Stephanie Austin, Something I Might Say

 

When I was growing up in the 1980s, my dad was a laborer. He wore flannel shirts and trucker hats and always smelled like sweat, cigarettes, and beer. My dad had a friend named Stan, and we would all go to Stan’s house out in the woods in rural Illinois. This area was thick with trees, which seemed like a jungle, and was full of small lakes and rivers. Stan had a dog named Ribs, or maybe Bones. Something to do with the skeleton. He lived beside a lake edged with sand, but my sister and I were not allowed to walk barefoot there so we wouldn’t cut our feet on broken glass. My dad and Stan drank beer and built things together. My father surrounded himself with other alcoholics.
            Stan died in a drunk-driving accident. His car slid off an icy backroad and into a tree. My mom said Dad was drunk at the funeral. He situated a six-pack of beer and a hammer in Stan’s casket, angering Stan’s sister who asked him to leave.
            “Stan liked beer,” my dad said in defence. “I wanted to send him off with something he liked.”

I’m just now getting into Arizona writer Stephanie Austin’s full-length debut, the prose memoir Something I Might Say (Santa Rosa CA: WTAW Press, 2023), a slim volume of sleek writing packed with complicated grief. Composed as five self-contained stories or chapters, the back cover offers: “Stephanie Austin had a complicated father and a complicated relationship with him. His death, after a short battle with lung cancer, forced her to reckon with his always-threatened and now permanent absence from her life. Then the health of her grandmother, with whom she had always been close, began to fail, and she faced another looming loss, intensified by the bewildering early months of the pandemic.” The prose is clear, unflinching; clearly describing the turmoils and details of losing a parent and then a grandparent, back to back, while mother to a four-year-old, and all beneath the shadow of Covid-19 pandemic. All of this, of course, more complicated due to the difficult relationship the author had with her father. I found elements of parent loss and the surrounding grief entirely familiar, as my own father died within weeks of pandemic [see my essays in the face of uncertainties], and Austin delves deep into the details of his erosion, death and all that followed. “He tried to cut his oxygen tubing. He said he needed to cut the tybing to breathe. I told him no, it’s the opposite. I took the knives from his house. I took the scissors. I drove around with his knives and scissors in my trunk.”

The core of the collection emerges from grief, rippling out into the specifics of a central idea most if not all of us will engage with at some point, especially through the losses of a parent or grandparent. When someone close to a writer dies, one can imagine the advice (whether external or internal) becomes the mantra of “write through it,” and here, Austin does, allowing for a process that might otherwise be so much more difficult. She writes of deathbed conversations, hospice care, health care professionals and funeral homes, and how grief is impossible to compartmentalize or contain. “After he died,” she writes, “there was no place for my bitterness about him, about men, about life, to go. No place for my righteous sense of emotional abandonment. My dark, awful feelings had always been directed at him, and now he was gone, and those feelings hovered around me like ghosts.” Not long after her father, she writes of her Grandma Sis, and the onset of an erosion, both sudden and slow, through dementia.

            My relationship with my father had been complicated, troubled, unhappy most of the time, and now, just weeks ago, his life had ended. Grandma Sis was not ending. She was injured. I argued with my mother: it should be me who went back to collect her.
            “Why?” she asked.
            “Well, you know, because I could probably make the transition for her a little smoother.” We both knew. Grandma Sis responded better to me. My mother told me to stay home: my own daughter needed me.

Austin’s prose is exploratory, capturing the essence of the chaos that surrounds attending care, especially while simultaneously working and parenting, and a self-awareness throughout, enough to articulate elements of surprise, such as the end of the first piece, as she cleans her late father’s house:

            In his nightstand, I found a pack of cigarettes stuffed into a sock. I laughed and held them up to my husband. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “He lived alone. Who was he hiding these from?”