Hold it Against Your Bones

Hitting Submit

Yesterday I submitted my thesis for the Creative Nonfiction Writing MFA I am completing after two years. It is a series of eight linked essays called ‘Hold it Against Your Bones: On Love, Duty, and Letting Go’. In lieu of writing even one more word, I am sharing a passage from the introduction here:

Last week I dug up my application to the Hunter College MFA in Creative Nonfiction program, written over two years ago. I remembered the difficult moment I was living through when I hit submit, but I wanted to see exactly how I had characterized it. This is what I wrote in February 2023:

A really un-funny thing happened to me as I got ready to submit this application. My eighteen-year-old daughter was in an accident while hiking in California and fractured her skull. I got a call from her roommate at 8:00 on a Friday evening, and my husband and I got on a plane at 6am Saturday and got to her before the surgery. She is going to be OK -- which is the only important thing. I am on day five in the hospital with her now, and she is due to be released on Friday and then we will find an Airbnb and stay there with her and cross our fingers that she can recuperate in time to finish her freshman year. The piece that I have been working on for my MFA submission is about accompanying my mother as she was diagnosed with and went through treatment for Glioblastoma - a brain cancer - and how I have survived her death. It took a few years until I felt ready to write about it in a serious way. Starting to feel ready, I applied to the Hunter program. And then, during the final ten days I had planned to work on the application, I found myself back on a neurology floor in a hospital. There are some very significant differences - the first time with my mom was in NYC. This time we are outside of LA. The last time I was in the hospital with a 75 year-old with the worst kind of cancer. This time I am with a healthy 18 year-old who has a serious injury from which she will recover. But the sounds, smells, endless days reminding nurses about pain medication, filling out the menus for meals she won’t eat - falling in love with today's nurse then never to see her again. Those are all the same. And the impossible, exhausting, devastating, sweet, boring experience of seeing a person at the center of your universe in pain, in a hospital gown, staying in that bed when you leave at night - that's all the same. I cannot bear to go back and revise my writing about being in the hospital with my mother from my seat next to my daughter.

Until today, I figured the universe was telling me to forget this application. But walking up to the hospital from our soulless Airbnb today, I remembered that I don't believe the universe tells me things. And I have already unearthed my college transcript from a million years ago, and made two people write recommendations for me- so I am going to hit submit on this application. Thanks for reading - and sorry it's not in better shape - and wear a helmet whenever possible.

I am so glad I hit submit that day. Writing and reading for this program has helped heal me, and get me ready for whatever comes next.

When my father was in the hospital in 1988, dying of Leukemia, a friend of his who was a rabbi came to visit. This friend was writing a sermon for the high holidays, and asked my father for his advice on what he should say.

“Tell them,” my father advised “tell them what a day is.”

“Tell them all they can do in a day, all they can feel and say and do.”

At that time, my father didn’t have many days left. Since then, I have had many, many days.

The collection of essays is my attempt to tell you what a day is for me, and maybe it will remind you of what your days are like too. As Annie Dillard wrote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”

And Maria Mottola’s lovely landscape for today:

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