And a Kiss B4U Go is the cover pick! (alongside other amazing authors like RIchard Russo and Jeannette Winterson…)
Wow! Happy New Year!
P.S. A favor: There’s a really nice review of the book and I’m sure it would be helpful if people who come up on it knew others had read it too, so please, feel free to comment on it too and share your experience of the book. The more the merrier!
A drawings and some thoughts that never made it into the final version of my book, AKiss B4UGo
I sit in the Hong Kong airport, and, somewhat hesitantly, open the folder of my photos of Patti. In the past, I avoided looking at these pictures unless I was willing to lose it, even wanted to lose it. I take a breath and I flip through the vacation pictures, the birthdays, Patti playing with Jack at three, at ten, at fifteen, hugging the dogs, hugging me.
I feel a smile grow, seeing my love, my friend as she was, as she is, full of warmth and fun, all good memories, not sad or heartbreaking but there in me, warming me, keeping me company so far from home, just like she always has. I miss her like I would have done on long journeys past, thinking of how she would feel about what I’m doing now, what she would have thought of the curried noodle chicken soup I had at the airport cafeteria. “Ew, sounds goobery, honey,” she would have said. “Hurry home. I miss you.”
I miss you too, Pandy, I miss you a lot, but the thought of you deep inside me will help me keep on, keep happy, keep living. Our love is forever, no matter what happens, and now I feel like I might just cry, here in the Hong Kong flight club.
A sad declaration, written in my journal when I was just sick and tired of being sad and tired.
I have been forced to stand on my own, to define and empower myself as a single unit rather than part of a pair. I have had to take responsibility for things I could get away with not doing, have had to be much more practical and unsentimental about things. Sentimentality is too powerful an emotion to bear now.
The life I define for myself is leaner, stripped down, less indulgent. Like a hard mattress, a rough blanket, a single pillow. In some ways, many actually, this is good for me. I feel more confident, more in control of the edges of my life, less anxious about the next shoe dropping. But my life is a lot less rich and beautiful. My harder, rational side is unmitigated by the gentle flirtations of love. And, while my heart is still here, still beats, is still capable of love, I fear it is also smaller and harder and less romantic.
Patti’s death has changed me forever. Just as Patti’s life did.
I just read a beautiful review of my new book by my pal and mentor, Roz Stendahl. I hope you get a chance to read it because she describes her experience so beautifully.
This painting is in my new book. The following words are not.
365 days after she was gone, I took off my wedding ring to see what my hand would be like to be without it. Single.
The skin of my finger had grown thick around it, hugging the ring and, when I tugged and cajoled the three interlocked gold Cartier bands off, the knuckle was distorted and misshapen.
The next night I had a dream that Patti asked me where my ring was. I told her a lie to explain. I don’t remember the details, just the feeling.
A week later my ring finger looks normal again but on closer inspection the skin is paler, softer, and the outline is still faintly there. But only I can see it.
I just got “Autobiographical Comics: life writing in pictures” by Elisabeth El Refaie, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University in the UK. It’s an academic book that discusses the work of lots of different artists (including me). It’s thrilling to be discussed alongside r.crumb, Marjane Satrapi, Joe Sacco, and Art Spiegelman. Coolest of all : it uses a drawing of mine from Everyday Matters as the cover art.
An email exchange between my sister and me about my (then 3-year-old) niece Maggie soon after Patti’s death. (For those who’ve not yet read my new book, A Kiss Before You Go, we are referring to Patti’s urn, a bear-shaped cookie jar).
Miranda: Maggie says she wants to die so she can be in the cookie jar like Patti. How should I respond?
Me: It’s good. From now on A) she’ll associate death with sweets and B) she’ll associate sweets with death. Win-win!
Here’s a note I wrote in my journal during the days I covered in my new book, A Kiss B4UGo, about wishing I could be a drunk so I could share in the kinship of recovery. These words never made it into the book. Probably just as well as they are a bit nutty.
This page never made it into my new book.
I have become very attracted to AA recently, though I dont drink enough to qualify for membership. When I attended a meeting with T____ in LA, I discovered the power of kinship, shared suffering and resolve, of having a step-by-step guide to overcoming a lifechanging obstacle. The peace recovering alcoholics seem to find in honestly sharing their stories and admitting their shortcomings was very inspiring. They accept each other as they are, know how deeply they have failed and sharing their common experience to support each other. The daily attendance, the community of broken toys, is something I wish I had.
T_____’s meeting was just men and I realized how rare that is, for men to be together and share of themselves, not just doing (watching sports, camping, working on cars, drinking) but being open and frank. It’s so rare to get advice and example from men like that. In a business context, people must be guarded and in any other context they are just drawn together by a single common interest and are less likely to share. As I get older, I share more and more with my friends as women do but it was moving to be in a room with 200 men all just laying it out there without reserve or competition.
I have tried to get to similar meetings here but most seem closed to people who aren’t actually alcoholics. I’ll have to keep drinking alone.
Our vacation has been pleasant and relaxing — until the last 24 hours. Last night, while we were in the cinema, Jack’s headache turned into a full-blown shaking fever. We tottered home on our bicycles through the dark streets and he went straight to bed, his whole body burning up. I slept fitfully too, waking with panicky thoughts that he could be dying a 19th century death from a mysterious fever. I climbed the stairs with a wet cloth to mop his brow, glasses of juice, Advil, anxiety.
In the morning, he was cooler but still wrung out like that cloth. I headed out to town to buy a thermometer and some chicken soup; our dogs yapping at me as I drove away. When I got back, the gardeners were mowing the lawn and the gate was wide open. The dogs were gone. The gardener told me he hadn’t known they were our dogs, that a lady had stopped them by busy the road, looked for their owner and driven off with them.
I rushed back and forth through the house, unsure what to do. The dogs have tags on their collars but they are inscribed with Patti’s now-cancelled cel phone number. I ripped out sheets of paper, pieces of cardboard and painted up signs to hang along the road. I kept flashing to images of my boyhood dog, Pogo, who had wandered away from our house when old and doddering and never came back.
Jack still lay twisted in his damp sheets, exhausted and pale. I squawked at him, explaining the situation, and he crawled down to help me put up the signs. Then I started calling anyone I could think off, the police, the shelters, vet after vet, until one said .,”Yes we have them.” I rushed out of the house, and drove off, was instantly lost. Found my way back, begged Jack to come with me as navigator, and we found our way to the vet and returned, all intact, little worse for wear.
I felt a new tic, a flickering twinge under my right lower lip, matching the one in my right upper eye lid. I almost lost what little I have left. My boys. I am responsible for their safety, their well-being.
Have a lovely holiday and, if you happen to find A KissB4UGo under your tree, do let me know what you think of it. I’ll write again around New Year’s.
Danny Gregory 