Every summer, Bay Path University’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction writing offers a weeklong Writing Seminar based in Dingle, a town nestled on the Atlantic coast on the western shore of County Kerry, Ireland. Each day throughout the week, Seminar Facilitator Suzanne Strempek Shea gives participants a prompt to encourage writers to investigate new ideas and topics in their writing. During August 2020, we’ll publish our Emerald Blogs to showcase the diverse work developed from responses to Suzanne’s prompts.
From Suzanne Strempek Shea
Susan Davis Abello MFA ’17 wrote “The Last Visit” during our very first Summer Writing Seminar in July 2015 on this prompt:
So Where Have You Been?
Even the moment you read this is a place you can’t revisit. Use all your senses to write about a place to which you can no longer return. *
The Last Visit
by Susan Davis Abello
Sometimes when you close a door, you say to yourself, I will never touch this knob again. Sometimes you just know. You know when cardboard boxes are packed with your belongings and your voice echoes through empty rooms of a house, that you won’t be back. You know when you take one last look around your dorm on your last day of senior year, you won’t be back. I might have known I would never see my sister or her house again when I pulled her front door shut behind me 10 years ago, but the thought was buried deep under my denial. The kind of denial you need to stay sane. The kind of denial that allows you to believe that you’ll be back.
“See you at Christmas!” is what I would have shouted over my shoulder on any normal summer visit to my sister’s house in far-away Chicago, but this was no normal visit.
I left without even saying goodbye to her beloved cat, Ricky, who must have searched everywhere for my sister after we took her to the hospital days before—searched the white kitchen with its rooster plates and collection of mismatched teacups, searched the bedroom with her medicine bottles spilling from the bedside table onto the carpeted floor, searched the bathroom where the wig and the walker and the bed pan were left abandoned. Abandoned just like Ricky, like my nieces and their father, like all of us. But maybe Ricky already knew what we didn’t know, or didn’t want to accept.
It was the last time I would ever step foot in my sister’s house, and I wish I had taken the time to look around, to take note of the home she had, with so much joy and love, created for her family. I forgot to ask her the name of the color of paint on her parlor walls or where she found that little rug in the powder room. I forgot to appreciate the way she organized her linen closet or to find out what she kept in those sweet hat boxes in the guest room, the ones with the lavender flowers that were tied shut with a wide grosgrain ribbon. I forgot to tell her how beautiful her garden was, with its deep blue hydrangea and fat orange roses that flanked the back-porch door. I didn’t mention that the bed I slept in was soft and the sheets were lovely and smooth, cool on my skin even in the heat of July nights.
Sleep didn’t come easy in her house that summer. It wasn’t because my sister hadn’t made her guest rooms welcoming. No, sleep eluded us because she cried out sometimes. Moans that carried with them the weight of loss. It was a sound that settled heavily into the air, making its way down the upstairs hall, slinking uninvited through open doors like the oppressive heat we tried to keep at bay. The night left us anxious and ashamed of how we couldn’t help her. The comfort of her rooms was eclipsed by the stabbing pain of our hearts breaking slowly as she struggled to stay with her family for one more day, one more night.
Beside her, in the dark, my brother-in-law must have propped her pillows and adjusted her morphine-soaked body on the memory-foam mattress that burned the skin off her back, buttocks, and calves. Around her was all the softness and beauty she had created, but none of us could feel it, see it, or smell it. She had become all there was in that house. Her pain, her every breath, her moans, the sight of her—so foreign except for her eyes, the lightest blue with a hint of green. In the kitchen, meals were reduced to whatever the neighbor left in the freezer. The table was a neglected space, devoid of fresh-picked flowers and the pointed elbows of family and friends.
When my stay was over, there were no farewells. There was only denial––the kind that let me have hope. Hope that the door I pulled shut might one day open again. The kind that let me convince myself if I didn’t say goodbye, maybe she wouldn’t go.
* This prompt was inspired by “Write From the Heart: Inspiration and Exercises for Women Who Want to Write” (Ten Speed Press, 2003) by Lesléa Newman.
About the Writer
Susan Davis Abello is an author, illustrator, and business owner who published her first children’s book, Pumpkin and Buster and The Right Thing to Do About a Bully (Tate Publishing) in December 2011. She particularly enjoys writing essays about family, life in New England, and her experiences working in South America (where she met her husband) after earning her undergraduate degree. Susan earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Bay Path University in 2016.
Write with us in Dingle next year, July 31 to Aug. 8, 2021. Contact sshea@baypath.edu for full information.
We welcome submissions to Multiplicity Blog (nonfiction prose of 1,000 words or fewer, poetry, and photography) all year. We also accept submissions of longer nonfiction works (up to 5,000 words), poetry or photography for the Fall 2020 issue of Multiplicity Magazine: At Work. Magazine submissions close on September 25, 2020. More details here.