Buy Issue #52 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and support the amazing Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, excellent writers and editors who make a point of lifting up others.
If you are reading for awards and would like a copy please contact me and I will happily send a PDF.
Behind “Clearance Items at the Dark Magic Night Market” by Tammy Komoff
When Gavin Grant and Kelly Link of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet first read my story “Clearance Items at the Underground Dark Magic Night Market,” they had only one question: What happened to the Caretaker’s husband?
I’ve been deep in Mama-mode for a decade now, with all the jargon and shorthand that entails. The second to last line had originally read “That sad and blissful day when I put him down and he never gets up.” To me, the Caretaker was putting her husband down the way a mother might put a child down for a nap. For Gavin and Kelly it sounded more like euthanasia.
Later, I asked my best friend who had read the story what she thought happened at the end. “Oh, she murdered his ass,” she said, and then after a pause, “I thought that was the point.”
Nope.
This, people, is the reason a good editor is gold. Because sometimes you are so wrapped up in your little slice of life you fail to see from others’ points of view. Apparently, everyone who had read my story up till then had read exactly the opposite of what I intended.
It was my mom who came up with the line’s replacement. “…kiss him goodnight not knowing it was for the last time.” Her voice quavered as she said it.
My Dad is 83. The last few years have been a whirlwind of hospitals and surgeries as his health has grown worse. The Caretaker is a character Mom knows well.
Our whole family does, really. My maternal grandmother lived with my parents for a time as her dementia progressed. A couple of years later, we home hospiced my paternal grandmother, Baba.
It’s difficult navigating the end of a loved one’s life. It’s rewarding to spend so much time with them, you grow closer than ever before, but heartbreaking to watch them wither. And exhausting, so exhausting. The last few months of Baba’s life my mom spent sleeping in a chair by her bed, because Baba was afraid to die alone.
The nurses and doctors were often godsends, but they could also at times be cold and clinical, as if they forgot that the small fragile thing in the bed is still a human worthy of dignity. And sometimes the bills come so fast and furious, it feels almost malicious.
All those feelings went into this story and memories of caring for my grandmothers, of talking through my Dad’s care with my mom, of evenings spent with friends confiding their own struggles with end-of-life care for their parents. Of the frustration and exhaustion and desperation and that hidden hope that maybe it’s not all in vain. Maybe this time a loved one will beat the odds and survive, and then that crushing realization they won’t.
Review from Reactor Magazine