I can’t bear to think of the alternative, can’t bear to think of her in that horrible moment, the sudden realization of her imminent death after allowing herself to believe she had escaped. Imagine what we would know as a people if those were the monuments that inscribed the landscape. But it is the very thing, that kind of awareness of death, of that possibility, that undergirds everything I do. Trethewey points out that her own name, Natasha, is the Greek word for “resurrection,” which feels especially poignant, given her mother’s fate. In her startling new memoir, Pulitzer Prize winner and former US poet laureate Natasha Trethewey recounts the event that shattered her life at the age of 19. And I think that that's probably the moment that I had decided somehow, consciously or unconsciously, to separate myself from the person to whom this horrible thing had just happened, as if I could move forward in my life without that part coming with me, too. Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Trethewey's stepfather was sentenced to life in prison, and Trethewey, who was 19 at the time, spent years trying to forget what had happened. I could not then grasp the inherent metaphor of the plant, my relationship with my mother, what it would mean that she had made its care my duty, while warning me of its danger. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web. Cristina Cuomo Is Immune to Your Criticism, Apple AirPods Are The Cheapest They've Ever Been, This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. And then finally he left. Looking at it felt like I was watching somebody else. I think it is what made me. Natasha Trethewey was just 19 years old when her mother was shot and killed by her stepfather. Even then I felt as though I were watching someone else—a young woman on the cusp of her life, adulthood and bereavement gripping her at once. It’s as if he made of the negative space around her a frame to foreground some difficult knowledge: the dark past behind her, her face lit toward a future upon which her gaze is fixed. Reprinted by permission. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io, J.Lo's Daughter Talks Collaborating With Her Mom, An Exclusive Excerpt from 'Dial A for Aunties', Dr. Shah Will Never Stop Telling Abortion Stories, Emma Cline Moves on from 'The Girls' in 'Daddy', Two Rising Literary Stars on Truth and Fiction, Black Women Should've Been Bestsellers for Decades, Stephenie Meyer Is Writing 2 More ‘Twilight’ Books. hospital later that he had shown up at the football stadium to kill me, to punish my mother, but hadn't done so because I had waved and spoken a greeting to him. Nearly thirty years after my mother’s death I went back for the first time to the place she was murdered. I’d not been there since the year I turned nineteen, when I had to clean out her apartment, disposing of everything I could not—or would not—carry with me: all the furniture and household items, her clothing, her large collection of records. The Reckoning of Natasha Trethewey In the three and a half decades since her mother’s murder, the two-time U.S. poet laureate has been stalked by the ghosts of her past. This is a wound I carry that never heals. She says revisiting painful memories and talking about her mother has been a "mixed blessing" after so many years of trying to forget. Then Joel entered the picture, an underemployed Vietnam vet who constantly invoked his wartime service to justify his oddities. Natasha Trethewey is a two-time U.S. There I was in a hotel room that the police put us up in to hide because they hadn't captured Joel yet. Copyright © 2020 by Natasha Trethewey. For a short time, it was bliss. What caused her first marriage to Trethewey’s father to fail? There’s a video recording of my arrival, made by a local news station, and so the image is not only of those few moments, but of watching myself—from a distance—entering my former life for what I thought to be the last time. It originates in the middle of the city, Memorial, and winds east from downtown ending at Stone Mountain, the nation’s largest monument to the Confederacy. The last time I was at the apartment complex, the morning after her death, I could see the faded chalk outline of her body on the pavement, the yellow police tape still stuck to the door, the small, round hole in the wall beside her bed where a single bullet—a missed shot— had lodged. Courtesy Natasha Trethewey The last image of my mother, but for the photographs taken of her body at the crime scene, is the formal portrait made only a few months before her death. hide caption. It would have been repaired soon after, filled and painted over, and I wondered now if the building had settled more with age, the walls shifting. I knew that my grandmother was on a list of people being watched among the citizens' council, because she had tried to place my parents' ... marriage announcement in the newspaper. I have a poem called "Letter to Inmate" and it's his inmate number that I wrote when I first found out he was going to get out [on parole], and I ask the question at the end of the poem, "What does it mean to be safe in the world? Perhaps she intended to look back on it years later and say, “That’s where it began, my new life.” I am struck with the thought that this is what she must have meant to do: document herself as a woman come this far, the rest of her life ahead of her. That’s what’s drawn me back: the hidden, covered over, nearly erased. Row after row of rusted stair rails and window screens mark the shabby buildings—just a decade old when we moved in—and a lighter shade of paint coats the walls, as if to hide the dark history beneath it. On her mother's death being the most formative experience of her life as a person and artist. Natasha Trethewey served as U.S. poet laureate in 2012 and 2013. Perhaps the reporter spoke our names; or perhaps she did not, calling my mother victim instead. To be published on July 28, 2020 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Because I think that had he killed me, then he would have been arrested for that, and she'd be the one alive today. I know she had gone to see a psychic for entertainment with some friends from work; she’d told me as much, though she never said what she’d learned.

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