Grief, Memory, and the Ghosts of Belonging
These poems were written in the shadow of a return—years after everything had unraveled. Sometime before 2010, I began making quiet pilgrimages back to Wilmington. I’d save up money, take the bus, rent a hotel room, or stay with a new friend. The place was the same—but not the same. The ocean still moved with its tide. The streets still bent around familiar corners. But Lynn was not there. The life we built was gone. And in its absence, everything I once knew became surreal.
The poems that follow—Desolation (or a Sign of the Times), The Color of Death, Tears for Grandmother’s Passing, and Genealogy—come from this in-between space:
Not quite home, not quite gone.
Not quite memory, not quite dream.
In them, I tried to make sense of what remained—both physically and emotionally. The ghost of our home, the loss of elders, the rupture of lineage, the fading of names and faces that were supposed to define who I was. But these poems aren’t simply about mourning. They are about absence—the kind that hollows out a person slowly, over time.
I was returning to places that once held love, hoping perhaps to find fragments of myself there. But grief doesn’t offer clean answers. Sometimes, it only echoes.
The Color of Death
I saw a little boy
carrying a dead fish
along the beach.
The fish was flat—decayed—
the color of wet sand
behind my tinted glasses,
which added to the gloom
of an overcast October day.
Just three months ago,
this beach teemed with life.
Now the waves fold inward,
the sun keeps its distance,
and the water no longer calls.
The days are getting colder.
I hate the cold.
It reminds me of something inside—
not just cold,
but lifeless.
People say life comes in seasons.
But there is no guarantee
that the warmth
I once knew
will ever return.
Desolation - A Sign of the Times
The land is parched.
The trees are bare—
they stand like burnt skeletons:
dead, soulless sentinels
left as markers
of what used to be.
The sun no longer shows itself.
Each day brings only gray—
flat, formless clouds above.
I cannot bear
this time,
this place,
this reality.
Gone are most colors.
All that remains are
dark browns
and shades of gray.
Some speak of endings
as a kind of hope.
But I see no end—
only this monotony,
this ache,
these days
stretching on
and on
and on.
Author’s Note:
This poem is not a glorification of suicide, a glimpse into the inner world of someone overtaken by despair. When suicidal ideation takes hold, it can feel like a different state of consciousness, a possession of sorts. Not metaphorical in feeling, even if metaphor is how we express it. If someone you love reaches that place, don’t wait for them to “act serious enough.” Don’t try to talk them out of it with slogans. Be there. Take them seriously. That presence might matter more than you know.
Possessed
I walk through days
as if inside a dream -
a dream within a dream.
Yesterday is now.
I am back from the dead,
with the stench of death
still clinging.
I tried to end it
back in December -
pills after alcohol.
Three days later,
I was planning again
when I got out.
A girl stepped into the hallway.
"You can't sleep either?"
Her words reached me.
"You mean... I’m not alone?"
For the first time, I wondered.
No, I didn’t see visions.
No voices called to me.
But the world felt hollow—
dark, cold,
like everything had stopped
but the echo.
It’s like being possessed.
Not by demons -
but by absence.
A silence so complete
it hums.
Anne Sexton wrote:
"Suicides have a special language...
They never ask why build."
And that’s it, really—
it wasn’t a question.
It was a certainty.
A shadow that settled in.
And when it does,
death speaks.
Not loudly—
just enough
to drown out everything else.
Tears for Grandmother's Passing
Introduction to the Poem
This poem came from a quiet, in-between moment—one of the last visits I had with my grandparents while I was in college. I was 21, traveling between school in Georgia and work up north, and their home in Burlington, North Carolina had become a stopover. But it wasn’t just a place to rest—it was a place where, for a little while, I felt I belonged.
During that visit, my grandmother asked me to look around the house and decide what I might want to keep when she passed—some item, some heirloom, to remember them by. I nodded, said I’d think about it, but in truth I had no idea what to say. I thought we had more time. I didn’t want to imagine the world without her in it.
Years later, after she’d suffered a stroke, Grandmother lived in a nursing home with fading memory. She didn’t know that her daughter—my aunt—had died of cancer before her. Perhaps that was a blessing. What still shakes me, even now, is how my family handled these losses, and how the news came to me.
I wasn’t prepared for the way I found out that two others I loved had also died—by suicide. Auntie Rosie, who wasn’t family by blood but was family in all the ways that matter, took her own life with a shotgun. I had never known she was depressed. And my cousin Karen hanged herself. My sister delivered both pieces of news as though they were routine facts. There was no space for grief. My mind could barely take it in. I had dreams where Rosie looked fine, untouched. My brain rejected what it couldn’t absorb.
Grief like that doesn’t come in a neat procession of tears and closure. It crashes in, long after the house is gone, the photos lost, the people scattered. It catches you while writing a poem, remembering a room, touching a chair.
In some ways, this poem is about my grandparents. In others, it’s about every home I’ve lost, including the one I shared with Lynn. That home, too, was packed up and sold while I stood there, unable to stop it. I watched the evidence of my life disappear, just as I would imagine the fading away of my grandparents from this reality - the only reality I knew.
.
The items vanish. The people fade. And you’re left wondering what still belongs to you.
Here is the poem below.
Tears for Grandmother’s Passing
I'm sorry, Grandmother,
that I didn’t give it more thought
when you asked me
to look around your home—
to choose something
to remember you by.
Mementos, handed down for generations.
Photographs, albums,
kitchen chairs and quilted pillows.
At twenty-one, I still believed
there would always be time.
But time runs silent
until it doesn't.
And comfort—
and belonging—
can be forgotten
in a room full of fading items.
You didn’t mean for it to go like this,
I know.
Not a nursing home.
Not the dimming of memory.
Not knowing your husband had passed,
or your daughter before you.
Maybe, in some mercy,
you were spared that pain.
They said you wouldn’t know me.
So they didn’t bring me.
But it would have hurt
in the right kind of way—
the way grief should hurt
when it means something.
Later, they told me Rosie was gone.
Shotgun, they said.
And Karen—
they said she hanged herself.
And I dreamed of Rosie smiling,
untouched.
My mind rewriting the unbearable.
No one asked how I was doing.
No one let me mourn.
If there’s awareness after death,
or something of us that remains,
know this:
I shed a tear for you today.
For you, and for them.
For what we lost,
and how no one spoke it.
And I remembered.
And that memory—
that ache—
feels like love.
And it’s good.
And it’s right.
Author’s Note
This poem first appeared in Simple Vows, published by St. Andrews College in Pembroke, NC, where I was honored to be featured alongside poets I deeply admire—many of whom shaped the literary landscape of North Carolina and beyond.
“Genealogy” emerged during a time when I was still seeking meaning in ancestral roots—hoping perhaps for a feeling of belonging. I walked among graves that bore my last name, thinking I might find some proof of where I came from. But what I found was silence. Names that never knew me. Stones that never spoke my story.
I have since come to understand that the true legacy we carry is not biological but relational. My life was shaped not by the names etched on tombstones, but by those who loved me fiercely—Celta, Lynn, those who truly saw me. They are the ones who made my life meaningful, not the ancestors whose names I happened to inherit.
This poem is not a rejection of history but a protest against the way families can scapegoat, erase, and exile those who never asked to be cast out. I was the outlier long before I found the courage to speak my truth. Whatever the reasons—unstated, unearned—I was cut off without explanation, unseen despite everything I accomplished. I bore the family name, carried the best of my parents’ intellect, and still, I was othered. Their choice to exclude me severed any obligation I once felt to protect their silence.
By the time I began to speak the truth, it was already clear:
I hadn’t walked away—
I had been erased.
Now, through these pages, I reclaim the narrative they abandoned.
Not to belong to them,
but to honor the ones who made me feel I truly belonged.
Because in the end, what really matters is not legacy—but love.
Genealogy
(Originally published in Simple Vows, St. Andrews College, Pembroke, NC. Revised by the author in 2025.)
Self-history in quest of
self-knowledge brought me
today
to this
church cemetery.
A certain history—
made visible in stone.
I saw my last name—Whealton—
etched on so many markers.
Written here,
and here, and on a stone next to this one,
and over there, and there,
and there again...
Yet nothing stirred in me.
No sense of inheritance.
These were not the hands that raised me,
not the arms that comforted me,
not the voices that shaped my name.
Why were my ancestors put into the ground
like plants?
From dust thou art—
it says in the Bible,
and to dust thou shalt return.
But what does that mean
if love doesn't root there?
I see my ancestors
immortalized in tombstones
with the name I carry.
Will I live on as well—
through my writing, maybe?
The road I traveled to reach this place
was too quiet, too deserted.
A town of ghosts
where my ghosts tell me nothing.
In the church my great-great-grandfather built
I found albums of the living
posing beside the dead—
names I should know,
but don’t.
What did I come here seeking?
Proof?
Origin?
Belonging?
All I found was dust—
along the roads,
between the stones.
And names
that never meant me.
