Ghosts Under the Stairwell

What We Keep, What We Lose, What Haunts Us

I went to the desert this week to end something. Not my physical life (I’m not that dramatic these days), but something inside was beckoning: leave me. Something that wanted to die.

Some goodbyes are like that.

I left a voice message for Dave the day he died. I don’t know if he heard it. He didn’t call back. It wouldn’t have changed what happened next, but it’s not the message I would have left if I had known. If I had known, I would have said goodbye.

I met Dave six years earlier, under an indoor stairwell at UCLA during the L.A. Times Festival of Books, where we had both darted, looking for a place to avoid the crowd. After awkward apologies, we exchanged a few stories, and I told him about the students at the community college where I taught. He said I reminded him of his mother back when he was a young boy. That made me feel safe.

A few weeks later, we ran into each other in the Honnold Library at the Claremont Colleges, where I had gone as an undergrad and where he then taught. I told him I liked The Onion article about his 67-page break-up letter his girlfriend couldn’t get through and he snapped at me, expounding how it wasn’t true. I laughed. He looked increasingly uncomfortable.

“Of course it’s not true, it’s The Onion,” I said. He stared at me awkwardly. “Come on,” I nudged him, “David Foster Wallace can’t take a joke? DFW doesn’t like being part of popular culture? Isn’t self-referential satire a schtick of your work?”

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said, “but we’ve met.”

He called the next day during my office hours, explaining how he put two and two together and had some books for my students. I laughed and we began a dialogue that would continue for the next several years. Each time he emailed or left a phone message (which he invariably began with, “Um, so the thing is”), we would continue wherever he had left off, as if in a conversation that never ended.

Until it did.

When I stopped by his office to ask his advice on the literary journal I was starting at our college, my 12-year-old son, Storm, waited in the hallway, sitting cross-legged against the wall, reading the Banana Yoshimoto novel Goodbye Tsugumi. Dave commented that kids were entering college younger and younger these days and chuckled to himself, then insisted I bring him in. He asked Storm questions about Banana Yoshimoto and then handed him Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, suggesting haphazardly he might enjoy it, and then, in that perfunctory way of his, asked him to choose anything else he wanted from the collection housed on his office’s 12 heartily stocked shelves. He removed and then returned several individual titles until, upon closer inspection, he concluded he had far too many books to ever get through and Storm must choose at least three and keep them as a token of their shared interests.

He gave me a key to his office so I could borrow books or grade papers while waiting for my son. The department secretary thought I was his interior decorator.

In exchange for the access to his books, I tried to add some color to Dave’s office and his work life. He told me he was washed up, that he would never write the way he had when he was young. I told him maybe he could be a mentor, that there’s divinity in that, too, how opening the gates for younger writers is its own form of gift. He said he wasn’t generous like that, the way his mom and I were, that nurturing people wasn’t enough.

Sometimes when he rambled and paced, I would use the hand gesture I had perfected with my dogs and command him to sit. When he complied, I would use my gentlest voice to tell him, “Good boy,” and we would sit in silence and I would try not to laugh.

I told him nurturing is just another word for paying attention, and he knew how to pay attention better than anyone I knew.

“Paying attention is exhausting,” he said, “but I would stand in line to get into your office hours.”

Of course, standing in line is inherently exhausting, so Dave didn’t often do it. I would visit his office while waiting for my son, and he would continue to call during my office hours instead of coming in, asking me questions about my students and my dogs, almost interchangeably. I reviewed his syllabi and reminded him what students want most is our enthusiasm, much the way our dogs do. I worshiped the way he responded to my thoughts, the way vocabulary fluttered from his mouth as if from the sky. He was an older artist, at the height of his craft, while I was a young mother, bound to the banalities of the earth. He was idealistic. I was pragmatic. When he told me I talked to him the way I talked to my dogs, I wasn’t offended.

How does the heart reconcile itself to its feast of losses?

When I was nine, my friend and I rescued a baby duckling and nurtured him back to health along the Mississippi River. We loved Sippi and we coddled him, and because he had imprinted on us, we believed he loved us in return.

We didn’t want to put Sippi in a cage, so we made a small leash with a soft wide leather loop that hung gently around his neck. We took turns leading him, though it was hardly necessary, because everywhere we went, Sippi followed us willingly. We were two little girls with one little duck between us, and for a few weeks, we saw ourselves as maternal, as indispensable as water. We walked with tender pride along the river, radiant with the kind of confidence that comes with being needed.

I want to tell you as Sippi grew, we began to feel more and more ridiculous, leading him along campgrounds on a leash, that, eventually, he began to pay more attention to the natural world around him than to us, and we realized we were holding him back from being a wild duck. I want to tell you we shooed him away along the river, watched him approach other ducks with trepidation, waited patiently until he was ready, cheering when he flapped his wings and flew toward the other ducks, that we watched him go, crying hot self-sacrificial tears.

Some goodbyes are like that.

But the truth is, Sippi died in a campground as a duckling. We let him eat grass with pesticides and he went limp and we held him and watched him convulse until he was stiff, eyeballs open, judging us.

Some goodbyes are like that.

My dad raised me to believe we are what we accomplish, that what matters isn’t who we are, but what we do. He said we’re all paper cups, disposable and replaceable, that the work we contribute to the world is what we hold in our cups, that the work we do is what we’re worth.

Dave also told me his value was in his work.

The man who would have become my grandfather (had he lived long enough to see his son grow up) battled depression and died by his own hand when he was 46, just like Dave. Neither my dad nor my grandmother would speak of him. But we grew up with his ghost, a specter haunting the house, reminding my dad where his own story would end if he ever let down his guard.

Unlike Dave, who held tightly to the brilliance of his work, I’ve emptied the water from my paper cup over and over again — into my children, my students, my dogs, the earth. What’s wrong with being ordinary? Where’s the shame in being of use?

I told Dave we couldn’t spend our lives hiding under stairwells, avoiding our ghosts. But maybe I was wrong.

My dog sleeps under the stairwell in our 1920s home, curling around his darkness. I pour coffee, sit next to him, and watch him breathe. My cup holds more than the money I’ve earned, the career I’ve forged, or the memories of men I loved and couldn’t keep. When I climb out from the stairwell to face the day, I lift my cup toward the sun and let it burn into the hollow spaces where I used to be. This goodbye is like that.

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Upcoming Events - If you’d like to join a small group of fellow creatives, here are three upcoming options, in person and remote.

Foraging for Self-Care: A Nature-Inspired Writing Retreat on March 30, 2025 from 9:30-4:30. Establish a writing practice and reconnect with your writing—in nature and other artistic spaces. Share a colorful, nourishing lunch with our small group and cultivate accountability partners and a sustainable practice. Early-bird pricing until the end of February. Click here to register.

Advanced Writing Workshop on April 27, 2025, 9:30-4:30. Learn more about the publishing industry, agents, proposals, contracts and how to get your best advance, while exploring elements of craft, reading and responding to each other's work, co-creating a support system within the container of this space. Guided activities will inspire new perspectives to deepen your writing practice, help you reconnect with your story, and find avenues for publishing. Click here to register.

Artist’s Way cohort - The Artists’ Way is Julia Cameron’s seminal book on cultivating creativity. There are two main components in her 12-week program: daily Morning Pages (three sheets of unfiltered, anything-goes journaling, written by hand) and weekly Artist’s Dates (solo adventures during which you spend time with your inner artist). Our next cohort will convene for the season of the Summer Solstice on Zoom on the first Saturday of June (6/7) at 1:00 PT for 12 weeks of self-directed study and guided support. Become a paid subscriber to join this group.

You need to both remember where love leads and love anyway; you can both see the end of desire and be consumed by it all at once. The ecstatic body’s a place to feel timelessness and to hear, ear held close to the chest of another, the wind that blows in there, hurrying us ahead and away, and to understand that this awareness does not put an end to longing but lends to it a shadow that is, in the late hour, beautiful.

~Mark Doty

A huge thank you to all of you who are part of this winter’s Artist’s Way cohort! The comments section below is designed as a way for you to share your experience this week with other members of our group.

Please answer as many of the following questions as you have time for in the comments section, and feel free to respond to one another as support in our shared journey.

How did it go for you this week?

• How many days this week did you do morning pages? How do you feel about this week compared to last week?

• How about your artist date? Will you share what you chose to do?

• Did you do any of the tasks? If so, which ones? Any discoveries there?

• How are you treating yourself like the luxury you are?

  Can’t wait to see all your faces on Zoom on March 1! Same link. Reminder sent the day before.

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Thank you for being on this journey with me. I am grateful for the gift of your presence. Walking this path, knowing so many of you are walking it too, gives me hope. May we recognize our interbeing, with one another and the anima mundi, supporting each other in growth and recovery, like a mycelial network.