Passing Notes: On Grief-Craft with Michelle Suzanne Mirsky
I was thirteen years old—the same age my daughter is today—when I met Michelle Suzanne Mirksy She was a zesty, confident sophomore; I was a big-eyed, tell-me-everything freshmen. We each spun with other crowds but our social circles were concentric, and we bonded over early ’90s in-jokes, after-school hang outs, and boys. We both had baby crushes on baby Neil Patrick Harris. We kept journals, published our poetry in the school paper, and in the Albany High School hallways between classes we would pass perfectly folded, college-ruled notes.
When Michelle went off to college and I was stuck in Upstate, NY for yet another year we continued to write letters for a while. Our little packets of shared daily details became fewer as distance transformed into time. We lost touch. We grew up.
For those in my Gen X cohort, the advent of social media answered the question “I wonder whatever happened to?” by suddenly providing Technicolor snapshots with glossy copy. Peering through the lens of Facebook, Michelle’s life still seemed to me to track one grade ahead of me. She was married when I was still dating and became a mother a few years before I did.
Then Mirsky, the adult version now living in Texas, wrote about her younger son, Lev, a medically complicated sweet-cheeked lion of baby. She still told good stories, with wit and clarity. But the stories were devastating. Lev had been born with a congenital heart defect and died of lymphoma in 2010 when he was only three years old. Michelle’s posts transformed into an artfully crafted column on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her essays about Lev’s death, the dissolution of her marriage, parenting her living young son who had lost his baby brother cracked into my heart.
“I admitted aloud that nothing will ever be quite okay” she writes. “I touched his urn. I held his toys. I stood in the middle of the room and wept. I kept a tiny heart shaped pendant full of his ashes on a long chain, sometimes tucked into my clothes, sometimes sparkling on the outside (I’ve rubbed it between my fingers so much that its texture has changed). For a time, I experienced shooting pains in my arms. Holding a ghost is cold comfort.”
In 2017, my daughter was diagnosed with lymphoma at six years old. I somehow found myself posting from the pediatric cancer bedside, just as my friend had done ahead of me. Michelle was the first mother I knew to care for a child with cancer. She was the first mother I knew to lose a child. She was the first I knew who wrote about it. My daughter survived. Others in the hospital with her didn’t. My circles now are heavy with caregivers of medically complicated kids and grieving mothers who can hold up a mirror to worlds you don’t want to imagine. Mirsky’s essays take readers through that mirror, to another side.
Here, Now, Mirksy’s brutally beautiful collection of essays was published this fall by Northwestern University Press. It hit the shelves within days of the anniversary of Lev’s death. In her work, I’m struck by Mirksy’s memories of her earlier self and the messiness of the middle-aged version which she calls a “re-teenaged state.” It makes me wonder how we orbit back around to our earlier selves, while simultaneously changing completely.
Jess Phillips Lorenz: Mirsky! I’ve been thinking back to our teenage days passing notes tucked into little triangles. When did we write those? During class (probably) or the night before? Our writing practice was on point when we were teenagers. Pre-all the things. How does it feel now that you have a book coming out?
Michelle Suzanne Mirsky: Man, I miss the multiple elaborate interwoven written correspondence threads we casually kept up in our teens. I think we wrote some of the notes in class, inspired by the sight of our crushes in situ? But we must have written some of those multi-page salvos the night before. They were so long. Like pages and pages? And detailed. Just overflowing with private jokes and secret nicknames. Like a solemn passage in someone’s yearbook, but on a random Tuesday. We crushed it from a word count standpoint. Prolific af. Proud of young Us!
Writing, at this point in my life, is almost always driven by a need to process something outside of myself. I guess that’s what our high school notes were, too? Shared processing. The writing for this book was a crucible of processing, just a drill press of figuring out how to start over and keep going. Seeing it and holding it my hands as a book, so many years later, is something of an out of body experience. Not entirely unlike reading our high school letters. The rawness and intensity of the feelings I wrote about in Here, Now feels young to me. And far away. As unfamiliar as the perspective feels, though, I recognize that version of me and I’m amazed.
JPL: October was our birthday month (Scorpios). Do you want to talk about turning 50? And November holds the anniversary of your sweet Lev’s death. How do you think about anniversaries and time moving on?
MSM: Our birthdays are 364 days apart, yours and mine, so happy birthday to you, too, Jess. Turning 50 is feeling satisfyingly meh to me. My son Joss turned 19 and started college this year. My mom turned 80. Dad turned 86. All of these things feel bigger than turning 50. That said, I’m also humbled by my body and mind at 50. Frustrating to be constantly icing some part of my body or stretching some sore appendage. But it feels earned, for sure. She’s seen some shit and she’s tired. The timing of the release of this book, so close to my birthday and the election and to the anniversary of Lev’s passing, was purposeful. In that this is when the publisher’s calendar suggested it could happen and while we could have delayed it to make it not so on the nose, it was also a bit of a lucky break of timing, like—this confluence feels too obvious and perfect not to do it. And here we are. Interestingly, I used to be very sensitive to anniversaries, almost always on my heels, ready to be smacked down by waves of feeling. It’s a bit sneakier now. There are so many happy anniversaries in there too. I don’t set my clock by the coming sadness. I forget to be devastated. I’ll take it.
JPL: I love the title of the collection and wonder if you can speak to it.
MSM: “Here, After” was the title of the last essay published in the original column, and it’s what runs first in the book. And this was where I first landed for the title. I was certain. As we edited, though, and my editor (the sublime Megan Stielstra) and I read and re-read the essays over and over, it became clear that the *now* of this book is the whole thing. Whatever happened before or what happens after: Be here now. You know? You know. I know you know.
JPL: The essays published in Here, Now were written during what must have been the hardest year of your life. There are images from your essays that are so visceral. For me, little Joss building a pillow fort around you when you were too hobbled by grief to get out of bed is such a tender rendering—I can’t shake it. In terms of your craft, how was the editorial process for you?
MSM: Editing the book was an exercise in looking back gently at the hardest year of my life. I needed for present day me, whose voice is a little more mature, whose lifestyle involves 100% less Jameson and online dating, who has grown up as a writer and as a human, to forgive the rawness and roughness of 2011 me and just let her be. To polish the writing would be unfair and untruthful. I needed to let the messiness live there in that fucked time and also here, now. It was hard sitting in my cozy happy 2024, reading and rereading my 2011 voice so lost and defiant and determined to make sense of it all. But it was also fucking cool to remember being her. Like WHO IS SHE? So intense! So drunk! Her hair was so good!
JPL: I also wonder about the big picture, if there is a big picture after losing a child. How does the political swirl with the personal for you?
MSM: The pictures, both political and personal, have shifted seismically in the wake of all of it. In my personal life, after a frenzied few years of crashing grief and a full dance card, I fell in love with an introvert and realized that I am also very much in love with staying home and being oh so quiet. I was always this way, but when I was younger, especially when I was married to my children’s father, and deep in the shit of raising small children, being home and quiet felt like a comfortable prison. And when we lost Lev and I exploded my whole life—our whole lives—I felt driven to be outside of my head and loud as hell and to not be alone with the guilt and pain.
A few years later, when the political became so suddenly all-encompassing and urgent and loud, there was another shift in me. I realized the power and luxury of small ignorance’s. I read so much, listened and struggled to pay attention. Stepped up my advocacy and changed careers to work in Public Health. In my specific field of vaccine equity, the pandemic has been a sea change on all levels. Realizing the power of small interactions, of thinking before I speak, of listening longer…this has been transformational for me as a person and as a citizen. The writing I’m doing now is less rooted in personal processing and more in the realm of processing *all of the things* and trying to digest some big societal sadnesses.
JPL: I followed every post you shared about Lev in real time, even before the column on McSweeney’s. I remember feeling profoundly connected with you, with your grief. I remember sending little gifts for Lev when you both were in the hospital. Later, when Audrey was diagnosed and I lived in the hospital surrounded by dying children and receiving gifts from long lost friends, I remember thinking: “I get it now.”
MSM: For better or for worse, I am an open book. It was such a balm, during Lev’s illness, to be connected to so many folks virtually when I couldn’t connect with anyone irl. My life was in hospital rooms with Lev or in hospital conference rooms for my job or at home with tiny Joss, limping through activities of daily living. I remember when Audrey got sick, reaching out to you, devastated. Like how can this be? But then also reveling in your triumph as she fought and recovered. I was in awe of the amazing community that rallied around you. You were held and it was wonderful to witness.
In retrospect, I think my superpower during Covid was having lived my life on Facebook a decade earlier and being able to find easy comfort in connecting online when we were all trapped in our homes. Do you feel like your isolation with Audrey prepared you?
JPL: Absolutely. I already knew how to pivot and prioritize. “This is what we are doing now,” is my default setting. It wasn’t the first time I was hand-washing our groceries, you know what I mean? But there is a unique loneliness to having a child with a life-threatening illness. What was different about Covid was that my community and I could relate to one another, somewhat, about the thing that was keeping us apart. Did you feel that?
MSM: I definitely felt that and I still feel it, even among other parents in the terrible club of having had a very sick child. We can share that swath of painful reality, though the end of my story sets me apart. Or, in my mind it does. Like, “there but for the grace of G*d…” I’m okay with it after so long. It is a kind of armor when I want it to be.
JPL: I think about that, too. My kid lived. Your kid didn’t. We have very different stories. I’m hesitant to say my story has an ‘ending’; I try to keep the fear of recurrence at bay but I always wonder if this is a reprieve. The absolute privilege of having your kid survive cancer is being afraid forever.
How do you write about the people close to you? Your children’s father? Your past loves?
MSM: Writing about the people close to me at any point in time is an exercise in self-centeredness. While I may know how someone else felt, in the story I’m telling, it’s not my place to say. I always feel some freedom to use direct, attributed quotes, because if I remember it well enough to want to write about it, odds are they do too and they know I’m speaking truth. It’s all about making sure that I’m always pulling the thread of how it happened for me, not trying to nail anyone to the wall or make them own their bad behavior.
JPL How do you make time for the work and also for the light you find in your life today? I see your joy, too. Joss reminds me of your brother when he was a teen.
MSM: Grief has been a gift. The experience of loss and the need to process it has driven me back to writing as a practice and as an identity and it has made me able to find joy absolutely everywhere. I never lose touch with grief for even one second. That’s the trick of it. I’m always in smithereens, but the shards of me are smiling.
Joss and I say ‘I love you’ with every hello and goodbye and goodnight and tossed-off text message. My husband and I never don’t kiss goodbye. Never don’t say I love you before we go to sleep. It’s so sincere! A lot of the time I am steeped in anxiety. I feel the weight of the world and the horrors of society and I feel a heaviness of how much there is that I’m not saying or doing to make the world better. But in my small world, I am hyping up absolutely everyone I know. I am the queen of the pep talk.
Here, Now is out now. It’s a good idea to get a book.
featured image (yellow note on blue) by Alex Padurariu on Unsplash
About the Author
Jess Phillips Lorenz is a playwright, essayist, and childhood cancer advocate. She has performed several original solo plays throughout New York City including Drawn about her family connection to cartoon icon Betty Boop. Jess’s work has been featured in many publications including Chalkbeat, Insider, Romper, Real Simple, Parents.com, MUTHA Magazine (Pushcart nominee), and a theatre festival for babies in Northern Ireland. Most recently, her monologue, Permission, was selected for the upcoming PlayGround Experiment’s Faces of America Monologue Festival #5. In 2023, Jess was awarded a writers’ residency with The Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois and her latest play, BEST PARTY EVER! was granted a workshop production with Piper Theatre’s Playwright Spotlight Series. Jess is a member of Emerging Artists Theatre, Piper Theatre, The American Childhood Cancer Organization, and Momcology. Jess lives in Brooklyn with her children, husband, and pet snail. jessphillipslorenz.com IG @playpracticenyc
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