The
Excavation.

On September first, I said, “Happy birthday, Mom.”

It came out almost by reflex. She has been dead for more than a year, but September first is still my mother’s birthday.

“Thanks, honey,” she said back.

I heard it exactly as she would have said it. The warmth. The rhythm. The familiar little lift in her voice. For a moment, I continued talking to her.

Then I remembered that I was supplying both voices.

That is the part that hurts. I can remember my mother well enough to make her answer, but I cannot make her hear me. I look for some clue that the conversation has traveled beyond my own mind and find nothing coming back.

Ghosts appear. Ghosts happen. Why can’t she be a ghost right now? Why can’t she reach me?

I do not want a better memory of my mother. I want evidence I did not manufacture.

This is what my mind does with loss. It searches. I take one more trip through a memory because one more trip might provide clarity. It might clear my conscience. I revisit conversations from my perspective and then from the other person’s. When neither view gives me what I need, I invent a third person who was never there and try the case through their eyes.

There is no actual verdict out on me. Still, I keep trying to obtain one.

I ask different questions. I look for the trapdoor. I rearrange motive, context, tone, and injury until everyone has testified and no one has been believed.

I used to call this a search for clarity. That is the respectable description.

What I want is acquittal. I hope the next replay will not condemn me.

The trouble is, I do not think I would believe an acquittal. If someone could enter my conscience, review every piece of evidence, and declare that I had done the best I could, I would find the moment they overlooked. I would appeal.

The courtroom was never built to reach a verdict.

Grief is constantly trying to testify. It is trying to find its witness. It is trying to find its defense. And I exhaust myself trying to find all of them.

I have done this with a relationship that ended, with my mother, who died, and with my daughter Delaney, who died as a newborn. The facts of those losses are not remotely the same, but my mind knows only one charge: If I had loved them differently, the ending would have been different.

There was someone I loved who left after a rupture I helped create. I screamed. I said I hated them. I did not hate them, but in that moment I hated what our relationship had become. I had spent years being the good girl, and then I slammed the door.

That night is easy to enter into evidence. It is loud, visible, and ugly. The months before it are harder to hold.

I was depleted, but I wanted loving me to feel effortless. I did not want everything I carried to become something they had to carry too. So I tried to be attractive, capable, accommodating, and easy.

I felt like I was doing the relationship well by not speaking up.

The peace between us was real. So were the things I chose not to say. I could give them the benefit of every doubt. Explanation and impact could exist at the same time.

By the time I finally spoke, I did not know how to speak proportionately. I ruminated out loud. I would not let the conversation breathe because I had been holding its breath for months.

My body hid while my language chased. I avoided eye contact. I folded into myself. Then I became relentless.

The urgency inside me said, Hurry. Make this better. Make it right. Save it. Push, push, push.

Maybe if I became more destructive, there would be a breakthrough.

I am responsible for the harm I caused. I also refuse to pretend that my behavior occurred in an empty room. I was hurting inside a relationship I still loved, and sometimes I responded to that hurt in ways that caused more hurt.

After the relationship ended, there was hope, reassurance, and the possibility of seeing each other again. There were plans that stayed somewhere out in the universe and never became a date on a calendar. There was contact and then silence. I will not claim to know the intention behind any of it. I know what it did to me.

I let parts of my life wait.

Each return reignited hope, and I let that hope carry me. I began preparing for the role. I imagined that perhaps next Christmas I would take out the decorations with them beside me.

I did not only ruminate backward. I ruminated forward.

I pre-lived the reunion. It would redeem the rupture and prove that I was not bad. That I made sense. That I was indispensable. That I was someone worth coming back to.

I wanted to be the exception to every rule.

I thought I was waiting for the person I loved. I was also waiting for their return to tell me something about myself.

Every new contact became evidence in a case I did not know how to close. I kept reading possibility into an ending that still felt unfinished.

I kept waiting because I had given their return a job my own reassurance could not do. It could come from outside me. It could prove that I had been someone worth returning to.

My mother cannot return in that way.

When I put myself on trial over her death, I search for evidence that I could have loved her differently. I should have been more patient, compassionate, and gentle. My nervous system was consistently activated around my mother. She had a complicated mind, and I did not give her the best of me.

I can say that without pretending our relationship was simple. My mother could push the places in me that were already bruised. Beneath my dry humor and sarcasm was a daughter still asking to be loved.

My mother used to call people “neat.” She did not mean tidy. A neat person was someone whose way of being delighted her.

I wanted her to think I was a neat person.

“You’re so funny, Amy,” she would tell me.

I was funny. I was also armored.

After she died, I felt as if I could take better care of her. My nervous system was no longer activated by what she might say or need from me. I could carry her legacy. I could study her with the compassion I had not always been able to access while she was alive.

I wanted her to see the daughter she raised, not only the daughter I had to become to survive.

I became capable of loving my mother differently after our relationship could no longer change.

Delaney was one of my quadruplets. They were born at twenty-five weeks, and she lived for three days. I have put that pregnancy and my body on trial inside me too. I have wondered whether caring for my body differently could have saved her. I have searched for the version of myself who would have made the right choice, noticed the right thing, inhabited a body capable of producing another ending.

I know how impossible that sounds when I place it plainly on the page. The impossibility has never stopped the search.

On what would have been Delaney’s tenth birthday, my mother asked why she had not been allowed to hold Delaney after she died when other people had. Her grief was real. So was my inability to trust her with that moment. I was a mother whose baby had died, and I found myself accounting for someone else’s pain.

What I needed my mother to ask was not why she had been excluded.

I needed her to say, “How are you doing, Amy? It has been ten years since you lost Delaney. How is your heart? How are you, honey?”

I needed my mother to become the witness to my grief.

Instead, I keep looking for her inside myself. I say, “Happy birthday, Mom,” and I make her answer, “Thanks, honey.” I continue caring for her by remembering, reconsidering, and reviewing what I might have missed.

If she could answer from somewhere outside me, I would need her to say that she is okay. That she is safe. That she was ready to go. That I did not overlook the one thing that might have saved her.

I am still searching for a missed rescue.

Maybe that is why grief and guilt become so difficult to separate. If I failed her, there is still something for me to do. I can keep reviewing the case. I can keep trying to become the daughter who would have changed the ending. If there was nothing left to save, then love has nowhere to send its remaining urgency.

I began with the belief that rumination is grief trying to solve what can only be mourned. I still believe that. But solve may be too clean a word for what happens.

I think rumination is grief searching for someone.

An answer is not enough because I can supply an answer. I can speak in my mother’s voice. I can argue both sides of a relationship. I can invent the third person and imagine what they would decide.

What I cannot supply is an answerer.

I want someone outside my mind to speak back. The person who left. The mother who died. The daughter whose voice I never had the chance to know. I want them to tell me what happened, what I meant, and whether I loved them well enough.

But when I imagine my mother finally asking me the question I needed, I know what I would say.

My heart hurts, Mom. My heart longs for you.

Even now, there are parts of me that still want to be taken care of. Parts that still do not know whether I am doing life right.

I want to live as you did in the ways that mattered. In the ways that made you shine.

You shone in the way you loved, too. I could not always recognize it while you were here.

The ache has never left.

I could have treated you better. I could have been kinder. But some part of me stayed guarded with you. I still do not fully understand why.

I am sorry, Mom. I am sorry for not seeing you. I am sorry for not hearing you.

I love you so much.

I love you so much, Mom.

— Amy Steinhauser

The visit began several days before they arrived.

The person I loved had left our home months earlier after a rupture. Most of their belongings remained inside it. Now they were coming back to collect what was theirs.

I understood what the visit was for.

My body prepared for something else.

I cleaned a house that was already clean. Not because they had ever demanded perfection from it, but because the house knew too much. It had watched me fight to remain after they left. It had held the body I punished, the hours I could not account for, the rooms where survival had looked nothing like survival.

I needed none of that to be visible.

I gathered their belongings and organized them carefully. Boxes here. Bags there. Everything ready. I wanted them to be able to enter, find what was theirs, and leave without having to spend one minute longer than they wanted.

I was hoping they would stay.

Not the night. I was not asking the fantasy to be that reckless. I imagined a few additional hours. A conversation that forgot to end. Some small delay that would become evidence that leaving me was no longer urgent.

I made their departure effortless and waited for them to choose against it.

That morning, I dressed for the possibility of being reconsidered. I wore the skinniest jeans I owned - technically leggings made to look like jeans - and a white flannel crossed with brown lines. I clipped my hair back. I chose a scent I knew they liked and avoided the ones I knew they did not. I wore cut-off gloves that covered my hands but left my fingers exposed. They gave me an edge. Or life. Something that suggested I had not spent the months since they left disappearing inside my own house.

I had lost a great deal of weight. They did not comment on it. They did not say anything about my appearance that I remember. The meaning of my body that day belonged entirely to me.

I believed being smaller made me safer.

I believed perhaps they would look at me and see that the fight had gone. That whatever had frightened them the last night we were together had somehow left with the weight. I wanted my body to testify that I had changed, although what it actually carried was evidence of how badly I had been hurting.

They saw a smaller body.

They could not see what it had cost me to produce it.

I did not need them to know I had tried. That would have exposed too much. I needed them to believe they had simply noticed me again.

When they arrived, I began walking them through the house, showing them what I had set aside. Within the first twenty minutes, we entered the room where many of their belongings had been kept - the room with their walk-in closet, the room that still understood possession in the present tense.

They entered the house with the same ferocity with which they later crossed the room to hold me. They had come determined to get through the day. I was quietly hoping the day might refuse to end.

I remember their face.

I remember their voice cracking immediately before they moved toward me.

Then they lunged forward and held me.

There was so much inside that embrace that I have never been able to give it one meaning. Perhaps it was goodbye. Perhaps it was grief. Perhaps their body missed me for one unguarded second. I only know that I had not been held by them that way in a very long time, and some part of me recognized the pressure of their arms as a language we had once spoken fluently.

The warmth was real.

That is what made everything after it so difficult to understand.

I decided immediately that I had to handle the hug correctly. I had to show them I was safe to hold. Safe to feel something around. Safe to approach without being asked for more than they intended to give.

They hugged me once.

I spent the rest of the visit proving I would not ask for a second.

I returned to our bedroom and sat on the same bed where everything had ruptured. I think I held my phone. I cannot remember whether the television was on. I could not do anything except sit there knowing that the person I had intended to spend my life with was inside the house.

They were finally close enough for me to touch.

I was still waiting for them to cross the distance.

I listened to their movements from the other rooms. I wondered whether they would come into the bedroom and find me. Whether they would sit beside me. Whether they might hold me again without my having to ask.

I left the door slightly ajar.

Not enough to look like an invitation.

Just enough to make being found possible.

I cried quietly while they moved through the house collecting the pieces of their life. Not hysterically. Not loudly enough to summon anyone. Even my grief was trying to make a good impression.

Eventually I came out of the bedroom. We stood in the laundry room before walking through the garage. They had gathered what they could, but some of their belongings would remain. They would have to return for them.

They told me they needed time. There were things they needed to do, things they needed to sort through. Their words did not promise that we would find our way back to each other. They did not make it impossible either.

It was not a promise. It was not even a plan. But it left enough room for a future, and I moved into it immediately.

After months of emotional famine, that sliver of future felt like a feast.

We walked through the garage and onto the driveway. That driveway had held so many of our long goodbyes, back when leaving still carried the expectation of returning. It had held long hellos too - the kind where distance ended and our bodies remembered before our minds could catch up.

They hugged me again.

Then they kissed my forehead.

Not my mouth. Nothing that could be mistaken for a reunion. But a forehead kiss can feel almost crueler in its tenderness. It carries care without desire, intimacy without claim. It blesses what it does not promise to keep.

They got through it.

They left.

I stood in the driveway and waved as they drove away.

Then I floated back into the house.

I did not know which room to enter or what to do with my body. I walked through the rooms looking for their scent. Looking for an imprint. Looking for some small disturbance in the air that might tell me what had happened.

What did they leave?

Did they leave me a sign?

Some of their boxes remained. For a long time, I allowed those belongings to become evidence. Surely no one leaves pieces of their life somewhere they never intend to return.

I did not yet understand that unfinished business can look exactly like hope to someone who cannot bear an ending.

The hug was real. The break in their voice was real. The tenderness on the driveway was real. I do not have to turn any of it into deception in order to understand that it was not a plan.

Warmth is not intention.

Love is not always direction.

Someone can feel something enormous while holding us and still leave when they let go.

But I could not know that then. Or perhaps I knew it and could not survive knowing it completely. I had been given just enough ambiguity to keep grief from completing its sentence.

The door was not only the one I had left slightly ajar in the bedroom. It was the future I believed their tenderness had not entirely closed.

For a long time, I called that opening hope.

But hope was only half of what kept me there.

The other half was the belief that if I made myself safe enough to leave, they might finally choose not to.

Some of us are not trying to move on.

We are trying to become

impossible to have left.

— Amy Steinhauser

Before I published some of my poems, I tried to make them behave.

I softened them. Criticized them. Sometimes threw them out.

I could write a sentence that felt true and then spend longer judging myself for it than I had spent finding it.

Someone would think it was about them. Someone would make assumptions. Someone would see how much I felt and decide something about me that I had been trying, for years, to disprove.

I sound pathetic.

Sometimes I worked up the nerve to post anyway.

Then I cringed.

At me.

What embarrassed me was how badly I wanted to be understood.

I wanted to say that something had hurt me without watching that admission become another reason to question me. But even alone, writing, I could hear myself doing it.

Maybe I was being unfair.
Maybe I had misunderstood.
Maybe this was another feeling I should have managed privately.

I would read a poem back and think, I sound pathetic.

Sometimes I threw it away.

I wish I could say I only discarded the poems that weren’t good. Sometimes I discarded the ones that said exactly what I meant.

I knew how to write longing. I could make devotion beautiful. There was room for what I missed, what I understood, what I could forgive.

It was harder to leave a sentence on the page that suggested I had deserved more.

Because I wanted more. There. Even writing that, I want to explain myself.

I wanted clarity. I wanted consideration. I wanted my hurt to be allowed into the conversation without having to arrive with an apology.

And I wanted someone to know me beyond how carefully I could phrase all of that.

I had learned to choose words according to what might happen after I said them. Certain words could end a conversation. Others might keep a possibility open. When I still hoped for connection, I became careful with anything that might cost me the chance of it.

Eventually, I didn’t need someone else in the room to feel that caution.

It was there when I wrote.

My earlier work stayed obedient. I could describe pain while still protecting someone else from what the description might reveal. I made room for their circumstances, their struggles, their reasons.

Then I looked at what remained of mine.

Having a diagnosis made this harder to untangle. I knew I had things to take responsibility for. I was working on them. I also knew what it felt like to explain my distress and hear it understood almost entirely through what was already known about me.

Anxious. Borderline.

I began bringing those words into conversations with myself. Was something hurtful happening? Was I responding to it? Could both my history and the present circumstances matter?

I could ask those questions endlessly.

What I struggled to say was simpler.

That hurt me.

Without immediately following it with everything I might have done wrong.

I missed being authentic. I missed the intimacy of my words. I knew they could make people happy when they were obedient, but I wanted to find out whether someone could recognize me when I let them say what I had been leaving out.

Maybe the heart of me would reach one person.

That would have been enough.

So I posted.

Then I cringed at myself for hoping.

There wasn’t one person who changed everything. It was one person here, another person there.

“This.”

“You read my mind.”

They were small replies. I had spent so much time making those feelings smaller that I didn’t quite know what to do when someone recognized them at their full size.

Those readers didn’t know my whole history. They couldn’t settle what had happened. But they knew something about wanting an answer. About being hurt. About feeling ashamed of a need that would not disappear just because we had learned to phrase it politely.

I had expected to have to explain myself.

Sometimes, they understood before I did.

I wish I could say their recognition immediately became my own.

It didn’t.

I still worried about what people would think. Still softened things. Still felt embarrassed by how much of myself had found its way onto the page.

I hadn’t had much chance to practice standing behind those feelings elsewhere. Sometimes the poem could say something I still struggled to say in conversation.

But I went back to the page.

As I wrote more honestly, I began giving my own experience space I had once reserved for everyone else’s. I let the hurt remain. I let a need be a need before asking whether it was convenient.

And people kept recognizing themselves there.

Something I had almost deleted could give another person words for what they had been carrying. I thought about that when I wanted to throw the next poem away.

For a time, I looked at other people and thought everyone had someone.

Everyone had a person. A love. Somewhere to put the things they couldn’t carry alone.

Of course I knew lives were more complicated than they looked. But knowing that did very little for me when I felt alone. I could understand, intellectually, that other people suffered and still feel as though no one could possibly feel as horrible as I did.

Then I began hearing from them.

People who had been left in silence. People still trying to understand an ending that had never been spoken clearly. People carrying questions they felt embarrassed to keep asking.

So much of what I had questioned through the lens of borderline was familiar to people whose lives and histories were different from mine.

They knew this pain, too.

I had spent so long wondering what my feelings revealed about me that I hadn’t understood how much they connected me to other people.

There were more of us than I knew.

Hurting deeply. Getting through the day. Wanting someone to hear what we were struggling to say.

Sometimes I wrote a poem hoping someone would understand me. Then someone answered, and I understood something about them.

“This.”

“You read my mind.”

“Me too.”

I began to feel more heard than silenced. I don’t mean that the silence stopped mattering. I mean that it was no longer the only response I had to measure my voice by.

I wrote the thing I believed made me unlovable.

Strangers called it home.

And slowly, the comments became more than reassurance about my words. They were people letting me know they were there.

I had wanted to be authentic somewhere.

I hadn’t known how many people were waiting for somewhere, too.

— Amy Steinhauser