Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station, has an essay on the amazing site The Rumpus today. Here is an excerpt:
What the dead leave behind: Questions. And boxes of things. And hair, cut off hair tightly wrapped into rubber bands. And pictures of drunk ex-lovers. They leave behind socks, bodies, skin, recipes for guacamole (always good served with potatoe1 chips or corn chips.)
They leave behind: photographs of Burt from Sesame Street smoking a cigarette and holding a bottle of booze, a Barbie doll spread eagle in his face, an open shirt and a loose tie. My father took that picture. He set my Burnie doll up (I called him Burnie because I didn’t know if he was Burt or Ernie from Sesame Street, but looking at the picture I can now see it’s Burt) like that in what I now think may have been a self-portrait. So the dead leave portraits of themselves.
What the dead leave behind: doughnuts. I remember the morning my father died. I walked into the kitchen and thought doughnuts and also: bodies. Continue Reading…