Four Cemeteries on my ‘Bucket List’

As Halloween and Samhain draw near, I’m thinking a lot about the cemeteries I’d like to visit. All of them are places where my ancestors are buried; I’ve also got a long mental list of “destination” cemeteries where nobody I know is buried. Maybe that’s a post for another day.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, New York

One of my ancestral lines that I’ve been able to trace back quite far is the Storm family, who lived in the Netherlands for many generations before Dirck Goris Storm (1630-1716), my 10th great-grandfather, immigrated to the U.S. in 1662. He eventually wound up in a new, small town called North Tarrytown on the eastern banks of the Hudson River, and later wrote the history of the Old Dutch Church in North Tarrytown. A man after my own heart.

I wrote a longer post about him in 2020, but he died long before Washington Irving came to visit and made the town famous. It later officially changed its name to Sleepy Hollow and the old cemetery (pictured above), where many Storms are buried, has become a tourist attraction. I recently learned, thanks to my friend Loren Rhoads, that the Ramones filmed their video for “Pet Sematary” here, too. 

White House family graveyard, Virginia

The White House in Luray, Virginia. Photo courtesy the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

Another cluster of my ancestors were Mennonites who immigrated to the U.S. from Switzerland in the early 1700s, settled in Pennsylvania for a couple of generations, and then established a community in the Shenandoah Valley in a place now called Luray. My fifth great-grandfather, Martin Kauffman, Jr., built a meetinghouse called the White House that still stands today.  

A small family graveyard was established next to the White House, where several of my ancestors and their families were buried. I recognize so many names on the gravestones: Brubaker, Roads, Albright, Strickler and Martin himself, along with his father, Martin Kauffman Sr. 

Downpatrick Second Presbyterian Church, Northern Ireland

My second great-grandfather, James Corry Nesbitt, came to the U.S. in 1866 (three of his brothers also immigrated within about a decade of each other). But the rest of his family remained in Northern Ireland, particularly in and around a small region called Tyrella. 

There’s a memorial stone to these ancestors in the churchyard of the Second Presbyterian Church in Downpatrick, including James’ parents, William Nesbitt and Margaret Corry; his siblings, George, Alexander and Robert, and his grandparents, Robert Nesbitt and Jane Cochrane. There are markers for 24 Nesbitts here, and I’m probably in some way related to all of them. James Corry Nesbitt, his wife, Elizabeth Woollard and their kids are buried in Green Lawn Cemetery in Franklin County, Ohio; another stop on my wishlist.

Old Roswell Cemetery, Georgia

My second great-grandfather, Zachary (or Zachariah) Taylor Jones, Sr., was a significant patriarch on my mom’s side. He was the second-oldest of 10 children, born in 1849 in Roswell, Georgia, where he lived his entire life. He worked as a farmer and also served as the town constable. He married three times and fathered a total of 19 children. 

He’s buried in the Old Roswell Cemetery, along with all three of those wives (Mamie Hunnicutt, Alice Bruce, and my second great-grandmother, Lucretia “Cressy” Perkins) and most or all of his children, including my great-grandfather, Bartow Jones. I’m especially grateful to the Roswell Historical Society’s Cemetery Project, which is restoring and replacing grave markers with the help of donations. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick virtual tour. What cemeteries — ancestral or otherwise — would you like to visit?

Míle Buíochas, a Chara: Manchán Magan

I was devastated to learn last night that Irish writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan died on Oct. 2. It seems impossible; he was only 55, and had so many plans ahead of him. 

I first encountered Magan’s work around 2020, when I began learning the Irish language on Duolingo (not the best platform for it, but that’s a conversation for another time). He was a vigorous spokesman for the Irish language, and for bringing it back in a way that went far beyond the rote learning students get in Irish schools, making it enchanting again.

A little background: Irish developed from the language the Celts brought to the island when they settled it sometime between 2400 and 2000 BC. It has been in use ever since, and was the primary language of Ireland until the English began colonizing the country. Speaking Irish in public became illegal, and all schooling, government communication and legal affairs were conducted strictly in English.

British rule was less absolute in portions of Ireland, particularly the far-Western areas, and the Irish language survived here, in places collectively known as the Gaeltacht. Those regions have continued to shrink over the decades. 

In 2003, the Irish government signed the Official Languages Act (Acht na dTeangacha Oifigiúla), reclaiming Irish as an official language of the island. 

Four years later, Magan traveled around Ireland, testing how far he could get speaking Irish, and recorded the results for a four-part series called “No Béarla” (“No English”). 

I watched the series shortly after I began my studies, and was both amused and horrified by moments like the one in which Magan tries to buy condoms in a drugstore, or when he sings bawdy songs in the streets of Galway to see if anyone understands just how filthy he’s being (mostly, no). 

I began following Magan’s work online at that point, and discovered he was working on a wealth of projects that tie Irish language, culture, folklore and landscape together in ways that resonate with me deeply. 

Off and on for years he hosted the Almanac of Ireland, a Radio Telefis Éireann podcast that considered bogs, sacred wells and Irish foods as well as numerous artists, mythologers and elder storytellers.

He gathered forgotten words from Ireland’s fishing communities and shared them in a project he called “Sea Tamagotchi.”  (For example, the word for the “sucking of the ocean at the shore during large tides of spring and autumn [that is] particularly noticeable at night” is suaitiú.)

In the fall of 2020, he released “Thirty-Two Words for Field,” which focuses on how Ireland’s language and landscapes are tightly interwoven. I devoured this book when it finally arrived in the U.S., and it remains one of my favorite books of all time.

He’s released a few wonderful picture books, including “Tree Dogs, Banshee Fingers and Other Irish Words for Nature” in 2021 and “Wolf-Men and Water Hounds: The Myths, Monsters and Magic of Ireland” in 2023. (Did you know that the Irish call jellyfish smugairle rón — literally, seal snot?)

In 2022 came “Listen to the Land Speak,” in which Magan takes the reader on a journey across Ireland, investigating ancient place-names and the myths they reference. In particular, he talks about the rivers of Ireland as goddesses, places where visitors can communicate with the divine (or be disappeared into another world, if they aren’t careful). 

Unlike many other men of his (or really any) generation, Magan celebrated the feminine in language, landscape and mythology. 

“We fell head over heels for this man who taught us the vaginal nature of the sacred passages all over Ireland, and how much worship we must bring with us into the womb of the Earth. I will never forget the relish with which he spoke of women’s divinity, and the sparkle in his eye when he spoke of love,” writer and activist adrienne maree brown wrote on Instagram this morning. 

I recently acquired Magan’s book “Focail na mBan” (“Women’s Words”), a collection of Irish words for vaginas, vulvas, clitorises and periods that he collected over the years, to give Irish women back the language around these parts of our bodies. I haven’t yet read it, but will likely savor it this weekend while thanking this writer for all he offered. 

Magan was diagnosed with prostate cancer a couple of years ago, and he revealed in September that it had metastasized to just about every part of his body. He thought he might have a year or two more, or at least a few more months. It turned out he only had weeks. 

Cancer is a real bastard. Especially this year, somehow. 

Katie Greenwood Ross — who created music and art under the name Thistle Thistle — died in May of breast cancer. She was only 34, and such an amazing bright light in the world. Before her death, she wrote, “I feel very fulfilled. I feel like I did great stuff with my life. I feel like I was a very prolific guy. And I feel proud of myself and what I have done.” 

And then went the incredible poet and empathy-generator Andrea Gibson, who died of ovarian cancer in July. Their writing taught readers how to open their hearts, to soften, to find wonder and awe in the everyday. Just before they died, they said, “I fucking LOVED my life.”

And now Manchán Magan. I am so grateful to have lived at the same time as him, Andrea and Katie.

In a recent interview, Magan said he wasn’t afraid of death. After death, he predicted, "[I will] remember all that other life I've been, all that being I've been for thousands of years beyond the physical body, the times that I wasn't in the physical body. And I'd say pretty soon again, I'll probably come into another body to continue this work.”

Where I've Been and Where I'll Be

I know it’s been ages since I’ve updated here. Frankly, my mind was a little fried after finishing the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum names project, which got a nice writeup from KQED’s Rae Alexandra.

May was hectic and, in the midst of it, Courtney Minick (Here Lies A Story) and I began recording episodes of our new podcast, Dead Reckoning (“where death isn’t the end of the story!”). Court and I became friends while I was writing “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries,” because we’re both fascinated and nerdy about the same stuff, and we love talking to each other about it. You’ll see as you listen to the first three episodes:

1. “Yerba Buena Cemetery: Everyone had broken noses”

2. “Fort Mason Burial Pit: The world’s worst layer cake”

3. “The History of Medical Cadavers: Never enough bodies”

Please listen — I really hope you enjoy these conversations as much as we enjoyed having them. More are on the way, too, so subscribe if you like what you hear.

This spring, an older poem of mine, “False Clover,” was published in a UK collection called “Ten Poems About Weeds” (order here). And in June, I had a new poem, “Red Deer,” published in Nonbinary Review (order here). I’ve been writing a lot of poetry this year and I’m excited to share more as it comes out.

Even though I was a bit done with the Magdalen Asylum for a while, it wasn’t done with me. In August, FoundSF (a great resource for locals interested in our history) published a piece I wrote about my efforts to determine whether our laundry hid a mass grave like some of those in Ireland did. You can read it here.

This month, I have a short story, “I Would Breathe Water,” in the Limbo issue of Club Chicxulub. It’s a modern retelling of Scottish/Orcadian selkie folklore. I rarely write fiction, so it’s a real treat to share this story (written in 2022, I think) with you.

Also, this month and next, I will be appearing at a few events, online and in person. Here are the details:

Friday, Sept. 19, 11 a.m. Pacific: “Dying in the Margins: A Closer Look at Funeral Poverty” (online) with Beth Winegarner, Amy Shea and Evie King, hosted by The Order of the Good Death. Join us for a powerful conversation on funeral poverty and the stark inequalities that shape how we die and how we’re remembered. Register here and go deeper here (PDF).

Thursday, Oct. 16, 6 p.m.: “A Book Tour of Cemeteries.” Beth WInegarner, Amy Shea and Loren Rhoads will read excerpts from their work on death and cemeteries and hold a lively conversation about respect for the dead and the importance of memorialization. In person at the San Francisco Columbarium, 1 Loraine Court, San Francisco. Register here.

Saturday, Oct. 25, Lit Crawl (time and location TBD): “Campfire Stories and Other Ghostly Narratives.” Beth will read at Lit Crawl, the final event in San Francisco’s annual Litquake, along with fellow writers Rowena Leong Singer, Sezin Devi Koehler, Doug Henderson, Jennifer Christgau and Jenny Qi. Keep an eye on my Instagram feed for details.

Consciousness, memory, retrograde

If you’re not interested in astrology, bear with me for a minute.

Astrologically speaking, Mercury is currently retrograde. This means that from our vantage, it appears to be moving backward through the skies. Mercury is the planet of communication and technology, and during these phases, astrologers advise double-checking your emails and travel plans, and being more conscious of how you speak to others and how you listen to and read others’ words. 

Mercury went retrograde on March 15. Three days in, the morning of March 18, my mobile phone started rebooting itself over and over. It was a Pixel 6a, a few years old, and many of my past Android devices have kicked off their death processes with the dreaded boot loop, so I began making plans for its demise. 

I was born with Mercury in retrograde, and I sometimes have this internal debate over whether this makes Mercury-retrograde periods easier on me than on others (with the occasional minor crisis, like this one), or if it just puts me in some kind of perpetual, low-grade communication/technology miasma. The jury’s still out, but I did manage to hardlock my laptop by connecting a game controller a day or two after my phone started glitching.

D. managed to get my 6a out of the loop by putting it in airplane mode, but that evening, while we were trying to manually back up my photos, its touchscreen began reacting erratically and, while we were both in another room, my phone spontaneously blared an alarm and called 911. 

My phone was literally calling for help! All the same, I’m grateful the local dispatchers didn’t send an ambulance to the house. 

I ordered a new phone the next morning. While I waited for it to arrive, I thought a bit about phones as conscious beings; the hardware as the body, and the software, apps and all of our personal touches as the soul. I’m someone who strives toward animism, the idea that everything — plants, stones, clothes, coffee mugs — has a soul, or some kind of independent consciousness. I often imagine, for example, what the pebbles and gravel in our roads and freeways think about; how they feel about their current circumstances, and what they remember about their lives before they were turned into pavement. 

Our phones are made of so many disparate materials. In mine, the aluminum housing is made from recycled aluminum, but the original ore is mined in Eurasia. The glass screen is made of sand, soda ash and limestone, abundant materials that have been with us for millennia, if not predating humans entirely. The silicon in the chips is forged from sand and quartz. 

And then there are the rarer ingredients. Indium gives touchscreens their ability to respond to your fingertips; tantalum prevents internal components from corroding; yttrium and others make phone screens more vibrant and luminescent. The batteries run on lithium and cobalt, while other components glitter with gold, silver, platinum and palladium. 

What is the consciousness in each of these components? What souls do they carry?

Over the weekend, I heard a talk by New Zealand artist and author Charlotte Rogers, whose animism embraces the idea that objects contain not only consciousness, but memory. I brought up the disparate elements in mobile phones, and she remarked on the fact that many of those elements are mined unethically, without respect for the earth or the miners, some of whom are children. She asked: If these components have the capacity to remember, what do they remember about the process of being extracted in this way, and what does it mean for us to hold such an object in our hands, or press it to our ears? 

Look, even if you don’t believe in animism, it’s an interesting mental exercise. Give it a try.

When my new phone arrived, I was able to copy everything from the 6a onto it, connected by a USB cable like an umbilical cord or blood transfusion, soul moving into a new body. I factory-reset the 6a and sent it back to Google to be refurbished and, perhaps, reincarnated with a new buyer. I hope whatever frightened it — whatever caused it to reboot, glitch, and call for help — is over now. 

Corseted scapulae and dead butt syndrome

Ever since I was a teen, people have been telling me to fix my posture, particularly chiropractors and physical therapists. Just sit straighter. Picture a string attached to your sternum, lifting it up. Pull your shoulders back. But it always hurt so much to try.

My new physical therapist has a better explanation: The muscles at the front of my shoulders and across my chest are strong and short, while the ones in my upper back are long, floppy and weak. The solution? Work those trapezius muscles, named for the geometric shape they make on our shoulders and backs, and they will strengthen and shorten. 

The distance between each shoulder blade and the spine should only be a couple of inches, she says. My gap is much wider than that. I am tempted to punch grommets along the inner line of my shoulder blades and lace them together across my back, like a corset. 

Humans work those muscles by reaching overhead for things, something we don’t do as often these days. I imagine our ancestors picking fruit from trees, layering hides over wooden frames for shelter. But I also point out that, at 5 foot 2, I still have to do a lot of reaching, even to gather food off the shelves in the grocery store or my kitchen. She concedes the point, but still urges me to do the exercises.

She also tells me that I have a tendency to lean back when I stand or walk. It’s no wonder it hurts to pull my shoulders back further or puff my chest out. My whole torso needs to move forward, not further back. 

It’s similar with my hips, which have been hurting for years. The muscles at the front of my hips, particularly the tiny tensor fascia lata and the larger rectus femoris, have been doing all the work of stabilizing my hips (and body!) while my glutes do fuck-all. 

She tells me about “gluteal amnesia,” AKA “dead butt syndrome,” in which our important booty muscles have forgotten that they have a job. It’s a major cause of gluteus medius tendinopathy, which I definitely have and which has been the source of much of my hip pain. 

As I try the exercises she gives me to wake my butt back up, I find that my glutes really have forgotten. When I try to use them, the tensor fasciae latae say, “here, let us do that,” and then they hurt because they’re already doing too much. It’s a bit of mental gymnastics to use the sleepy muscles while quieting the overachievers. 

It reminds me of those group projects in school, in which one or two people do all the work while the slackers claim their share of the credit. 

All of this is a byproduct of a life spent sitting at computers and on sofas, curled up like a prawn, hunched into a defensive posture. And in the world we live in, who can blame me? I think of my therapist, encouraging me to stand with my arms on my hips like Wonder Woman or spread in a tall V, like a champion. It always felt silly but she assures me that such postures make us feel more powerful and confident. 

I’m firmly middle-aged. It feels like my muscles and connective tissues are turning into jerky and my body is screaming for estrogen (did you know that the joints in our bodies have estrogen receptors?) It feels good to find a physical therapist who understands bodies in a more holistic way. As much as I resent doing daily physical therapy exercises, I’m hopeful that this process will help my butt and upper back lose their amnesia before it’s too late. 

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.