I can remember sitting in a restaurant with my family one particular Thanksgiving, because my mother thought that changing the routine might give our holiday a little more cheer. But of course there was some disagreement between my parents that had soured the mood, so my father refused to order out of some kind of passive aggressive spite, and my mother sat across from me, spilling quiet tears into her mashed potatoes. We sat like that for the entire meal, a public display of misery: my silent, feuding parents, and my brother and I forcing ourselves to swallow all the things that we’d been served.

My father’s birthday is around the same time, so in addition to the dreaded feast, I labored to find a just-right gift that he never seemed to want, accompanied by an appropriately neutral card to convey the affection that I felt without seeming like I was lying. When I got older, I joked that I should start my own greeting card company to target others in my shoes — people for whom card-shopping was a difficult chore of expressing love to loved ones who didn’t always seem love them back. “I love you even though” was what I wanted to call it.

That’s how I feel about my country right now. America, I love you even though.

I cried hard in the shower last night, for a man I barely know, but whose bare naked soul I’ve seen glimpses of, and with whom I’ve fallen deeply and utterly in love. Brian Doyle’s writing gets me through the hard times, hard times such as these, and yesterday I learned that he has been diagnosed with brain cancer.

I met Brian at a literary festival in Bend, Oregon, and all of us who attended that festival that year will tell you that he stole the show with his humor and humility and brains. I sat in his craft lecture, eating up all of his stories about his brothers and his kids and his crooked nose — which he’d gotten from an injury playing basketball, “the greatest sport on earth.”

Later, when I asked Brian if he would write the foreword to the anthology of student writing that our literary organization was publishing, I mentioned that I, too, have a crooked nose, but that I’d instead gotten it from soccer, the greatest sport on earth. To which he replied, yes of course he would write the foreword, but that I was WRONG about soccer. Basketball is the greatest sport on earth. End of story, he was right, “because I’m the Dad, and that is that.”

—Which made me laugh and cry because it reminded me of my dad… and of love and hurt and anger and joy all mixed up together. Look, if there’s anything I’ve learned from Brian’s work, it’s that life is full of contrasts. Even within the most horrific moments of human tragedy, there is beauty and hope and grace. Like the moment he captured in his essay, “Leap,” about a man and a woman, hand-in-hand, falling from the World Trade Center to their deaths on 9-11. Of that moment, Brian wrote:

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

Let me repeat: That human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires. And that love is why we are here.

I am meditating on those words with a pen in my hand, and I think that you should, too. Stories are food, Brian says. We need them. We need your stories to survive. I will leave you with the Foreword that he wrote for our student anthology, Lost and Found. Please, as you read it, think of Brian and send him your thanks, your food, and your prayers.

(Friends interested in helping Brian and his family can also check out the Doyle Family Support Fund.)

The Nature of Words, ed. Lost and Found, 2013

Cover art by Rachel Lee-Carman

Foreword: Brian Doyle, “Food & Prayers”

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Last night, America chose a racist, misogynist, xenophobic, over-privileged businessman with absolutely no public service record instead of an over-qualified, life-long public servant woman to be our next President of the United States. Last night, as I tucked my two daughters into bed, the America I thought I knew, the America I trusted to honor and protect us voted to put a bully into the Oval Office. A man who uses a numeric scale to place a value on the opposite sex. A man who chronically lies and makes fun of the disabled. A man who incites violence to exclude and prosecute the minorities and dissenters among us. A man who brags about his self-proclaimed entitlement to grope women without consent.

As an American woman, I feel betrayed by my country today, betrayed by the promise of honor and respect, by the American ideal of equality and justice for all. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to wake up black or brown, Mexican or Jewish or Muslim or LGBTQ in this country today. These citizens have been handed an eviction, a message heard loud and clear: YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE. You are a stain. And to women: You will be tolerated only if you are pretty and quiet, the way that God intended.

Two and a half years ago, I was evicted from my role as a daughter. I had made the grave mistake of sharing stories of my youth, of revealing that my childhood was not entirely happy, that our home was not normal. I had revealed that the power between my parents was unbalanced, and that my father was, at times, a tyrant in his control over us. I had broken a code, disobeyed the expectation of silence and obedience. I had broken the promise of never questioning a system that is unfairly favorable to the white man in the room.

So I was punished, harshly. No apology, no discussion. You are not wanted here. My love for you was conditional upon your obedience with the unwritten rules, conditional upon your silence.

On the day of my eviction, my father sent me a package that contained all of my childhood artifacts: drawings, stories, newspaper clippings. For me, it was one of the few times he’d ever revealed that he was even paying attention. For him, I imagine it was a message: See how much I cared? Now you are dead.

I can say from experience that dead is how you feel when you have been evicted like this. You curl up into your covers and weep for the love that you thought you had, for the love you thought you deserved.

Of course you deserve that love.

It’s okay to draw the shades and grieve, dear ones. It’s okay to gather your strength. But please don’t despair. In the days ahead, you will come to realize that you are loved, even if not by the body of people to which you thought that you belonged. This country is a crazy patchwork quilt of communities and families stitched together from the most mismatched, unlikely pieces of cloth. There is always a place for love.

Here’s the thing about shunning: for it to work well, it must be total and complete. And the last time I checked, more than half the country disagrees with what we’ve been told America wants.  And if you look at the voting results of our youth, you will see that the forces of evolution are still at work.

Those of us who have faced eviction from our lives can tell you that there’s a sort of freedom in dismissal. I am no longer bound by the “rules.” The worst has already happened; there’s no point to my silence now. This is my promise to you, and I hope a promise that many of us are willing to make.  Over the next four years and beyond, I will not look away. I will see what needs to be seen. Then speak. Speak up. SPEAK OUT.

Photo credit: New York Times

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