I am Christmas shopping this weekend when, again, I think of Marcia. I found her journal in a box donated to the thrift store where I volunteer. I keep it on my desk.
11/7/97
I love this time of year. I love Christmastime. I buy myself Christmas presents... I wrap them so as to forget what I have... so on Christmas morning I have something to open. I learned this from someone who is also alone...
Marcia writes in a small Pen-Tab Pocket Notebook. Burgundy cover with a sticker on it. A cherub-cheeked little girl with her hands to her mouth and the words "OH, NO" hanging above her wide eyes.
8/12/97
How my life is: I have had no hot water since April. My refrigerator, dryer, and stove do not work... I'm tired anyway nothing gets done.
Marcia lived in a house not far from my own, worked for the Forest Service where my partner works. She writes of the love of her dog, Abby, of the woods, and of books. She wanted time to work on her "inner self." She wanted to be a writer.
8/21/97
How many sad lives do we have to live before we learn everything we are supposed to? Lives of 'quiet desperation' is right.
She doesn't leave McCall, I don't want to go to Boi... The single letter I find in her belongings is from her mother, who writes, "Marcia, if you can just make it home."
8/29/97
Yesterday I borrowed a rake... so I could sit on the couch and use it to pull stuff on the floor towards me. Abby barely has room to lie down anywhere and the cats travel across the future [sic] and avoid the floor.
Marcia is in pain. Debilitating pain. She goes to work, the grocery store, the pharmacy. Home. She writes, there is a haze, a mist over things, beyond the swamp, the bend in the river...
11/5/97
It is surprising how a person can slip into a desperate situation without realizing it... as a person gets older they have to rely on other people to help them... I expected it at 65 not at 45.
"No one really knew Marcia," a retired Forest Service employee tells me. There was no obituary.
Marcia writes about the cures she's dreamed of, from the "magical medicine basket" to a "spiritual guide." And then, I conclude that I am a failure, that something is "wrong" with me.
"The storms in life are inevitable, their passing reveals the beauty of the day."
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9/4/97
Yesterday was wretched. I took 6 Darvocet and 4 Vicodin. I guess getting sick on Vicodin will keep me from taking too many.
The doctors prescribe Marcia DurAct, which will be pulled from the market a year later. Side effects included abnormal dreams, amnesia, anxiety, emotional lability, euphoria, hallucination, incoordination, insomnia, paresthesia, psychosis, tremor... pain.
11/5/97
The storms in life are inevitable, and yet their passing often reveals the beauty of the day.
The regular entries conclude with, there is not a lot of sympathy for something that doesn't show.
My friend Kim is right, there is something about Marcia I recognize in myself. That's the reason I hang on to her journal. Keep her ceramic turtle on my desk. Why I open its back to see the tiny turtles inside. Why I think about Marcia while looking for Christmas gifts. Why everything in her box has come to mean something else. Becomes a reminder of all I cannot see. Behind doors, windows, in written words. Why I check in. With neighbors, students, friends. Myself. Why I write. Especially now, in pandemic times, when our ways in (and out) are limited. In these times it is easy to assume that others want to be left alone. That they know how to reach out, can reach out, are able to name the things that cause their pain. Our pain. We assume they know; we assume that everyone has a gift to open on Christmas morning.
In her final entry, Marcia copies "Ithaka" by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you. / Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, / you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
This Ithaka of yours, Marcia, I understand. ♦
CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) and co-editor of Native Voices (Tupelo 2019). Fuhrman is also the director of the Elk Rivers Writers Workshop and resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho.
