Facing the Future After Loss
By Autumn Widdoes
In December 2021, I suffered loss twice. First, I lost my mom to cancer and then, two weeks later, I lost a lifetime’s work. Both losses are entangled with each other and both continue to haunt me.
Prior to my mom’s death, I spent four months in Florida caregiving for her full time. About a month before she passed away, I wrote in one of my journals about time. I’ve always been interested in the concept of time and memory in my own work, but now I was thinking about time as an imperceptible dimension, a thing we accept but can’t understand. This dimension is what separates the living from the nonliving. I wrote about time to try to figure it out because I knew I had such a limited amount left with a person I loved the most in this world.
Photo by Christine Palamidessi. (“Suzanne"): My mother playing drums at an outdoor performance in the 1970's.
A few months prior, when my mom first went on hospice, I asked her if she wanted to listen to any of the thousands of albums she had. As a musician and former music teacher, my mom surrounded herself with music. She had even kept the ethnographic recordings she’d made in Ghana in the early 1970’s, when she’d gone there to study drumming.
As I looked through her collection, I found an album by The Bad Plus that I remembered she had loved. I put it on. My mom said it was just too much for her brain to process. I lamented that she had once loved all these challenging pieces of music. She then said to me, "There's a ton of ugliness in this world and I no longer have time for that. All I want is beauty now." She didn’t mean that the music was ugly, but that the chaotic sounds didn’t provide joy anymore.
We know that we have a limited amount of time to experience all that we want to in this life. We feel it when we're exhausted from spending hours doing the exact opposite of what we love so we can buy food or pay bills. But to get a sense of this incomprehensible dimension propelling all of us forward, you have to spend time with someone who is dying. You realize that the simple delights, the things that have brought you earthly pleasure, begin to slip from you. Your body no longer wants to hear music that once brought you joy. You may no longer want to hear music at all. You no longer want to eat the foods you craved. You eventually stop wanting to eat food. Eventually, you can no longer talk with the people you love the most. And it is time that moves all of us towards that end.
The act of writing can counter the wash of time. Writing allows for documentation, articulation, expression, playfulness, and freedom of thoughts and feelings. Without writing, we have very little to look back at to compare where we are now – individually and collectively. Writing is a connection between the past and the present. It can transport you across time and allow you to feel close to moments, places, and people. Writing is not only an act of remembrance; it is a way to hold on while time glacially breaks everything down.
Photo courtesy of Autumn Widdoes ("All Five of Us"): My mother (holding sunglasses) in a family photo at the age when she owned the transistor radio.
Just before I left Florida, I packed up all of my belongings that my mom had stored at her house over the years. She had catalogued my journals of poetry, essays, short stories, and plays I’d written by hand since I was a child. I had often moved, sometimes around the world, and lugging those items with me would have been impossible. I shipped this box with my life’s work to my home in Nevada.
In the early morning hours on the day after Christmas, the box with all of my writing was stolen. I could no longer look back at journals from middle school, my high school year in Germany, my writing during college, memories from the time I lived in London, my ideas and drafts when I was living in NYC and creating performance art, my journals that I kept over the four years I lived in Japan. All of those were taken by someone who thought that the package might have electronics in it. And I guess it had something of the sort within it.
Included in the box along with the journals was a small pink transistor radio. It had been my mom’s when she was a teen and she had given it to me years ago. It had long stopped working before I became the owner, but I thought it was retro and cool. I had kept the radio because it reminded me of her.
Something about this second loss ruptured the fissures within me I was trying to stitch together from the first loss. Only two weeks had passed since I had lost my mom. Suddenly, I had to face a future without my mom and without the writing I’d created.
What does it mean to have a whole life’s worth of writing disappear from you just as you’re trying to make sense of a life altering loss? It reminds me of how, at the end of my exchange year in Germany, I had to make the decision to throw out all of the hundreds of letters I’d accumulated from friends and family. I wanted to keep all of them to document my year but could not afford to ship them home. I still remember tossing them in the garbage and immediately regretting the loss of that writing. I still think about those letters, especially as I lose the people who wrote those letters to me.
Even though these were only journals, they articulated my past, who I was, work I drafted, and ideas that I wanted to revisit at some point. The loss of the journals isn’t equal to the loss of my mother, but I will always think about what happened to my work.
Photo courtesy of Antonie Aquino.
Autumn Widdoes is a writer and theater artist. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Magma, White Stag, Fourth & Sycamore, and Helen. She has shown performance work in New York City, San Francisco, London, Las Vegas, Tampa, and Japan, and she is a founding member of the performance collective TASK 沖縄. She was the Managing Editor and an Editor-at-Large for Interim Poetry and Poetics. She has a Substack where you can follow her writing. Autumn received her MA in Performance Studies from New York University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She lives in Henderson, Nevada.