Ashley Farmer - Dear Damage

ASHLEY MARIE FARMER

Copyright 2022 by Ashley Farmer

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without
written permission of the publisher.

Dear Damage is a work of nonfiction. Certain names and details have been changed or omitted to protect identities. While some conversations may be compressed or recreated, I have done my best to convey these events accurately based on public information, media, recordings, conversations with family, and memory.

Publishers Cataloging-In-Publication Data

(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Names: Farmer, Ashley F., author.

Title: Dear Damage / Ashley Marie Farmer.

Description: Louisville, KY : Sarabande Books, 2022

Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781946448903 (paperback)

ISBN 9781946448910 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Farmer, Ashley F.Family. | Grandparents.

ParalyticsDeath. | Mariticide. | LCGFT: Essays.

Classification: LCC PS3606.A7138 D43 2022 (print)

LCC PS3606.A7138 (e-book) | DDC 814/.6dc23

Cover and interior design by Alban Fischer.

Printed in Canada.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For Cindy Lynn

The mercy of the world is you dont know whats going to happen.

WENDELL BERRY, Jayber Crow

It was the light in things that made them last.

DAVID BERMAN, Governors on Sominex

On January 19, 2014, my grandfather Bill walked into my grandmother Francess hospital room with a loaded gun hed purchased that morning. He set their Neptune Society cards side by side on a nearby table and kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years. Then he shot her once in the chest. He tried to shoot himself, too, but a spring popped from the pawn shop gun and the weapon broke apart in his hands. Correctional officers who were at the Carson City, Nevada, hospital that day arrested him. According to subsequent news stories, he wept as he was apprehended. I failed in my mission, he said.

Sun dotted my Long Beach, California, apartment as my sister relayed this news over the phone. Id been grading student essays on a weirdly warm winter morning, and now my brain flickered, and it felt like a hand had my throat. I interrupted her to tell my husband, Ryan, what happenedMy grandpa shot my grandma and now hes in jail and she might dieand then shock propelled us: we slipped on our shoes and walked quick miles down Ocean Boulevard with the sea shimmering below us. I thought of the people in the hospital who heard the gunshot, how horrified and panicked they mustve felt, and then the word ruined echoed in my brain, a powerful certainty that everything good about our close-knit family was finished. My grandmother shot, my grandfather in jail: these two people I love so much and know so well now shatteringand my mom, who lived with them both, left to pick up the pieces.

Ryan and I shared an American Spirit on a park benchI wasnt even a smokerand I took my shoes off and stood on the shore where the tide washed over my toes. The sand looked tiger-striped and glittered with flecks of mica, and I thought about how many times Frances, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, swam in this same ocean or, years later, depicted it in dramatic oil seascapes Ive memorized. I figured I should be exactly there, feet freezing in the water, when someone inevitably delivered the news that shed passed. But amid the flurry of phone calls from my siblings and mom who now drove to the hospital, news of Francess death didnt arrive: doctors declared that she wouldnt survive her injury, but it could be hours before she left us, days.

When we returned from the beach, my students essays on the American Dream sat where Id left them, a collection of sunny, abstract relics from just a few hours ago, the era of before, not after. I couldnt focus enough to make sense of their words, and maybe words would never make sense again. Gun? I thought. Shot? I thought. Ruined. Surely this cataclysm must be a mistake and this nausea gripping me must belong to someone else.

I Googled Carson City shooting: news crews already filmed in front of the hospital crime scene tapea violent tableau that somehow belonged to us. At a different link: footage of my siblings backs as they rushed toward the entrance. Other news outlets reported from the jail where they now had my grandfather on suicide watch. In yet another piece Id view hours later, a woman held a microphone outside my grandparents home, the home that belongs to all of us, the site of Christmas dinners and sagebrush Easter egg hunts, the house my grandpa built by hand, the one we picked out moss-covered rocks for from the old mine. The house where youll find us grandkids names scratched into concrete beside our small handprints. Where my grandparents initials are ringed with a heart in Francess perfect scriptan image the cameraman came close enough to film.

This isnt a story I often share. Ive feared others judgements, and I become flooded with the temptation to explainwere not gun people and my grandparents are more than just grandparents and, and, and. Plus, despite the public nature of this event and the fact that strangers have dissected it in their own articles and posts, Ive wondered which parts are mine to tell. Theres also this: the few times Ive shared itwith a coworker, a stranger, an old friend over a beer at a writing conferenceIve watched their faces tense, grimace, wince. Even if I offer a warning or soften it, a story like this can, for the briefest moment, drop an anvil on a listener. And Ive decided in these past few years that if theres one thing I dont want to do, its contribute more pain to the world.

Instead, Ive made a quiet study of pain, the blinding, bewildering strain you dont see coming, the pain of reality biting the dust, of looking toward the horizon to see pain extending forever into the future, an unforgiving desert. Or maybe pain has made a study of me, taking up residence in my body, thrumming in my chest, skyrocketing my blood pressure to ER levels and throttling me from sleep at two a.m. until night eases and the sun slides up. Because theres grief, yes, but its complicated, too: What do you do with pain caused by someone you love, for actions you dont agree with but, on some level, understand? For a gunshota gunshot in public, no lessin a time of mass shootings? For my suffering grandmother? For my weeping grandfather who tried, but failed, to leave us and was now condemned to live?

This disorienting grief proved to be a baptism of sorts: even though Ive barely been to church, I found myself in the months afterward praying in LA freeway traffic on my way to teach, tossing up pleas of