I make my trek to the water’s edge two miles from home, the promise of spring in the light air. I sit, pull out my lunch, and read my new book, a collection of essays by Leslie Jamison.

“There you were: an arrival, a cry, the beginning of another world.”

Nostalgia for my Elisif: such promise, so much pain.

My thrill at her birth (more than 30 years ago now) rendered by Jamison’s words. From them, my drawing: a seed becomes a child, her fate her own, flowing like a river.

(There she was, before she was not.)

“I would have loved to hear Amy Winehouse sing sober.”

Leslie Jamison (who I’m reading again today) had also been lost to substances for a time. For her, it is no leap of imagination to Amy (to Elisif).

“Like she’s been air-dropped into a moment she can’t possibly fathom.”

A cloud’s shadow skitters by. Looking up, I think of them as a trio of raging brilliance: Amy the singer. Elisif the artist. Leslie the writer (the survivor), her prose elegiac.

“Drunken stumbling under the broken tower of her beehive, her body barely holding up the weight until it wasn’t, until it couldn’t any longer.”

That’s the moment I draw: her beehive, swaying in purple and black.

(I would have loved to see you draw sober.)

“To Peter, who has been elsewhere.”

This, the inscription from Mark C. Taylor to me in the copy of Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Death and Dying. In his book, he writes of his own near-death experience, and where it brings him.

“After such a journey nothing, absolutely nothing, remains the same – everything must be reconsidered and reevaluated. Family, friends, foes, colleagues, values, ideas, work, play, success, failure are no longer what they previously seemed to be.”

I toss my apple core aside. The ocean is different today: frothy, like the aftermath of a storm.

My daughter has died, and I am elsewhere.

(My drawing, puke-yellow and green; all teeter and fall.)

Heading to my lunch spot, I pass children on holiday. The season has changed.

It’s not so much that I fell out of love with one as I fell in love with another. I had no story for that, no solace or explanation – until reading Rebecca Solnit.

“Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs.”

Her allegory resonates for me.

“The hermit crab: grabbing on one side and clinging on the other. Eventually the creature outgrows the shell, and thus comes the risky moment called the molt, when the crab is between shells.”

I draw that hermit crab (I draw myself) – between here and there, between love stories – “soft and vulnerable.”

At the water’s edge, pine trees yield to pebble and stone: my oceanside place.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s words seem to speak of me.

“Lonely one you are going the way to yourself, and your way leads past you and your seven devils.”

I am my devil – I have left my wife. I am an abandoner – the betrayer.

“But the worst enemy you can encounter will always be you, yourself. You lie in wait for yourself in caves and woods.”

Cramped on my rocky shoreline spot, I spin and burn. (It’s what I draw.)

Walking back, sweating from the heat, I pluck at wild blueberries ripening by the roadside.

I have just read Underbelly. For the poet, a cautionary tale to a prospective love. I read it differently, the words offering a corrective lens on my relentless self-recrimination.

“In it I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either
so let’s say in the story I was human.”

This: a reframing; a maybe truth.

“Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard.”

(The drawing: us split, left and right, blade and guard, poetry cradled between.)

A bald eagle speck appears at the horizon. Today, I bring along Robert Hass: the poem, Faint Music.

“Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.”

Daughter dead, marriage over, family scattered … grace is what I long for.

“I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.”

Reading these lines, I realize I am part of that chorus: in singing our pain, we find acceptance, and release.

I copy his feathery words in russet ink. From them, hope rises in yellow diaphanous lines.

I hear the faint music; I find grace.

Autumn. Ochre needles carpet the forest floor and browning leaves cling to trees. I sit again at the shore, lunch in hand. Low silver light dances on the water’s dimpled surface as jittery red squirrels leap from branch to branch gathering cones for winter.

I have come so far; endured so much.

I read once more: Merrit Malloy’s Epitaph.

“Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.”

In the soft light of day I exhale, and know everything is okay.