LETTERS ABOUT LITERATURE

Letters of 2008 National Winners and Honorable Mentions

Level 3 National Honorable Mention: Marissa Brogger

Dear Sue Monk Kidd,

As our sedan tumbled languidly across the pavement against the fading sunrise of November 8^th, 1993, my mother, at least part of her, ran away. Her youthful face drawn to an ambulance's ceiling as she quietly drifted in and out of consciousness is what resonates. In Lily's own words, "I recall broken pieces of time." Among the broken pieces I can identify: grasping a limp hand, the piercing of sirens, frantically searching for my mother in the eyes of a woman who appeared not to recognize me, and the steering wheel that forever branded my mother as a victim of a traumatic brain injury.

After seven surgeries and four years of physical therapy to regain speech, movement and function, my mother was supposedly back. On a cool summer day thirteen years later, having just argued with my mother for the seventeenth time that morning, I sat down to read The Secret Life of Bees. As my mother was stating, "I heard it's a great read for the adolescent girl," she casually thrust 302 pages of literature into my lap and darted out of the room. In my first reading, I decided it was a good book. A month later I read it again, this time the words enveloping and embracing my 'traumatic stress induced depression' that had reverberated for 14 years. My mother's traumatic brain injury had saped her into a new person. It was impossible to tell that she had lost, but as a three year old, I had sensed loss. As a sixteen year old, I sensed loss. Somewhere in those 302 pages of literature, I found Lily; and together we embarked on a journey to retrieve some of what had vanished in her mother's death and mine's rebirth.

My mother's head injury had induced anxiety, depression, disassociative behavior, and rapid aggravation. In a sense, on November 8^th, 1993, like Lily's mother, my own mother ran away. Each day since then, it has felt as if every moment had been structured intricately so as not to induce dizziness or anxiety in my mother. All those who observed our spectacle of a familial existence -- including friends, family, babysitters -- handled my mother, and our family, delicately, careful not to agitate, anger or depress her. As I read on, I realized Lily faced this same struggle with T-Ray. By losing her mother, Lily had lost the sentinel of all things nurturing, gentle, and placid. I thought the same sentry had disappeared from my life. Of course my father was nurturing, and my mother to an extent, but the maternal aspect of kind, gentle, and unwavering care that Lily and I sought so greatly, was supposedly absent.

I went with Lily to her yard, and she dug up her tin box which held the pieces of her mother's life. I carefully inserted the bronze key into my own splintering and flower-plastered box in which I kept pictures of my mother before November 8^th, 1993. I fantasized about what life would be like with that woman. She stared up at me from a torn picture -- her eyes shined with a vibrance she no longer had, her face once soft and placid had been replaced by wrinkles and other remnants of anxiety. What would she have smelled like? How would have that woman worn her hair? Who would she have been? With the beginnings of one of my mother's and T. Ray's screaming sessions, I shut my box, Lily shut hers and we once again walked the worn paths of acquiescence.

I first ran away from home at the age of 8. When Lily ran away I felt the same invigoration. We were free. I was to return only minutes later after my daring escape from my mother's pain, but Lily kept going. Finally realizing Lily was truly free, a joy swept over me. She had freed herself from pain to find her mother. After arriving at the Boathouse's, there was a sense of finding what had been so long lost. What we had been searching for was in front of us.

After placing down my worn copy of your novel, I looked into the mirror with a new strength. I went up to my mom and gave her stiff body a hug. She relaxed, and in her eyes, I saw the same vibrance that was sustained in my tattered picture. What Lily and I had lost could not be replaced. However, in the hush of the bees at night, the torn pictures staring back, the appreciation for my mother, different and wonderful she may be, and in the stronger people that stared back at us in the mirror, something new was found -- ourselves.

Sincerely,

Marissa Brogger