Our beautiful Melissa has part of her new memoir published in Parnassus – you can buy the current issue there, but here’s an excerpt taken from Little Star Journal:
When it became apparent by my mid-twenties that I could not live by myself or in communal housing or anywhere except the hospital, I moved in with my grandmother. I’d nearly died. I wished I had done. The ER had called my parents to break the news that I might not live until morning, and they wouldn’t drive fifty miles to see me. When I finally managed to return to consciousness, the doctor asked me why I’d tried to kill myself. I could only whisper, “Grief.”
I sat in my room in my grandmother’s black house in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and chain-smoked for two years without seeing or talking to anyone but her. But my grandmother—legally blind, arthritic, full of needs—slowly pulled me out of the paisley shape I made on the bed. I began to care for her because she needed me, and I needed to be called back to life, in whatever form it took. She was eighty, and I was twenty five…
Melissa has picked me up more than once. It’s an honor to know her and love her and I’m beyond proud of her. I can’t wait to see the memoir in its entirety this summer.
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