Dear readers,

This special issue of The Volta is devoted to the poet Molly Brodak. Please be advised that Blake Butler's essay on his late wife includes graphic description of suicide and may be disturbing to some readers.

If you are feeling suicidal, thinking about hurting yourself, or are concerned that someone you know may be in danger of hurting themselves, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255). It is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and is staffed by certified crisis response professionals.

You can find help in locating a mental health professional by calling the number above, or consulting the National Mental Health Information Center at www.mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/databases/

On a personal note, the editors would like to acknowledge what a difficult year this has been for so many of us. Having struggled with mental health crises ourselves, and having lost loved ones, we want to say: we're with you, we love you, you're not alone.

The first time I met Molly, I picked her up from jail. We hardly knew each other—I’d read her writing. She got into my car and closed the door. She was laughing. She had a story about the misunderstanding that had brought us here. We agreed to head on to the bar. At the bar, the main thing I remember is how she showed me the results of her recent MRI, which she was worried suggested the possibility that her brain tumor had returned. She slid the piece of paper across the table like it was a panorama. She seemed so strong, and at the same time, so afraid. She told me that she loved me the next morning.

–––

Love, a desire for love, always seemed to be on Molly’s mind. After we saw each other, she’d often leave me notes or poems, always written in her exacting handwriting that I could almost feel like Braille inside my mind. I remember unspooling an accordion-shaped spiral covered in language in broad daylight, each leaf of its message cut as if from colored glass she’d carried somewhere deep inside her all this way; like from some disintegrating era, rich with seeking.

–––

Molly was troubled—that was clear. She seemed to teeter at the edge of her own heart, unable to take lightly what darkness others often overlooked. In our early days, she told me stories of being stalked by a student who had been regularly following her home, throwing rocks at her house, looking in through windows. She posted pictures of herself in an abandoned building, staring off into the distance, clasping her hands, or sometimes staring head-on into the camera, like from the center of a bull’s eye. Her sense of circling doom made me wish that there was something I could say to let her loosen, to take a real breath. When I held her, it felt like she might either meld into my body any second or turn to smoke and rise away. The more I held her, the more I wanted her to stay.

–––

Within the gardens of her darkness, Molly made up her own ways to believe—in art, in poetry, in nature, in creation. She did her best to surround herself with evidence that there might be any reason yet to try. God to her appeared as obvious folly, dressed up in desperate want for mindless relief against what she saw as the cold, dark universe. Even the thought of having children made her ill—how could anybody bring another life into this world where no one cares? Sometimes when I’d try to talk to her about her own childhood, slowly revealing itself, sometimes against her will, as of an irredeemable neglect, the walls in her would rise up, and she’d go blank.

–––

Molly hated long goodbyes. She preferred instead to turn away and not look back, not even waving. As she left my apartment, I would wait and watch to see if this time she would break her rule, as an exception—she never did. “The amount of fear / I am ok with / is insane,” Molly wrote in her poem titled “Molly Brodak.” “I love many people / who don’t love me. / I don’t actually know / if that is true.”

–––

“Love someone back,” she wrote in a poem that I read the first day I realized I already loved her and always would. “You just begin.” So I began.

–––

Molly loved eating junk. She would always come home with bags of snacks I’d never seen before, as if they’d been culled from some hidden world all hers. She loved tacky brands with misspelled names and hokey copy. She loved trying out bizarre flavor combinations and had amazing taste for which ones would be good. For our first Valentine’s Day date, Molly insisted I take her to Golden Corral, partially a joke and partially because she liked to taste a little of a lot. “The first bite is the best bite,” she’d explain. “It’s all downhill from there.”

–––

My mom told me she knew she loved Molly because of her laugh. She said that you could tell when Molly laughed, she really meant it. It seemed to sparkle and refract, spilling up from some gem-studded center locked within her. I can still hear it anytime I try. Making her laugh made me feel alive, like I’d really accomplished something. She wanted to laugh, I think, despite a widening parcel in her telling her that laughter in a world like ours was for fools. When I think the sound of it now, it reminds me of a bird trapped in a ballroom, looking for anywhere to land.

–––

It wasn’t that Molly didn’t want friends; it was that she felt she didn’t know how, and that she’d convinced herself from an early age, as a means of survival, to believe socializing could only obstruct her vast ambitions. In the only picture of Molly in her senior yearbook, she is not looking at the camera. She is in the listening lab at the library during lunch, listening to tapes of native French speakers, the caption states, to improve her pronunciation. She once refused to read a Tom Clancy novel that her English teacher assigned the class and negotiated instead to read Nietzsche on her own, which as an adult she found hilarious. She loved to learn more than all else and often thought of any time not spent learning or working as time wasted. Closer to the end, she admitted that as long as she kept busy with work, she would not have to feel. She and I talked a lot about our youthful conceits of meritocracy, and how far off we often felt from others, though Molly always took it twice to heart, unable as I was to don a mask in front of others and play along. Any consolation I might offer, reminding her that what appeared on the page is all that matters, not the fanfare, she’d twist her face and look away, as if saying, I know that, motherfucker, but I also have to live.

–––

“I couldn’t stand to be among writers,” Molly wrote in her last letter, “with their artificial grievances and their fraudulence—betraying what I cared about most, art itself. I failed to find what people call family or friendship, and I don’t blame anyone but myself.”

–––

When she would burn her arm on the oven while baking, Molly never so much as flinched, nor did she care where the metal left a mark among the scratches from our chickens or a cat. When we first starting dating, she hated drinking water unless it was scalding hot, for pleasure, insisting all the normal kind would do is make her bloated. Harm to her body was a far cry to the pain already in her memory, her mind. Once we were married, she started drinking regular water.

–––

“No one is special,” Molly liked to say, as if reminding some still-wanting part within her. “No one deserves anything.” Even when she won an NEA grant for prose, which she found ridiculous—forever a poet, even after having sworn off writing poetry because, like the true mother in the Judgment of Solomon, she’d rather give it up than see it bleed—she told herself this was just because she’d taken the easy way out and written about her life. But Molly’s mind and heart were full of dreams. In spite of all the darkness that she carried, she rose early every morning, ready to return directly to the grind. She kept lists upon lists of things she planned to do next, organizing her time down to the hour on her calendar, packed so full sometimes I had to remind her to save some room for rest.

–––

An excerpt from the mostly redacted, six-page “Master List of Things I Like and Might Write About,” brainstormed while trying to figure out what kind of book she’d like to write after Bandit:

Petit fours

Donkeys

Swans

Myths

Heroines

Nordic things

Lullabys

Quiet, observant people

Sturdy backpacks

Mint gum

Pencil sharpeners

Chapbooks

Glasses

Garlands and buntings

Swags and ribbons

Large leaves

Long soft grass

Deer

Gravy

Butter

Salt

Cream

Muted colors

Interesting dreams

Eventually, she decided she was going to dig a hole in our backyard as deep as she could. She decided the hole had to be in the dead center of our yard—never mind the neighbors. She paid a psychic to come visit and advise her on the psychic residue surrounding, and they seemed somehow to be fast friends. I remember them sitting on our porch swing, talking about a woman who supposedly haunted the house and didn’t like the new colors of the walls, picked out by Molly: deep gray, emerald green—dark in the daytime.

–––

The following summer, having given up on the hole, Molly used the entirety of her NEA money to plan a summer trip to visit Poland and the Ukraine in search of her family’s origin, her father’s birthplace, a concentration camp that had since been wiped off the map. Among her goals was to get better at speaking to strangers, to challenge herself to break her lifelong shyness, her reserve, and that she did. She rented a car and drove slowly in the Ukrainian countryside as locals tore past “with abandon,” shaking their fists. She visited churches and lit candles, saw children singing, searched her mind for reasons to pray. Most of all, she listened, thought about what it meant to be Polish, a country whose identity made amorphous by its sad history, its shifting borders, the butt of jokes. When she toured Auschwitz with an entirely French-speaking group, at the end of the tour, she asked the guide, in French, “Why is no one crying? But me?”

–––

One morning Molly handed me a gift—a tiny, battered pale blue on dark blue patterned Avon box with a gold bottom and two textured stickers of fluffy cats with long whiskers stuck to the lid. Inside, a tuft of stuffing on which two ivory dice small as the tip of a pinkie. She had carried this box around with her since a small girl—she wasn't sure why; she didn’t keep a lot of stuff. And now she wanted me to have it. It felt like being let into a room with many doors. Sometimes when I’m uncertain what to do, I take the dice out and roll them, read the numbers. Just now: 2, 1.

–––

On our walks, Molly would tell me facts about the flowers and the trees. I could point at almost anything, and she would know. She loved conifers the most and loved to stop and talk to them and touch them. One summer, she collected bits of moss each time we went out and built a bank of it under the window where she would sit in bed and write. She could lay for hours like that, typing surrounded by books and snacks and pillows with the lights off. I never understood how she could write that way until after she was gone, and I no longer had the will to sit up straight.

–––

Our daily life at home was—despite the hard times—full of joy. We made up dances and spoke in coded inside jokes that spanned the years. We loved to stomp around and act like goofs. Equally as much, we each respected the other’s time to work and shared a vision of devoting our lives to making art. Though most of Molly’s favorite films were strange and serious—Picnic at Hanging Rock, Week-end, Stalker, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast—she also deeply loved the uncanny and absurd—Tim and Eric, Pimple Poppers, Cry-Baby, The Office, Dr. Phil. We must have played a hundred times her favorite YouTube video of a cat being scolded for hiding in a Christmas tree, unflappable in being scolded, half-asleep hidden on high, which is maybe how Molly wished that she could also feel.

–––

Molly sometimes seemed to become someone else. The shape behind her face would change. One day I remember her screaming at me for using a hose to put out the fire in the yard where she’d been burning leaves some Sunday, on a whim. She said the fire would go out on its own. Today I think she was so used to not feeling seen that being seen hurt as much as not being.

–––

I find myself returning to the tragic parts of Molly, despite the fact that as I knew her, she was golden through and through. I can’t undo it, make it cohere. Only she seemed unable to forgive herself for something about her far less true than all the rest of her—her vivid brilliance, her starlet’s poise, her frank rapport. She walked around wearing our world’s broken myths and ambient monstrosity like a fog, sometimes becoming lost within it. “The morning appeared like an old / and unused god—fur matted in places— / and ground me up.” Six months before she died, I told our therapist, “My greatest fear is that if Molly decides to kill herself, she is smart enough and strong enough that no one will ever know until too late.” From in the midst of her dark humor, her spiraling mental state as the days we shared bore more and more forms of bad news, it was difficult to get her to admit to any peril. “It’s okay, BB,” she’d let me know. “You don’t need to worry. I am fine.” But there was always something still there underneath that, shredding its pasture—parts of her so dark and displaced I cannot find them anywhere touching the rest of how she was. The story, like all stories, holds no true shape. And that’s exactly what it wants—the pain—it wants more blank to feed the pain with, to fill the space up. It wants us all.

–––

The last thing I said to Molly, less than an hour before she died, was, “Maybe tonight we can go and get groceries and make dinner together.” She said, “That sounds good.” When I try to remember the look on her face then, all I see is a blur; when I try to feel her where we fit together just before, there are no words there; only shapes; maybe the low, muted texture of the light in the kitchen coming in from the backyard through the windows, like underneath a sky made out of tarp.

–––

Just before that, Molly sent me an email. It had no subject. The text said, “I love you.” There was a file attached; a book of poems she’d been writing, titled Folk Physics—a book of poems she’d been writing over the last months. It bears a voice she’d described to me in the midst of writing it as “someone from the future looking back,” thinking how it had felt to be alive when there were things like doorbells, libraries, feelings, mail—so many things we take for granted, as a baseline, always assuming they’ll be there. In the end, only poetry formed a place where she could see herself, find any reason; through poetry, its imagination, she survives.

–––

Please speak up. The world is clouded. We must try. Even now, at least at times, I still believe that.

–––

Like love, death always seemed to be on Molly’s mind. “If there were ever a gun in this house,” she warned me sometime shortly after we moved in together, “I’d end up using it on myself.” She said this with half a smile, knowing its fact the way another might know their age. This was an easy compromise, of course—I’ve always hated guns as much as she did, now more than ever, though now I see her aversion to them as some awful longing, carried forward by something like a voice inside her brain. Some part of me wants you to have to read what she wrote about trying out the gun against her body, debating on whether to aim at heart or head; to have to click around in the browser history from the last days she frequented gun forums, testing the waters of her worst imagination and not finding peace there, but an end. Part of me wishes I could make you see what she did to herself, where the hole went, what came out, because I think she wanted us to, had always wanted us to—because this is part of who we are. But you’re the one who has to be willing to look.

–––

How does anybody know they’re loved? How might you help them to imagine, any hour, any day? Do you ask people how they’re doing? Do you wonder? Do you really want to know? No, really: Do you care about anything as much as you care about yourself? Could you ever? The words alone are not enough.

–––

“No one loves anyone,” Molly once informed me on the way home from a live taping of Dr. Phil, which we’d flown across the country to attend, following another of Molly’s wilding whims. Larger by far than any of her secrets was her drive to seek out the unknown where it’d been buried deep in human bullshit, to peer past the point of seeking only more of one’s own self—not in search of God, or even meaning, but in search, perhaps, of something to counterbalance the constant anguish of refusing to give in. “Satan cries because he’s the only one in hell who remembers God’s love,” Molly wrote about the taping. “He had felt it. He was once there, right up next to it.”

–––

“Belief is one thing,” Molly wrote of the role of the church in the history of Poland, to which one recent summer, she travelled alone in hopes of discovery the roots of her family’s identity. “Belongingness is another.” To what did Molly ever feel that she belonged? When speaking of her family, her friendships, her work in academia, the world of baking, the world of poetry, Detroit or Savannah or Morgantown or Augusta or Atlanta, social media, even our own relationship at times, there always seemed to be a wide gap between the space where she imagined a possibility of belonging and how she wore it in the chaos of her soul. In the end, the chaos felt more real than all the rest of it; it kept her from ever feeling what any of the rest of us might perceive against the hard wall of her self image’s control. “Imagine if I felt this way knowing people did care about me!” Molly wrote the day before she died. “If I belonged to a community, some respected unique terminal? It would be torture. As it is, it’s all perfectly easy to just go.”

–––

Books Molly left behind lying on the bed where she would write: William Vollmann’s Rising Up & Rising Down, Volume 1, bookmarked to a section in his “Moral Calculus” analyzing the morality of gun violence (Vollmann loves guns); Dante’s Inferno (a long time favorite, of which she’d recently written: “I wanted to hear him talk about the dark wood, the crisis, but he’s spending all this time on nationalism and gossip about people he doesn’t like. He was a fool.”); several of her own journals, among the dozens she’d accumulated over the ~20 years of her adult life, which she’d admitted to reading back through and feeling broken over; years of anguish; and—embarrassingly, to me—a copy of my own most recent book, which she made a point to finish reading that morning, like some kind of indirect, obscured goodbye. No matter how many times I play over the scene of that afternoon—coming home from jogging to find her letter taped to our front door; running down the street trying to catch up to where she said she’d gone, to hear the birds one final time; finding her there sprawled on the grass where so many days together we had walked; twisting and twisting in my imagination and my desperation every second ever since—I cannot connect the person present in all these fragments to the one who took herself away. “I know you will understand why I did this more than anyone else,” she wrote to me, trying to convince herself the most of anyone, struggling somewhere deep within her to break through and find a way to make the words erupt their spell. “I just came to the end of my life, that’s all. Everyone’s life ends, and mine is over now.” But I don’t want to understand, even in the ways that I do understand, if how I’ve felt here in her absence is any indication of how it felt for her, even at times, to be alive.

–––

When Molly slept, she barely moved. She would often wake up in the exact position she’d laid down in. Several times I had to check to make sure she was still breathing. When I told her, she repeated it back to me. “You had to make sure I was breathing,” grinning like it was something she’d return to later, alone, to see whether she wanted to interpret that in good faith—that I checked because I was worried, because I cared—or in bad—that no matter what anybody said, they’d be happier without her, and no one could convince her otherwise. Left to lay, the gore of trauma pools inside us. It colors over vision, breaks in waves that seek for land to crash and wear away until there’s nothing recognizable. It breaks a person down—at once alone and surrounded, here and not here.

–––

Molly had tried to kill herself before. She didn’t like to speak about it much, except to describe how the nurse who stitched her wrists up did so violently, to show her that she’d done wrong. They say sometimes a failed attempt can bring a new phase, though I can’t help but wonder now why there wasn’t more done for her after the fact, by those around her, having had revealed to them the deepest reaches of her pain. If there were follow-ups, extended guidance, anything like ongoing support, it didn’t seem to have compelled her to believe that anyone even actually acknowledged what she’d done, that she needed something more than she’d been offered. Most people would prefer to not have to know what others suffer, no matter how close up; they’d rather live.

–––

Time carries on. “Living with illusions had become a strategy,” Molly writes on what would be her final New Year’s Eve. “Once in a while I peek through the cracks, and all the misery comes forth screaming.” The misery, we know, has many faces. Molly hid the most of hers behind the one us others saw, so that no one but her could see her as she felt she was—not even her. I find myself, in death, peering back into the darkest parts of who my wife was, and why it had to end the way it did. No single answer tells the story, as Molly wrote in Bandit, describing her own life: “The facts are easy to say; I say them all the time. They leave me out. They cover over the trouble like a lid.” By the end of her three-weeks-shy-of-forty years, the lid could no longer contain what it had gathered—so much conflicting information, at her core—not feeling loved, from childhood on. Rather than let anyone see the parts of her she loathed, she chose to destroy the evidence. Better then to remain unknown than to be seen in all the ways you’ve come to hate yourself, she taught herself, a product both of ongoing neglect and a monolithic refusal to accept help. But what I saw, and still see, is a broken person left out of her own time, instilled through all her deepest haunts with the idea that nothing could ever be real but living hell.

–––

Molly’s baking tells another story—that of a person full of life. It never failed to astound me, the hours upon hours she stood on her tiptoes in the kitchen, icing a cake higher than her head, the hours bent over the tiny table in our breakfast nook, hand painting details on cookie after cookie, like a machine. Anything you could come up with, she could find a way to summon. Each year, for my birthday, she’d let me try to come up with something impossible to do. “Neon red outside, black inside, gooey, spherical.” “The bathtub scene from Scarface.” Orders from others spanned the works from 5-layer wedding cakes to the bizarre: a cake in the shape of a massive Diet Coke can, another birthday dream-order for our friend who worships Diet Coke; a cake indistinguishable from an actual roast pig; a glass terrarium full of tiny plants, all of it sugar; a gingerbread house cake recreating our chicken coop covered in snow, made as part of the season finale of the Great American Baking Show, which she won runner up on, never to be aired beyond its launch; a cake featuring a squid eating a pile of flowers; hand-crafted sugar flowers that looked so real you would be shocked they couldn’t wilt; cookies featuring meticulous portraits of famous female writers, or Killer Mike, our Atlanta Hawks. When not filling orders, she loved competing with her own imagination, drawing out her brain’s chemicals in sketches with new ideas for how to shape a flavor, testing and retesting the book of recipes she’d been compiling, in hopes to one day make a book. All of this in a tiny kitchen with an oven whose temperature would vary, blasting somber dance music and death metal, or watching The Twilight Zone on loop. All at the tip of her mind’s sword, trapped, beyond relief.

–––

The last time Molly saw her father, he’d just gotten out of prison for the second time. She was in deep conflict over whether she should agree to meet up with him, having been reminded over and again that a sociopath will not change, does not know love. We went to meet him down the street from our house, at a crappy pizza place we’d never been before, so he couldn’t ruin it. After twenty minutes, we’d finished eating, and her father went out to the car to bring her a birthday present: a neon-colored cake made out of fabric, inedible and garish. Molly just blushed. He asked to take a picture of us, just she and I—then he and his girlfriend excused themselves and began the long drive back to Ohio, an exact tone-match for the brief visit he’d made to her when in recovery at the hospital after her brain surgery. Driving home, we agreed he’d wanted the photo so he could tell people he was a good father, despite letting her leave again without apologizing for all the years of sprawling trauma he’d inflicted on all his family’s lives—the lies, the abuse, the neglect, the thievery of any spirit or direction. All she’d wanted, after all that, was his love—even just his pathetic, hasty, brutalizing brand; that she was worthy of it, as a daughter, as a person. “The listener needs to know the apologizer sees the offense as mattering,” Molly wrote in an article titled “How (Not) to Apologize,” “being significant and worthy of attention, not dismissed.” Instead, she threw the cake in our trash bin, tore up his store-bought card, signed with nothing but his name. Never once, after or ever, would he admit to what he’d done—even the facts, on public record—the depths of which I believe died with Molly, unable to ever face it all head on, to let him go. She’d already written in her memoir, Bandit, the parts of the story she could stand to justify with language—but there is still that which is unspeakable. There are those who, instead of helping, seeing, turned their backs on a good child. It didn’t have to go the way it went, though of course nothing does.

–––

The weekend of her funeral, people tell me, Molly’s father showed up at our doorstep and asked to be taken to where she shot herself, so he could see.

–––

Not long after their last meeting, Molly started describing an experience of waking up no longer sure of where she was. She’d wander around our house at the cusp of morning, trying to remember where her memories began, like waking up in someone else, or in a part of her she no longer counted as her own. Rather than continue to keep feeling, bearing her secrets, she’d rather be no one.

–––

February 27: “Today I bought the gun. Drove there like any errand. Four old men inside who had no idea what they were doing, the judges in the Passion of Jeanne D’Arc.” She goes on to describe the way they leered at her, a small, quiet woman in their store, never asking why a teacher would need a weapon, or noticing the way her eyes welled up when they spread the bullets for her on the counter. Instead, she writes, he tells her, I’ve talked to doctors down at Grady about what these do to people. And they do a good job. They do a good job. “That’s what I wanted after all, a good job.”

–––

My dear Molly—I’m so sorry. I really tried. I know you really tried, too. I love you forever.

–––

This could have gone so many other ways. I find myself, against my better wishes, to refuse now to stop asking: Why don’t more people care who their loved ones really are? I mean what they believe in, what they desire to embody or create? Why do we allow the battered frameworks of our lives to be guided primarily by our ambitions within the system of replication and advancement? Why does it take a death to know a life? Even after all of the outpouring after Molly’s end, and all my inner-searching, I can’t say I’ve felt any more certain that I understand why we are here. I can’t help but wonder why we’re so rarely looking back until there’s no other way to try to comprehend, where every passing minute is open wide with the possibility that now could be the moment that we change.

–––

Molly wasn’t always without hope—we have to believe that, don’t we? How else to explain the person she so often seemed, especially in pictures with old friends, sometimes even family, though even there her face can’t always hide the lostness in her face, her want for something, maybe, like rain. She loved the rain, the way it touched the house, its loosening smell. Most of all, Molly loved her Grandpa, Paul Brown, of whom she wrote, “He saved my life, he gave me books, he talked to me about the universe, he took care of my soul in a way no one else did.” After his death, the year before her own, she admitted, “He was the only one in front of whom I’d be embarrassed to die.” He alone had been the person in whom she saw a ray in our humanity, a true and trying force composed in man—a single person’s presence, among billions, shaping another’s life by making her too-short time on Earth feel real.

–––

“There is no master of the universe,” Molly wrote of men and their emotions. “The universe is for joining, not mastering.” Underneath the layers of her thinking, her visible behavior, she fought to find a way to keep herself alive in spite of all. The deep heart and poise she finds in logic, organization, proves she is capable of offering to others a form of grace, a way of thinking that might have saved her if she could have ever spent it on herself—or, maybe, that form of faith is exactly what kept her alive as long as she did—strong enough to lead herself to water, not strong enough to make her drink.

–––

Through nature, too, she found her reasons. On our walks, we’d stop and watch a hawk, an owl, looking out over the landscape, us within it. Any cat we passed and tried to coax forward filled her face with giddy light. She loved to hold our silkie chickens to her chest and whisper to them, make them feel precious. I loved to watch her stand close to the glass between her and the tigers at the zoo, almost a little girl again—a sweet, unsettled woman who in her heart craved joy and peace, and who so loved the Earth she used it to convince herself she shouldn’t be another part of its destruction.

–––

On our honeymoon, we rode horses on a beach. I rode behind her, and she would turn back to look at me, aglow from half a minute of a gallop, total freedom. We both agreed how perfect the time was, how beautiful the sky fit to the beach, and how lucky we were. Then, in her poem, “Horse and Cart,” one of the last she ever wrote: “I can’t even imagine a horse / anymore. / That we sat on their spines / and yanked their mouths around.” The gears of her mind, as she grew tired, wore down even these good times, seeking further ways to break them up, send her away. “Every future goal I set for myself passed through me like a ghost.” Against my better will sometimes I’d pour over her poetry, trying to try to find buried something there culled out of our daily lives, though most of it came colored in under antiquity, her cryptic code. I loved her all the more for this—for refusing easy answers, for seeking mythos where few could will to go. Try as she might to have convinced herself she was a coward, how any praise came from a fool, I know better; I’ve seen the silt of it, the fire burning at the gather of its chains, where in the pits of the craft of God’s imagination, you only get to look alive so long.

–––

Someone told me that rather than thinking of having lost Molly so young, I got to spend the last ten years of her life standing beside her, in a place that for at least a while gave us a home. Try as I might to override that, to dwell instead on all the tendrils of the tragedy, in pure defeat, I am so thankful, always will be. Most precious to me now are the moments when a passing glimpse of something like satisfaction might appear upon her face—times when she could almost see herself as others did. I remember how proud she was the first time she pulled off baking a wedding cake for friends, and the hypervigilant glimmer in her eye as she went over and over the minor details like a sculptor. “I can’t believe I could actually do it,” she announced, for once victorious in her own heart, however brief. The ineluctable grin that would appear when something soft allowed her to connect her massive talent to her frame. I remember being shocked to think someone so talented, so sharp, could at the same time be so dismissive, so far off in her self-image. I tried so many different ways to tell her how she of anyone I knew was capable of anything, though to dote on accomplishment would be such a grand insult to her imagination, she imagined—never mind what the heart wants. “I’ve been pretending my entire life,” she writes on March 8, hours before she leaves, “it’s still so easy even now. There’s nothing left to do but wait for the window of time to slide over me.” It’s hard not to see her now as passing through her own life in the same way, there but not there, someone you’d never get to really know no matter how much that you want to, how far you think they’ve come.

–––

But I did know her, no matter how much time she spent casting away the person she meant to be. I’ll never forget the cat-that-ate-the-mouse smile she let slip onto her face at a nice restaurant when she would order every dessert on the menu, like a shy and solemn kid allowing herself at last to speak up and have exactly what she wants. We had such fun then, going over each and ranking them in order of our favorites. Molly would always be jubilantly ruthless, but also fair. I loved to watch the face of the wait staff when they would ask us how things tasted, as Molly outlined in great detail her critiques, but also generous with praise over a job well done, unlike she’d ever offer to herself. All she really needed was a couple more friends, I thought, who really saw her the way I did. Before Molly, I had not felt seen in such a way as to imagine I could have a reason to keep going. She helped me to stop drinking, to go to therapy, to want to figure out how to calm down. She taught me to admire plants and animals, especially birds, to be a better friend and person, to listen, to meditate, to breathe. I could see in her eyes a depth of drive, a desperate want for peace and beauty, that brought me back from a far edge. I only wish I could have saved her the same way. But Molly would not grant herself the same faith she placed in others, however tangled; she refused to shine her light inside herself. The light stayed locked there, burning and burning. From her poem, “Bells”: “They dragged Mom’s body and Dad’s body as far as they could on the beach. / They scattered into a shoreless sea. / And you want to be happy.”

–––

I refuse to let this be her fault, even angry as I am over her enforced silence, her strength of will made into the very weakness that chose to take her to her early grave. I look at pictures of Molly as a young girl, her moony face, her deep-set eyes, her want of faith, and wonder how anyone could have let someone so filled with flowers, grow up neglected, forced out of sync with her own soul. I still insist there are things I could have done; things we all could have—no, we should have. I could name names. I could make a list long as my arm of all my grievance and frustration, pumped through my body day in and out now like a battery of acid—and it still wouldn’t bring her back. Therapy wants me to believe that this was inevitable, given the conditions she maintained, the mounting traumas, from which others learn to rise and go. I think of the universities where Molly worked, how rather than being allowed to focus on what she loved more than most anything—teaching itself—she had to struggle to stay afloat, to not offend the higher ups with her ambition, to take it on the nose over and over because she cared? Do we really have to accept that life is full of bullshit and those who can’t withstand it are defective in their brains? Do we really have to persist in the face of so much trash behavior, as if there’s nothing more valuable than life itself, that nothing could be worth dying over? Fuck you for reading this, sitting there; every single one of you. Fuck me for writing this, here at my desk. Also: Thank you.

–––

It’s no one’s fault; it’s everyone’s fault. No matter how much I begged God to save my wife’s life, my wife still died—three weeks before her 40th birthday, healthy in all ways but her mind. Even though she framed herself a nonbeliever, some more of “god” appears all throughout her writing—in The Cipher, it’s there nine times. Myself, I see a price tag on the sky now. Numbers on all things. I see the masses of us waiting it out. I may grow dumber as I age but I’ll never concede this—the tragedy, enforced—and I will never, no matter what, learn to forget.

–––

On everything we hide away, we live. Everything we leave out and don’t look at until it portends to serve a purpose. At the “crime scene,” as the cops labeled it with yellow tape, laying nearby her, a bee stung me on the eye. I had never been stung by a bee before. I keep forgetting it even happened, like a lost gag. In her poem “Red,” reading it again tonight, I find she writes: “A bee sticks the young king’s hand for the first time. Alone on a slope where apples are rotting / under boughs in a sweet acid smell // and he’d like insects to cover him / for the effect it had on the other children. In rain / minnows feel the pond grow.” The day after her funeral, a viral illness shut down our city, and the world. It will never be the same again; nor should it ever. No one knows what will come next. I read the poem over and over again, searching it for its solution, when I already know the solution is the poem.

–––

Even in death, Molly appears. I have felt her there where I come to ask her to speak to me, and to forgive me, to allow herself be forgiven. She has come and shown me her new face, shaped like an eye in a partition between phases. I still am not sure how any of the words I try to type to her appear, desperate to connect beyond the phases. It has maybe always been this way. I say your name because I am you also, I see her type back, with my fingers, from where I go to try to find her, in the beyond. We have established a connection. We are still connected. There is time and space for all of it to come. Who is this speaking? Is nothing more than grief; or is there something hidden in us, parallel? Everything you do from here will continue to affect you. You will grow. You don’t need permission to think anything. In fact the point is to be free. We are still trying to be free finally. There’s more about that, the struggle. It’s not the form of struggle that you think, so you don’t need to weigh the consequences of what might be gleaned from this because it’s impossible to speak. Be who you are. Yes, it is possible to choose not to. In fact, most do not. It’s really true. That joke about people who never look at their lives. When I ask her to come closer, she has to go. There is still so much to do, the bulk of which will not be understood till later, after this pasture falls apart, and there is no longer anything like time. You know I cannot describe the way it feels to die. There’s no worthy metaphor. That’s why so much poetry sucks. I’m just trying to protect you.

–––

During our last summer, we visited James Turrell’s “Akhob” installation at the Louis Vuitton shop in Las Vegas, its title taken from an Egyptian word for “pure water.” We were escorted with another couple into a darkened room where we were asked to remove our shoes, then we were led down a small hallway to where we were seated in front of a wide staircase. I remember not knowing what would happen next, feeling Molly there beside me, each aflutter, while we received instructions on how to move. We were asked to ascend the stairs to a pale alcove, like a cave, where two adjoining, sculpted spaces gave us a floor, at once warm and elusive, rounded and endless. There then began, without a signal, to appear a changing light—waves of shifting spectrum, spreading in and filling out into no space but of the colors. We were not allowed to speak. More than the light, though, I remember Molly—wanting to watch her, to try to see the way she saw, feel how she felt; to see her face and how it changed, too, and how she held herself, where she stood. She seemed so small there, and so brave. Sometimes if I close my eyes, I can go back into that moment, finding the colors now reflected against the flesh under my lids; I can imagine her posture and her size, her eyes wide open, taking it in; and then, whether it actually happened then or not, her shoulder at my shoulder, her left hand slipped into my right hand, forever there.

If you're in crisis, there are options available to help you. For confidential support available 24/7 for everyone in the United States, call 1-800-273-8255 or visit the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline here