September 10th, 2023
I cried a lot for Theia.
Like, an obnoxious amount. I always tell people that if you want someone to feel something in your art, you should feel that way while you’re making it.
And I do. Arguably, too much.
Look, if you don’t want to feel sad today, I recommend maybe saving this essay in your back pocket for later, or never; it’s taken me almost three years to gather the guts to write it.
Theia was the last book I ever showed my mom.
I wrote Theia in August of 2020, and released it (a surprise drop, á la Taylor Swift) on September 1st, thrilling my three fans.
It was an unthinkably fast process.
On September 16th, my sister called to tell me that our mom was in pain and they brought her to the hospital. We found out soon after that she had an aggressive kind of ovarian cancer. On October 16th, she was gone.
It was an unthinkably fast process.
I think all the time about how we never got time to really process it at all.
The last week of September, I received the paperback copies of my new book. I brought one to the hospital room where my mom was staying. There was a part of me that felt (and feels) like my work is inconsequential, not helpful in any meaningful way; but my mom always reminded me that she was my biggest fan, and I know I will never have a bigger one.
“Cute,” she signed in her expressive way, looking at the cover. “What’s it about?”
“A dog,” I signed. “She’s trying to escape.”
She looked out the window into the gray and I knew she felt the same way.
I’m trying to not spoil my books in these behind-the-scenes essays I’ve been writing this year, but I need to talk about Apple the Golden Retriever.
In 2020, I started feeling strongly that we weren’t seeing each other as human beings anymore. You know the expression, “Be kind, because you never know what someone is going through”? It felt like nobody gave a shit about what anybody was going through, and they were treating everyone accordingly.
So, in the story of Theia, we get to know what the animals in the shelter have been through, to remind us to be kind.
None of those stories made me sob harder at the keyboard than the story of Apple, the goodest boy.
If you want to read it with no prior knowledge, here’s your spoiler warning. ⚠️
Before Apple ended up in the shelter, he had an owner whom he loved very much. His owner gets sick, and he passes away, and Apple learns what it means to be sad.
I wrote this in August. My mom got sick in September. She died in October.
And I couldn’t shake the truth that I had more in common with a fictional Golden Retriever (and one I created, more bizarrely) than any person in the world.
I won’t get into the months and years that followed my mom’s death (I’ve done this plenty online if you have time to kill and you’re really into sad bois), but the pandemic didn’t allow for the natural flow of grief; I had also started a new job at this exact same time, and I don’t know how I did all of the things I had to do while absolutely lost in my loss, a process mangled and swallowed whole.
“And every day, at least once, Apple feels sad.”
I think of that line daily, because it epitomizes grief for me, and I wrote it two months before I would even understand it fully; two months before I would need it.
I cried a lot for Theia. Writing it. Publishing it. Talking about it. I re-read it a few weeks ago in preparation for this month, and I teared up at least five times.
I think I cry because of the relentless empathy in the story. The kind of empathy my mom taught me; the idea that everyone deserves love, and we’re the only ones who can love them, despite and because of who they are.
I think I cry because I just miss her so much, and I don’t know how to deal with that, even three years on, and telling stories is how I keep her close to me.
The Den 