The Flyfish Journal • The Flyfish Journal 15.3 • TO PATRICIA

“When I was in high school, my mom wrote, directed and starred in a one-woman show based on the weekly humor column (called ‘Afterwords’) she wrote for our local paper. The show opened with my four brothers and I doing a bit in which we replicated the chaos of an evening at home while Mom, a single parent, did her best to maintain order and keep from throttling us. She had a keen eye for melodrama. This photo is an outtake from a promotional shoot she did

Though I only took up flyfishing later in life, my mom, Patricia, always liked to take credit for my love of the sport; in her telling, it had something to do with taking me to rivers when I was young.

That may or may not be true, though I’d defer to her. What I can say is my interest in the way words can be strung together to create stories is more directly tied to her. She instilled in me a love of books from an early age, and throughout my childhood there was always an overflowing bookcase next to my toy box. Overflowing bookcases remain a constant in my life.

Though early in life I only knew my mom as just that, “Mom,” by the time I hit middle school and decided I was going to be a writer, she had rediscovered her own long-dormant creative impulse and she became a writer as well. She worked as a small-town journalist, wrote a humor column, got a master’s degree in poetry, and published her work in various literary magazines. For the last decade or so, she hauled around binders of poems, arranged and then rearranged into the ideal order for a manuscript she wanted to publish, but never did.

Grief manifests in surprising ways, often when you least expect it. Like Chloe Nostrant, whose gallery in this issue tangles with a similar loss, I’ve found myself frustrated by my mom’s passing. It was too early, too soon, too painful and debilitating, too emotionally and mentally draining. Her grandchildren didn’t get enough time with her. I didn’t get enough time with her—not only quality time, but also time to heal the wounds we’d inflicted upon each other over the years. It’s a simple fact and source of cynicism we learn from an early age—life just isn’t fair.

But I’ve also come to believe that death is death, whether it comes at 64 or 84, and not a thing to treat with revulsion or distrust. Except in extreme cases, I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a “good” death or a “bad” death. Though short by some standards, my mom lived a full life. She was an inveterate high school partier; she served in the Army; she lived abroad; she climbed mountains; she raised six boys who were hell-bent on breaking every piece of china she ever owned; she fought her way to the other side of more than one abusive marriage; she struggled with her mental health; and she greeted each day with a smile and an open heart, fiercely loyal to those she loved.

I miss her, which is an oversimplification; it’s far too complicated to be contained in those three words. But all the same, I miss her.

You can’t flyfish about grief any more than you can dance about architecture, but you can write about it, or make art about it like Nostrant did. The writer and critic John Gardner wrote: “Art begins in a wound, an imperfection—a wound inherent in the nature of life itself—and is an attempt either to live with the wound or heal it.” In dealing with that wound, that grief, you pick and pull it apart, look at it from different angles, and come out the other side with, if not less grief, then at least more familiarity with it and thus a greater sense of its shape, its scope, its contours.

And this, for me, is where flyfishing comes in—or running, or rock climbing, or taking a long walk in the woods with your dogs. When you know the shape of grief, you can carry it. And when you can carry it, you can take it to the river with you, hold it up in the morning light, and let it sift from your fingers into the current, like ashes meant for an ocean far away.

The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.3

TO PATRICIA

Issue List

The Flyfish Journal 13.4