Grief's Country
Praise for Grief’s Country
“Grief’s Country is a powerful and lyrical meditation upon loss. It is also a celebration of those moments in our lives that redeem our mortality through their transient joys. Here, grief is deeply personal yet transcendently mythic, both heart-breaking and heart-mending. Griffin has written a remarkably honest, tragically beautiful memoir.”
—Sue William Silverman, author of The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew
“A fiercely honest, deeply human examination of grief’s gradations, shades, nuances, and degrees, as well as its life-altering consequences. An essential book for anyone who has lost a loved one or knows someone who has.”
—Michael Steinberg, founding editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction
“In Grief’s Country, Gail Griffin embraces loss by navigating grief with an open heart. Griffin shares personal tragedy with such big-hearted courage that she lifts us up with her. Those who yearn for support will find tremendous comfort here. Grief’s Country is profoundly beautiful.”
—Renée E. D’Aoust, author of Body of a Dancer
“Gail Griffin’s lyrical Grief’s Country is a deeply considered meditation on grief, grace, and surviving the unimaginable. It’s a beautiful exploration of the human condition through the lens of loss.”
—Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir
Grief’s Country
Made in Michigan Writers Series
General Editors
Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts
M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University
A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu
Grief’s Country
A Memoir in Pieces
Gail Griffin
Wayne State University Press
Detroit
© 2020 by Gail Griffin. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.
ISBN 978-0-8143-4739-3 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8143-4740-9 (e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955125
Publication of this book was made possible by a generous gift from The Meijer Foundation. This work is supported in part by an award from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.
Wayne State University Press
Leonard N. Simons Building
4809 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu
To want to make a fire with someone,
with you,
was all.
—Katie Ford, “All I Ever Wanted”
Contents
| The Bride Wore Black
A Strong Brown God
Ghost Town
Grief’s Country
| “Write a poem in the voice of a widow whose husband has drowned”
Heartbreak Hotel
The Line That Carries on Alone
A Creature, Stirring
| Toward Water
Singular Bird: A Discovery Log
Bodies of Water
The Messenger
| Devastated
Postscript: Breathe
Notes
Acknowledgments
The Bride Wore Black
which should have been the first clue. She ambled
down the south aisle in her new cheap shoes
while the groom came down the north in the dark
blue suit men buy one of, for weddings and funerals.
Dinah Washington sang It’s very clear, our love is here
to stay—Jesus, in a Greek play that kind of hubris
would get you castration or blinding or a raptor at the liver.
Instead everyone had omelets, made to order by a deft
and silent man behind a table in the great old mansion
on the hill overlooking the last day of the year.
A blizzard was on its way across the plains, and nobody
would get out. Meanwhile everyone smiled
and made their choices: spinach, gruyère, green onions.
Mimosas bloomed from the open bar. She flapped
and stumbled through it all: what was she doing here?
Who said her life had anything to do with strawberries
tipped in chocolate, ornate seating charts, Polish crystal
etched with names and date? Who was she kidding,
moving around the room, dazed and footsore
in those shoes, failing to see his eyes, him in the dark
suit, waiting for her to be done with this, the man standing
quiet in the cyclone’s eye, slowly disappearing?
A Strong Brown God
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable . . .
—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”
On my memory’s retina is an open door, imprinted like a flash image. It is a pale frame around darkness, a picture of nothingness. I am in a warm golden-brown light, facing the door. On the other side is sheer unrelieved night. Out there a weird and fearsome world waits. I study myself standing there, occupying the final instant of Before, with a terrible knowledge just beginning to rise.
*
This story begins with a river.
It is a river of memory, though it might be memory not of what happened but of what I was told: I am floating down the Manistee River in what my family grandly called the Au Sable Float (named, I don’t know why, for the other big river in northern lower Michigan), which consists of the inner tube of a tire covered with olive-drab canvas in which two leg holes have been cut. The float is tethered to my father’s waders by a rope. He is walking upstream, fishing for trout. My feet are pushing against the rippling current. I am maybe three or four.
By the summer of 1960, when I turned ten, my father was dead. That summer I was sent to a fifty-year-old camp for girls on a little crystalline lake among the pines southeast of Traverse City called Lake Arbutus. I would spend six summers there, taking me from ten to sixteen. Over those years my mother remarried, was widowed again, and remarried again; I inherited one set of stepsiblings and then another; I went from elementary school to junior high school to high school in three different cities and came home to three different houses with three distinct domestic cultures, three different father-men loudly or quietly determining our orbit. In that span of time the country went through a great cultural shift, and I went through puberty. In this whirlwind, those northern woods were the still place. In winter, downstate, I would imagine them silent, bare, filled with snow, and something in me feared they wouldn’t be there in June. That they were—the same sunlight rippling through the spectrum of greens and breaking into diamonds on the lake, the soft, sandy soil, the smell of pine—amounted to an assurance of continuity and the possibility of return. For eight weeks I ran and swam, shot arrows and rifles, rode horses, paddled and sailed. My arm and thigh muscles rounded, my skin browned and freckled, my hair went blond. The world outside, increasingly crowded with rock bands and makeup and social strata and fashion imperatives, faded; what was real was this island of girls in the woods.
Small groups of campers were selected for overnight trips. The littlest girls were bussed with their sleeping bags to the cherry farms on the Old Mission Peninsula, which bisects Grand Traverse Bay. In a subsequent summer you might get to spend a weekend on mysterious South Manitou Island. But when you were old enough and your canoeing skills were deemed sufficient, you were tapped for what was called The Manistee—three days and two nights on the river. After canoeing the calm lake waters, the river was jazzy, both easier and more chall
enging. In the stern, I loved shaping the green water with my paddle, working with and against the current. I remember the sun winking through the heavy canopy of July, the long, buzzing afternoons. In the bow, less busy, I studied the whorls and eddies of the waters where I had once trailed my feet.
*
People who loved Bob and me often said we were perfect together. On the contrary, I found us a strange match in most ways. But we had three big commonalities. We both worked at colleges—he as a student affairs administrator, I as a faculty member (although some within the academy would deny that constituted commonality). We had been fathered by American Dream men who came from nothing, made their fortunes in Detroit’s industrial heyday, and in the process grew repressed, rigid, driven, and punitive, especially toward their sons. And finally, we both loved Michigan’s north country. Bob’s acquaintance with the area came with his first post-law-school job, at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, on the Lake Superior shore of the Upper Peninsula—really Up North. In fact, some Michiganders insist that Up North doesn’t even start until you’re over the Mackinac Bridge. But his sagas of tearing around the woods, from bar to bar, on motorcycles or snowmobiles, avoiding adulthood, shared something with my tales of tearing around the woods, from horse to lake, in Red Ball Jets, both of us creatures relishing the sense of operating outside the bounds of civilization. Among the things Bob learned Up North was the deep pleasure of wading a trout stream.
We met and became friends when we were both working at Kalamazoo College. He was married, with a young daughter and son. We merged later, after he moved to a college in western Massachusetts and his marriage ended. He quickly found his river there: the Deerfield, which runs through deep chasms in the Berkshires. I remember sitting with a book on a big flat rock overlooking the river, watching him wade the current, calculating trout behavior, casting his line. In that moment he was as centered and calm as I’d ever known him. A few years later, when I had a sabbatical, we rented a little A-frame on a small, round, perfect lake north of Amherst. I watched from the balcony as he canoed out in search of fish, over still water perfectly reflecting a ring of blazing October trees.
So now I had two dreams. Bob was the one that seemed to be realizing itself: the man who anchored me, counterweight to my histrionics and self-doubt, true and deep-rooted as a fir. The other dream was to get back Up North.
The return to paradise: the most futile human delusion. Surely I knew that. Why didn’t I recognize my old tendency to look backward, yearning for what’s lost? My penchant for imagined Elsewheres? Did I think reoccupying Up North would fill both needs once and for all? Or did I imagine that going back to those roots would somehow solidify a self that has often felt permeable or mutable? My dream of returning to innocence can’t simply be innocent, because it flowed into disaster with the force of fate, though I don’t believe in fate. The fault is mine. If only I hadn’t wanted. If only I hadn’t wanted so much to go back, and dragged him, my amenable Adam, into my dream of Eden. For his own good, I told myself, and this is the worst of what I live with: I had to get that man back into a river.
*
Since my camp summers, the northwestern corner of the Lower Peninsula has been transformed by money flowing northward from the white Detroit suburbs and elsewhere. You have to know where you’re going to avoid McMansions, gated communities, stacked-up condos, pricey boutiques, and chichi restaurants. My early Internet prowling, focused on lakes, revealed prices on the Arbutus-like inland lakes that temporarily stopped my heart. The one property on an adjacent lake that I actually visited, the one for sale for less than a quarter million dollars, turned out to be a sagging shotgun cottage floored in curling linoleum, smelling of mildew.
Driving north on U.S. 131 one summer day, I happened to look down as the highway crossed the Muskegon River. The river was wide, smooth, lined in thick trees. A tiny motorboat dragged a slow V upstream. I had a small epiphany: northern Michigan is laced with rivers. River property has to be cheaper than lake.
Afterward, I decided to read the way we found the place as karmic, a sign of the universe blessing my plan. Bob was now working in Colorado, and we were in our fourteenth year of peculiar long-distance togetherness. The summer of 2003, when we were both Up North, I decided it was time to get serious. After two days of trekking around several northwestern counties with a realtor, we had a more specific idea of the landscape. On Saturday we drove through the tiny village of Fife Lake and I said aloud, “I want to live here.” But our explorations had also brought us to economic reality. “Let’s see what happens when you raise the price a notch,” said the realtor, plugging a new figure into her computer. Up popped three listings. One looked lovely, but already had a buyer. A second looked unlovely. And then came number three: a squat, funny-looking log cabin. “Five hundred feet on the Manistee,” the realtor read, “outside of Fife Lake.”
The next day, Sunday, we were to head back downstate. But what if this was the crooning of karma?
So we delayed our departure. We drove through the village and crossed from Grand Traverse County into hardscrabble Kalkaska County, land of lower prices. The economic collapse that would hit the rest of the country in 2008 was already happening in Michigan, especially in these rural outlands. On for five miles, through fields, marshland, stands of pine. This is Up North’s unromantic backside: rooms built onto trailers and insulated in plastic; domestic ducks and geese wandering around the shells of cars; driveways where signs proclaim dire passages from Scripture—mostly the Old Testament: lots of judgment, little mercy.
The road crossed what we would learn was known locally as Rainbow Jim’s Bridge, arching over a narrow point in the Manistee, and entered a tunnel of white pines. Beyond it, three parallel driveways branched out like fingers toward a horseshoe peninsula in the river.
At one of them we turned. The cabin looked much smaller than it had in the photo we’d seen on the realtor’s computer. It was squat, obviously very old, built of big full logs painted an unfortunate milk-chocolate color under a green roof that had seen much better days. It sat nearly on the edge of the water. Our realtor remarked, “The codes wouldn’t let it be built that close to the river today.” About a hundred yards to its right was a pristine A-frame constructed of blond half logs. To the left, further off, perhaps five hundred yards through a stand of trees, was a large contemporary home. My heart sank a little; I wanted my cabin to be in the woods, not the neighborhood. Between these two places, the cabin looked very small and low and seemed to sag into itself.
But inside, it opened magically into a much bigger space: a great room with a big fireplace under a log mantle and a cathedral ceiling. A little modern kitchen with an eating area, a tiny bathroom. The sharply pitched roof made the place dark and cozy, but the whole place gleamed with the warm shine of the logs. One long tree trunk ran overhead the entire length of the living room. Upstairs a loft looked down into the great room. Downstairs a bedroom and a sunroom had been added on the river side. Outside the sunroom door was a deck. The river glimmered through the trees on the bank.
Norma, the owner, met us in a wheelchair. She’d lost a leg to diabetes, and her daughter had finally insisted she move downstate. She obviously hated the idea. I behaved as if the sale would depend on the owner’s liking me. And she did. Later she said, “I knew you were the one. You and that nice man of yours.”
No decision had been made. But that afternoon, driving south, without any preamble, Bob suddenly burst the silence. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Weekends!” I chirped. “I’m going to come up on weekends all the time, and then when you visit, we’ll come up together, and we’ll spend Christmas here and all summer!” Bob sighed and said I should check the property taxes. They turned out to be, like the mortgage, much higher than I was paying on my house in Kalamazoo. But investing in waterfront property in northern Michigan—how could we lose?
Later, as we negotiated over the furnishings, Norma told me she
had bought the cabin with her husband, who had died suddenly shortly after they moved in. She warned me that his ghost might be around; one night she had been awakened by a chord sounding on his guitar in the empty living room. “He’ll be welcome,” I said happily. “I’ll listen for him.” A ghost—perfect.
*
Our five hundred feet of river frontage turned out to be highly irregular and mostly inaccessible. The cabin sat high above the water, perhaps ten feet. The bank was dangerously eroded; on our side big cedars and white pines leaned out sharply over the water, roots exposed by the current. The property then sloped down to a point where Bob’s son could install a dock. As the river curved away around the top of the horseshoe, the rest of our plot was swampy, overgrown, and tangled. In the middle of this little heart of darkness someone had installed a large circle of ugly white vinyl, like a gigantic children’s swimming pool—to create a pond, possibly. What it created was a mosquito breeding ground coated in bright green scum. We spent hours debating how to get the thing dragged out so that the area could revert to wetland.
The cabin itself was equally irregular. Structurally, it was a nightmare. In the process of turning it from a 1940s fishing cabin to his mother’s home, Norma’s son had done the wiring and plumbing, both of which proved to be endless sources of mystery and frustration. Five or six experts called out to help with our water-pressure problem examined the well and the pump and shook their heads. The stunning fireplace was framed in wood, pine planks radiating in a sunburst effect, very striking—and wonderfully combustible, so that the guys who came to fix the chimney refused to touch the job until the whole thing was refaced in tile. But after we’d done it, and the guys had returned and repaired the chimney, and our neighbor had plowed our driveway so we could get in after driving up in December, we sat before the fire, watching the snow fall, Bob with his eternal dry martini with a twist, I with my Dewar’s over ice, and life held itself in a tenuous, wondrous balance, like Scout, my transplanted cat, who walked the log beam above our heads.