Remember the Dragonflies
A Memoir of Grief and Healing
by
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I sat at the breakfast table, the one Charlie bought in Pittsburgh when he lived there and worked for Alcoa. My elbows rested on the glass top, and my forearms lay out in front of me, palms down, fingers spread. I wore my mama’s wedding ring on the right hand. She had given it to me on her fiftieth wedding anniversary. On the left hand, ring finger, I wore three specially designed gold bands: an engagement ring with blue sapphires, a wedding ring melted down from my father’s first gold band—my mother had bought him a new one—and a one-year anniversary ring with white sapphires.
But I wasn’t married any more.
My arms tingled. It was dusk outside the bay window. The big, old scrub trees, eleven of them, that have stood in the same spot for more than a century—pasture-turned-subdivision back yard—changed from green to black as light faded. The hum was taking over my head. The ceiling fan whirled above me. A layer of dust had piled up on the edges of the white blades. My heart pounded in my throat, sending vibrations through my cheeks and down my neck. Air wouldn’t go all the way down my windpipe, so I gasped to force it through. The four walls of the room started to close in on me.
I felt the edges. Of my body. Curling up.
I could picture it in my mind as it was happening. Skin. Like old parchment paper. In the Seventies, I decoupaged, and for an aged effect, I’d tear around the page of art or script, then hold a lighted match to the edges for a burned look. That’s what this felt like. My edges charred, cracking, and peeling up. Leaving a red, oozing rawness underneath.
I knew what it was. The shock was wearing off. It was lifting off of me to expose a pain like I’d never known.
Crippling grief. Uncontrollable anger. Guilt bearing down. Devastating loneliness. The need to scream—a tribal, uninhibited scream. I made fists. And cried.
All these feelings, I didn’t know what to do with.
And I couldn’t. Get. My breath.
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About the Book
“Kathy Rhodes writes about grief and fear and denial and pain—and she does it well. She crafts scenes that make us feel like we’re in the room with her. Highly recommended.” —Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts.
At some point life boils what’s in your crucible down to the salt of you.
Everything she had depended on her husband—job, income, identity, companionship, future hopes and dreams, even her house—and then, suddenly, he died. Kathy Rhodes staggers onto the grief road and navigates her way through the fog of disorientation, decisions, “death duties,” the dreaded firsts, and basic daily survival. She lands a new job, loses it when the company fails, gets another job, loses her mother and her childhood home, then sells her own house and buys a smaller one. Five years down the road, she realizes she has journeyed from “our” to “my.” She has built a whole new life.
Her journey parallels the metamorphosis of the dragonfly. Dragonflies start out in the water, submerged in the dark, then gradually, in time, find their way to the skies. Rhodes survives the darkest time of her life and makes her way onward and upward.
She finds the well place in her heart.
About the Author
Kathy Rhodes is author/editor of three books. She is founder of TurnStyle Writing, Editing & Publishing Solutions. She earned a BA in English from Delta State University, did graduate studies at the University of Memphis, teaches creative nonfiction workshops, and speaks to grief groups. Rhodes lives in Williamson County, Tennessee, where she kayaks on slow, twisting rivers and gardens in her back yard.