Wary Lammas Day

Yesterday marked 13 years since our Lisa Marie left.

Our Lisa Marie because the King inspired so many.

A horse, a winding country road, a quarter moon night.

She and her son were on their way home from a wedding.

I too had attended a wedding with my husband and son

at the state's other end, six hours straight north.

On our return trip, nearly the full length of Illinois, I got

the feeling that something wasn't quite right.

A couple of messages from my mom dripping with anxiety,

more than usual, imploring us to get home safely.

We had been living closer to my family for several months,

after six years of marriage and moving frequently.

I suspect anyone who braved a union with me would

find themselves moving somewhat frequently.

I never seem to learn that I can't run away from myself.

Their faces looked wrong when we walked through the door.

I was going to have to feel something and I resented it.

It's Lisa.

What did they mean? She had finally stopped starving

herself when her baby boy was conceived four years ago.

She should have been invincible, surviving that disease.

She passed out in a grocery store once—her heart kept beating.

She was in a bad car accident. A horse jumped a fence. It

was standing in the middle of the road. She never saw it,

said the police, driving full speed in the dark. She's gone.

No helicopter or hospital could save her, repair the damage.

In the back seat, her four year-old-son sat whole, unscathed.

Except he would be a motherless son the rest of his life.

We couldn't look at her when it was time to say goodbye.

I heard my mom's brother sob in the other room when he

and Lisa’s mother, his ex-wife, privately viewed her.

Unrecognizable. It wasn't her. It was just a body she had been

taught to hate her entire life by TV and magazines.

She and I had been the fat ones. Five years older than me,

I watched and worshipped her, wanted to be Lisa Marie.

She went to college, the first of us to get a degree, and so would I.

They said fat could be fixed—you had to be born smart.

I ran into her once at Fred's Dance Barn, and we smiled as we

sipped beer from a can that she shared with me.

I couldn't drink because I wasn't old enough to be there.

When she stopped eating, I knew I could not follow her.

When she fixed the fat as we had been told we could, she could

not stop. Our family's inheritance—obsession and compulsion.

She should be turning 50 this January, but she only made it to 37,

Six years younger than I am today, carrying on without her.

I remember a conversation we had a couple of years before she left

washing our hands in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant.

I was pregnant, worried that I might have been missing the instinct.

She told me that having a son to care for had saved her life.

When our eyes met in the mirror, I knew she meant it and I had hope

that having a child to care for would save my life too.

Her funeral is the last time I tried to make sense of it all, stupidly

suggesting that she somehow sacrificed herself for her son.

Could she have made that choice in the split second of impact?

Cold comfort, like church—it's too hard to believe now.

 If there is a God, it is Lisa's love despite a hateful world she nearly killed

herself to please. The rest is a heart that refuses to stop beating and luck.