3. Reading How to Lose Your Mother at Hollywood Forever Cemetery

1. Reading Sex and the Rage at the Gynecologist

2. Reading The Dry Season at the DMV

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I haven’t come to the cemetery alone in years. Had forgotten what it felt like to cross the lawn against the silence, ankles exposed to a kind of grass x weed collab, knife-sharp and ombré.

When there are no living people as far as the eye can see and hundreds if not thousands of rocks as their placeholders, one can’t help but feel it existentially. Or maybe it’s just me.

I feel self-conscious in front of all these dead people and their bones. Like showing up to a theme party in the wrong attire.

(The spiritual abhorrence of flesh and cut-off shorts.)

***

Years ago — the last time I was alone here — I set up a sort of makeshift office beside Hal’s grave. I had just started the proposal for what would become All of This, and realized, after hours of staring back and forth between my cursor and his name imbedded in granite, that I could not write in front of him. Felt like he was reading over my shoulder.

I cannot write at any angle that puts my words at risk of being read off the screen and with the dead you never can tell.

(Ghosts will be ghosts.)

But Hal seldom, if ever, came to me in dreams so I ended up writing the entirety of my book cross-legged on the king-sized bed we purchased just before he got sick, when, for the first time, we had money to afford one.

The irony of having slept besides my husband and a revolving door of toddlers — in a queen-sized-bed for thirteen years, only to finally buy a king I have slept the last seven years in alone, my body hanging off the left side, 90% off the bed untouched and empty, is something I am acutely aware of.

But one cannot unlearn certain claustrophobias. Especially when she runs the risk — however small — of waking up to a daughter, on the lam from a bad dream.

A mother must always make room.

***

Hollywood Forever feels like a place I should only come to with my children and I think that’s why I never come here alone. My relationship to Hal’s death is welded to my kids in such a way that even after all these years, I am unable to differentiate them.

The handful of times I attended events here without my children I felt as if I’m cheating on them.

Today I definitely am.