'The Year of Dying' appears in County Highway
Plus a followup to my last post and some membership housekeeping.
My essay “The Year of Dying” appears in the Jan/Feb issue of County Highway, edited by Walter Kirn and David Samuels. You might know the piece as one that appeared here on Substack briefly about my cousin Joel’s death from cancer and all the other deaths surrounding us at any given moment these days. I can’t link to it online because I’ve sold first rights to County Highway, almost strictly a print publication. In fact, when I submitted the piece, I sent it as a hard copy through US Mail. Who does that anymore, right?
Here’s the opening as an excerpt:
This past year seemed to have taken up dying as its prevailing theme, at least here at our house. The business I launched eight years ago and grew to employ six writers at our peak is slowly dying. A company is not a person. But a small, family business, as ours was, has a life of its own, and when the people who made it what it is are let go, the death is palpable. We wrote dialogue for video-game characters for a living. Our voice actors gave each character speech. The laughter we shared on table reads, the spirit we breathed into tiny screen images—those had an energy, and that energy has now gone cold and dark. Dormant, like the earth in winter.
The business of dying, too, is serious. My cousin Joel was dying of cancer. He and his wife kept birds, and in the final weeks of his life he requested the birds be homed elsewhere so that he could die in quiet. It takes concentration and effort to leave this world, as I have seen in other people who are dying. My husband’s mother, when she left, had to work at it. It took everything she had to die.
You can read the rest in County Highway, available via subscription. Consider subscribing, as it’s a fine publication; it’s an honor to be a contributor. I’ve subscribed since the summer 2023 launch and read every issue. The writing tends to stay with me; for example, a while back they published a long-form piece about how President Donald Trump draws heavily on what’s known in the wrestling world as a kayfabe, and ever since then, I view his actions through that lens.
Another County Highway article that affected me was a thorough examination of the Taylor Swift phenomenon, and that was a hard sell since I am apparently the last woman in America who isn’t a fan. One of my former employees treated our team to a full week of Taylor Swift song references as part of a game we played to keep up morale—not even that could win me over, but the essay in County Highway made me appreciate the megastar’s business savvy.
I originally found County Highway, AKA “America’s Only Newspaper,” via Matt Taibbi, who mentioned it on his Substack and during a podcast with Kirn. That was during the height of the Covid lockdowns, and County Highway gave me hope during a difficult time. From their own editor’s note:
Some of us fear the specter of an incipient totalitarianism emerging from our laptops and iPhones. Some of us are simply allergic to conformity and brand-names. What we share in common is a revulsion at the smugness, sterility, and shitty aesthetics of the culture being forced upon us by monopoly tech platforms and corporate media, and a desire to make something better. We encourage you to think of our publication as a kind of hand-made alternative to the undifferentiated blob of electronic “content” that you scroll through every morning, most of which is produced by robots.
This is the second Brunette Gardens piece to find a home outside Substack. GreenPrints magazine published “Losing the lucky frog” two years ago.
Some writing I did for Missouri Conservationist and Chickens magazine didn’t start out on Substack, though it could easily have.
But maybe I didn’t need to list these publications for you. Maybe you’re here for my words and don’t need anyone else to legitimize the experience for you.
My apologies if I’m trying too hard to make you like me. It’s one of the legacies of a childhood marked by trauma. I catch myself here wanting to remind you of the way I have thrived in my career, how good I am so you won’t look at me with eyes of shame for the horrors I still carry in my memory and in my body.
Coming out to readers in my last post as a survivor of childhood sexual assault and rape was the riskiest moment of my career. But you know what?
You really surprised me.
My own family members—with the notable exceptions of my husband, son, and youngest brother—have met me with rage, condemnation, and demands that I immediately forgive the criminals who hurt me. “Just get over it,” my mother says, while also insisting that she is the one who’s suffered the most, like suffering is an Olympic event. “No one has suffered more than I have except Christ himself.”
Yeah. Direct quote, that one.
So when you wrote comments of support and appropriately asked if the perpetrators had been punished for their crimes, I was deeply relieved.
There was only one bad comment, from someone who posted an angry tirade about how dare I praise the Trump Administration’s new food guidelines when Trump is a sexual predator and on and on. Her rant was off-topic and felt abusive to me in my vulnerable moment of having just revealed a secret I’ve kept close to the vest for decades, so I removed it. But maybe I should have left it for the prime example of what they call Trump Derangement Syndrome that it was. I haven’t set a comment policy here on Substack yet. I’m against censorship, haven’t had any comment problems until now, and that’s the first time I’ve removed anything other than spam links to pro-Palestinian fundraising sites. But I realized I do have a line, and that reader crossed it.
I wish I could say I was surprised to hear that the reason many of you sympathize with me is because of your own experiences of child abuse, but sadly, this doesn’t at all surprise me. Back when I served as deputy editor at Crosscut, part of my job was to scan the morning news for links, and the sheer number of daily child-abuse cases—most of the perpetrators family members—was a matter of dark reality. I’m painfully aware I’m not unique in this experience, and please know that I’m with all of you, every day and with every breath.
Whether you can commiserate on the basis of first-hand experience or not, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your understanding, your empathy and well wishes, and your pledges to stick with me on this journey.
Now for some membership housekeeping
In returning to Brunette Gardens after nearly half a year away, I discovered that the link to my companion-planting guide was broken. The guide is supposed to be a free gift to anyone who signs up for this newsletter, so I’m sorry to all of you who joined and got a broken link. Here’s one that works!
The membership tiers remain the same as when I pivoted more directly toward the trauma theme last year. Here they are for reference.
In the time I’ve been away, a lot has transpired. I last left you hanging with the story of our move and the bittersweet sadness of leaving the place I’d lived in for the longest stretch of my life:
She’s a hard friend to say goodbye to, this home. I’m not ashamed to say I hugged that stairwell newel post and blew her kisses as I closed the back door for the last time.
Though she’s 121 now, she told me she felt prettier than she ever has, and thanked me for all the attention and care.
Though I’m in my fifties now, I told her I’d never felt more at home as when my husband, son, and I all lived together under her peaked roof.
You’ll be happy to know our former home went to terrific new owners, a young couple. He’s an electrician, and she’s a nurse, and they were so taken with the garden that they wrote us a love letter to accompany their offer.
But where did the man and I go? And does the new place have a garden?!?!
Let’s start there next time.
You might like this book of poetry themed on how nature, spirituality, and love can be healing balms.
After giving it some more thought, I regret deleting Stephanie Thomas Berry's comment on that earlier post. I just had to take it out of the realm of the deeply personal hurt it caused in me, which can't be denied; I mean, this is the most personal topic I've ever written about publicly, and her comment was beyond the pale. To add insult to injury, she was not just a reader but an artist whose work I've amplified here on Brunette Gardens. That made her a past content partner, and the tone and tactic of her comment was not at all what I would expect from a partner. But all that aside, I think it would have been much more transparent to retain the comment as-is and let the readership here experience it and react to it without my hand involved.
Congratulations, Lisa, that sounds like a really wonderful piece of writing. Am looking forward to reading more unexpected, moving and interesting stories from you.