Question
by May Swenson

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

Answers

Body my house

We moved around a lot. I lived in three or four different places with my parents together, before they broke up sometime in the middle of my third year. My dad had one bleak, basement-level bachelor pad I stayed in half my weeks before he could afford a fixer-upper when I was eight. My mom cycled through a series of apartments, chasing cheap rent in the small town where a big university meant good public schools. I believe she believed that this would save me. From what?

my horse my hound

My mom bred pedigree Pekingese dogs. She bought me a puppy for my sixth birthday and one for herself a few years later. Then, finally, a third as a gift to her fiancé, my soon-to-be stepdad, Charles. On top of these small dogs, we had a big, sweet, and bounding Bernese Mountain Dog/Afghan Hound mix named Samson. Once, when my mom’s Pekingese was in heat, Samson lunged at me as I walked past him in our upstairs hallway. He snapped out of it as soon as he broke the skin above my upper lip. Where he bit through, a scar splits my mustache.

what will I do

I’m not sure how my mom and my stepdad first met, and so I’m not sure when, either. After a point, Charles starts appearing in memory — at our apartment, at his when we visit; his family starts to become her family. We drive cross-state to see his mom and aunts for holidays. I’m sent to stay for long weekends with his sisters in New York, where they live lives as-seen-on-TV (a model! a lesbian!), date people I’ve seen on TV. These sisters will be my mom’s bridal party when I’m almost twelve and she and Charles get married. At the wedding, I’ll give her away.

when you are fallen

Walking to her car from her therapist’s office one late winter, Mom slipped on a spot of ice that evening had rendered invisible. She braced her fall so that the sudden weight of her body shifted across her forearm. The spot bruised quickly, but for days she felt no pain. She felt nothing at all. A small bump rose near her elbow, and after she pressed it, after her vision came back from blackout, she went to the emergency room. X-rays revealed a break at the bottom of her right ulna. The doctors and nurses were horrified when they heard how long she had waited to see them. Relaying the story later, wearing a cast, she laughed and rolled her eyes.

Where will I sleep

Growing up, there were several periods when the weight of my mom’s illness became too much for me to bear. Once before memory, another time around five years old, then at seven, she briefly disappeared. Where had she gone? On the days I was scheduled to be at her house, my dad took me instead to a building I had never been to before, where the blocky late-’80s architecture felt too much like my elementary school. There, down a series of hallways, we found her, sleepy in the ward’s common room. At twelve, when the severest episode of her lifelong major depressive disorder began to show, I knew it was happening by how often, sleeping or not, she wanted to stay in bed.

How will I ride

When we reunite in the Southwest, summer 2012, my aunt and grandma tell me their happiest memories of Mom. All of them are from before I was born. That’s not because her life became miserable then, just that they barely knew her at all after she moved so far away — less and less as I got older. They tell me about how my mom and aunt went on a cross-country road trip with a friend and the friend’s mom when the girls were thirteen. They look for photos. When they find them, they show her young, beaming. Happy, as promised.

What will I hunt

There are many metaphors for sorrow, for the way depression destroys life. A weight, a fog, a pit. The feeling of nothing at all. One day, my mom was feeling fine, and then the next, she wasn’t. She was curled up in a ball in her bed or watching TV or taking breaks to sit at the kitchen table and smoke cigarettes, sip coffee. Doctors told her that after seven years, her medication had simply stopped working. A change in the brain, in body chemistry…she explained after an afternoon of appointments at the psychiatric hospital in which she’d soon be living. It’s easier if they can track new meds up close. She held me in a hug, shaking.

Where can I go

I was back East on a road trip while she was dying. I was going to see old friends in places I had been before — Connecticut, Boston, Maine. She was in Tucson, Arizona, where her mother had moved her at age eight from Chicago. The last time I had been to Maine was when I was eight years old and my grandma flew out to drive with my mother and me up the rocky New England coast. My grandmother had waded into the cold water with me. This time, I swam with my partner. While I was naked, swimming in a lake for photographs, my mom’s body was being hoisted into a dumpster. I wouldn’t find out for a month.

without my mount

In the days after the memorial service, before I fly back home, my grandma and aunt want to give me anything that belonged to my mother. Her bright clothes folded neatly into a shoebox. A small figurine of a lap dog reclining on a pillow, all done in felt and bristle-brush. The papercut cat she made decades ago for a family friend that somehow made its way back to the family proper in the wake of the news. I can’t take everything on the plane with me; I have to choose what to leave behind. The friend who picks me up at the airport takes me to the craft store before bringing me home so that I can buy a cheap, black plastic frame to mount the papercut cat in when I unpack.

all eager and quick

When I tell people about my mom, I worry I condense long spans of her experience and miss the details — the interesting parts of her personality, her best stories. How to account for anything as complex as one person’s life? I move too fast, because I know there’s no way to balance the narrative. Try as I might, I cannot make the facts of her tragedy mean anything outside of themselves. There is no world in which losing her — twice — signifies anything beyond the loss. When the pain comes, I let it in. I let it wreck me, then I move on.

How will I know

After my mom’s health declined rapidly, when I was a high-school sophomore, she vanished for good. Most of what happened between her disappearance and the moment when she was murdered, a dozen years later, I’m still unsure of. Over two years of sporadic phone calls, her words often unintelligible through her own laughter, I never learned much about what her life was like. Mom never talked about how she got back to Arizona or where she’d been or what had happened along the way. She barely talked about what she was doing there or where she was living or with whom. What I’ve learned since all comes from estranged family members, court documents. They’re all missing something.

in thicket ahead

If they weren’t about her, the language of the police reports and the content of her killer’s confession would have been right up her alley. She loved true-crime documentaries, horror, police procedurals, thrillers. I grew up loving those things because she shared them with me. On summer nights when it felt too humid to sleep, we would meet on the couch and solve mysteries, catch the killer on TV. When, suddenly, they all turn out to be about her — when the creepy stuff becomes real — I don’t quite know how to feel. In the court room at the start of the trial for her murderer, I’m seated in the front row, where I can only stare blankly ahead at him. Through him. Too much of her life and death was spent staring directly into fear.

is danger or treasure

While they were on good terms, my grandma would send my mom gifts. When she found out my mother and my stepdad were engaged, she started a quilt, then sent it a year and a half later, a few months before they were married. It was a wedding-ring pattern: interlocking circles joining scraps of dusty pinks and forest greens. In some spots, barely visible against the material, whitework batting stitches flourish into the couple’s names, Deanna & Charles. Mom’s been dead for four years when her sister posts photos online of a quilt she made with church friends: Bible verses cut out of my mother’s clothes. I recognize the fabric from what I left behind in a box.

when Body my good

Mom’s brother, an uncle I have never met or spoken with, finds and calls me one day. On the voicemail, he carries the same slow and soft voice my mom and her immediate family spoke in. The tone belies the urgency of the message. He has some information. It has been six years since the murder — what more is there to learn? I return his call. Man, it’s great to hear your voice, nephew. I can make out the sound of him tearing up cross-country, pacing ground somewhere in the Oregon forest. He wants to tell me that when it happened, she was good. To assure me how good she was doing, he has to tell me about how bad things had been before, when she had arrived in Oregon, at his door, after decades without seeing him. It takes him some time to say that she started using crack cocaine while she was staying with him, that that’s why he couldn’t have her there anymore. I’m so sorry, he tells me, weeping. It’s okay, I tell him. Really, it’s okay.

bright dog is dead

Hers wasn’t the first violent death close to me. Hers was the farthest. What’s the scale of violence? This was not a question I knew to ask as a child when a close family friend, the first queer man I ever knew, was murdered under mysterious circumstances. I did not think about it when a stranger stabbed my first boyfriend through the heart with a chef’s knife across town from my apartment. I did not wonder when a friend with whom I had weekend plans canceled them and all future ones by jumping out of a high rise the Monday before. I walked the parks with our unused museum tickets in my pocket, weightless.

How will it be

She’s present, but only like a ghost is. Which is what she has become. There are too many questions. Who was she? What was she like? Can you recall the shape her voice would take, launching into song or a long, winding story? Not sure. Hard to say. I am sorry to tell you that I cannot. I sense a deep disrespect in presuming to speak for the dead. She’d be so proud of you; it’s what she would have wanted. What does pride matter? All that she wanted was to live.

to lie in the sky

I meet up with my best friend from childhood and travel to the house I grew up in, or, rather, the one my mom rented for the longest time. I lie on the lawn and stare up: branches, clouds, blue. Weeks later, on the plane headed home from Mom’s memorial, I sit with the black box containing her ashes in my lap. If I start crying, silently, I don’t realize it until my boyfriend squeezes my hand in his or reaches to hug me across my shoulders.

without roof or door

The last time I saw my mom, I was fifteen. She showed up, unannounced, in the doorway of the small family restaurant I was working regular shifts at each day after school. By then, I had been remanded to my dad’s full time for a year already, which began after it was revealed that my mom’s depression was presenting new symptoms: suicidal ideation, dreams of killing me and her husband while we slept. She had these dreams in a new house bought within months of their wedding, at the same time her medication stopped having any effect. I woke up on the day of my eighth-grade graduation and tried to get into the bathroom, but the door resisted, her body slack against it on the other side. Our dogs watched my frenzy, cocking their heads and cooing low, worried sounds.

and wind for an eye

When I was still in grade school, my mom would regularly volunteer to chaperone field days, trips, and special events. She was, objectively speaking, a cool mom. She would show up in brightly colored bike shorts and band t-shirts. The fact that she was hip and beautiful somehow recalibrated the parental scale. Everyone in my class lived in big houses, got new clothes and toys, went on long vacations with both their parents. Of course I was jealous, growing up relatively poor in one of the wealthiest areas on the planet. None of that mattered when Mom showed up to help my fourth-grade class dissect sheep eyeballs, though. As she cut away the thin film of the cornea from the sphere, guiding a razor with smooth motion, we all gasped.

With cloud for shift

I worry the facts of my life fall too quickly into tragedy — or worse, into melodrama. I worry that everything I’ve known is too brutal, too hard for others to want to understand. I worry that if I haven’t gotten over my grief by now, I never will. I worry about whatever it is in me that’s trying to get over it. I worry sad stories are the only stories I can tell. I worry about what’s left after all the stories are told. In the actual act of telling, the worry lets up. I shift the weight so that it moves from being unbearable, carried alone, to a public grief. I write whatever I can remember from my mistaken childhood. I can pack and repack the box forever. Grief is endless. Do you mind taking some of this stuff back with you? It’s too heavy for me to keep holding on to it all.

how will I hide?

Everyone agrees that at the end — or, rather, just before it — Mom was at peace. Had found peace? Peace was a destination at which she had arrived. Does it matter how she got there? On a bad day, when the worst of her symptoms caught up with her, when she felt the day end before it began, she would call out of work at the crisis center, duck under an old quilt, and eat junk food, paint her nails, watch a movie. She knew when to fight against the rush of her sadness and when to hide and wait it out. Pictures I had sent of me and my boyfriend decorated the walls. At her window, she placed a small dog made out of bristle-brush. Though I held this object in my hands only briefly, I can still feel the texture of its rough coat. Like so much of everything that belonged to her, when it was offered to me, I left it behind.

Poem from May Swenson: Collected Poems (Library of America, 2013). c 1954 by May Swenson. Used with permission of the Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved.