Communing With the Dead

Patrick Wolf, one of my favorite musicians, recently released a new single, “Dies Irae,” that imagines what he and his family could have done together to celebrate their connections in the days before his mother died of cancer. She was a painter, and he asks her to “show me your unfinished painting; What bird here were you intending?” Later he suggests she go dance with his father in the kitchen: “You’ve been his religion and his joy … it’s later than he thinks.”

My own mom died when I was 22, 29 years ago in January, and I didn’t really get to say goodbye to her. My spring semester at UC Berkeley had started a week before her death, so I’d said goodbye to her in the hospital, but it was a casual “see-you-soon” hug and farewell, not the proper goodbye I wish I’d had. 

Wolf’s new song has me imagining what I’d want to include in a “last good day” with my mom. Granted, I’m much older now and the things I think I’d want aren’t necessarily the things my 22-year-old self would have enjoyed, but I think I can find some common ground with my younger self here.

Some ideas: 

• Listen to music together, maybe the Traveling Wilburys or Pink Floyd or Twisted Sister (yes, she was into all of them). 

• Eat some ice cream

• Tell bad puns and stupid jokes and laugh

• Sew together, quilting or embroidery or something along those lines

• Go through family photo albums and see if she’d tell me stories

• Ask her to tell some favorite memories from my childhood

• Hug a lot

Last week, I went back to UC Berkeley to visit the library and watch a DVD that they have in their collection, a short documentary, “Shellmound,” made by UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Alum Andres Cediel. I haven’t been on campus in years and going back there is like digging back through everything I went through in my brief two years at the school, including my mom’s death. 

“Shellmound” is about another kind of digging: The construction of the Bay Street Mall in Emeryville, on the site of a massive Ohlone shellmound, a burial ground for thousands of indigenous people who lived in the East Bay before European settlers arrived. I knew about the burial ground when D. and I lived in Oakland in 2001 and 2002, and the documentary makes it clear that hundreds, if not thousands, of indigenous people are still buried beneath the shopping center. I may write or talk more about the documentary at another time, but I encourage everyone to watch the trailer here. 

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As I emerged from the basement at Doe Library where I watched the film, I encountered displays of experimental books, including one by artist Stephanie Gibbs entitled “Amissa Anima: A Book of the Dead.” According to the text accompanying the display: 

Stephanie Gibbs, Amissa Anima: A Book of the Dead (Los Angeles Stephanie Gibbs, 2016), printed paper, glass bottles, and mixed materials in cloth-bound box, N7433-4.6447 A83 2016, Art History Classics Library, University of California, Berkeley.

An artist's book is an experience. Here, Gibbs has created a kit to commune with the dead, featuring items ranging from historical photographs to a candle and Ouija board. The kit also includes bottled emotions. "Hope (kindling of)," for example, is represented by a matchstick. Gibbs imagines her audience not as viewers but as participants. This work also demonstrates how ephemeral artists' books can be. Items such as the candle will be consumed when put to use. The collector must make a choice: engage in the full experience intended by the artist and use up some of the artist's creation, or imagine the experience and keep the creation pristine.

Following my experience with the documentary, and appearing among these recent thoughts of death and mothers, this display felt as though it were speaking to me directly. Just like this artists’ book, life is so ephemeral. You can engage in the full experience, or you can try to keep it protected under glass. It won’t last either way you approach it, but one path will leave you with fewer regrets and resentments (shards). 

Memento mori

Let me tell you about the first time I saw Death.

Not the grim reaper, not the rider on the pale horse, but the petite goth in the black tank top, back-combed hair and ankh necklace from the Sandman comics, penned by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Mike Dringenberg. I think about her often, and I’ve been thinking about her almost nonstop since sexual abuse allegations started coming out against Gaiman last year. 

Back in 1994, I was living in a student-run co-op at UC Berkeley and began bonding with a British exchange student, Alison, over our shared love of Tori Amos. She asked if I’d read Sandman; Tori namechecked Gaiman in “Tear In Your Hand,” off her debut album, even before the two became friends. When I said no, Alison pressed the first collection of issues into my hands and told me to come back when I’d finished reading it. 

Graphic novels aren’t usually my favorite way to enjoy fiction, but I was sucked in by the gothic, surreal, moody atmosphere of the stories. And even though the Sandman/Morpheus/Dream is meant to be the central figure of the series, I immediately fell in love with Death, Dream’s older sister, when she appeared in issue #8, “The Sound of her Wings.” 

By the time this character entered my life, Death had already made her mark. I lost a close friend when I was 16, followed by my mother when I was 22. A friend of mine’s mom died when he was 13 and I was 20. Another friend took his own life. Any adolescent sense of immortality had long been stripped away. It felt as though life could end at any moment and, if there was any personification of Death out there, it was indifferent at best, and possibly cruel in its timing.

Sitting in an urban park while Dream feeds the pigeons, Death offers her brother wise advice, but she never pulls rank or condescends. And when she does her job — that is, turning up at the moment of death and escorting people to the afterlife — she is kind and empathetic. In one issue, as she’s arrived to collect a man’s soul, she tells him, “You got what anyone gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime.” Somehow, she makes it sound fair. 

“People feel as pleased to have been born, as if they did it themselves,” Death tells Dream in the 2022 Netflix adaptation of Sandman. “But they get upset and hurt and shaken when they die. And eventually, I learned that all they really need is a kind word and a friendly face, like they had in the beginning.” 

A moment later, she gathers an infant into her arms and tells it, in the gentlest voice, “Yeah, I’m afraid so. That’s all there is, little one.”  

Seeing those scenes, I thought: If that’s what death is like, if she’s the one who comes to take you across, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

I was deeply grateful to Neil Gaiman for giving me this character, who I needed so badly. And for giving me the space not to hate, fear or resent death, even as I experienced more losses. 

But my fondness for this character, Death, became more layered and complicated about 25 years ago, when I grew close with someone who strongly identified with Morpheus. Like Dream, my friend was tall, charismatic, shrouded in darkness. I started to feel like the Death to his Dream, the petite, compassionate and patient older sister. And I felt, too, like the Tori Amos to his Neil Gaiman, particularly in the lyrics from her song “Carbon,” where she sings,

“Get me Neil on the line
No I can't hold
have him read
‘Snow, Glass, Apples’
where nothing is what it seems
‘Little Sis, you must crack this,’
he says to me,
‘You must go in again
carbon made
only wants to be unmade.’”

Things began to unravel from there. I brought my friend to see Tori Amos perform live, and when she got to “Carbon,” tears of resonance streamed down my cheeks. But when I turned to my friend, he only gave me a blank look. We weren’t in this moment together; I was in it alone. Soon he started keeping his distance. He engaged in unethical and predatory sexual behavior. Cutting myself off from him was one of the most painful things I’ve ever done.

There’s no way I could have known then that Gaiman, too, was engaging in unethical and predatory sexual behavior (to be clear: Gaiman’s is many orders of magnitude worse). Everything looks different in hindsight. But in hindsight, perhaps the echo between my friend and Gaiman was a clue. 

In the decades that followed, Gaiman’s version of Death continued to feel like a companion, an ally. “On bad days, I talk to Death constantly,” Amos wrote in the introduction to a collection of comic issues focusing on the character. She meant it more in the way of serious depression, but I felt it more in the way I was drawn to graveyards and history, particularly the histories of forgotten dead. Other personifications of Death — Hades and Hel, in particular — turned up in my dreams, though that’s a story for another time. 

I fell in love with Death all over again when the Netflix adaptation of Sandman came out. Kirby Howell-Baptiste infuses her with a grounded warmth and wisdom that makes her feel more real than ever. The fact that a longtime friend of mine (one I met 30 years ago through Tori Amos fan communities) is a writer and producer for the series is a serious bonus. And I’m excited for the next season, due out later this year. 

When the truth about Gaiman started to emerge, I gave away most of my copies of his books. But I’ve held onto the Death stories: “Death: The High Cost of Living” and “Death: The Time of Your Life.” But now I realize those stories may be tainted in other ways. In addition to the sexual abuse, Gaiman also liberally appropriated ideas from other writers, especially Tanith Lee, whose Flat Earth series underlies Gaiman’s entire Sandman premise and pantheon, and whose “Red as Blood,” a retelling of Snow White, is the blueprint for “Snow, Glass, Apples” — the story Amos sung about in “Carbon.” (I’ve loved Tanith Lee’s fairytale versions even longer than I’ve loved Gaiman’s work, but never made the connection.) 

It’s hard to know what to do when something so important to you turns out to be constructed from lies, mirages and charm. I stuck by Buffy even after it turned out that her creator, Joss Whedon, was a creep on set who paid lip service to feminist ideas while firing an actress for becoming pregnant. But again: What Gaiman did is many orders of magnitude worse and, for the most part, I want to make sure none of my money ever gets into his hands again.

And yet, some of the same framework applies. Like “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer,” “Sandman” is a series made by hundreds, if not thousands, of people: Cast, crew, writers, directors, graphic designers and so many others. They deserve to have their work seen and appreciated. They deserve money and accolades for their hard work. They don’t deserve to have that work tainted by Gaiman’s actions; it’s unlikely any of them knew anything about it. 

As for Death and me, I’m not sure what the future holds. I’ll have to keep thinking about it. These kinds of touchstone characters rarely stop being important to us. There’s a way in which I don’t want to let Gaiman and his horrifying actions take her away from me. And I still hope that she — or someone just as kind — is there for all of us when we take our final breaths. 

Slow-stitching my way through 2024

I did a lot of good things for my nervous system in 2024. I tried craniosacral therapy. I went through listening exercises as part of the Safe & Sound Protocol. I continued with psychotherapy and different kinds of massage. I started somatic tracking meditations. I did a lot of pilates, and began regular cold-water dunks/swims. 

Also, at least once a week, I engaged in a little slow stitching. Slow stitching is both an art form and a mindfulness practice, in which you hand-stitch and embroider something, letting your intuition and focus guide you, not worrying about perfection or the end result. It’s about the relationship between the stitcher, the thread and the cloth, the feel of the textures in your hands, the beauty of the finished work (or, sometimes, the fact that it’s hideous but you had fun making it). 

Late in 2023, I lucked into discovering Kathryn Chambers’ YouTube channel, where she posted prompts for weekly stitch-alongs throughout 2024. She also opened a really kind and supportive Facebook group for people participating in the prompts, and it was beautiful to see each one interpreted so differently. I did most of the prompts, skipping only a few, but I stitched at least one “page” each week to put into my stitch journals. I filled four journals in 2024 and started a fifth. You can flip through each one with me in the videos below: 

• First journal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUF7VDakxgk&t=1s

• Spring 2024 journal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZAC-9xzqWo

• Summer 2024 journal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pKoa0LzPWU

• Fall 2024 journal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVheBHbUZrY

I enjoyed trying so many different approaches and techniques, but there were a few things I returned to, over and over. Weaving blanket stitches into a kind of web was one. Creating circular portals or doorways was another. Often, I combined these two. Sometimes it felt like creating a boundary of protection around myself, and a way through. Other times it was a way to quiet my mind. Sometimes, it was both. 

Portals

I could talk about why this kind of stitching is great for my nervous system: The experience of being in a flow state, the benefits of bilateral activities on the brain. Many people have written or talked about how a slow, laborious process of working with textiles by hand can be incredibly healing. 

I can’t say that I was necessarily “healed” by this practice (I’m not even sure what that means), though I’m grateful for the extended periods of calm it granted me. It’s also just satisfying to make something pretty out of scraps, something you saved from another project, maybe something you hand-dyed, maybe a bit of a favorite but worn-out garment. You can make deeper meaning out of that if you want to, and many people do, but you don’t have to. 

I have had a stash of embroidery threads for a long time. I did a lot of embroidery when I was in high school, including embroidering one of my fictional characters, a red-headed vampire, onto the back of my denim jacket. When my mom died I absorbed all of her leftover embroidery threads and still have some of them (I never would have purchased so many shades of brown on my own). There were times this year, using her threads, when I felt like I was stitching with her. It made me wish I could actually go through Kathryn’s prompts week by week with her. And in some ways, I was.

A lot of people have told me they find my stitch posts on Instagram inspiring, and that makes me feel amazingly good. I’d love to inspire you, too. If you’d like to give slow stitching a try, follow some of the resources I’ve linked to, and let me know how it goes!

'Wind in the Wires:' A love story

Photo by Ernest Brillo on Unsplash.

I remember clearly the night I started falling in love with D. 

It was a December night, a few days before Christmas, at the end of 1994. I was back from my first semester at U.C. Berkeley, and he was hosting his annual holiday party for the teens and young adults who used local BBSes — a dial-up precursor to the early Internet. 

Someone had brought multiple reels of magnetic tape, the type used for recording sounds before the invention of smaller cassette tapes. And someone (possibly the same person, but I’m not sure) had strung the tape between the streetlight poles along the cul-de-sac where D. lived, and for quite a ways down the street, somewhat like a festive holiday garland, but made of brown plastic. 

D. was stationed by the front door, so that every time someone came in, he could play an audio recording of another friend saying the name of our local BBS network in a comically sexual voice. It was cued up on his computer and he would play it over and over again throughout the night. 

At some point I walked by him, and was struck by how attractive he was. We’d been friends for a few years already, and I’d been in a couple of romantic relationships with others in our community. But on this night, for some reason, I was drawn to him in a way that hit me like a sandbag to the gut. 

“Oh, shit,” I said to myself. 

I went out the front door and started walking.

It was a breezy night, and the wind blew through the garlands of electrical tape, making the most unearthly noise. It whispered and rattled and stuttered overhead as I took long strides, as if I could outrun this new feeling. The suburban winter darkness was cold and quiet, aside from the song of the tape echoing along the streets. Somehow, it was the perfect soundtrack for my mood. 

This wasn’t even the first time I’d fallen in love with someone in that house. I’d met someone who felt like a soul twin at the prior year’s holiday party, and I was still nursing the grief from losing him. And as I walked through the neighborhood streets, I passed the weedy lot where I’d hidden, trembling, from another ex who’d chased me through a nearby parking lot, screaming at me to grow up. I was on a break from romance; I couldn’t bear to have my heart shattered again. Besides that, I’d been in relationships almost nonstop since mid-1989, and I wanted to know what it was like to be on my own as a young adult. 

Eventually, I came back to the house. Although I don’t remember the rest of that night, I do recall that, soon after, D. and I started writing each other long, rambling emails, getting to know each other as I held strong to my self-imposed moratorium on dating. But by June 1995, we were together. And we’re still together, almost 30 years later. 

---

Patrick Wolf, photo by Ingrid Z, courtesy Patrick Wolf’s Flickr page.

I discovered Patrick Wolf’s music in 2007 almost by accident. A former music-publication editor invited me to a new social-media platform where folks mostly talked about and shared new music they were into, and someone posted a video of Wolf playing a new song, “Bluebells,” on a grand piano in his apartment. “Lucy, remember, the smell of that fall: The fires, the fungus and the rotting leaves.” The beautiful, melancholy song hooked me immediately, but the album it was from, “The Magic Position,” wasn’t out quite yet, so I bought the previous one instead. 

It was called “Wind in the Wires,” and the title alone drew me in, reminding me both of wild landscapes and of that night under the shuddering electrical tape. I loved the album’s dark, brooding mood right away, and began listening to it several times a week as I took long walks through the wooded canyon near my house. 

In Wolf I felt like I’d found a kindred spirit, someone who loved being alone in nature (I only found out recently that, as a city boy, he found such untamed spaces terrifying, until relatively recently), someone whose emotions were so huge that it took an album’s worth of melancholy lyrics and minor-key instrumentation to express them. 

Even though I was hiking through parks in San Francisco, when I listened to “Wind in the Wires” it felt as though I was walking alongside Wolf, who returned again and again to the vistas of Southwest England, and Cornwall specifically, on “Wind in the Wires.” I’d visited Somerset and Cornwall, in 1995 and 1999, and had glimpsed seaside terrain similar to places he described in his songs. 

In “Teignmouth,” referring to the spot where the Teign River in Devon empties into the English channel, he sings: 

On the night train
From the city to the south
I saw spirits
Crawl across the river mouth

There’s also a deep sense of wanderlust on this album, a longing to explore, and one I share: 

There's a house by the rails that I know
In a valley on its own
With trains and bones and birds in the yard where the wild nettles grow

x

A blue map of Cornwall
Up on a bedroom wall
Drawing a line
I'll be following soon

x

While I'm asleep
My spirit crawls out
Of this belly button
And goes down to the sea

To gather the wind
The wires and the shore
To wander the hills
Like a day gone before

x

I'm leaving London for Lands End
With a green tent and a violin

The title track of “Wind in the Wires” was inspired by a couple of things: One, the title of a film that Wolf saw in a local newspaper, and two, the sound of the wind blowing through the power lines near the Hayle Towans, also in Cornwall. He sings: 

Wind in the wires
It's the sigh of wild electricity
I'm on the edge of a cliff
Surpassing comfort and security

Again, when I heard those words — for the first time, and every time after — I thought of D. and that December night when I took my turbulent feelings for a walk along the suburban streets, the wind in the electrical tape shuddering overhead. Even though Wolf’s song is quite different, describing a feeling of anger and rootlessness, it still felt like he’d seen into my heart and made something kindred with it. 

This wild electricity
Made static by industry
Like a bird in an aviary
Singing to the sky
Just singing to be free

“Wind in the Wires” turns 20 in February 2025, and I feel lucky to have known and loved it for most of those two decades. A newly remastered version is coming out early next year. Keep an eye out for it and, in the meantime, I hope you give the original a spin. 

I don't know how to make you care. But I need you to.

Humans are designed to care about each other deeply. Without empathy, generosity and cooperation, we wouldn’t have gotten this far as a species. 

But when we are told to see any human, or group of humans, as something else, and when we act on what we are told, we lose a huge piece of our own humanity. 

I can’t remember when I first learned this idea: That dehumanizing one another robs us of our own humanity. But I have been furious about it ever since. 

I grew up in a society that taught me, or tried to teach me, that many others are sub-human; I don’t need to tell you who they are. Every day, I find myself slamming up against these messages, and reaching beyond them to recognize how connected we are. How what happens to you is happening to me, too. 

Covid-19, a tiny virus, understood this better than we do. It emerged in a single city and quickly spread around the globe, killing at least 7 million people worldwide. It burned through all of our lives, disregarding our perceived differences. While many of us go around pretending we don’t need to wear masks and take precautions to protect each other, more still die. 

Not protecting each other in a global pandemic makes us less human. But that’s just one example.

As a journalist, I’ve written about what homeless people, immigrants, rape survivors and the disabled and mentally ill experience in this country; the discrimination Black and brown students face in our public schools; what it’s like for people living in oppressive regimes; and so much more. I always try to describe how we got here, how the current systems and people in power created these situations. I’m supposed to be objective, but in truth I’m desperate to make readers care about people who are different from themselves. To think about what it would feel like to live in someone else’s situation.

And every time I see people blaming a group — whether it’s unhoused people, or people undergoing a genocide — I feel like a failure. 

I don’t know how to make people, particularly the people in power, care about Chez and his community, living in tents beneath Highway 101 in San Francisco. And I don’t mean pretend to care, to talk about forcing them into shelter and drug abstinence. I mean recognizing that housing, food, healthcare, toilets and hygiene are basic human rights — and if someone is living without those things, it means society has failed them. 

I don’t know how to make people care about Shaaban al-Dalou, the young man who was burned alive in an Israeli bombing attack on the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, or about the 43,000 others killed in Palestine in the past year, all of whom were beloved by someone. 

Or how to make people care about the increasing violence in Lebanon, or the specific attacks on journalists throughout the region, or my friend Kareem, reporting on it all from Beirut, risking his own life to bear witness and write the truth, even while his colleagues are slaughtered.

I don’t know how to make you care that politicians push us to hate and fear one another. 

I don’t know how to make you care about the immigrants in your community, who went through such horrors to get here and just want to make their neighborhoods better. 

I don’t know how to make you care that the petroleum industry has turned its back on all of us, and left us to clean up its messes, whether it’s vast wildfires in Australia, California, Oregon, Washington, or Canada (the fire zone grows ever larger), or devastating hurricanes 300 miles from the coast. 

And I don’t know how to make you understand that when you turn away from these things, you are not only letting them happen, you are losing a key part of yourself. 

It’s not like I am revealing any great mystery here. Almost every religion and spiritual path on this planet teaches us how connected, how interwoven, we are. How much we need each other.

I don’t mean to say that you should only care because it harms you, personally, when you see someone else as less worthy, less deserving, less human. But you should care. And it does harm you. 

I know it’s too much to feel. It’s too much to bear witness to it all. 

But when we turn toward it, and we feel how unbearable it is, that’s when things begin to change. 

Lost SF landmarks I discovered while writing 'San Francisco's Forgotten Cemeteries'

My book “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” just celebrated its first birthday on August 28. It’s full of so much information and trivia about the city, but I learned many more things that I had to leave out because they didn’t have anything to do with burying the dead. Here are a few of those discoveries.

1. The Bay-side waterfront looked very different before the 1850s

Before San Francisco’s first civil engineers began sculpting the eastern shoreline of San Francisco, downtown, North Beach and South Beach looked very different. This map from the David Rumsey collection shows what the shoreline looked like at the time, along with the imagined blocks that would go in once the Bay was filled. In many spots, the Bay reached most of the way to Montgomery Street, which is now half a mile from the waterfront. This is why there are so many ships buried beneath the streets of downtown SF — about 40, experts estimate. 

2. Downtown was full of sand dunes

An 1853 map of San Francisco, showing large dunes along Market Street, especially near Second and Third streets. Courtesy of the David Rumsey map collection.

If you know what downtown San Francisco looked like when settlers arrived, it’s mind-boggling that it ever became an urban center. It was wet, swampy, and riddled with massive sand hills. The design of today’s Market Street was hampered by a number of sand dunes, particularly a 60-foot dune where the Palace Hotel is now (at the intersection with New Montgomery), and a second dune nearly 90 feet tall near Market and Third, about 100 feet away. Between 1852 and 1873, the sand was slowly removed and used to fill several spots along the waterfront, bringing the Bay shoreline closer to what it looks like today.

3. There was a lagoon south of Fort Mason where people did their laundry

An 1857 map showing the Washerwoman’s Lagoon. North is to the right, while south is left; the land marked as “San Jose” is Point San Jose, now the location of Forth Mason. Courtesy of the David Rumsey map collection.

The first time I saw the Washerwoman’s Lagoon on a map of 1850s San Francisco, I was baffled. I didn’t know if this was a cute nickname or a reflection of a real practice in Gold Rush-era SF. Turns out, it’s the latter. Apparently, it started when some Chinese residents established a laundry business at the lake near today’s Gough and Greenwich streets. Before long, others were taking advantage of the free water and “they would make a Sunday outing of it, taking their families and their picnic lunches and, in wheelbarrows and dump carts, their washing. After scrubbing and rinsing it down by the shore, they would hang it on the chaparral to dry, and then that night would take it home and iron it,” according to FoundSF. 

This is, in fact, how Laguna Street got its name. And just a block or so south of the lagoon was the city’s first Jewish Cemetery (between Franklin and Gough, Green and Broadway). 

4. There was an actual peat bog near 7th and Mission

An 1852 U.S. Coastal Survey Map of San Francisco, from downtown to Mission Bay (on right). Mission Plank Road is the long diagonal that clips the edge of the swampy wetlands at today’s 7th and Mission. Courtesy of the David Rumsey map collection, by way of FoundSF.

We might associate peat bogs with Scotland and Ireland, but San Francisco had one of its own, which complicated plans to build a wooden road from downtown to the Mission District in the 1850s. They decided to build a bridge on pilings to get across the bog, but “the first pile, forty feet long, at the first blow of the pile driver sank out of sight, indicating that there was no bottom within forty feet to support a bridge. One pile having disappeared, the contractor hoisted another immediately over the first and in two blows drove the second down beyond the reach of the hammer … there was no foundation within eighty feet,” according to J.S. Hittell’s “History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally of the State of California.” This and other swampy areas in the city were “forty to eighty feet deep, covered by a crust of peat moss eight or ten feet thick.” Read the whole, wild account of trying to build the Mission plank road here. 

The San Francisco Magdalen Asylum register, 1857-1872

Notes from the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum register.

[Mrs. Swords was] taken by her husband May 20, 1863. Before leaving, she left a letter for No. 96 (Mary Augusta, 14, of Kentucky), to whom she had taken a great fancy, urging her to leave even if she had to jump from a window, and promising her a home. Her husband afterwards tried openly to force the girl out but failed.

These lines were written into the resident register of the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum sometime in 1863. Mrs. Swords (no first name given) entered the Catholic-run institution with her 12-year-old daughter, M., on May 9. Within 11 days, Mrs. Swords, 32 and born in Ireland, took a fond and likely maternal interest in Mary Augusta, whose last name may have been Binhammer, but it’s often difficult to decipher the nuns’ cursive. 

The register I’ve been slowly transcribing — a copy of the original kept in the Sisters of Mercy Archive in North Carolina — begins in 1857 and ends in late June of 1872. It documents the names of 663 girls and women (and, likely, trans and nonbinary folks) who stayed in “The Mag” during those years, whether they left after a few days or dedicated themselves to the Sisters of Mercy for life. 

For those who haven’t already heard me talk about this or read my 2022 Mission Local article, a group of Catholic nuns belonging to the Sisters of Mercy came to San Francisco from Ireland in the mid-1850s and started the Magdalen Asylum. It was affiliated with those in Ireland, the UK and Europe, whose mission was to “rescue” so-called “fallen women:” Sex workers, the mentally ill, those addicted to drugs and alcohol, and unmarried women and girls who became pregnant. One note in the register from 1863, regarding 7-year-old Mary Neval, describes her “premature depravity” — a local Right Reverend was likely blaming her for sexual abuse she suffered at home.

Ellen Gray, 18, entered the Mag on Aug. 1, 1858: 

Went to her parents May 1, 1859. Respectably married to a German July 1859. Her infant was adopted by a lady recommended by F.P. Magagnotti. 

Eliza Monaghan, 46, entered on Aug. 29, 1859: 

Her mind was never perfect, by degrees she became quite (this word is unreadable) and was transferred to the Lunatic Asylum July 9, 1864. 

On Oct. 29, 1858, Mary Campbell, 27, and Elizabeth Reilly, 16, ran away from the Mag “disguised in men's clothes.”

Mrs. Hanson, 26, entered on Jan. 5, 1862: 

Went to the county hospital, died in St. Mary's Hospital Sept. 28, 1863. Her eldest boy sent to Orphan Asylum, the second adopted by Mrs. Kelly, Sacramento, and the baby by a lady here.

Later, the asylum also opened a prison wing, taken in teen girls who’d been convicted of minor “crimes” including homelessness, sex work, petty theft, “incorrigibility,” or “leading an idle and dissolute life.” I’ve already transcribed nearly 200 articles from local newspapers of the era, describing many of these teens and their circumstances.

Like the institutions across the pond, which have become more commonly known as Magdalen(e) Laundries, the San Francisco facility processed industrial laundry, along with providing embroidery and other sewing services for businesses and the public. The inmates served as unpaid labor, working long and back-breaking hours while the income went toward supporting very institution that kept them confined. 

San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum operated until 1931, changing its name to St. Catherine’s Home in the early 1900s. I have another register from the facility’s final years that I hope to transcribe eventually. The Irish Laundries operated a lot longer; the last one closed in 1996, and there were women alive at the end of the 20th century who remembered living in them. Who were kept as prisoners and abused, whose children were taken away from them and adopted (or sold) to other families, and whose shame kept them from admitting they’d lived in these places. 

The Catholic Church has often made it difficult for families to find out more about their ancestors’ histories in these places, or for families separated by adoption and arguably trafficking to reconnect with their biological kin. We’re fortunate that the Sisters of Mercy have held on to these archives and records, and make them readily available to the public, so researchers like me can shed light on their operations in the U.S..

I’m hoping that, by sharing the names and brief stories attached to them, I can help the descendants of these patients and inmates learn more about them. 

Lines listing Mrs. Swords and her daughter, M.A., on the left; Mary Augusta’s name appears on the right. What is her last name? Binhammer?

Mrs. Swords hoped to rescue Mary Augusta from the Mag, but Mary Augusta stayed with the nuns. She took her first communion on July 22, 1863, and received her Black Badge, a recognition of her dedication to “reforming herself” and also being a good Catholic girl, on July 22, 1864. In January 1868, when probably after she turned 18, she was sent to Mrs. Denis Jordan, likely to become a household servant, as many Magdalen residents and inmates did. 

I haven’t been able to find solid records on her after that. Not being sure of her last name doesn’t help, although many of the people who lived in San Francisco before the 1870s stick around for long. I hope she had a good, happy life. I wish I knew.

Two more books (on disability) I'm excited to read in the coming months, plus some bonus books!

Early this year I wrote about 11 books I was excited to read in 2024, but there were a few I either inadvertently left out or didn’t realize were on the horizon. I’m here to rectify that now.

Above are the covers of two books I’m VERY eager to read. Both deal with the subjects of chronic illness and disability (subjects I experience and think about a lot) in new and complex ways.

1. How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom,” Johanna Hedva (Sept. 3, 2024)

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism―a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies―we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal―from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness―relying on and fueling ableism―to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.

2. “The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human,” Sophie Strand (March 4, 2025)

At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore? 

In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers readers a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness—a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networks she begins to see as a metaphor for the profound connections between all species and the earth. Grounded deeply in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, each moment of this far-reaching narrative snakes its way through the multi-layered ecology of the land around us, from the stunningly powerful pollen of a phlox plant to the unexpected beauty and wisdom of the woodchuck. 

The Body Is a Doorway dives into the murky waters of sickness and trauma, as well as the resonant challenges and joys of friendship, young adulthood, first love, and fertility. Throughout, in precise, sparkling language, it explores questions both personal and universal: Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending? Is there something wilder and more symbiotic beyond narrow ideas of well-being? 

And some others I inadvertently left out in January:

1. “From Elder to Ancestor: Nature Kinship for All Seasons of Life,” S. Kelley Harrell (out now): “This book explains how, through personal introspection and engagement with the living world around us, we can cultivate our unique way to elder well.”

2. “You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music,” Glenn McDonald (out now): “Spotify's former data guru charts how music's digital revolution affects fans and musicians.”

3. “The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing,” Andrea Warner (out now): “An engaging exploration into the enduring popularity of Dirty Dancing and its lasting themes of feminism, activism, and reproductive rights.”

4. “Karaoke Queen,” Dominic Lim (Sept. 17, 2024): “A man hopes his drag queen alter ego will help save a karaoke bar and give him a second chance at love in this joyfully queer rom-com.”

5. “Much Ado About Keanu: A Critical Reeves Theory,” Sezin Koehler (March 11, 2025): “Much Ado About Keanu provides the deep dive into his art, identity, and ethnicity that this oft-misunderstood cultural icon deserves.”

Every loop and curl of the journey memorized

I only got my driver’s license the year I turned 19. It was my second semester at Santa Rosa Junior College, and my friends Elizabeth and Maia, who were my ride to school, were leaving for a semester abroad in Paris. The bus from the JC to my tiny Western Sonoma County town only ran every two and a half hours, and stopped running at 4:30 in the afternoon. I had no other option. 

When I learned to drive, it was in a 1971 Mercedes 220 that my dad brought over from Germany after a visit in 1970. Although it was the compact car of its model line, it was heavy — 3,031 pounds of steel body, with no power steering or brakes to help a petite teen like me tame it. Plus, when I learned to drive it, the engine would stall when the car stopped, so I learned to brake with my heel and feather the accelerator with my toe to keep it from dying. But soon, I mastered it. And on hot days, I drove barefoot. 

Although I was late to the driver’s seat, I came to love driving almost immediately, especially on the twisty backroads of Western Sonoma County. Pop a CD into the car stereo — Dead Can Dance, Alice in Chains, Fields of the Nephilim — and swoop along that ribbon of asphalt, deep into the woods, out to the wild Pacific shore. 

Highway 116 west to Goat Rock Beach was one of my favorites, from the drizzly redwood towns of Hacienda and Rio Nido to the cow-dotted fields closer to the coast. Or Bodega Highway west to Highway 1, steep hills rising on either side of the road until it opens out into the quintessential beach town of Bodega Bay, made famous by Alfred Hitchcock and some aggressive seagulls. 

For a while, a friend of mine lived in Joy Woods, west of Occidental, and I loved finding ever-more-obscure ways home from their place: Joy Road to narrow, curvy Bittner Road to Graton Road, with its open fields and pasture land, was a favorite. Or veer off Graton to oak-dotted Harrison Grade Road to Green Valley Road, which more than lived up to its name. I felt safe on those nearly empty roads, trees and more trees guarding me, melancholy music in my ears, body swaying as the car slalomed through the curves. 

There was a skill to it. Slow down and downshift before a sharp turn, then slowly accelerate and shift back up as you come out of it, belly dropping as you pick up speed. Heave the steering wheel like a fisherman in a rising tide. Back then, I pushed the speed limit, ever frustrated with cautious drivers and tourists who didn’t have every loop and curl of the journey memorized. The rule was, if more than five cars were piled up behind you, you needed to pull off, but not everyone obeyed. They slowed me down, interfered with my flow and flight along the road.

When I moved away to attend U.C. Berkeley a few years later, I could still picture those backroad routes in my mind. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d trace them: Joy to Bittner, Bittner to Graton, Graton to 116. Evergreen boughs flashing in my peripheral vision, dappled sun streaming down, painting everything gold. Or high-beams piercing the deep darkness, like something out of a David Lynch project.

I returned recently, but it wasn’t the same. I’m a much more cautious driver now, despite the power steering, and the data signal was too weak to stream more than one or two Dead Can Dance songs before the music cut out. But my feet remembered to slow down before the turn, then rev my way out of it like an aircraft picking up speed. And the narrow, tree-lined pathways still felt like home. 

I am a shade plant

Whenever the conversation turns to weather, especially the heat and scorching sun of summer, I frequently remark that I identify as a shade plant. It’s meant as kind of a joke, but in many ways it isn’t. 

Many who know me are aware that I’m uncomfortable in sun and warm weather. The bright sun hurts my eyes (and can sometimes trigger migraines), and I’m very prone to sunburns and heat exhaustion. It doesn’t help that I rely on multiple medications that make me more sensitive to the sun and heat. 

I’m glad so many people enjoy summer weather. I’m just not one of them. 

I recently returned from a short retreat in the terraces of Monte Rio, where I stayed in a cabin perched on a steep hillside deep in the redwoods. While there I saw very little direct sunlight; all of it was filtered through those deep green canopies, or shaded by tall auburn trunks. When it was 95 degrees Fahrenheit in the towns nearby, it was more like 80F among the trees, and even cooler indoors. I was able to rest outdoors without feeling like I was being blinded or slowly roasted. 

It was amazing. 

My ancestors must have thrived among the woodlands, whether it was in the lands now known as Germany or Switzerland, Sweden or Norway, Britain or Scotland or Ireland or Wales. From them I inherited eyes made for lower-light discernment, skin that’s at home in the cool, misty air of a shadowed wood. 

Some years ago I learned that there are a number of specific genes associated with red-headedness. Some of them lead to bright, coppery hair while others lend a more subtle redness; I love that my particular hair color matches the hue of redwood bark. 

These genetic differences originate in the Central Asian grasslands, and are associated with a different kind of melanin, sometimes considered a malfunctioning form of melanin, called pheomelanin. It’s why so many of us burn instead of tan, and it’s why we develop clusters of freckles rather than tanning evenly. Unfortunately, it also makes us less able to absorb Vitamin D from the sun and more likely to develop skin cancer. These days I think of those inscriptions in my yearbook — “have a good summer! Get a tan!” — with scorn. 

Often, redheads also need more anesthetic during dental and surgical procedures, as my dermatologist recently reminded me while removing an unevenly shaped bump from my arm (a biopsy revealed it was benign). 

For whatever reason, our culture worships summer and abhors winter. But we’re not all alike. To go back to plants: If you give them all the same things, most will die. Succulents often want lots of sunlight and very little water. Ferns love deep shade and cool, humid air (hi, kin). Some plants want only distilled water; others are happy with used dishwater. It’s silly to expect every person to love the summer sun and hate rainy, cloudy or cool weather. Hopefully we can all find ways to plant ourselves where we are happiest.