elsywrites

I Can Admit I Am In Pieces

an experimental writing space

  • TV SHOWS FOR GRIEF & PANIC

    Ranked by Laughter, Bawling, and Amount of Time Spent Before Remembering That Everything Is Terrible

    My father died on December 22nd of last year. Last Friday, my mother was diagnosed with an advanced metastatic cancer of unknown origin.

    Below is a listing of what’s gotten me through. The rating system is my body. Laughter counts. Bawling counts. Time is its own unreliable factor.

    TV SHOWS FOR KEEPING THE ROOM FROM GOING QUIET

    Law and Order – from the pilot through whatever season it is when the old angry bald man leaves. The series plays 24/7 on Pluto and Roku Live. Nostalgia points: live streaming means no pausing or rewinding, and there’s recurring ads for reverse mortgages and car insurance. Feels like being sick from home on a school day. Major comfort vibes.

    The genius of this series is that nothing accumulates. The death comes first. All the violence, all the shock, all the confusion of how could this happen all come first. Someone dies in the first 60 seconds and by minute forty-two the death has been converted into a procedure, and the procedure has been completed. Then it happens again. Then it happens again. You can enter at any point. You can leave at any point. No matter what, you know that questions will be asked and answered. You already know the outcome. There is nothing to be afraid of.

    • Laughter: light chuckles at hard-boiled NYC Detective banter.
    • Bawling: sometimes and unexpectedly.
    • Hours: I stopped counting last May.

    Tires, on Netflix. For when you need a hearty guffaw to break through your crippling skepticism. No disrespect to the show makers but, from the trailer I assumed this was going to be a dumb show (it’s a show that plays on your notions of what’s dumb). And yet the guffaw came out of me like something dislodged.

    • Laughter: yes, surprisingly, loud, and then repeatedly.
    • Bawling: none until the second season with the dad.
    • Hours: 12

    Private Practice, on Netflix. For when “Grey’s Anatomy” is too much. Same hospital logic, lower voltage. Nobody I love is in it. In fact, some of the characters are detestable.

    • Laughter: yes but mostly for scenes like when they all suddenly become surgeons and remove a blood clot from a woman in labor and then perform a C-section and then perform heart surgery on the newborn. Good for mild hate-watching.
    • Bawling: sometimes, not always related to plot.
    • Hours: 77.

    Cobra Kai, on Netflix. Men who cannot stop being seventeen, which is a subject I have opinions about.

    • Laughter: intermittent.
    • Bawling: none.
    • Hours: 30.

    Love After Lockup, on AMC? I’m not going to look it up. Part of the diagnostic value of this show is that I never once knew what channel I was on.

    • Laughter: uncharitable.
    • Bawling: none.
    • Hours: unknown.

    Real Housewives, whichever city. My best friend came and stayed for a week because my father was dead and I live alone, and we fell into the rhythm we have had since we were girls, which is two people watching garbage and narrating it. I felt better. I went to work. On the drive home I had a screaming fit in the car and wiped my face before I got to the door so she wouldn’t see the streaks.

    • Laughter: real.
    • Bawling: in the car, off-camera.
    • Hours: one week.

    Shrinking, for when you want to pretend that everyone you love and care about lives within a five-mile radius and shows up instantly for every conversation and crisis. This is the most fantastical program on television. It is science fiction. Yes, even moreso than Private Practice with its spontaneous surgery in the conference room plotlines.

    • Laughter: yes.
    • Bawling: yes, and I resented it.
    • Hours: 17.

    TV SHOWS THAT UNEXPECTEDLY REMIND YOU

    Your Friends and Neighbors, on Apple TV. Current season. His father dies.

    The failure here is mine, not the show’s. I had done the work of locating a show as far removed from me as possible. This show is about a rich man committing crimes in a gated community just because he wants to and he can. Oh and he has a Latina housemaid sidekick. And then his father died in it and I was in the room in Silver Spring with the humidifier ticking and the aide saying he’s comfortable in the voice they use, and then I was back on the couch in Hartford with a show still playing, and the whole trip took maybe two seconds.

    No measurement.

    TV SHOWS THAT WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH AND THEN CRY BECAUSE THE HARDER YOU LAUGH THE MORE PAINFUL THE REMINDER THAT YOU WILL NEVER LAUGH LIKE THIS AGAIN WITHOUT CRYING

    Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, on Netflix. For mourning your relationship to an unavailable man, who became unavailable during the worst year of your life. I have nothing witty here. I picked it for the title and the title delivered.

    • Laughter: bitter. salty. dry.
    • Bawling: yes, desperately.
    • Hours: Six.

    Six Feet Under, series finale only (Season Five, Episode 12): This is so well-done you don’t even need to watch the full final episode to get the full effect. You can just skip everything, go right to the end and you let it do the thing it does. You’ll get the cathartic release you haven’t been able to produce on your own after so much time in reaction mode. After days of paperwork, phone calls, group chats, and shitty first drafts of your dad’s obituary.

    It works. That’s what I want to say about it as a critic. The final seven minutes is a strict machine that works. You put yourself in and grief comes out on schedule, in the shape our culture has agreed grief should be, set to music.

    • Laughter: no.
    • Bawling: on demand.
    • Hours: seven, cumulative, one hour at a time, four times. The episode is 72 minutes, although you only need the final seven.

    TV SHOWS TO BINGE AT 3AM WHEN YOU ARE DELIRIOUS FROM EXHAUSTION BUT CAN’T GO TO SLEEP BECAUSE IF YOU GO TO SLEEP THEN IT WILL BE TOMORROW AND TOMORROW MEANS COMING CLOSER TO THE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW BUT DON’T WANT TO KNOW

    Law and Order, again. Same show. Different show.

    At three in the afternoon it is a machine for making time pass. At three in the morning it is the sound of a television in a room where a man is dying, which is a sound I know now, and which I will apparently know for the rest of my life, and which is not silence, and that is the entire point of it. You are not watching. You are being kept company by a device. Somebody is talking in the room. Somebody is always talking in the room. Nobody needs anything from you.

    • Laughter: none.
    • Bawling: none.
    • Hours: these don’t count.

    TV SHOWS THAT ARE NOT TELEVISION AT ALL BUT AN ENTIRE FILM FRANCHISE WATCHED IN ORDER WITHOUT STOPPING ON A BIG SCREEN YOU BOUGHT BECAUSE YOUR FATHER DIED AND HE LOVED BIG SCREENS

    The Fast and the Furious, all of them but one, in order. Seventeen hours and twenty-seven minutes across four days.

    I skipped Tokyo Drift. This is not controversial.

    After my father’s funeral I flew home and I bought a big screen television in my father’s honor.

    I have loved these movies my whole life. People tease me about it. They think they’ll get me to admit know better, but I always disappoint them, because I do know better and I love them anyway and those are not in conflict. I have been arguing this position for twenty years to audiences that did not want to hear it. So I have been doing criticism for a long time. Nobody was paying me and the subject was fast cars going to space. YES, I LOVE IT BECAUSE IT IS COOL.

    What these movies offer is magical thinking with the seriousness of an engineering diagram. A car leaves a cliff and lands. A body takes an impact that should end it and gets up and keeps talking. Force is survivable, and physics is just an option. The films don’t wink about this. Instead, they commit, they double down with a straight face, for hours, and that commitment to absurdity is the pleasure.

    And there’s the simpler thing: it’s fun to watch fast cars. Even when you want to call your dad to talk about the fast cars but you can’t because he’s dead.

    • Laughter: constant.
    • Bawling: only when it was over.
    • Hours: 17:27, spread over four days.

    HONORABLE MENTIONS

    Being Mary Jane, “Sparrow,” season three, episode three.

  • I Need To Tell You What Happened

    When my father died I was waiting in line at the CVS picking up a prescription in preparation for my flight in two days to visit him. He was in hospice w/ sepsis pneumonia. It was December 22, 2025, and he’d been there since Thanksgiving. Prior to hospice he was in a nursing rehab home still dying but much slower and without pneumonia.

    I hadn’t had a full conversation with him in 18 months. Or maybe a little less than that when he was still talking and responsive but not lucid or barely coherent. You see, in order to tell you what happened I need to tell you what happened a year and a half before he died.

    I woke up in a hotel room and took my phone off Do Not Disturb. The man I was sleeping with had just gone to shower and I checked my phone to see text after text in the family group chat about Dad in the hospital, because he’d fallen down. His wife found him on the floor, head bleeding and crying and by the time the ambulance came he was no longer conscious. I saw texts about his brain, his skull, his being taken in a helicopter to a trauma center in Baltimore.

    My lover came out of the bathroom shiny with steam and wrapped in a towel, he saw my face and asked, “What happened?” and I said, “My father fell. He’s in the hospital.” He went into an immediate strategy mode, asking about how I would “go down there” and I shook my head and said no softly almost silently. “You don’t understand,” I said. Or “you don’t know my family” or something like that. This had become the norm in our family group chat for years. Dad gets sick. We react. We move. That was my response or so I’d like to believe.

    But what happened next wasn’t movement: I froze. I did nothing. I replied to some texts getting clarification on some details but I did nothing else. My lover left to start his day, but I stayed in the hotel. I stayed in the bed. I did not leave the bed for the entire day. That was not my norm. That was not my usual response to my father’s varied accidents and surgeries and hospitalizations. Normally, I’d “come down there” right away. I’d rearrange my life and plans to go see him. There was always this urgent need to see and confirm the existence of my father because that’s really what was being threatened.

    I texted my therapist and told her about my inability to leave the bed. She said this was normal — that it was a fear reaction — and there’s fight, flight, and then there’s freeze which I was doing. She reminded me about our sessions on threat of annihilation when our parents’ lives are threatened (or perceived as such). I would come to have this response repeatedly during my father’s descent.

    And then, as quickly as I first froze, I moved. It was the exact opposite — multiple flights and arrangements for dog boarding so I could see my father even if just for a few days. Even if “seeing” him meant sitting by his bedside watching him murmur and mumble in his sleep. Eventually, I’d start to journal about all of it. Eventually, I’d come to only write about my dad, about loving him, and losing him. Eventually, I would be the first one to admit my father was not going to come back from this. That my father was not going to return to the man I knew as my father. That my father was slowly dying and there was another man in his place that I knew and yet didn’t know at all….

    But I still haven’t told you what happened. I need to tell you why I was in that hotel room.

  • Grieving Grammar

    Flipping through my physical planner I came across a brief to-do list from early January 2026:

    At first I read it as: “Get a box for dad’s things.” It was only when I took a picture of it had I realized it said: “…dad things.” Anyone with a parent knows how a line like that can mean so many things. Children of men have a way of creating new terminology whenever referencing our parents. For instance, a dad thing might be a love of Philadelphia, hoagies, the downtown harbor in Baltimore, the Eagles and the Mercedes S-Class series, or a loud sneeze that takes three shouts to complete itself. Just as much as gaslighting, raising one’s voice so loud you think the walls will collapse, or slapping one’s wife could all also fall under a dad thing.

    It’s the preceding “get a box” that should have tipped me off.

    Here’s where things might sound a bit absurd.

    By January of 2026 I had already buried my father, he died in December, two days before Christmas. But when I read those lines in my planner it did not yet occur to me that my father was dead.

    There’s this thing that happens after someone you love dies. It isn’t right away. Which is why what I’m describing seems so bizarre. After the death, after the grief stages, after the arrangements and the service, after the cremation, and the return to work, and the attempts to find a new routine, you will find yourself forgetting that they died in the first place. You will remember everything but the fact that someone you loved very much is dead.

    Since my father died I have struggled (even more than I normally do) to respond to the small talk question of how I am doing. How are you? It’s not that I’m unpracticed in the small talk dance — the one we all do. It’s that Fine became insufficient after my father died. Mostly because I have struggled to find the ability to say the word. Fine. It’s as if I lost knowledge when he died.

    Seeing that line in my planner my mind immediately went to the question of “…‘dads things’ for what?” Followed by a strange moment of vertigo when I remember, “oh, that’s after dad died.” Followed by the more practical questions such as, “But it was before the funeral so what does this note mean? What ‘things’? Did I mean the ashes? But he hadn’t been cremated yet.”

    When you imagine grieving a loved one you probably don’t picture wondering about things like a grocery list of post-funeral tasks but there it is. Right in between a reminder to do a spring cleaning and to check the syllabus for a writing workshop you’d signed up for before your dad died.

    Maybe I deliberately left out the possessive apostrophe “s” because I didn’t want to let myself forget he was dead. Putting “dad” into the possessive “dad’s” would have been misleading and maybe I knew I’d be mindlessly searching through my planner months later and I would randomly (is anything random in a planner?) come across this page with these three lines of cursive text. Maybe I wasn’t numb or callous. Maybe I was deliberate in my minimizing of importance, stripping away as much meaning as possible without a complete sentence or capital letters. No period marking finality. The more I look at this piece of paper the more I take comfort knowing I was looking out for my future self. I must have been in so much pain to lie to myself so I wouldn’t have to remember that my father died two days before Christmas in December 2025.

    Recently the writer Tamela Julia Gordon (@shewritestolive) raised the question of breaking. Glennon Doyle says that no one is ever really broken, whereas Toni Morrison said some of us do break. And we keep on keeping on with our broken pieces. While Tamela sides with Morrison, I read her post as offering a third space of breaking — one where we are just broken and make no pretense otherwise. No intentions or aims to heal, no plans to glue ourselves back together. And then she said the thing that made me gasp aloud:

    There it was — no, there I was, reading myself to myself all of a sudden. Reader, it’s not that I am in pieces. It’s that I can admit I’m in pieces. That this space — this writing space — is where I write broken and breaking.

    The note in my planner is a sentence in pieces. No possessive, no capital letters, no period marking finality. I have no plans to glue it back together.

    That’s the thing with losing someone. It’s not living with the knowledge of a death. It’s having to always remember that there was ever a death at all.

  • Back to Basics

    I’ll do my best not to do that thing I normally do where I explain and excuse and request and negotiate my way to the point. The point is that I am a writer with an urgent need to release my words. Over 20 years ago I used to have a blog — a pretty popular one.

    Grad school did a number on me. Multiple Sclerosis did a number on me. Recognizing my addiction to alcohol and getting sober did a number on me.

    But…grad school really did a number on me.

    I have internalized every rejection, every pass no matter how kind or encouraging, every unanswered email or delayed response out of sync with my urgent need for acknowledgement.

    I don’t like email. I don’t like sending just any old thing to folks’ inboxes. But I also don’t want to keep it all inside. I don’t think that’s working too well for me anymore.

    So this is where I come to play. To experiment. Bake. Try and fail upwards.