I’d buried that email, and the guilt that accompanied it, for awhile. Sometimes I had these dreams: my family would be eating a holiday meal, and my uncle would emerge through the kitchen—almost hit his head on the top of the door frame, like our house had shrunk since he died—and he’d laugh. He’d assure us it was all a joke; he just needed space. Some joke, we’d say. I’d wake up, and in that hazy space between dreamness and awakeness, I’d recognize that my subconscious hadn’t fully adjusted to the new Order in my family. I’d remind myself that he was gone.

When tasked with developing a semester-long project for the Minor in Writing capstone course, I thought about these dreams. A chronic overthinker, I figured that my dream-mind was carving space for these thoughts because my awake-mind pushed them away. My experience in the Minor in Writing has been one of tough, knotted conversations—about hyperreality and cultural appropriation, about the fickleness of words—so it made sense to dedicate my last semester to the toughest, knottiest one yet.

It’s not that I needed solace; this wasn’t a matter of “feeling better.” And it’s not that I needed clarity; I knew

how

, I could hypothesize

why

, the facts were there. I needed something I couldn’t name then: something akin to adaptation. And so, while I envisioned

Re:

as a reply to my uncle’s email, it soon became a response to my body’s subconscious-made-conscious cry for reconciliation.

There was a level of aspiration here. I frequently read Mark Doty and Louise Glück and Ross Gay, occasionally scribbled little odes in my notebook, sometimes sent them to friends—but I never took a poetry class or studied the mechanics of a poem or sought feedback from practiced poets. My poems were lyrical prose, nothing more.

I wanted to know if I could do more.

And, entering this project, I also understood poetry as a primary vehicle for the expression of grief. The relationship between poetry and healing has been well-documented: poetry collections, like Kevin Young’s The Art of Healing, are standard condolence gifts, branches of psychiatry have embraced poetry therapy, and numerous online forums encourage visitors to write and exchange poems of hope in the face of grief. Why not try it myself?

But, on a deeper level, I knew poetry would always be insufficient, because language is insufficient. It always fails us—but it’s all we have. Similarly, grief always fails us, but it’s all we have. So I needed to immerse myself in the inevitable incompleteness of poetry to reconcile the inevitable incompleteness of the experience—of healing, or memory, or whatever noun seems best suited for acknowledging both a life lived and a life lost.

Above all, I desperately wanted to avoid cliché—because, well, writing in cliché would be an insult in the face of my uncle’s distinctly uncliched memory.

Instead, I wanted to be frank. I wanted to tackle the smoke-and-mirrors of my own cynicism—to write a vulnerable, tangible, honest collection. I wanted to embrace the simultaneity of the whole thing: the way time warps around the affinities of emotion, you know, and how we’re simultaneously five years old, playing baseball with our uncle, and nineteen, scattering his ashes, and eight, asking our mom her favorite color.

One part of this meant embracing non-linearity. I took the feel-good rhetorics of “he’s in a better place” and “the five stages of grief,” and broke them, moved them around a bit, to demonstrate their fallibility.

And the other part of this meant finding a new structure: if I couldn’t rely on chronology, I had to find another narrative arc. By virtue of the 2,300 miles between Michigan and California and strained financial resources, I saw my uncle maybe once a year. My own experiences felt limited, numbered, murky. But I saw my mom daily. I always knew when she was on the phone with her brother because her breaths held more weight. I always knew when her brother was at our house, without even seeing him, because her feet danced when she walked. It made sense, then, to structure my collection through my experience of my mom’s experience of her brother. So I wrote a three-part prose poem, which became my collection’s scaffold. And I printed it in gray—an in-between color and a relentless color—to emphasize the persistence of these emotions and the resilience of my mom.

Well, first, there was the feeling of Imposter-ness. And the accompanying writer’s block that obstructed my hypercritical mind: no cliches, no false memories, no misrepresentations, capture him, Stina, dammit, don’t hurt anyone.

That’s a lot of pressure.

Mostly, though, the challenge was editing. I’m the sort of person—and, consequently, the sort of writer—who craves closure. I love the Neatly Wrapped Ending, the circular story arc I’ve honed over the years.

So, when I began editing, I desperately sought to fill gaps. In a fit of panic, I went to my mentor, Ray, and suggested that I write an overarching prose-narrative, which I would try to wrap around my poetry to ensure I left nothing out. He cautioned me against this instinct; he told me to sit in the discomfort of incompleteness. Another mentor, Maya, recommended that I fracture my work even more, that poetry is an exercise in deletion, that “pretty words” too often obscure raw emotion. And this was frustrating, because, on some level, I felt that to fracture my poetry would be to fracture my memory would be to fracture the whole notion of my uncle, as he exists in my head today.

It wasn’t until later that I realized that everything was already fractured—always was, always will be—and my poetry needed to reflect these fragments. The gaps were, well, kinda the whole point.

And I thank my mentors and professor, deeply and sincerely, for their role in this process of reconciliation:

To Ray: Thank you for teaching me that dislocated lyricism does not poetry make. Thank you for driving me away from gerund verb tenses and toward precision, tangibility, and purpose.

To Maya: Thank you for teaching me to grasp at the stove burners of my writing and locate the heat. Thank you for encouraging me to fracture more than I remedy.

To T: Thank you for encouraging me to pursue this project. Thank you for your flexibility and fortification and reassurance.

For me, poetry has always been a private crusade. Pages listen better than people, sometimes.

But when we’re dealing with a topic like suicide or mental illness, part of the stigma stems from the silence. And so it felt important to enter a public conversation: to build awareness, to raise consciousness, to say you—the suicide survivor, the suicide loss survivor, the suicide ideator—are not alone.

By both introspectively writing poetry and publicly publishing this poetry, I hoped to bridge the chasms between the personal and the shared, the private and the public, the vulnerable and the empathetic.

Why a book and a website, specifically? I think there’s something to be said for the permanence of print in the face of loss: something concrete, something reliable, something you can touch and hold. But, given financial restraints, I could only print a handful of books. So I figured a website would increase my “publicness,” allowing me to give my poetry for free. This website ensures that my project is accessible to a community beyond my inner circle of friends and families, giving me the opportunity to reach out to others who might benefit from my words.

I imagine my audience as three concentric circles. In the smallest circle, there’s my family, those who knew David intimately, those who shared this exact experience with me. One rung out, and there are those directly affected by suicide—suicide loss survivors, suicide loss survivors, suicide ideators—who might appreciate a poetic vocabulary for an experience similar to theirs. In the largest circle, there are those who’ve lost someone, anyone, in any manner.

For those in this final circle, I want them to know that the most formative moments of this project were the ones I shared with others: expressing frustration about my poetry’s deficiencies to my best friend, attempting to locate the source of my collection’s “injury” with a mentor, pitching this idea the second week of classes and telling my Minor in Writing peers—utter strangers—about something deeply personal.

And so I hope each of these audiences gains an appreciation for words about difficult things. Even better: I hope they become more willing to start conversations about these things themselves—to talk about death, about suicide, about mental illness, about empathy in the midst of it all. Ultimately, that’s the only way these few, isolated words can generate momentum.

The watercolors on this site are handmade by my mother, Karin Perkins.

A potter and home-creator, Karin spends her time capturing the beauty in this world and sharing it with the people she loves.