5:09pm 13th september 2022

One thousand, eight hundred twenty six days ago was the last time I heard your heart beat next to my face.

I miss you.
I miss you every day.
I am glad you saved me from hearing your voice that day, already altered by the stroke.
I am glad your face was already placid and sedate when you heard me telling you that I loved you. I can imagine the smile.
You were actively dying.
You knew I would be angry for not waiting and you knew I would understand.

You were dying and you saved me.
You have saved me.

You have saved me.

I wish you got to see

I wish you got to see me today
I have my new glasses
My curls; the color of the hydrangea we planted out front
and the porcelainberries that grow wild out back.
hopefully soon they will belong to someone else
someone else who will take so many closeup photos of them.

The curve of the tip of my nose
I wish you could see it.
You would kiss it.

Maybe.
Probably.
I’d like to think you would.

i do not know if I can take being loved this way.

Yesterday was my birthday.
I turned 53 years old.
I spent the entire weekend with people and missing people who clearly love me and who I love so much.
I spent the weekend

I spent the weekend doing familiar birthday things,
Going to the Lyndhurst craft fair as I have done for decades
(maybe half the artists this time, different layout, timed ticketing, all due to covid restrictions)
stressing out from all of the unknowns
(known and unknown, thank you D. Rumsfeld)
wanting so much for normalcy
(but what is “normal”, anyway? I certainly don’t have a fucking clue)
feeling so much that I have to explain even though I know I don’t
It seems like all I have been doing for the past three and a half years is explaining and explaining and explaining because honestly I
don’t understand any of it.
Just when I think I do I get caught off guard and none of it makes sense again.

I suppose I’m not explaining to others so much as to myself.

I miss all of the things that we talked about, all of those things that we never did.
All of the ways we responded to each other, all of the good, all of the terrible.
The contrast, I think,
the contrast is what’s killing me now.
i do not know if I can take being loved this way.

I can say things out loud and
I can say things out loud and not worry about feeling stupid for saying them.
Being made to feel stupid for saying them.
I can say things out loud and not worry about
I can say things out loud and not worry about being instantly and immediately criticized.
I can say things out loud and not worry about who might be on my side.

I know
I know for sure
I know now that you loved me but I didn’t then. I never knew for sure. I never knew from one minute to the next.
You would rescind and retract your love like the outgoing tide.
Snatch it away from me,
away from my

craven, grasping, grubby little paws

I want to forgive you for saying these things to me.
I want to forgive you for this so much.

How can I miss you so much and still be so angry at the things you did to me?
That we did to each other.

I told your sister once that I never really had an accurate sense of your feeling for me, not that I felt I could believe anyway. That I always thought you thought I was stupid and not enough and too much all at once.
That now I can look at the last things you wrote, and know.
I can look at all the small lovelinesses you left behind.
I can look at those things and know that they are real, they are proof.
Not soon enough to be able to enjoy with you, no.

The very desperate need to hold onto them

((craven, grasping, grubby little paws)screaming to the sky to talk to you
for you to hear me

I am trying so hard to do everything I can to be well.
I am still so
I am still so unwell but I don’t feel crushed by having to hold up every other damn thing anymore if only because I have given up on everything it seems)

I can look at the small lovelinesses that you left and see them for the huge gestures that they were. Everything is relative.

I can see the unexplored and forever unknown possibility of us becoming better to each other, to ourselves.
Knowing how difficult it was even in the very best of us
knowing I would not be this person if you were still alive
proving my progress to the memory of a dead man
wanting so much to escape your critical eye, your devastating words
and yet wanting to show you that I am okay
I am not okay.

Yesterday was my birthday.
I felt loved, and cherished, and adored, and so sad for what we never had.
If you could see how people treat me now.
If you could see how people love me now and aren’t afraid to say, to show.
I know you would, too.

ancient artifacts

black clay medallion, going into the salt

I look at this
it looks like a cookie
i wanna eat it
I look at this and I think you might have liked it.
Like really liked it.
It has that stone boulder-type look that you loved
you made your file folders and icons all have it
It has that riveted, homemade robot-type look to it
that wonky, wabi-sabi ancient technology look.
something you could have unearthed on a dig
or found in our backyard, sticking half-up out of the dirt.
You can see my fingerprints in it, for now.
You can see the literal hand of the artist.
The linen cloth I use to protect both surfaces
above and beneath.

I had to come forward this far.
this far.
Three years.
I had to come forward this far
to make something I truly think you would like.

I think so much that you would like it.

but why am I trying so desperately to please my dead husband?

Christmakah, 2016/2019

a photo of my bald, beautiful, dead husband with bows stuck to his head. a lit christmas tree is in the background.

Gary’s last Christmas, at my brother’s house in Connecticut.

We had finally become, after fourteen years together, aware, cognizant, and appreciative of most of each other’s most pressing and (otherwise seemingly) frivolous/unnecessary needs. It’s incredible to me now; just how much time we spent getting to the beginning of clarity. We had it, in the beginning, I think every cerebrally-minded couple does, but then life and mental illness and physical illness and unemployment and underemployment and medication side effects and more flavors of mental illness all dump themselves unceremoniously into the (already) deliciously complex stew that was our relationship.

Both of us stubborn, at times obstinate. Both of us eternal students, intellectuals, always needing to know more, and why. And to then debate both. Ad nauseam. Never satisfied with “author unknown” or “because I said so”. Dear gods no.

I miss watching TV with him. Needing to allow time for discussion and unpacking. Missing so much the back and forth. Not, however, missing the bad bits, and there were some really, really bad bits. Bits where I felt scared for my safety. Where I don’t doubt he was scared for his. I can be pretty fucking scary. Scared because I knew that the nastier it got, the less able I was to back away. Until he’d finally scream full-volume at me, in my face, stomp upstairs (watch that first step, it’s a doozy), and slam the door to his office. Further screaming and literal hysterical crying ensued. On both sides of the door.

I didn’t see how much danger we were in. I didn’t see (and neither did he) just how badly we were hurting each other. We couldn’t understand each other, couldn’t even speak civilly to each other. I know the truly horrific shit I thought about him (and never, ever said, no, not to him) and can never un-experience the truly horrific shit he said to me (no fucking filter on that boy no SIR). So many terrible things. So many red flags. And yet…

We never gave up. Came close a few times.

Lessons of the first 18,032 days of my life. Supernovaed the very next day. Big Bang. Everything coalescing into the shitstorm of the past 833 days and has led me to today, Christmas Day, 2019. More patient and less tolerant. More willing to give people enough rope to hang themselves with, and to then to pull the lever when I’ve had enough. No hard feelings on my end, just no thank you anymore. Unsubscribe and DELETE. No more time for negativity; my brain manufactures enough TYVM.

1056a 3 december, 2019. Antarctica.

listening to talk of “bucket lists”
places they want to visit

long ago we shared our bucket list adventures
not
actually
going anywhere, no.
but talking about them.
seemed rational, if not feasible.
I’d sent away for this catalogue
this Antarctic adventures catalogue.
came once a year and lived in the downstairs bathroom.
I mean.
we were living in our stay put forever house.
why not think about forever plans?

I haven’t really thought about Antarctica in a long time.
sometimes it creeps in
I push it away.

far away as it seems.

12:45p, Thanksgiving Day, 2019

So I never liked my last name growing up.
Schwartz
One syllable, one vowel, lots of consonants.
My sister and I were the only ones with it in grade school.
Come middle school and a whole bunch of new kids.
Lots of Schwartzes, none of us related.
I never liked introducing myself, either.
Didn’t like the sound of my own name in my own mouth.
The sound of it on the lips of others
still odd to me, strange.
Always feeling accusatory at first, second
…

I’d changed it to take my first husband’s name, Block.
Which wasn’t even his, really.
Block.
ugh.
Got rid of him and his fool name.
Back to Schwartz by default.
The second one, Aubert.
OH-bear.
(don’t marry a rebound, people. It doesn’t end well.)
“Best thing in my life right now,” I told him on the phone as I was leaving the DMV,
“is getting my own name back on my license.”
Accurate, but certainly not kind.
Unnecessary to say. I’m sorry now that I did then.

The third one, though, the third one stayed up.
Hoffman.
What if I hyphenated it?
Schwartz-Hoffman jfc no thank you that’s a mouthful.
We discussed combining our surnames,
this wonderfully wonky man of mine.
Schwartzman. Or…

Hoffartz.
I mean.
Truly.

In the end I decided that I wanted to be Mrs. Hoffman.
And since I decided (upon resolving my second mistake)
that my signature would be a mononym forevermore
signing it like
Cher or
Madonna
somehow it got easier to say my own name.
Lysa.
Like lovely.
Lysa with a Y.
(watch the furrowed brow as they try to put that together
where? where does the Y go?)

On facebook I dropped my middle name in favor
of putting my maiden name there
(maiden name! ooo how archaic!)
yet it annoys me beyond reason when people use that entire name.
Lysa Schwartz Hoffman
because that is not who I am.
I am
Lysa Hoffman.

When I berate myself it’s usually to say
“c’mon Schwartz, hustle up”
liking that name now, perhaps only as an afterthought,
but feeling comfortable in it.

so today, feeling a measure of all the things you’re supposed to feel at thanksgiving
and more content and pleased with my comfort in my evolution
I changed my name again, relegating (Schwartz)
and elevating myself to who I decided to be when I married Gary.

I finally got there, here.
Train’s not staying, though,
she’s moving forward.
taking my name with me into the night.
Because what other comfort is there
than knowing my true name?

Home. 10 November, 2019.

Gary is finally home.

It doesn’t hold all of his cremains that I have left.
It doesn’t have to. It holds enough.
I’ll scatter the rest in places he liked.

I think I can finally go, now.

clockwise from top left: day 1, raw. step 2, bone dry. step 3, bisque fired. step 4, applying wax resist. step 5, glazing before the salt fire.