If my muscles grew every time someone told me I was strong, I’d be able to lift 200-pound surgeons up over my head by now. But my arms don’t lift much more than grocery bags or laundry baskets. Some days they don’t lift much more than a cup of tea or a dog’s leash. Grief can make the world feel rather small. And make life’s minutia feel rather hefty.
I’ve learned over the years, though, that what people mean when they tell me how strong I am is “Better you than me.” I started hearing that in the days after my son was born in 2003. It’s not meant in a hurtful way, of course. But understandably they’re relieved that it was my son—and not theirs—who was born with half a heart and a chest filled with organs that landed as if jumbled in a bingo machine. Because it happened to my son, I suspect they feel as if they’ve won some kind of lottery shielding their family from medical jargon uttered in unfamiliar hospital corridors.
If I lived in the utopian version of my life, where children were born with all of their organs in their proper working places, I suppose I’d probably utter similar well-meaning phrases to the unlucky. But that’s not the world I live in. My town’s children—including my other son and two stepchildren—catch balls, play Minecraft, and bounce on pogo sticks, while all that’s left of my eleven-year-old rests on a bookshelf boxed like a parcel as if ready to be shipped.
You see, on October 20, 2014, my son Riley died after complications from his sixth heart operation. If he had lived, I wouldn’t be writing this letter, and this magazine wouldn’t exist.
During some of the 235 days since that horrible day, I’ve slept all the hours that the sun warmed my house, shaken uncontrollably as stars twinkled through the night, filled prescriptions for sleeping pills, anti-anxiety pills, antidepressants. I’ve wanted to cut long lines into my thighs with sharp objects, lie naked in mud as the sky shook rain from storm clouds, crash my car. I screamed so hard that I burst hundreds of capillaries around my eyes; I chopped down the “Gratitude Tree” in my front yard in the middle of the night. Grief slurped me into its hungry mouth and promised to chew me endlessly. On many days, I quite happily let it grind me between its teeth. It was easier than trying to claw my way out.
One night when my gentle husband brought a cup of ginger tea to my bedside, he looked at my open laptop and read my sentences spewing sorrow, isolation, and guilt. I had been detailing the world of the grieving mother. “I can make sense of words when I can’t make sense of anything else,” I said.
“I know,” he offered, pulling me close, pressing his lips to my forehead. “But I really want to encourage you to come up with a project that has nothing to do with grief. Find a different place to put some of your energy and creativity.” He kissed my damp face and headed down the stairs and into the other world where laundry needed sorting, dishes needed washing, and children needed dinner and routine.
As I stared at the closed bedroom door, the picture a friend had painted for me as a birthday present a few weeks before Riley went into the hospital came into my peripheral vision. It was a landscape featuring rolling hills and a few chickens scratching the dirt. She had told me that she was inspired by our backyard chickens, our gaggle of feathered, egg-laying birds. In that moment, that painting inspired me. That night Six Hens was conceived.
My grief hasn’t gone away. But I have begun to play with the idea that I can shift focus like the famous optical illusion that depicts the profile of an old woman or a young woman depending on how you look at it. I decided that I could read submissions and edit stories and promote Six Hens and also grieve my son. My fear had been that if I do anything but grieve, I was betraying my son. Doing one does not erase the other; they are not mutually exclusive. The decision to try shifting focus was one of my defining moments.
It’s in those defining moments that we launch ourselves in unexpected directions. They are moments that change how we live, change how we see our place in the world. They color events in our lives, breathe life into projects, make us shift, shape, and remember. They define us; they redefine us. They are bitter, sweet, and flavor the spectrum in-between. They create the outlines that we step into. They provide the lily pads from which we leap to the next part of our lives. The stories in this magazine celebrate those moments.
Celebrate them with us. Welcome to Six Hens.
Suzanne Galante, Editor in Chief
