Your daughter wears your face.
She has the same rusty-blonde hair, a true mane above her strong body, framing her tan face and arms. Her lips and forehead are yours too—smooth and wide. Grieving at the front of the church, she embodies your goodness.
In the receiving line, the man behind me says, to his companion: that’s got to be his daughter. My eyes meet his as I turn to the side, revealing my eavesdropping in a moment too intimate for politeness. I do not glance toward the altar; I have already seen your features on her perfect face.
Forty minutes prior, we mourners sat on tufted blue cushions, buffered by the hush of grief, waiting for our turn to stand in the too-long line. As soon as I saw her face, her practical stance—on flat, comfortable sandals—I thought the same: she sure favors her father.
Your daughter is at ease in her own skin, twinning the woman to her left, her partner; this makes me wonder how beautiful, how healing, another woman’s soft embrace must be.
–
Last night, while remembering you, I hung my long black silk dress from a rusty nail on my front porch, hoping that the mid-June humidity would ease it toward presentable.
I opened the lid on my box of jewels and discarded black pearls and silver, swinging diamonds and gold, before snatching up the thick garnet pendant on a gold rope chain and narrow, fragile, garnet-and-diamond ring.
Yes, I am mourning you. I would rather stay at home and write, pull weeds in the many overgrown gardens that surround my house, rest my soul after weeks on the road. But you, Jimmy, taught me that suiting up and showing up, one day at a time, is how we keep living this new way of life.
–
After shaking your daughter’s hand, I walk out into the steaming afternoon, my black patent sandals matching the funereal asphalt. The sandals are my grandmother’s, but I do not think of her until my car sits, signal blinking, at Commonwealth Boulevard and Memorial Drive.
She always said, remarking on my name: Good thing we raised your mother on Quincy Lane, instead of Commonwealth Boulevard. And now I see how—as we age, as we pass through each year, as time turns over—these heady losses mix with the joys, the shining moments.
I wanted to cry on April ninth, one long decade ago—the day my grandmother died, the day before my bridal shower, six weeks before my fated wedding. But inherited practicality overtook me, and I did as she would have done: I packed my grief away until after the honeymoon.
–
In the decade since, I have tried to weep for my grandmother. I never succeed. Even when I feel the stab of her absence, I cannot summon my tears. I locked that loss away, deep. I hope I can retrieve it someday.
I wanted to cry for you on Wednesday, Jimmy, but I was late for my gynecology appointment. I was afraid that the young resident would think me irresponsible and sentimental. So, I swallowed hard, and waited—at the same university hospital that could not save you.
–
As I turn onto Memorial Drive, my face is damp with the humidity of June in Virginia. Still, my heart is stuck: no tears in sight, floating through Martinsville, the “City Without Limits,” wondering what could have been.
When not at her writing desk, QUINCY GRAY MCMICHAEL stewards her farm, Vernal Vibe Rise, on Moneton ancestral land. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Assay, Appalachian Review, Yes! Magazine, and Chautauqua, among others. Quincy holds an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She is a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, and her poetry collection, Without Child, was shortlisted for the 2023 Steel Toe Books Prize. Quincy serves as Contributing Editor at Good River Review and is completing a hybrid memoir that explores obsession and overwork through a blend of poetry and prose.
The art that appears alongside this piece is by GRANT RAUN.
