Content note: this essay contains discussion of suicide. If you or a loved one is in distress, call, text, or chat the 24-hour national suicide and crisis lifeline at 988.
After years of not having consistent access to an indoor pool, Duncan and I finally joined the local community fitness center. We resisted joining this particular gym for years, on account of it being run by an evangelical Christian organization, but our emergent health needs won out, and we opted for the gym we have (access to), rather than the gym we want. After learning that not only is it run by an evangelical Christian organization, but it is named for and funded by the founder of McDonald’s, we now affectionately refer to it the McDonald’s Megachurch Gym; I’m sorry to report that the vibes are impeccable, the people are kind, the facilities are clean and bright, and the pool is gorgeous. We’ve been going, well, religiously.
On Tuesdays I take a yoga class from an old man in blue jeans, white ponytail peeking out from underneath a Steelers hat (antagonistic), who offers perfectly precise and illuminating adjustments and prompts while complaining about social security and the cough he’s had for three months, and how he would like to escape this world before he has to have a hip replacement. People wander in 20 minutes late, phones buzzing, while he berates everyone for their screen time and implores them to think, really think! about their intention for this practice. Why are you here? he almost-yells, exasperated. I mean think about it! Real guru shit.
Other days, I swim. Slow and steady: head submerged, legs churning, torso twisting, face turning to the surface on alternating sides every third stroke like a waltz—ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE two three—air thrumming out of my lungs and drumming onto my swim cap, bubbles catching the sunlight streaming through the skylights. Magnificent.
Coordinating so many movements, managing breath, counting laps: it’s a cacophony, a fully engaging sensory experience that leaves little room for thinking. Though I’m no athlete, I’m starting to understand why so many sober people become ultramarathoners. We have to do something to get out from under all of these malignant thoughts. It’s sink or swim, baby, and these days, grief is tugging at my ankles, trying to pull me down. Hard, ugly grief, not the beautiful kind, not the edifying, poignant, footsteps-in-the-sand kind, but the heavy, messy, sticky kind. The undertow.
Because David is gone.
It’s impossible to name who David is to me, what we were to each other. As my friend Annie wrote to me the day I found out: I know you had, and will always have, such a one-of-a-variety of love. It’s hard not to try to assert my position, to prove some kind of primacy, but what made our love so special is exactly what made it illegible—once a lover but not an ex, not at all like a brother and more than a friend. We just had a one-of-a-variety love. And we always will.
The day I met David, the summer of 2010, I was on tour writing my book Cake Ladies, running the Cake Shop, separated from Duncan. Jasper was three, and I had planned to leave him with my friend Keri and her kids in Hillsborough for the day, while I went further east to interview a cake lady for the book. But when I woke up that day, I was restless, unsettled. It didn’t feel right to go. So I stayed, and Keri brought us to the Anathoth community garden in Cedar Grove, where David worked.
I felt like I had always known him. I felt like I would always know him. And I loved him completely. He asked me what I was doing in town and I told him, and he said, excitedly, well, I know a cake lady! I’ll take you to her right now!
And the next thing I knew, we were riding off together in his pickup truck. It was one of those things, one of those fated moments, where you catch the slipstream of life and let it take you, where you look up and wonder how you got here, and where you understand that this is it, life is really happening, finally, after so much strife and struggle and confusion.
We arrived at Betty Compton’s house, and I got my cake lady after all. That day, Betty and I baked a pound cake together, while David fixed Betty’s husband’s fiddle, and then we all sang Red Clay Halo, in harmony.
When he showed up on my doorstep in Asheville the next weekend, I understood exactly. He knocked on the screen door and stood on the porch in the heat and light of the late afternoon sun: an open door, an open book, a vaulted gateway, radiant. We sat in the backyard and drank dark red wine at dusk, I played records on the turntable and pulled tarot for him (outcome: Strength).
We talked about it, all of it, the spells we wanted to break, our fears and our sorrows. We made a pact, an experiment: an agreement to love each other without condition and share intimacy without attachment and I had the honor of his trust and initiation and the way that he loved me that day and ever since changed the way I saw myself and the way that I wanted to be loved.
There’s so much more, I could write a book. How do you sum up a life?
Though I came to know his sister, his parents, his cousins, later his partner Hayley, though he came to know Duncan and Jasper, our thing existed beyond all that. We mostly took walks. We talked on the phone. He and Hayley took a class I taught. I made their wedding cake. Duncan says I led a song at the wedding, but I don’t remember (I was drunk).
I quit drinking in 2019 and we moved to Philadelphia in 2020, and I didn’t see him again, though we talked some, through COVID, through the death of three of his immediate family members and a best friend, through the dissolution of his marriage. It wasn’t until after Hurricane Helene that I got to spend a day with David again, walking the land, in that timeless flow of magic that I always felt with him. He seemed good, he had been through a lot but was healing, he was radiant, as always, to me.
And then a month ago, I heard the news. David died by suicide the day after Easter, in the same barn where his brother killed himself four years ago. I was harvesting rosemary; I dropped to the ground in the alley between my tiny front stoop garden and the backyard, no no no no no no no no no oh god no.
Time warped. Thoughts and words untethered themselves from themselves, from each other, from meaning. I wrote a poem, I walked in circles, I took a bath, I sobbed and I wailed. Sleep was hard to come by. Someone texted me his obituary and the picture that accompanied it was one I took of him, in my room in the house on Westwood, arms wide open, smiling at me. It was unbearably strange to be so far away.
A week later I drove south on 81, towards North Carolina again, towards my family I haven’t seen or spoken to in six years, sobbing and eating gummy bears and blasting Indigo Girls like it was 1992, and arrived in Fairview, where everyone looks like him because he’s related to half the valley, where the rivers are still raw gashes in the earth, where the sky never looked so blue, where the borderlands between the realms of death and life have never seemed so slippery.
I traveled by myself, I stayed in my friend’s cabin by myself, I went to the memorial by myself. I felt so anxious: did I put out the candle in the cabin, is anyone mad at me, does my dress look weird, does my face look old, why am I so petty and needy and agitated all the time?
I sat by myself and I wept lavishly.
I left North Carolina again the next day, coming home towards Philadelphia, which, through all that has passed, is my home now, is where I belong. I turn the corner and startle a buzzard standing in the middle of the road. I come home through the peonies, the azalea, the mountain laurel, through the blackberry bushes in flower. I come home through the gifts of scented oils and Florida waters, through heat lightning in the night sky.
I want to be kinder, for David. I want to embody some of the softness, the tenderness, the gentleness that he carried, his exquisite sensitivity to life.
Because I continue to struggle with rage. Twice last week I yelled at people parked in a bike lane. One shrugged helplessly: it’s not my fault I got a flat tire! The other one was parking. I lied, it happened three times. The guilty shame has followed me all week.
I’m defensive all the time because despite all the years of therapy, all the love in my life, all the things I don’t eat or drink, all the people I don’t talk to anymore, all the places I don’t go, the ways I have learned to soothe and take care of myself; I still haven’t unraveled the profound sense of unsafety that I carry with me in my body, which always seems to have me bracing for punishment, for shame, for humiliation.
But I was safe with David. I could be myself. What we gave to each other we gave freely. I feel sick and bereft that I couldn’t keep him safe from his own pain, from the world’s cruelty. The least I can do now is to try to carry some part of him with me, to pray to embody that part of him that loved without condition or expectation, his oceanic heart.
David was a healer, specifically a Somatic Experiencing practitioner, and a massage therapist, a farmer, a songcatcher. He helped people come home to their bodies.
I’ve been opting to go to the gym—to ride my bike, to take walks, to garden and farm—over lots of other things these days, because it has just felt so imperative lately to be in my body. I think I am just beginning to understand what it even means to be in my body, what it even means to come home. David helped me learn that, and he told me I helped him too. I’ll never forget how you changed my life, he said.
This week has been quiet. No podcasts, no audiobooks, no music. Just the beat of my breath in the water and the sound of the birdsong and the coffee pot and the sirens.
I picture him now, swimming in the river deep within the primeval forest of Tuckaseegee. I see him tending the apple orchard, I hear him sing a song. And in the place beyond time, he’s still there, always singing, always tending, always swimming.
Always coming home.
If you wish to contribute funds to support David’s loved ones at this time, here is the gofundme. Donations can also be made in his honor to the Noquisi Initiative.
A note about paid subscriptions: I have tried to do subscriber-only content, I really have! It doesn’t work for me. I want this newsletter to be free (I want everything to be free 🕊️). And—if you open and read this newsletter regularly and find value in it; if you learn news, perspectives, and recommendations that broaden your view and deepen your understanding; or if you just feel some kind of 🩵winsome feeling when you read it, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber. The cost is $5 per month, or the cost of one round trip on SEPTA, or the price of one cute iced summer beverage (before tax + tip). It makes a measurable difference in my relationship to writing, and provides space and latitude for my creative life. And as always, a portion of subscription proceeds go to Many Lands Mutual Aid, supporting families surviving genocide in occupied Palestine. Thank you for considering!
Home.
I’m back at the Weaver’s Way Cooperative Farm one morning a week as work trade with my CSA and not a moment too soon. Last week I foraged lambs quarters from around the farm and made a beautiful beans, greens, and sweet potato soup. I’m in love with meeting my neighbors and growing food in community. 🌱
The World.
Recommended reading:
Inflamed by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. I’ve just started this book and I can already tell it is going to connect some dots for me in a new and important way.
From the book’s description:
The Covid pandemic and the shocking racial disparities in its impact. The surge in inflammatory illnesses such as gastrointestinal disorders and asthma. Mass uprisings around the world in response to systemic racism and violence. Rising numbers of climate refugees. Our bodies, societies, and planet are inflamed.
Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body—our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, this groundbreaking work illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Inflammation is connected to the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the diversity of the microbes living inside us, which regulate everything from our brain’s development to our immune system’s functioning. It’s connected to the number of traumatic events we experienced as children and to the traumas endured by our ancestors. It’s connected not only to access to health care but to the very models of health that physicians practice.
Purchase it on Bookshop.org or listen to it for free with a library card, through Libby!
The Nakba Day edition of the New York War Crimes from Writers Against the War on Gaza:
“THE PROMISE TO RETURN: The Nakba Day edition of The New York War Crimes launches today on the 77th anniversary of the Nakba. Produced in partnership with the Palestinian Youth Movement, it includes texts that articulate the antagonistic contradictions between Palestinian liberation and Zionism, between imperialism and Arab sovereignty, demonstrating unequivocally that the two can never co-exist. This moment’s horrors reflect Zionism’s barbarity. They also reflect our will to resist, to remain, and to return. For as long as Zionism attempts to eradicate us, we know we have not been defeated.”
Home + The World is an occasional newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links, and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake.
Home + the World observes the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and Jodi Rhoden is a proud signatory of the Writers Against the War on Gaza statement of solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Visit Home + the World on Bookshop.org, where I’m cataloging my recommended reading in the genres of memoir, fiction, healing, self-help, and social justice. If you purchase a book through my shop, I will receive a commission and so will an independent bookstore of your choice. Find it here!
⚔️❤️ Jodi
I love this memorial for your loved one. I just listened to it driving around. Beautiful.
so sorry for your loss jody! so happy for the love you had/have keep giving!