prayer to our fallen matriarchs
by Dyre Copenhale
This is the time of year when my senses come completely alive. It's ironic that it's really the smell of botanical decay that does it for me.
I practice letting go of my aggressive to-do list as I step over dead plants sprawling out of my garden boxes in all directions, stopping to notice a reddening baby strawberry plant that made its way into the cracks between the bricks on my front porch.
Leave it all for the pollinators to nest in. Humans try to do too much, and to what end? It can be dealt with in the spring, when it's time for new life to emerge.
The tree line in all directions is awash in peak autumn colors, and across the street, my neighbor's big tree is ablaze in a fiery orange that makes something inside me that's usually numb feel fully alive.
To feel alive is to feel connected.
The leaves are being drained of chlorophyll, drawing it all back into their roots to prepare for the coming winter.
I always connect the euphoric scent of dying leaves and cinnamon adorned jack o lanterns on the cusp of rot to an overcoupling with happy childhood memories, but perhaps it's more than that.
Maybe its recognition that we ourselves are ephemeral, our bodies organic matter. Someday we will all return through the intricate webs of mycelium.
Maybe to feel alive is to feel that tense connection to death.
*****
Dear Grandma,
When you died, Mom said she could feel Mamaw's presence in the room with all of us. She said, “Waiting to die is a lot like waiting to be born.”
If it's true that in most cases, our mothers come to bring us into the next place, then I figure you were there with us when Aunt Joyce died, too.
I know Mom was talking to you both constantly when she was in the hospital, after the brain bleed. I can't tell you how grateful I am that you and Joyce stayed with her, especially after visiting hours, when I couldn't be there sitting vigil.
She needed you.
Sometimes mom and dad talk about moving closer to me, but I think she likes that she's in those apartments right across the road from the cemetery on the hill. The one you originally picked to bury Grandpa in when he died of a heart attack at 34. You picked it because he would always drive his car up there to get away from you and the kids, and take a nap.
Now Mom's the one keeping vigil.
Soon, there will be another set of ashes there, behind your headstone. Uncle Mike wants to be put in your plot. None of us are ready for that reality to unfold, but like I told Kami the other day, you can't pray death away forever.
Its funny how we all seem to talk to you, and ask you for help, whether its me lighting candles on my ancestral alter with your pictures and trinkets that you owned; Mom choosing to live a five minute walk away from where you are buried so she can stay close to you and tend your graves; or Kami and Sarah praying to you and asking for your guidance with their kids.
Everywhere on the spectrum between evangelical and pagan, we all implicitly seek your help from the next place. We know you're still there.
You are our fallen Matriarchs.
Love,
Dyre
*****
It's odd that autumn foliage is so beautiful to behold - that draining the life from leaves casts them in vivid color palettes, like an ephemeral performance art, before they eventually shed what is no longer needed.
The wind kicks up falling leaves into a spiral, a fleeting glimmer that only those paying attention in that very moment are lucky enough to notice - a wink from the universe especially for them.
One last breath of life before collapse.
As if it's done intentionally, to remind us that death is just a cycle of rebirth, and is nothing to fear.
The tree itself stays alive. Its old leaves will fill the ecosystem below with nutrients, if some asshole doesn't rake them up into plastic bags and leave them on the curb.
Having finished their fleeting moments of life, with energy from their source coursing through their veins, they now detach, and give back to what birthed them, in the form of decay.
Sometimes destruction and creation are the same force.
This allows the tree to enter a dormant state, from which she will wake up after the frost to begin the process of creation all over again.
*****
Dear Aunt Joyce,
I don’t know how well you’d have handled current events if you were still here, but I wish you were anyway.
Uncle Mike is in stage 4 liver disease – he looks just like you and Grandma both did right at the end of your lives.
We are all shattered at having to relive this sequence again and again.
He suddenly wants to be baptized, which I totally respect, but also doesn't jive with my idea of who he's been.
All I can think of is when he lived with us that year when I was ten, and he'd have a cigarette and a mountain dew for breakfast every morning.
He seemed so cool and invincible back then, thin with a full head of curly blonde hair and a different wife or girlfriend on his arm every few years, always leaning over to tell us how they “looked good in a tight pair of jeans” in his southern drawl.
Mom is devastated. She never expected to bury her two youngest siblings.
Your daughter Kami is doing the best she can to heal her own fatty liver and survive capitalism. She’s burning the candle at both ends with two jobs. We keep waiting for her to collapse, but she won’t listen to anyone about adjusting her life to accommodate the fact that she’s about to be 50, and she's sick.
I don’t know if you have any of the answers, but I know you and Grandma are both praying over us.
Aunt Joyce, I know you have opinions about all the family drama, and we’d all love to hear what they are.
I think it's hard for us to fathom that you won’t be at your granddaughter's wedding this summer, even though you’ve been gone for 11 years now.
I miss you every day.
Love,
Dyre
*****
I had a moment of visceral disgust when I was describing my late aunt to an old boss.
I was describing the hard life my Aunt Joyce had - pregnant at 17, abused by the adult man who had gotten her pregnant, that she'd been forced to marry, and then got so depressed after the divorce that she bought a trailer and told my Dad she wasn't going to stop eating until she couldn't fit back out the door.
She did pretty much exactly that.
She babysat me as a kid and when it was time to start kindergarten, I pleaded with my Dad not to go. I wanted to stay home and watch Gilligan and eat potato chips with Aunt Joyce.
My boss said something like, “Ugh, yeah I have family members like that too. Worthless.”
She's lucky I didn't haul off and slap her across the face - I needed the paycheck, and I didn't need the assault charge.
My Aunt Joyce was a beautiful person. She was the most gorgeous soul I've ever known. She was a daughter, a mother, a sister, an aunt, and a granny - and then a great granny to little chicky-doo-dah. She excelled at being a family matriarch.
She died at 56 from cirrhosis, which she developed from fatty liver.
Just like Grandma did seven years earlier at 71, the year I graduated from college.
Even all Joyce's nurses in the hospital loved her. She had friends everywhere that last year when I would go visit her up at Fairview Hospital.
All our lives were brighter for her having been in it.
All our lives are darker now that her light is gone.
Nothing about her was worthless.
Nothing about her existence was senseless.
Nothing.
*****
Dear Grandma and Joyce,
You were the only two adults, besides Mom and Uncle Mike, who made me feel safe as a kid.
As it turns out, most adults aren’t safe people. That’s something I’m grieving hard right now – that a late in life autism diagnosis means I’ve had autism since 1985.
That my differences in emotional affect, cognitive processing, and communication were the reason I was mistreated by so many fully grown adults who just plain didn’t like me but didn’t know why. Teachers, professors, supervisors, friends’ parents, boyfriends’ parents turned in-laws… they all made sure I knew I was different, in some cases more harshly than the childhood peers I grew up with did.
At least by high school, after twelve years of being in class with me, the other kids learned to accept that this was just how I was.
Grandma, I'm not sure why you took such a liking to me. I know I was basically the baby of the family, and Mom says it's because you were older then and you were finally ready to be a Grandma.
And that I was cute, apparently.
Even in as much pure uncomplicated love that you gave me, coupled with softness and care that most of the rest of the family didn't get from you, I knew you were limited - not to be crossed.
You had serious sensory issues, were easily overwhelmed, and quick to temper. I might be the only kid in the family you didn't beat, although I do remember getting smacked and called a foolish heathern for picking your flowers.
You caught onto the punchline of the joke slowly and had a hard time keeping up. Your intentions were so pure, but you'd miss the mark and we'd avoid telling you so we wouldn't hurt your feelings.
I think you were autistic too.
Aunt Joyce, maybe you were just used to us and our shenanigans. Maybe you were just an incredibly easy-going person.
You never made me feel different, even though I’m sure you knew that I was, somehow.
Hell, you were present for most of my early sensory meltdowns. You handled them like a champ, with no knowledge whatsoever about a diagnosis I wouldn’t receive till I hit perimenopause – because when you get good grades and learn to stop trying to meet your own needs in your youth, you get overlooked. When you get smacked for your “tantrums” you learn to shove it all down and suppress your every need, in order to be acceptable. In order to be loveable.
You never made me shrink, though. You took me in stride, and you loved me fiercely anyway. I was allowed to be myself with you. It was as if you were my second mom, just as loving and capable as the first.
Both of you were the best parts of my childhood. Your home was filled with laughter and love, and I’m grateful I got to spend half my day there while Mom and Dad worked, before I started school.
Aunt Joyce, I can't help but think of you chauffeuring me and Grandma around in the little “lellow” car, when you were babysitting me.
Grandma yelling “LORD JOYCE ANN, ME AND DY-ER NEED SOME FROZEN COKES!” and making you drive us through the Burger King drive through.
You dying laughing telling my Mom later, “I was driving around Vermilion with Mom and Dyre in the backseat slurping their frozen cokes and I felt crazy!”
Grandma, how different do you think our lives would be if we'd known anything about autism while we were slurping frozen cokes in the yellow car?
Or if they'd known what it was when you were a non-speaker under the age of four, living in a shack with a dirt floor, when the whiskey still got busted up by the feds, and Papaw got taken to jail?
I was trying to piece it together in college once. When I was alone with Dad, I hesitated, and then tentatively asked him if you were smart. He got a very sad look on his face that told me he understood what I was getting at and why I'd never ask that in front of mom.
He told me about how poor your family was, how you had to stop going to school because Papaw couldn't take you in the horse and buggy in the winter.
Then you met Grandpa, the “ugliest boy you'd ever seen” on a blind date, and eventually got pregnant with Mom at seventeen…then had four more kids before the age of 25.
I get it. Your life was HARD. It was hard and you had no help, then your husband left you to run off with his girlfriend and his bluegrass band, with five teenagers and no car, no money, and a cancer diagnosis. Then he came home a year later.
Then he died at a party.
Your sister kicked his girlfriend out of the funeral that was paid for by the Grand Ole Opry Trust.
They played “I'll Fly Away” at the funeral and everyone cried - he'd been learning to play it that summer.
When I die, hallelujah bye and bye
You found the church and fell in love with Jesus and that became your only support system. It became your everything. It makes sense.
Only now as I reckon with my own late in life diagnosis am I starting to recognize our similarities.
We have had very different lives that have been difficult in different ways - but one thing I think we share is a developmental disability that's hereditary.
You and I were never, ever, worth less than anyone else. No amount of poverty or lack of social literacy can change that.
Did you pass down trauma to your kids? Definitely.
I knew a different version of you - a soft, sweet woman who fully saw me in all of my vulnerability and innocence, an innocence that others mocked.
I know there was once another woman inside you who screamed, and hit her kids, and threw jars at Grandpa’s head.
I saw her come out of my normally saintly mother a few times.
It's hard to pass down healthy coping skills that you never received, and don't have to give.
You needed help you were never in a position to get. It takes a village, and you had no one.
On top of all of it, you were disabled and had no idea.
I hope knowing that now brings some acceptance of who you've been, and who you had to be with no resources to survive and keep 5 kids alive.
Undiagnosed autism was an invisible thread running through the generational trauma on both sides of my family, all along.
I think it's helping Mom re-contextualize her childhood… and honestly, her marriage.
I don't know that a diagnosis excuses us, but it explains how our brains work. It brings into focus the disadvantage of having social deficits and sensory triggers that drive us to melt down from overstimulation, or in my case, totally withdraw from connection when I can't mask anymore.
If feeling alive is feeling connected, where does that leave us when the severe overwhelm we feel as autistics necessitates withdrawal?
I think many of us attune to the natural world, instead. A more fluid and predictable rhythm full of repetition and cyclical time. Seasons of rest and recovery. Nothing can sustainably bloom all year.
I love you both.
Dyre
*****
We can ascribe as much or as little meaning as we want to any life, but nothing is senseless.
Uncle Mike is back in the hospital struggling to breathe. They took 2 liters of fluid off his lungs yesterday - they'll do his abdomen today.
He's 63. Somehow, this runs in our family. For those of us that have it, unless we completely forgo refined carbs like my cousin Kami did for 2 years, our fatty liver turns into cirrhosis and we die young.
My uncle and I used to be closer. I would write him letters as a kid and he would write back. I guess at some point I stopped doing it. One day one of us mailed the very last letter and we had no idea.
Then a few years ago he showed up with a bunch of my old letters from childhood and showed them to my parents. Stuff I had written about what was going on in the house- I honestly have no idea what it was, no memory to connect to.
He was passing them around like they were cute and funny. Mom thought it was hilarious.
It felt like a betrayal, but by then my uncle and I didn’t even have enough of a relationship for me to address it.
He lurks on my Facebook and likes stuff, but when I try to start up a conversation, it feels forced. I am not his go to family member. He doesn't confide in me. I went to college and strayed too far from anything he could fathom.
Now he's laying in an ER bed, where he's been for 3 nights because the hospital is so congested there are no beds.
Struggling to breathe.
My own breath is shallow.
I'm never more aware of my breath than when a family member is laying in a hospital bed struggling to breathe.
All we can write to each other on Facebook messenger is:
Mom told me. I love you. Hang in there. I'm praying.
Thanks. I'm hanging in there. I love you too.
*****
Dear Grandma,
I loved you dearly, no matter what my mother's childhood was like.
Sometimes that makes me feel like a traitor, but I know she loved you and that she wanted me to have my Grandma. She forgave all of it a long time ago, even if the trauma lingers.
You loved me no matter how weird I was, even when I'd show up in my gothic castle dress from the clearance rack at Hot Topic. You'd just say, “LORD DY-ER, that's a purty dress! You could wear that to church!”
I'm sorry I never went to church with you, but I totally get why you went.
I hope you really are dancing with Jesus.
I hope it's okay that I'm a genderqueer pagan now. I know you're still praying for me.
I love you. I hope to see you in the room when it's time for me to come to the next place.
Love,
Dyre
*****
Dear Uncle Mike,
You went into hospice on my 40th birthday, and you died the next day. You died at Tanner Hospital almost exactly 40 years after I was born there.
Mom asked me if there is something metaphysical about that. I told her yes. Time isn't linear, it's like a folded blanket, yadda yadda. I don't know if I really believe that, but I want to.
It's been a rough few days. I was in a cabin for my birthday with my husband Bob, my best friend Amy, my cousin Erin and her fiancé Katie.
We got the news about hospice before we left the house. I texted Uncle Burl and asked him to make sure you got baptized if that's what you want, and to tell you I love you.
I didn't expect you to be awake but he texted back immediately, “He says he loves you, and Erin too.”
I lost my fucking shit. I cried, hard, onto Bob's shoulder for a solid ten minutes.
We packed up and left for the cabin. I tried so hard to allow space for both celebration and grief at the same time. I failed, so I tried to fake it.
Getting stoned around the fire, surrounded by the sweet, nostalgic scent of crunchy, brown November leaves, seemed like a good way to honor our stoner uncle.
It's ironic that it's really the smell of botanical decay that does it for me.
Edibles helped until they didn't. Suddenly I was seeing Hecate and crows any time I closed my eyelids. Then Erin, who was sitting across from me in a hoodie, slowly morphed into a specter of the grim reaper.
It was dark, it was insanely potent weed that Amy gets in Michigan for her fibromyalgia, but it wasn't laced with anything.
That was animistic trance shit.
It was Hecate and all facets of the Great Mother, all my mothers in flesh and in spirit, my spirit guides, my benevolent ancestors, and my beloved dead - holding space for me in death and rebirth, as I ask them to every night before I fall asleep.
I was certain it meant you'd died.
I left my phone in the woods on purpose, knowing I wouldn't be able to handle that news stoned, but Bob demanded to know where it was because a storm was coming through. Amy went back outside and found it before the rain hit.
The next morning, Burl texted that you were still resting peacefully.
We spent the day trying to have a birthday, taking turns in the hot tub, going on nature walks, making food and enjoying each other's company.
Around 11pm, Mom called. Her voice sounded completely hollow, as she relayed the news of your passing. Erin was washing her face in the bathroom, and I had to wait to tell her.
It's odd we happened to be together. We don't see each other much since she became a mom.
We held each other tight and suddenly we were 10 years old again.
Maybe we all feel more alive against the backdrop of death.
*****
In pondering all of this, the sentence came to me, "When we fall, it's not senseless. We are here as part of a natural process.”
That intention strikes me as a kind of reverse existential dread.
Of course we can't do anything to evade our purpose - individualism is a myth, sold to us by capitalists who need us to labor and consume.
The propaganda is that disability makes us less than. We're of no use to capitalism if we can't be exploited.
An undiagnosed autistic housewife gets written off to fend entirely for herself.
A single mom on welfare, who is a domestic abuse survivor gets shamed for needing the system.
A former stoner who didn't get on board with his health till after his heart attack in his early 50s gets blamed for his end stage liver disease, even though he walked ten miles every day for the last decade trying to compensate for the damage done. It wouldn't have mattered unless he'd eaten like a rabbit. It's genetic.
People think that if they can just control this or that they can avoid pain. Avoid poverty. Avoid disability. Avoid death.
They project their fears about suffering onto those of us who suffer by shaming us, like it was something that could have been easily avoided with better habits and moral hygiene.
As if generational trauma is nonexistent.
As if ability equals worth.
The truth is, anything other than existing within the natural cycle of earth and co-creation - of art, children, society or anything else - doesn't amount to much.
It's about the meaning we create together and the love we share. There is nothing else.
Life is meant to be beautiful in an ephemeral way.
We can ascribe as much or as little meaning as we want to, but nothing is senseless.
We're here to live, illuminate our shadows, and love each other despite our flaws. To exist and die together in an intricate web of life. No different from any other fauna or flora.
No one is worthless. Nothing is senseless.
We live and then we die.
Along the way, we collect moments, memories that made us feel alive, to remember that this is all temporary.
Life is only transition.
Photo of Dyre Copenhale
BIO: Dyre Copenhale is a genderqueer, neurodivergent, pagan memoirist from the Midwest. They write about healing, animism, generational trauma, and clawing their way out of survival mode. Their debut memoir "None of us Were" is in the works. Check out more of their writing at dyrecopenhale.com.