Soon after moving to Chile in 2011, I wrote about Culture Shock. I told you all then that I’d have to report on the final stage, Reverse Culture Shock, once we returned to the U.S. Well, that time has come. In addition to the overwhelming options that greet us at every turn, it’s now strange to be perfectly understood in my native language, to feel spring in the air in April again, to drive around the suburbs and pick up Chipotle for dinner. As timing would have it, an essay, “The Weight of Two,” I wrote about another kind of Reverse Culture Shock was recently published in Outside In Literary and Travel Magazine. I wrote it nearly a year ago, but here it is, arriving just when we are.
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| She Writes Press, 2014 |
Around that same time, I wrote another essay that has just arrived. On April 19, 2014, Three Minus One: Stories of Parents’ Love and Loss (She Writes Press) was published. My included essay, “Lorenzo’s Island,” recounts the trip Ryan and I took to Easter Island last year over, as timing would have it, Easter. It was nearly a year after we were supposed to travel there on a “babymoon” for Lorenzo. It was exactly a year after I’d first felt his kicks. Two Aprils ago. Now, one year later, this April, this Easter, H. is in the world. It all continues to shift and turn. Please consider supporting the book: for Lorenzo and other babies like him, for their parents, for anyone who tries to understand what it is to survive such brief lives.
It always means something profound to share Lorenzo’s story, which often stands alone. In this anthology, his story sits next to others like his. He isn’t alone, and neither are we. For so long, that’s how you feel. Your pain looks unfamiliar to those around you, so you presume you yourself must as well. It’s shocking to flip through all these many pages and see how similar our stories are. Our losses and our grief remain personal, but there is an undeniable power in the collective, in belonging to any true tribe.In other writing news, editor Allyson Latta asked me to pen a guest post for her website. She wanted to know how I came to write my memoir, what the challenges were, or any other part of the process I wanted to share. The result, “Memoir as Survival: On Writing ‘Lorenzo’s Heart’” is about all of that as well as the driving motivator for the writing and one of the central themes of the book: Survival. Because the fact of the matter is that the act of writing helped me survive those early days and months without Lorenzo. The result is a personal story that I hope will one day help others survive across the spectrum of grief. As you continue to read along on this journey, I say thank you for helping me.
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