Beauty Tips for the Bereaved

This week I sort of broke my own heart so that I can finish my book.
"I'm almost done!" I have been saying this for months, but now I'm really about to be finished and it's terrifying.
I think there is a part of us that is forever standing awkwardly in front of our high school locker hoping that we don't make a fool of ourselves in public. We are so afraid that someone is going to make fun of us that it keeps us from striving for greatness.
"Stuck up" was the worst thing another girl could call you in seventh grade. "Who does she think she is?" So to protect yourself you get smaller and stop taking risks with what you wear or what you say. I have learned to do this, unlearned it and had to find it again many times in my life.

"What if I try this thing and I think what I'm doing is so great but really it's not and everyone is embarrassed for me except for that girl who hated me in junior high who is thrilled because now she can make fun of me for failing?"

A lot of times the people in our lives who criticize us don't even have to say anything-we do it for them. I can hear my ex-husband's voice in my head making jokes about me to his friends. "You think your ex is crazy let me tell you about mine..." He says, and they all laugh.
But of course-that's fiction. Maybe he has better things to talk about. Either way-
I shrink.

But-
not anymore.


This is what despair feels like-
now here is how I dragged myself out of it.

In order to tell that story I had to stop protecting myself from the voice of my ex or that mean girl in junior high and be honest about everything I have always kept hidden.
I'm publishing all of my secrets online-in a form that will be easy to download by every potential employer or Match.com date I will ever meet.
"What would happen if you stopped pretending and let the world see who you really are?" My Dad wrote to me in the last letter he sent to me before he died.

Everything in my life stopped to write this book. Every relationship I have has been ground in it's teeth-no matter how cold my feet are at this moment I have to publish it. There's no other choice now.
Also-a couple of months ago my dead father's ghost reminded me not to take myself so fucking seriously.

I think it's going to be like skydiving-the anticipation is horrible but once you jump you are free from fear.


This is the part of the story where I publish the first chapter of the most awesome book you have ever read and once you get to the end of this excerpt you will be in a state of panic, wandering around your living room wondering when I am going to publish the rest of it already because doing anything other than finishing that girl's book seems so boring and stupid now-  you're welcome.

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                                                            Beauty Tips for the Bereaved






                                                                       Part One
                                                                        Pearline





It could have been any day. I chose a Tuesday. I had forgotten my lunch and the cafeteria was serving Sheppard's pie. I downed a bottle of Advil instead, just to see what would happen. After experiencing no ill effects, I decided to go for a walk. I left the high school grounds, searching for peace, something that would make the pain that was rising in me recede. Not finding it, I continued to walk, across town, through yards, over fences, across railroad tracks. I never felt tired, I never felt whole. By the time I walked through the front door I knew what I had to do. My mother was so angry she couldn’t speak for a minute.

"What is wrong with you?"
I shrugged. "I wish I knew." 

“Go to your room.”

Once the door was shut I pulled out a Ziploc bag full of stolen codeine, a half empty bottle of stolen Jack Daniel's and a handful of Tylenol just to be thorough.
As I lifted the handful of pills to my mouth and swallowed them with burning gulps of whiskey an overwhelming sense of peace settled over me. I picked up an X-acto knife from my craft table and drew slow hot circles into my wrists, deeper each way around, watching the red blood bead and stream. It was so pretty; I wished that I could replicate that color in oil paint.
I felt a moment of deep sadness for my Granny Pearl, then let it go.
"See you soon" I had said the last time I hugged her goodbye.
Now I am alone.

The decision to commit suicide doesn't arise solely from a place of madness. It's deliberate. It's calculated. Perhaps you begin to notice that each second ticking by feels like a slow weight, your heartbeat sending signals of agony to your brain. It isn't  just that you decide the future won't be any better, it's that the present has become so unbearable you cannot stand another second of it. You see no avenue of deliverance but death, so you take what is available to you.
People who have never experienced clinical depression are blind to this logic.


"If you are so depressed, why not run away? Why not hitchhike to Borneo and help some orphans or hop a greyhound and start a new life? Why choose to die?"

The explanation is simple. You can't escape your own chemical stew. You can't just walk away from your own mind, which is so very sad and sick. Sometimes the only way to stop the pain is the sleep of an overdose, a flying jump from a building, releasing your blood to fall into a puddle on the floor.

"You have to tell yourself a new story" My father had said on the phone a few days before. "This is your movie, kid. You decide if it's going to be a comedy or a tragedy."



"I guess I'm not a very strong person," I thought. "I'm sorry, Dad."

I stood up, clicked out the lamp and crawled into bed. I wasn't used to drinking so much so quickly and it filled me with euphoria.

"I should have written a note," I thought. "Something clever Dr. Tyler could have read aloud at the assembly."
I couldn't think of anything. I could barely keep my eyes open. My arms and legs were rubber. At the last minute I grabbed an orange felt tip pen and wrote-

"I should never have switched from scotch to martinis" and dropped both pen and note to the floor.
"There," I thought."It's not original, but Erica will get it."

I closed my eyes then, slipping one last time into my earliest memory. It had always come to me as a dream that dissipated, shy as smoke, with the smell of bacon and coffee coming under the crack in the door each morning.

I stand between my mother and father in an endless, moving field of West Texas grass, stretching my arms up to grasp their hands. I am little. As the sun sets in front of us it grows larger and brighter as it nears the horizon until it fills the whole sky. Suddenly it drops and lands in front of us with a heavy thud that I can feel in my teeth. With growing wonder, all three of us run toward it. It is unbearably bright. I shut my eyes but I can still see its orange light through my eyelids.

“It’s a dying star.” My father whispers to me as he holds me on one side and my mother on the other, shielding us from the light. Somehow I knew then that if I opened my eyes they would both disappear with the light, leaving me small and alone, the wind moving through grass as grey and empty as the sea.

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I killed my first rattlesnake when I was six years old. I was playing in our front yard when I heard the sound. In West Texas, even very small children know that sound, like seed husks in a dry bag. Venomous reptiles lie beneath rocks, curled up in old flowerpots, behind rusty sheet metal. They seek cool wet places to wait out the sun. Living creatures scatter into holes and crevices during the day to escape it, and you learn from the time you start walking not to venture into small, dark places. Sticking your hand underneath a pile of boards could mean a quick encounter with a nest of black widow spiders or a sleeping rattler. People and animals move slowly, the air so hot and bright it’s painful just to breathe it.

I had been sitting in the dry grass in front of the house braiding my dolls hair and waiting to hear the sound of my mother's tires crunching up the gravel road.

"Mommy is baking Teddy Bear Bread when she gets back," I whispered to my doll, who didn't respond. The cicadas buzzed at a chainsaw pitch, falling silent then catching their song again as they would all day from spring to fall. One of the dogs began to bark and soon all of them were jumping against the fence behind me and growling.

"That squirrel must be back," I thought.

Then suddenly the animal and insect symphonies cycled into a moment of perfect silence. I heard a rattle shaking somewhere near my left foot. I resisted the urge to jump up and run, took a deep breath and scanned the grass around me.

“You hear that sound you stop,” I remembered my father's voice. “Find out where it’s coming from and back away. If you can’t get away then look for a stick or a rake to use against it.”

In my Dad's opinion the best education you could give a child was Wilderness Survival Training. I could build three different types of shelter and peel a cactus for drinking water before I could read.

Scanning the high grass I saw it curled up around a water spigot that stuck straight out of the concrete foundation of the house. I could feel the snake looking at me, tense, its rattle moving too fast for me to see. I backed away slowly as I'd been told to do, my legs made of fear, and ran to tell my Dad.

I found him splitting firewood behind the still. As soon as he saw my face he began to move with the deliberate calm of authority in the presence of danger. I ran straight into him, struggling to get the words out through my sobs. He held my shoulders tight.

"Breathe," he said, staring into my eyes. "Be still and breathe."

After a few seconds passed I told him about the snake. He nodded once and stood up, pulling his long brown hair back into a ponytail. I watched him walk over to the shed and back with the garden hoe.
I shook my head as he handed me the long-handled rake.

"You're going to take care of this one." he said.

I backed up, preparing to run into the neighbors cornfield that stretched to my right across the dirt road. He caught my shoulders and kneeled in front of me, holding me in place. He continued to focus his eyes straight into mine.
"Listen to me," he said firmly. "You feel afraid."

I nodded. He let go of my shoulders so I could wipe a line of snot on each sleeve. We were still for a long minute in the sun, kneeling man in front of a small child; one of my braids had come loose and blew every which way in the wind. I could see a hawk draw a slow circle in the flat, cloudless sky.

"You're right to be afraid." he said again. "That snake is real. You have to be a warrior. I don't mean you always have to fight, but you have to conquer your fear. Move through it with open hands but hold your strength inside you like a fist."

I understood. I always did, even when everyone else raised their eyebrows. My dad always talked this way. I made a tight fist with my left hand as he had shown me to do when I was afraid, closing my eyes and gathering strength as I raised it in the air.

"Good Girl. Are you ready?"

I nodded "yes" grasped his hand and walked back to the water spigot.

The snake was still there. As it heard our approach the rattle began it's furious stacatto warning again. I froze.
"It's just a baby, kiddo!" he laughed, his eyes still serious."You can take of it. No problem."

He handed me the flat-bladed hoe and moved to stand directly behind me, his fingers curled around the handle above mine. I held my weapon tight, took a deep breath and raised it high in the sun, bringing it down hard as close to the snake as I could. At the last second I closed my eyes.

I felt blade click into spine and heard the bell of its contact with the stones underneath. When I opened my eyes I saw a baby rattlesnake leaking a thin stream of blood. Its belly was pale and soft and twisted up in a curlicue. It smelled like rotten garbage. Dizziness buzzed through my limbs like lightning. I began to laugh, my body on fire with adrenaline as I jumped up and down with my father.

"You did it!" he yelled, grinning as he caught me up in his arms and spun me in circles. "Don't tell your mother" he said as he put me down.
I stole another glance at the dead snake. All of a sudden I felt sorry for it.

“Let’s bury it” We dug a hole in that same garden where I had pressed seeds into the damp earth and watched them grow into flowers and sweet peas and mint that wafted through my window at night. I had planted gumdrops and Reese’s Pieces and spit slivers of my own fingernails into the earth hoping to see a tall vine bearing hard little crescents to chew on. I wondered if the snake would grow baby snake plants. In my mind’s eye I could see tiny rattles hanging like mustang grapes at the end of a long vine.




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I woke up to the sound of my father singing in the kitchen. With my feet I searched the floor beside the bed for my bunny slippers and padded silently down the hall in the dark to find out what was going on. As I neared the yellow light of the kitchen I saw my father waving a knife and moving his lips to the Grateful Dead coming from the tape deck on the windowsill. His friend Rick stood over a body wrapped in garbage bags on the long kitchen table. I squinted, but couldn't make out who it was. Clenching a cigarette in his teeth, Rick gripped and pulled at the weight of a shoulder as my Dad sliced open the belly, lifting a handful of slick guts into the smoky air. The head turned towards me, eyed me briefly and lolled back into a shoulder. Blood filled up the sink and piles of glistening parts lay on the dirty linoleum. I started to cry.


“Hey kid, come over here! I'll teach you how to skin a deer” He waved me closer with his knife. I shook my head and backed out of the kitchen towards the porch, where I knew my mother would be smoking a Virginia Slim in the dark. Instead, through the screens I saw her standing in the cornfield looking up at the sky. I walked out and through the rows to stand next to her, breathing in the apple scent of her waist length hair.
" I wish he would just do that in the barn" she said and sat down on her knees next to me, cupping both of her hands around one of mine. "It's going to take me a whole day to get the kitchen clean again."
"Soon the corn will be higher than you and we will have to find another place to watch the moon." she brushed a curl of my hair behind my ear with her index finger.


When a periodic breeze rippled through the field its rustle drowned out the sing-song mating call of the toads that lived in the creek behind our house. It felt like hearing the landscape breathing in and out.

"My grandmother used to tell me a Cherokee story about a Rabbit who became so angry at his mother-in-law that he threw her up to the Moon and she stuck there. Can you see the Rabbit in the Moon?”
I stared up at the full moon, searching for the rabbit. My mother squeezed my hand absently, I knew that she was a thousand miles away. It had always been that way. Even when she smiled the sadness played out in her eyes, I felt it in my mother from the crib, even before I could speak.

"I see it," I lied.




I studied them, cataloguing every detail I could pick up from stray conversations, mapping the landscape of their history. I observed the inner workings of my parents with the same intense hyper focused attention I used to apart the clocks and toasters that my Dad brought home from his scavenging trips at the local dump. If there was something that didn't make sense I couldn't stop turning it around in my mind until I figured out the answer.

"What if I got eaten by a bear?" I wondered, rearranging my pillow and unable to sleep."How would my soul get out of its stomach to go to Heaven?"
and
"What, exactly, is gravy?"
and
"Do my parents love each other?"


They met in the cafeteria of the Tarrant County Junior College. My mother noticed a young man sitting at a round table passing out brochures to recruit volunteers to work at Our House, the drug treatment center he ran down the street.
"He had that long brown hair and beard- he looked just like Jesus," my mother told me later.
"I was doing dry runs on impregnating the whole world back then," my Dad said.
The man who would be my father handed her a pen, and she signed up.

Half of Fort Worth filled up the churches every Sunday morning, while the other side slept off another bender. My mother's people sinned, my father's lived and breathed the Word of God. Although her tiny body was stunted from polio, his mother beat him regularly from her wheelchair with her cane and promised a much worse punishment from the Devil if he didn’t behave. His father, who would die of rheumatoid arthritis when my Dad was a teenager, let his wife run the show as long as she turned a blind eye to his Saturday afternoon cockfights and the little flask he kept in his trouser pocket. As my dad rubbed liniment into the legs of his handicapped parents, his mother read from the Bible and spoke in tongues. Physically she suffered, trapped in her strange, twisted body. Spiritually she soared as she awaited the rapture.
"Be prepared at all times for the End of Days," she had told me the previous Christmas."It's coming, I tell you what. The Lord is going to judge us all."

When he turned sixteen my dad began to rebel against his mother and her oppressive religion. He skipped prayer meetings to smoke reefer with his friend Rick. The longer his hair grew, the lower his grades dropped and the more belligerent he became. He was already beyond her control, she just didn't know it yet.

"High school is a drag. I hated it." He told me on the last Christmas Eve I would spend with him for seven years "I don't know how you stand it."

When his school participated in a series of nationwide intelligence tests administered by the Navy, my dad filled out the answers to hundreds of questions every fall without ever being told what the tests were for. One day in the spring of his senior year the meanest teacher in school called him out of class.

“ His name was Odie Adar, if you can imagine. He had been a Marine. He was famous for sneaking up behind the boys with the longest hair and pulling it. He was a real bastard.”

Odie Adar told my dad to follow him to the parking lot. They got in his car. Odie drove him to a barber and forced him to get a crew cut. Back in his office, my dad sat fuming in his chair.

“ Why did you do that to me?”
“ You are wasting yourself.” The teacher said.
“ What you mean, man?”
"The results from all of those Navy tests finally came in. You scored in the 98th percentile. You're one of the smartest kids in this country."

My dad was embarrassed. He looked at the floor.

"What the Hell is wrong with you boy?" Odie Adar stood up and leaned across the desk towards my Dad
“ Keep your hair short and you can do anything you want. Anything.”
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Despite the pleas of Odie Adar, my dad grew his hair long again, and moved out. He drifted awhile, but when he pulled his VW van into downtown Austin and saw a naked man directing traffic in the middle of a four-way intersection he knew he was home.

He got a job as a park ranger at the Mount Bonnell nature preserve by the lake. One afternoon he picked up a book he saw laying face down in the mud and began to read. It was 1984 by George Orwell.

The story kicked off rockets of paranoia somewhere deep in his brain, it’s circuits already wired long ago for such a revelation. Everything clicked into place, and he went home and packed warm clothes, a little food, a sleeping bag and a map. His plan to survive the end of the world was to walk to Mexico.

"You don't speak Spanish" I will tell him years later as I hold his hand and wait for the Hospice nurse to arrive with his pain pills. He will cough, struggle for a long time to clear his throat and then continue.

"I thought it would be safer there, less infrastructure. I'd just finished reading 1984. Seemed like it would take Mexico a little longer to get organized enough to pull off a fascist police state"

He traveled for three days, avoiding the highway for country roads and following dry creek beds. On the third night it froze. His feet began to crunch on frosty grass; he could see his breath clouding in front of him as he walked. His pack was heavy and he was tired. He made his way to the interstate, intending to hitch a ride.
When a car pulled up he ran to it, dismayed to discover that it was a cop.

“ Shit,” he thought.” I’m going to jail.”

The policeman told him to get in so he did. They drove for a few miles in silence, finally pulling into an elementary school parking lot. It was the middle of the night. No one was around.

“ Come with me.”

My dad followed the cop; dread growing stronger with every step. He was led to the boy’s bathroom. The cop pulled the door open.
“Get in there.”

He did as he was told. He walked in, dropped his pack and turned around to face the policeman.
“Look,” the cop said,” This ain’t much, but it’s awful cold out there. You could die. Block the door and get some sleep.”

“ Thank you.” My dad bleated, eyes blinking back tears.
“ It’s nothing. I’ll drive by every hour or so. You won’t hear me, but you’ll know I’m here if you need me. Try to get out before the kids come in the morning.”

“ I will.” He slept curled up on the cement tiles, blocking the door with his body.
His enthusiasm was waning for walking to Mexico when he woke up in the morning so he decided to let fate decide.

“ I will get in the next car that stops,” he thought as he walked” If it’s heading North, I will go home to Fort Worth. If it’s South, I’ll keep heading to Mexico.”
An hour later, a car stopped for his outstretched thumb. It was going north.

Back in Fort Worth my dad sweet-talked his way into a job running a drug crisis center called Our House. Anyone in trouble could knock on the door of the rambling two story house and be taken in, no questions asked.

“ We never wrote down anyone’s name. The police were always hassling us about our records, but we wouldn’t do it. In three years, not once.” Try to stay off the grid if you can.

Everyone who came in had to deposit their drugs into a stolen mailbox that was bolted to the floor of the big front room. The police came once a month to take its contents, baggies of multi-colored pills and vials-always noting that somehow there was never any marijuana inside the mailbox.

“ People came by, they wanted to blow their brains out, they needed to hide from the cops, whatever. We listened to them, played music, made it safe for them. Then they went on their way.”


If my father had followed the advice of his guidance counselor and kept his hair short, I believe I would never have been born. My mother had just converted the entire Diamond Hill football team to the Church of Christ. They held prayer meetings before each game and she was on fire to save some more souls. A treatment center would be full of people who were spiritually lost, and they might be more receptive to hearing the Lord's message if they were coming down from a bad trip. She signed up to volunteer to save a few souls, but she followed my Dad back to Our House for stir fry because of his waist length honey brown hair.
My Dad had a way with the ladies.

“ I was always trying to make it with her but nothing ever happened.” He will tell me one day, reaching his shaking hand out to hold mine. I will be sitting on the edge of a hospital bed trying to memorize him, capture as much of him as I can to carry with me. ”I remember her sitting across from me one night by a campfire, she looked like Joan Baez-waist length black hair, those cheekbones she got from the Cherokee side-you got those." He will gesture, as if to touch them, but he is too weak.

"I think it's the only trait I got from her" I will tell him, as I place my hand on top of his thin grey hair "That and the writing."

"That's because you are both excellent liars" he will smile, then begin to cough again.



When she found out she was pregnant, despite my fathers objection to involving the Man in his love life, they got married and moved to a one room cottage in the country. Tired of struggling with the police and weary of fixing people only to see them come back broken, he would work a vegetable garden instead. His uncle owned the land and agreed to let them live there for a while as long as he didn't have to pay for any repairs.
My Dad was sitting on the front porch on his last day at Our House watching the sun go down when a woman jumped in front of a bus across the street from him. It swerved and missed her. She continued to stand there, waiting for the next one.

“ Oh Shit.” he thought and called out casually “Ma’m? I just made a big pot of coffee in here and it’s too much for me. I wonder if you’d come over here and help me drink it.”

She turned slowly and focused on him saying nothing.
“ Do you take cream and sugar?” He yelled.


She nodded, made her way onto the porch and sat down. When she reached for the coffee cup he saw the blood running down her fingertips, pooling into the cracks of the wood.

When I think about my dad trying to exorcise such terrible despair from the strangers who blew into his life, I wonder if it prepared him for what would come. When his daughter would begin an education in madness and he would begin his in grief. And nothing he could think up to say would make any difference at all.

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