The Last Good Year

My post-mother creative non-fiction work-in-progress:

Crossouts sustain me now. I search out and cherish them like old photographs of my mother in happier times. It may be a stage of grieving that will pass. It may be I’ll never again think of sentences unshadowed in this way. It has changed me. Now I too am someone who knows marks.

Here is an epitaph for my mother I found on p. 19 of the Fitzwilliam Manuscript of Virginia Woolf’s Women and Fiction:

such
abandon Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into these
ment foaming waters, to
such compare the living with the dead make any comparison
rapture compare them.

Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours

First section: The Last Good Year; The Last Good Year; The Last Good Year;

Second section: house: a (tiny) memoir;

Third section: The Last Good Year; The Last Good Year; The Last Good Year; The Last Good Year; The Last Good Year; The Last Good Year; The Last Good Year; The Last Good Year;