weird goodbyes.

my life has been full of them.

Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place where I explore my spirituality and my humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…

On Friday afternoon, I got into my car and drove across the state from east to west.

Exhaust-choked sunflowers grew wild on the medians, their heads craned hopefully towards the sky. A little further out, bales of hay dotted the horizon like tombstones in a cemetery.

The drive is easy. Boring, even. I felt like I’d barely blinked before I was halfway to my destination of Kansas City.

Exit 148 off of Interstate 70 leads to Kingdom City, Missouri, a redundant title for a place that is neither a city nor a kingdom—it’s more like a consortium of gas stations. To the left of the highway sits a big, red barn called Ozarkland, filled with souvenir shot glasses and surprisingly good fudge.

I would know. Exit 148 is the one I would take to go back to where I’m from.

If I left the highway and drove for just a bit longer, I’d be right back where roads were named by letters if they were paved and three-digit numbers if they were gravel. Where my grandmother is buried and my childhood home still stands. A place I have not been for a decade.

I hurtled by exit 148 at 85 miles an hour, wondering what it would feel like to nudge the wheel just a bit to the right. Maybe I should, I thought.

I kept driving. I had promises to keep.

But the idea wiggled its way into my head and caught on to the edges of my brain, a burr of an idea that hitched a ride with me as the numbers on the mile markers dropped lower and lower.

The last time I saw my ex-husband, he was standing on my doorstep with a steam mop. His parents were with him.

I leaned against the scarred door frame and tried not to cry as his mother asked to hug me one more time. So much of the year I got divorced is gone, blown from my memory, but I will never forget the way the sunlight shone through her wispy brown hair and how tightly she gripped me.

It’s as if this moment is still happening, somewhere far from here, all of us frozen in the act of parting. Suspended in time.

As she held me, I remember thinking back to all of the other goodbyes we had shared, the Midwestern production of farewell. The opening act of placing suitcases by the door, a brief intermission of “let me make you a sandwich really quick,” and a curtain call where we all stand outside, shivering, as final hugs are exchanged.

But this was a watery monologue, a flickering montage of sadness and pain. The weirdness of the moment strangled me, and any words that I could have said in this very specific, terrible moment in my life were caught in my throat.

Why are we doing this? The question died on my lips.

What do you say to someone who you will never see again? What words do you say as dirt is thrown over an open grave that holds a life you once lived?

So I said nothing at all.

I crossed the state from west to east on Sunday afternoon. I stopped for gas at Kingdom City, and I watched the cars drive by, some headed in the direction of my childhood home.

I decided to join them.

For whatever reason, as soon as I made the decision to go home, I became nervous. What will it be like? I wondered. How will I feel? I imagined a sitcom of a situation, one where, as soon as I crossed into the county where I was raised, a sense of belonging would overtake me and a sigh of relief would escape my lips.

Instead, what I felt could only be described as weird.

As I moved deeper and deeper into the belly of Missouri, tears sprang unexpectedly to my eyes. I did not recognize the curves of the road the way I thought I would, the road I would swear that I could drive with my eyes closed.

Nothing looked familiar. The white church that marked where I needed to turn left was fenced off and surrounded by threatening “no parking” signs. A little farther up the road, the lilac bush that bloomed sweet every summer, the one I’d pull over to cut blooms from to give my mother, was gone.

But the graveyard was exactly how I remembered it.

I eased my hatchback on to the shoulder in a cloud of dust, next to the swinging sign labeled “Liberty Cemetery of Callaway County.” Rows of dying wild irises choked the roadside ditch that ran alongside the edges of the place where my grandmother rests.

I got out of my car and walked right over to her. I still remembered, after all of these years. I sat down next to my Meemaw, surrounded by the chatter of cicadas and the rush of the wind.

For a long time, I just sat there, not knowing what to say. What do you say to someone who you haven’t seen for a long time? Someone you will never see again? The sharp blades of dry grass needled into my thighs. Ants crossed the terrain of my bare toes.

Overhead, ten vultures circled lazily, catching thermals and observing the ground below for signs of death. I imagined the younger versions of me stretched out in the long yellow grass, a death rattle wheezing from their lips.

I’m sorry I didn’t bring you anything.

The first words I said to my grandmother tumbled out, an apology for not stopping to pluck some of the thousands of sunflowers that had paved the way to this place.

Because I had not, the stone vase to the left of her headstone stood empty. Lichen studded the hook of the J in her birth month and clogged the folds of the roses etched next to her name. The air that swirled around me felt stale, like it had been bottled up for years and finally released.

I don’t know what to say to you.

My voice sounded strange to me, strangled and stilted. Was this a hello? A goodbye? Why was I here, sitting at the foot of my grandmother’s grave? What did the dead have to tell me?

I asked her the question I’ve been asking myself repeatedly. Am I doing the right thing by leaving?

I yearned for a sign. I wanted it to feel less weird to be here, trying to talk to the dust and expecting it to answer. But, just like all of those times I closed my eyes and prayed to God, I heard nothing.

Nothing but the shifting wind, rattling the leaves on the trees.

A quarter mile to the east, there is another gravel road. To the left sits a split-wood bench that my father made. To the right, a wooden birdhouse clings to a rough-hewn fence post. He made that, too.

I sent a picture of both to my mother. You should drive up there, she said.

“Up there” was where my childhood home stood at the end of the long driveway. Different people lived there now. I didn’t want to disturb them, but I wanted, more than anything, to see the house that had, in a way, raised me.

No one was home but the two dogs that peeked their noses out through the blinds over the sliding door that my father always hollered at us to close when the AC was running.

The house looked smaller than I remembered, its sides covered with a spray of mildew. The flowerbeds that my mother had tended so carefully were sapped of color, filled with dried out bushes instead. The deck where I had turned many cartwheels was peeling. The garden in the backyard where we had grown seven-foot-tall sunflowers and a river of corn was reduced to the size of a spread-out picnic blanket.

I saw the house both as it was and as it is, one image transposed on top of the other, the contrasts leaping out of the frame.

I felt like I shouldn’t be there. Like I was trespassing on someone else’s property. Because I was.

I scanned the face of the house until my eyes landed on the last window to the left. The one where I had stood, many nights, and listened to the mournful cry of a nightingale, hoping for a life much bigger and more exciting than the one I was living.

In the blank stare of the window, I thought, for a moment, that I could see my younger self peering back at me, a fringe of bangs skimming her eyebrows and a look of curiosity on her face.

What do you think of who I am now? I asked her. Did you ever think that you’d be the one to leave? Are you proud of me?

She doesn’t answer me. No one ever does. She fades back into the moment she came from, back to her books and her imagination and her dreams.

I stood there for a beat. I got back into my car.

The lyrics of the Bon Iver song filtered into my ears as I started the engine.

There'll come a time I'll wanna know I was here
Names on the doorframes, inches and ages
Handprints in concrete, at the softest stages

The tears that had been gathering behind my eyes spilled down my cheeks.

I was here, I told myself. It felt hard to believe.

The truth of that statement razored its way into my body. It pierced my skin and spilled my blood into the soil of where I am from. It pinned me in place, forever a butterfly caught mid flight, a girl on a swing arcing towards the sun who grew up to be the sort of woman who would choose to break her own heart over and over again.

The sort of woman who leaves.

I'm feeling sacred, my soul is stripped
The grief, it gets me, the weird goodbyes

I wondered if I should say goodbye. But I knew the truth. There was nothing left to say. Nothing left to do.

So I drove away.

What weird goodbyes have you had to say? Do you think saying goodbye is a necessary part of life?

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✨Cards for Humanity: The Ten of Swords ✨

Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.

My mother had a pin cushion in her sewing room that I loved to look at as a child. It was shaped like a tomato, covered in fabric, and filled with sand. I loved pushing the brightly-colored needles she no longer needed into its sides, satisfied at how final it felt to sink the silver point into the depths of the cushion.

When I see the Ten of Swords, I always think, weirdly, of that tomato. Visually speaking, there’s definitely a pin cushion situation going on, but instead of needles in a tomato, there are ten swords piercing the back of someone who looks very, very dead.

This is a gut-punch of a card, to be sure: when you look at it, it’s easy to feel the heaviness of the energy of the Ten of Swords. The firm finality of it feels stifling, and there’s a defeated sort of acceptance that comes with recognizing that something is very, totally, and completely over.

Swords, which deal with our logic, thoughts and understandings, require someone to wield them, and it’s safe to say that this person wasn’t the one who stuck the swords in his own back. So the question then becomes one of where the swords came from: who placed them there? And did the swords kill him, or were they placed there after the fact as a gesture of finality?

I suppose I go back to the idea of pinning something into place when I see the Ten of Swords. This card marks the end of a difficult cycle, one of hard-won realizations and the death of thought patterns that needed to be released back into the universe.

The swords act as grave markers in a way, letting others see, from a distance, that this is where it all ended. It was here that it happened. This place is sacred because of it. There’s a cleansing energy about this card. The water in the background is still, tranquil in death. There is peace in this ending, in spite of its inherent violence.

When the Ten of Swords appears in a reading, I strive to look at it with reverence. Any time we trod upon a grave, we are asked to pay our respects and to honor the dead, so to speak—to honor that which has died and ended within us. But we are not meant to linger here forever. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is move on.

The Ten of Swords reminds us that, in death, there is release and freedom. The figure is draped in red to show just how powerful it is to say goodbye. The pinning into place of a physical body is just another way to say that, yes, you were once here.

And now you are not. You are returning to a state of fluidity, ready to take on a new shape and a new way of seeing the world.

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✨Prompts | The Ten of Swords ✨

Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.

☀️ How can I honor the necessary spiritual and mental deaths I have experienced?

☀️ What freedom can I find in releasing an old thought pattern or perspective?

☀️ What power might emerge when I choose to end something?

☀️ How can I shift my focus from endings to beginnings?

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✨Weekly Mantra✨

I find freedom in saying goodbye.