I saw your billboard today – the one you signed, 
the one that said:  Life is short. 
Eternity isn’t.  
God
 
I wondered about your punctuation, why you created two 
stand-alone sentences.  I would have used a semicolon 
because it seems more powerful to connect the two –
you know, like dying may seem scary on its own 
but if you think this short life is like a day in the park compared
to what comes next, the threat of eternity really picks up some steam.  
I’m sorry – it’s presumptuous of me to instruct You on punctuation 
but I feel more and more presumptuous these days.  It could be eternity
but I think it’s really just another day looming like the next  eight or 10 hours 
and all it will take to make my way through.  I’m tired, 
you know?  You must know.  Have you ever considered 
reincarnation – how nice it might be to have a good long rest as a tree, rooted 
in earth but able to rustle and sway?  It sounds pretty great to me.  
The thing is, I’m not clear about your whole eternity plan.  Keeping people out –
that part feels familiar – it’s pretty much the way things work around here too.  
But have you ever considered just letting us all in – every single person 
you made no matter what our short lives offered 
or withheld?  I don’t know.  It is lovely to think about
though.  I like to picture you pondering it; (semicolon) 
I like to picture you considering the possibility of another way.
 

You’re a nickel 
of a thing, same
color,you fling
yourself akimbo and not
like a frog at all.
You’re a child
no matterhow old,
you heedless bit, 
squashable from lack 
of consideration 
for stomp, 
you and your 
careless gaze.  
No grace, no reason,
all go.  Plaintive peanut
of perpetual resound.
You common 
implausibility, 
intimate
with ground.
Water born
lung breatheryou
too small to be called 
quitswhen come
what may.  You’re hope
looking down, every kind 
of possibility
unbound.
 

From Seed to Tree to Fruit: A Daughter’s Memoir of Grief and Healing

by Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk

    For young Becky Williams, a transplanted Northerner living in the segregated South of the 1950s, childhood was cut short when her father, a researcher at Oak Ridge and a beloved biology professor at the University of Alabama, suffered a psychotic break. He died three months later at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the state mental institution. In this heartfelt memoir, Mlynarczyk searches through family scrapbooks, old letters, and her own childhood memories in a quest to understand her father’s mental illness and sudden death. Readers who revisit the past alongside her will see what can be gained by looking back on our loved ones in all their complexity. If we are fortunate, we experience healing as we learn to love them in new and unexpected ways. “This remembrance is a poignant love letter to the father Mlynarczyk has spent a lifetime grieving.” — Kirkus “Haunted by her father’s psychic crisis and his early and unexpected death, Mlynarczyk brings us on a poignant journey, exploring her father’s violent breakdown and coming to terms with a past weighted with fear and silence.” — Julia Miele Rodas, author of Autistic Disturbances “This memoir exemplifies the healing power of writing as a path through pain.” — Mindy Lewis, author of Life Inside: A Memoir “From Seed to Tree to Fruit does what good memoirs must do: explain the present by helping us to understand the past.” — Wendy Ryden, co-author of Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes and Noble.

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