light and rich with Victorian symbolism. The site of a former plantation, we paused at Bonaventure’s elaborate mausoleums, angels with broken wings and bare feet, and talked about how beautiful the beds of flowers and trees must have been that once masked the smell: rosemary, camellias, honeysuckle, southern roses, lilies, sweet olive. 

At the end of our tour, we stopped at the family plot of long-forgotten poet Conrad Aiken. At the gravesite, we learned how Aiken’s father killed his mother—known for throwing extravagant parties and causing financial stressors—then himself in the early 1900s. Aiken, a boy at the time, was sent north then for schooling, only returning to Savannah as a man. 

According to lore, Aiken liked to sit on the Wilmington River—in and around the cemetery, writing and watching the ships come in. One day, while looking out on the Wilmington’s waters, he spied a boat with the name Cosmos Mariner painted on its bow. Delighted, he turned to the day's shipping news, logs to see where it was headed. Its destination became part of Aiken's own epitaph, mythology: Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown. 

Under the dripping light and Spanish moss, I thought what an extraordinary tale and also what an extraordinary loss. 

Not Aiken’s, but his mother’s. 

A loss so big it needing filling—with parties and brimming cocktails, tinsel. 

"In the end, we all become stories,” Margaret Atwood said. But who becomes a story in dying, and who becomes part of someone else’s story? Didn’t the latter, too, lose? 

When I rock Aoife to sleep at night—the night brimming in darkness, I often caress her head with my hand to show her she is loved, then purposely run it over her nape’s hemangioma to show her that it, too, is loved. 

Now, with burning, red hands, I do this thinking of Wiener’s poem:

I wd handle 
the details,
two pillows, a window open, and the door
a crack so we could hear
her if she fell out
of bed.

When I take an arm away from my child, feel for a bed—its details, I find none. 

Here, in the darkness, there is no complex landing. 

We are together and alone, in place and adrift.

I kiss my baby’s head, and it is the last thing I do.