I agree 1000%, so “beautifully written”! And so honoring of Charlie’s impulsive and poetic spirit. Even his poem, Burial at Sea, reflects his creative return to spiralling depths. (He’d be awed & proud of you for expressing a bit of his essence). 💕
Your grief for your biological father is anything but indulgent. A possible life left unlived is some of the most painful grief we can experience. A potential life shared between you and Charles, left unrealized...even greater. All that remains are the what ifs and the if onlys. It's like carrying sand with our hands. A fruitless endeavor yet we try anyway and I will always love us humans for that. You don't have to personally know someone in this life to love them or mourn them. Charles deserves every bit of love, curiosity, witnessing, and mourning from his incredible daughter. Your desire to know him, that drive inside of you that pushes the questions that demand to be answered, is not in vain. You and you alone own the meaning that you place on these experiences, but reading it from the outside in tandem with my own culture, Charles is reaching out through the ether, tugging on you to connect. There are no coincidences. A bond born from within that transcends space and time. What agony! What bliss!
Jenovia... dearest human. I need to copy this entire paragraph and memorize it. Maybe even tattoo it to my forehead so I see it every day. Your validation of my experience is... well... like coming up for air after holding my breath for way too long. Even just this morning, 8 years after these discoveries have had time to settle and integrate, I found myself deleting future chapters, feeling like I've spent too many pages trying to understand him. And then you say with such clarity, "Charles deserves every bit of love, curiosity, witnessing and mourning"—I don't think anyone has spelled that out so plainly, with so much conviction. I could almost feel him next to me, reading your words, saying "Yes yes yes! I'm here, don't you see?" There have been so many bizarre moments of serendipity, the veil-almost-too-thin, that I want to lean into your culture's beliefs and embrace him as he "reaches out through the ether" to connect. How can I ever thank you for your deep well of wisdom? You are an ancient sage walking around in a woman's body. How blessed I feel to be showered with your compassionate brilliance.
Allow those chapters to be your altar in honoring him. Don't delete them. I would love to discover the man that contributed to the beautiful creation that is you in the way that only you can tell it. As your understanding of him deepens, so does your understanding of who you are and who you have chosen to be. I can't think of a more beautiful subject for a book. You're writing for all of the sons and daughters that so desperately desire to understand their parents (living or not) and how that contributes to our own identities. Your ardent desire to know Charles in any way you can is one of the things I love most about your memoir. It is love stripped down to its rawest. purest form. We need that more than ever, Kimberly.
Thank you Kate. I see in your bio that you are interested in helping writers share their family stories and history. Such a rich, layered and rewarding endeavor. Thank you for the work you do!
Thank you. When my husband died I realised how fragile our stories were, and how they could all disappear into a digital dark hole. Our stories are important, and I hope to highlight the issue and help people.
Oh... this is just so damn gorgeous and gutting! The phrases "... an unexpected Monarch butterfly migration jazzes up its propriety" and "Are fragments of his bones under my bare toes?" just astound. Your prose is so sensorial and lush. It reminds me of Lauren Groff's in Matrix and The Vaster Wilds. Love it. 💕
Good lord, thank you!!!! I need to add those two reads to my Kindle wishlist. Good timing because I just finished a horribly boring non-fiction about Polyvagal theory. :)
Gosh, wow Kimberly. I'm travelling, so I'm a little behind and thought "I'll just have a quick read of this and read it properly later" and then proceeded to be sucked beneath the words and swept away by not only the way you told this but what you were telling. I had little goosebumps at the mention of the time of when you woke up in the night.
Oh happy day! I love it when a piece pulls me in, especially when my brain is telling me "later, got shit to do." I get de-railed almost daily now, thanks to Substack and all the fabulous writers I've discovered, including you. And my days are the better for it. :) Thanks for sharing Nathan. And happy travels!
That's a whole lot of feeling in a short amount of space. I feel as though you're a little magic magnet, like the universe is intrigued by your particular, complex, display of itself and so gathers around you. You speak to grief in the way that I experience it, cosmic, total, potentially bigger than anything else, and therefor as interesting as it is terrifying. Burial at Sea...I've only read it three times, so far, and each time it spans further out, in ever increasing circles, saying more. Thank you, my love, this was a gift to read 💜
Haha! I'm chucking at this image of me, a tiny "magic magnet" wandering around the universe collecting glitter and fairy dust. ;) I certainly felt queerly tuned to magic during those first few years of discoveries. As Jenovia so beautifully shared in a comment, maybe part of that magic is Charlie reaching through the ethers, nudging me to connect. Maybe that's how all magic happens...when the veil grows thin and dimensions get all tangled up in one another. I do hope to learn more about your grief someday. I get tastes of it through Death and Birds, but I sense there's more. And I long to feel that cosmic, terrifying totality with you.
So glad you appreciated Burial at Sea. I just love the shape of the poem, I mean, the actual, physical shape. Drifting, spiraling, away....
I love that you feel both ends of the spectrum in my writing, the paradox of how seemingly opposite experiences can co-habitate in one form. I think our minds get all scrambled up with opposites, wanting resolve and tidy boxes for everything to fit into. But I love how our bodies are quite OK with holding it all at once. xo
Again, so many synchronous events... The universe IS talking to us ALL THE TIME!
I agree with Jenovia. Grieving for your father, the father you've never met, is like a double grief... Charles Brauer would have loved to meet you too, I'm sure, to hold you in his arms.
And I can see why my brother reminds you of him. He also left a child he never met (in different tragic circumstances) life so beautiful and so sad... 💕
And the poem!!! (Jakob left a painting foreshadowing his death in the sea) Sending big hugs
Oh my. Yet another parallel! Are you connected with your son's daughter? Sorry to prod, I'm just reeling with this fluid time/space continuum between your life and mine!
Jakob's girlfriend was pregnant when he died. His son was born 6 months later, in Tahiti. My parents went over and spent the first 6 months with mother and baby. And yes, of course. We've had contact over the years. My daughter (the one who had the bike accident) is 3 months younger than her cousin. She's planning a visit this summer... so the family stories continue...
Reading through your meeting with the Brauer family also reminded me, of course. There was never a question that Natty (my nephew) and his mom weren't firmly a part of our family!
Gosh, thank you Michael. I'm glad you felt that last line... grief truly is a visceral sense, a downward pull. So much so that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that people actually get heavier, bones more dense, when the weight of grief is upon us. I so appreciate your feedback. :)
I like to hope you’ve waded in waters that brought particles of him to touch you. I’m a sailors daughter who has some acquaintance with death by drowning (and lost). Nowhere near your proximity but close enough to wonder if what was left of her young body was near where we swam.
What a beautiful thought Patris. I do think of that every time I'm immersed in Lake Michigan... and also in Winnebago where my other father's ashes were dispersed. Fluid tombs that we can return to again and again and feel them near, almost like an embrace. I've never thought of myself as a "sailor's daughter" until just this moment when you spelled it out, and there's something quite poetic about how it sounds. Love to hear how that lives in you.
It seemed to me as I read your account how whatever else occupied your father, he was a sailor. No one else would venture on the water with the confidence he (and your uncle and others who live on the lip of water) do. My family on both sides did what almost all the men from their island for centuries back - when they were old enough - they went to sea, captains, engineers, crewmen, fishermen. My cousins and now some of their sons too, despite wider opportunities. I wanted to be a sea captain when I was little, and it was the one thing my father told me I could not be. It was not done.
We spent summers for 6-7 years straight on the island (Icaria) and if we weren’t in the water, we were on it, rowing or flying with sails.
(Sorry for going on and on) one last thing - it was my great grandmother who was lost at sea, going around the cape of the island, at 17, leaving two infant daughters. Whenever we rounded that cape I wanted to trail my hand in it, hoping I’d touch her.
Patris! I'm reading and then re-reading what you just shared and feeling the immensity of it. Right down to you wanting to be a captain but your father saying it wasn't possible. I imagine sailors have "a way of things" and one doesn't dare intervene with that order. But your great grandmother?! I want to know her! She must've been an adventurer to be so young at sea... was she saying alone? And leaving behind two infant daughters. Wow. Just wow. Have you written about this somewhere? I'd love to read more.
Kimberly,though it’s part of family history which we share and reshare within the family, no I never memorialized her death before. She must have been intrepid, sailing around the island with her equally young husband - but to do what never was shared. Other travellers came upon him, exhausted, and purportedly he spent two days diving in the waters there hoping to find her body, finally returning to their village home (near where we spent our summers). He remarried twice more, his two eldest daughters (of six children ultimately), my grandmother becoming the wife and widow of a my grandfather, who died in a skirmish with soldiers from the Turkish garrison there. The island has never been for the faint hearted, even now.
I had to do a Google search on Icaria, I’m sure you have read what Wikipedia says... fascinating! And this’ “The sea around Icaria had a fearsome reputation among the Ancients. Homer likened its changeability to a crowd stirred by demagogy: ‘the gathering was stirred like the long sea-waves of the Icarian main, which the East Wind or the South Wind has raised, rushing upon them from the clouds of father Zeus.’ “
Having spent hundreds of days swimming there, I can attest it’s not always like that. Though rounding the sharp ends of the island had my older cousin lifting me over the side to lose my breakfast once or twice. It’s a beautiful island. Much more polished than when I was there. Very little grows - hence the tradition of sailors.
I agree 1000%, so “beautifully written”! And so honoring of Charlie’s impulsive and poetic spirit. Even his poem, Burial at Sea, reflects his creative return to spiralling depths. (He’d be awed & proud of you for expressing a bit of his essence). 💕
Awww, thanks momma. A very prescient poem I would add. I wonder if Charlie ever had a felt sense of his own ending through the element of water...
Your grief for your biological father is anything but indulgent. A possible life left unlived is some of the most painful grief we can experience. A potential life shared between you and Charles, left unrealized...even greater. All that remains are the what ifs and the if onlys. It's like carrying sand with our hands. A fruitless endeavor yet we try anyway and I will always love us humans for that. You don't have to personally know someone in this life to love them or mourn them. Charles deserves every bit of love, curiosity, witnessing, and mourning from his incredible daughter. Your desire to know him, that drive inside of you that pushes the questions that demand to be answered, is not in vain. You and you alone own the meaning that you place on these experiences, but reading it from the outside in tandem with my own culture, Charles is reaching out through the ether, tugging on you to connect. There are no coincidences. A bond born from within that transcends space and time. What agony! What bliss!
Jenovia... dearest human. I need to copy this entire paragraph and memorize it. Maybe even tattoo it to my forehead so I see it every day. Your validation of my experience is... well... like coming up for air after holding my breath for way too long. Even just this morning, 8 years after these discoveries have had time to settle and integrate, I found myself deleting future chapters, feeling like I've spent too many pages trying to understand him. And then you say with such clarity, "Charles deserves every bit of love, curiosity, witnessing and mourning"—I don't think anyone has spelled that out so plainly, with so much conviction. I could almost feel him next to me, reading your words, saying "Yes yes yes! I'm here, don't you see?" There have been so many bizarre moments of serendipity, the veil-almost-too-thin, that I want to lean into your culture's beliefs and embrace him as he "reaches out through the ether" to connect. How can I ever thank you for your deep well of wisdom? You are an ancient sage walking around in a woman's body. How blessed I feel to be showered with your compassionate brilliance.
He is there :)
Allow those chapters to be your altar in honoring him. Don't delete them. I would love to discover the man that contributed to the beautiful creation that is you in the way that only you can tell it. As your understanding of him deepens, so does your understanding of who you are and who you have chosen to be. I can't think of a more beautiful subject for a book. You're writing for all of the sons and daughters that so desperately desire to understand their parents (living or not) and how that contributes to our own identities. Your ardent desire to know Charles in any way you can is one of the things I love most about your memoir. It is love stripped down to its rawest. purest form. We need that more than ever, Kimberly.
❤️
Can I hire you to be my therapist/curandera/witch/guru? You.Are.A.Gift.To.Me.
Always and anytime. And you are a gift to me 🥹
Beautifully written and very moving. Thank you.
Thank you Kate. I see in your bio that you are interested in helping writers share their family stories and history. Such a rich, layered and rewarding endeavor. Thank you for the work you do!
Thank you. When my husband died I realised how fragile our stories were, and how they could all disappear into a digital dark hole. Our stories are important, and I hope to highlight the issue and help people.
So true. And what a hard chapter in your story, to lose your husband. Thank you for sharing.❤️
Oh... this is just so damn gorgeous and gutting! The phrases "... an unexpected Monarch butterfly migration jazzes up its propriety" and "Are fragments of his bones under my bare toes?" just astound. Your prose is so sensorial and lush. It reminds me of Lauren Groff's in Matrix and The Vaster Wilds. Love it. 💕
Good lord, thank you!!!! I need to add those two reads to my Kindle wishlist. Good timing because I just finished a horribly boring non-fiction about Polyvagal theory. :)
Gosh, wow Kimberly. I'm travelling, so I'm a little behind and thought "I'll just have a quick read of this and read it properly later" and then proceeded to be sucked beneath the words and swept away by not only the way you told this but what you were telling. I had little goosebumps at the mention of the time of when you woke up in the night.
I too love the shape of the poem. Lovely!
Oh happy day! I love it when a piece pulls me in, especially when my brain is telling me "later, got shit to do." I get de-railed almost daily now, thanks to Substack and all the fabulous writers I've discovered, including you. And my days are the better for it. :) Thanks for sharing Nathan. And happy travels!
That's a whole lot of feeling in a short amount of space. I feel as though you're a little magic magnet, like the universe is intrigued by your particular, complex, display of itself and so gathers around you. You speak to grief in the way that I experience it, cosmic, total, potentially bigger than anything else, and therefor as interesting as it is terrifying. Burial at Sea...I've only read it three times, so far, and each time it spans further out, in ever increasing circles, saying more. Thank you, my love, this was a gift to read 💜
Haha! I'm chucking at this image of me, a tiny "magic magnet" wandering around the universe collecting glitter and fairy dust. ;) I certainly felt queerly tuned to magic during those first few years of discoveries. As Jenovia so beautifully shared in a comment, maybe part of that magic is Charlie reaching through the ethers, nudging me to connect. Maybe that's how all magic happens...when the veil grows thin and dimensions get all tangled up in one another. I do hope to learn more about your grief someday. I get tastes of it through Death and Birds, but I sense there's more. And I long to feel that cosmic, terrifying totality with you.
So glad you appreciated Burial at Sea. I just love the shape of the poem, I mean, the actual, physical shape. Drifting, spiraling, away....
You left me speechless, Kimberly. Every word holds so much heaviness, weight, meaning, vivid imagery, lightness and magic too.
I love that you feel both ends of the spectrum in my writing, the paradox of how seemingly opposite experiences can co-habitate in one form. I think our minds get all scrambled up with opposites, wanting resolve and tidy boxes for everything to fit into. But I love how our bodies are quite OK with holding it all at once. xo
Oh yes. Absolutely. <3
Again, so many synchronous events... The universe IS talking to us ALL THE TIME!
I agree with Jenovia. Grieving for your father, the father you've never met, is like a double grief... Charles Brauer would have loved to meet you too, I'm sure, to hold you in his arms.
And I can see why my brother reminds you of him. He also left a child he never met (in different tragic circumstances) life so beautiful and so sad... 💕
And the poem!!! (Jakob left a painting foreshadowing his death in the sea) Sending big hugs
Oh my. Yet another parallel! Are you connected with your son's daughter? Sorry to prod, I'm just reeling with this fluid time/space continuum between your life and mine!
I know, it's crazy isn't it?
Jakob's girlfriend was pregnant when he died. His son was born 6 months later, in Tahiti. My parents went over and spent the first 6 months with mother and baby. And yes, of course. We've had contact over the years. My daughter (the one who had the bike accident) is 3 months younger than her cousin. She's planning a visit this summer... so the family stories continue...
Reading through your meeting with the Brauer family also reminded me, of course. There was never a question that Natty (my nephew) and his mom weren't firmly a part of our family!
Oh my. 😭. His poem, your writing...💔. Your father’s daughter.
❤️❤️❤️
Kimberly, this was so lovely. The story is touching and the way you have written it is beautiful.
Below are a few lines which really stood out to me for just how well written they are and how powerful they are:
“Butterflies make metamorphosis look fun and I’m grateful for their reassurance.”
“My inner rainbow-studded-unicorn has always wanted to experience magic and now the universe is dumping bags full of glitter on my head.”
“Grief is a vacuum and we resist its gravitation pull with heavy, conclusive tombstones. Or flowering plums. Our void needs a place to go.”
Gosh, thank you Michael. I'm glad you felt that last line... grief truly is a visceral sense, a downward pull. So much so that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that people actually get heavier, bones more dense, when the weight of grief is upon us. I so appreciate your feedback. :)
Wow, thank you for this profound story and poem.
You're so welcome Michelle. Thank you for being with me as I share!
I like to hope you’ve waded in waters that brought particles of him to touch you. I’m a sailors daughter who has some acquaintance with death by drowning (and lost). Nowhere near your proximity but close enough to wonder if what was left of her young body was near where we swam.
Peace to you. And to his soul.
What a beautiful thought Patris. I do think of that every time I'm immersed in Lake Michigan... and also in Winnebago where my other father's ashes were dispersed. Fluid tombs that we can return to again and again and feel them near, almost like an embrace. I've never thought of myself as a "sailor's daughter" until just this moment when you spelled it out, and there's something quite poetic about how it sounds. Love to hear how that lives in you.
It seemed to me as I read your account how whatever else occupied your father, he was a sailor. No one else would venture on the water with the confidence he (and your uncle and others who live on the lip of water) do. My family on both sides did what almost all the men from their island for centuries back - when they were old enough - they went to sea, captains, engineers, crewmen, fishermen. My cousins and now some of their sons too, despite wider opportunities. I wanted to be a sea captain when I was little, and it was the one thing my father told me I could not be. It was not done.
We spent summers for 6-7 years straight on the island (Icaria) and if we weren’t in the water, we were on it, rowing or flying with sails.
(Sorry for going on and on) one last thing - it was my great grandmother who was lost at sea, going around the cape of the island, at 17, leaving two infant daughters. Whenever we rounded that cape I wanted to trail my hand in it, hoping I’d touch her.
Patris! I'm reading and then re-reading what you just shared and feeling the immensity of it. Right down to you wanting to be a captain but your father saying it wasn't possible. I imagine sailors have "a way of things" and one doesn't dare intervene with that order. But your great grandmother?! I want to know her! She must've been an adventurer to be so young at sea... was she saying alone? And leaving behind two infant daughters. Wow. Just wow. Have you written about this somewhere? I'd love to read more.
Kimberly,though it’s part of family history which we share and reshare within the family, no I never memorialized her death before. She must have been intrepid, sailing around the island with her equally young husband - but to do what never was shared. Other travellers came upon him, exhausted, and purportedly he spent two days diving in the waters there hoping to find her body, finally returning to their village home (near where we spent our summers). He remarried twice more, his two eldest daughters (of six children ultimately), my grandmother becoming the wife and widow of a my grandfather, who died in a skirmish with soldiers from the Turkish garrison there. The island has never been for the faint hearted, even now.
I had to do a Google search on Icaria, I’m sure you have read what Wikipedia says... fascinating! And this’ “The sea around Icaria had a fearsome reputation among the Ancients. Homer likened its changeability to a crowd stirred by demagogy: ‘the gathering was stirred like the long sea-waves of the Icarian main, which the East Wind or the South Wind has raised, rushing upon them from the clouds of father Zeus.’ “
Having spent hundreds of days swimming there, I can attest it’s not always like that. Though rounding the sharp ends of the island had my older cousin lifting me over the side to lose my breakfast once or twice. It’s a beautiful island. Much more polished than when I was there. Very little grows - hence the tradition of sailors.
My chest was so tight as I read this installment. Hugs, Kim. ❤️