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MEREDITH MAY is an award-winning journalist, author, and a fifth-generation beekeeper. She spent sixteen years at the San Francisco Chronicle, where her narrative reporting won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. She is co-author of I, Who Did Not Die and lives in San Francisco, where she keeps several hives in a community garden.
A Memoir of Loss,
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I let myself go slack. Conversation around me became muffled, like I was underwater. I fell silent, feeling myself get pulled into the breezeway, and when I looked back to find Dad, there were too many people behind me, blocking my view. My mind swirled as I let Mom steer me down the aisle and into a window seat, where I pressed my forehead to the chilly oval until I saw a tall figure with ink-black hair and plaid pants standing behind the plate glass of the terminal. Dad looked like he was in a television. I lifted my hand, but he didn’t see me. He didn’t move from his spot as the plane pushed back from the gate. I kept my eyes locked on him until he became smaller and smaller, until the plane turned away.
During the flight, Mom blew smoke at the folding tray in front of her and picked at her copper-colored nail polish with trembling hands. She seemed to be crumbling. I snuck peeks at her while pretending to draw in the coloring book the stewardess had given me. Mom still looked pretty to me, but her skin seemed grayer under the overhead light. At home, she was careful about the way she looked, and never went outside without first covering her freckles with beige cream and putting shimmery blue shadow on her eyes. I liked to watch her ritual, and all the tools that came with it. A blow-dryer to make her short curly hair stand up higher, fat brushes to put pink powder on her cheeks, and that clamper thing she squeezed on her eyelashes to curl them up. Sometimes she’d let me choose her lipstick from dozens of tubes she kept in the bathroom. The final touch was a cloud of smelly spray all around her head, to make her hair stay in place.
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