by Suzanne Bolos Westhues
Learning to rule the realm where you’ve been taken
A DISPATCH FROM THE UNDERWORLD
At the beginning, I relived a lot of my childhood with my firstborn. And then one day, it ended. And I stepped back.
During Hurricane Henry in 2021, after several months on lockdown, a first year of college on Zoom, my family packed up my oldest daughter and dropped her off for in-person college in New York. Her first home-away-from-home was an apartment in the heart of Greenwich Village. On the long, rainy drive to New York, I handed my daughter that day the letter I always wanted to receive from my own mother: to go forth, to embrace the unknown. The permission that I had never given myself. I wanted my Persephone to have the escape route I never had. The rules and judgements placed on me weren’t going to touch her.
But did I push too hard or lead too much?
Am I Demeter come to save Persephone?
Or am I Persephone who never was entirely able to be?
All I know is that when I hugged my daughter in the downpour of Henry, she felt small in my arms in the dark and foreboding city.
In Christmas of 2023, I received a ceramic pomegranate with the year 2024 painted on it. The gift was from my friend, Kelly, who lived in Eleusina (Eleusis), the town known for Persephone’s entrance into the underworld, a place I visited in 2014 when my whole family was whole and lived almost under one roof. The Greek New Year’s tradition is to break a pomegranate and the number of seeds is the amount of good luck brought.
I texted Kelly: I don’t have to break this at midnight, do I? I mean, it’s so pretty and it has all my favorite colors. She responded, Of course not.
I saw the ceramic pomegranate as my re-entry into the world after the sudden death of my mom in 2023. My mother did not live to see 2024, but I did. I vowed to use the time: trips in the books, two trips to Greece, one trip to Rome, one trip to Rhode Island, the White Mountains, Ogunquit, writing retreats. I would not stop, even if I was sad. I was going to live for both of us.
2024 started with traveling to Rome with my husband. We were kids when we met, and we grew into people who still loved each other. Between the long walks, ancient history, and delicious meals, we saw Persephone and Hades as sculptures, paintings, and the Mother and Child.
In March I boarded another plane, this time to Athens with my childhood best friend, who was one of the few people who came with a torch when I lost my mom. It was a bridge for me between lives: the one I come from (Manchester, New Hampshire) and the one my heart and soul inhabit (Greece).
June found me on Ogunquit Beach getting my yearly terrible sunburn. I took Marginal Way and read memoirs in the sand, and I traveled to the past, present and future, as I thought of my whole family: some in the world, some in the next.
In July, I was back in Ioannina with the handful of friends made a year ago. The Bulgarian journalists. The high school teachers from North Macedonia. The Greek moms bringing their own children back. I listened to bouzoukia in the local park and I took long solitary walks by the lake.
The autumn meant upstate New York State, seeing my beautiful daughter thriving in her new community of friends at college; then New Mexico, Montreal., and watching New York City Marathon. The year ended in the White Mountains, lighting candles and revisiting triple-deckers by Dickens. I visited my past, present, and future selves, and though imperfect, and though constantly “that loner girl who is so melancholic” I went.
There were other beginnings.
We adopted our rescue beagle, Adriatic, on Election Day 2024. I don’t know why but I had a terrible feeling on that day when we set the pick-up. The vision for adopting the dog was to gather in front of the fireplace with Adriatic, to return to the sunless winter in Boston, a literal one and a figurative one. His brother Red was still at UMass. Let’s get him. Let’s bring Red home too.
A few weeks later, we had two five-year-old dogs in front of the fireplace. They were lifelong kennel-mates and as my friend, Paula commented, who knows what they have seen and been through? Who knows that about any one of us?
And although our grown children thought we were crazy, the empty nest was filled with sleek, copper-colored animals who smelled like happiness.
We were in over our heads or maybe I was, and then Jukka went to Finland for a couple of weeks. I was alone with two dogs who needed a lot of walking regardless of weather, darkness, or traffic. And yet, as I walked them around Turner’s Pond and the snow-packed suburban Milton streets, I thought, about other reckless decisions. This was one of them. This was not the worst of them. It was just another.
The daily news shakes us. We don’t know where we will live, whether there are still cities and new places in our future. We feel shaken by personal and world events, and yet we still sit with the guys in front of the fireplace.
The guys will never meet my mother and sit by her, as she drinks her Saturday Martini. They will only see the kids on weekend visits. They only know us and our routines. They fill the emptiness left by life’s changes. The friends that were only for a season. The quiet of the house when one of us travels. The unknown of the road.
Perhaps I am now Persephone. I am she.
Persephone now. In various stages of her life, she would make lists of future accomplishments she was going to have. The future was this big wide open unknown that she would fill. She is still taking steps towards that future, but the steps are smaller, closer together. She tries to live in more compact spaces: the corner of the pizzeria, the darkness of the cinema or the folk club, the memoir section of the local bookstore.
She gravitates towards new neighborhoods in Boston that carry fewer memories and older ones where she has been a regular for decades. If the day is too cold or her heart too heavy, she puts used records on the turntable and time-travels with Emmy Lou Harris, Mary Black, Johnny Cash, Mick Flannery. She imagines the original owners of the records, and how her music will be the last thing she parts with – probably true of them too. While the larger narrative of current events weighs down, she looks for stories from other eras. She listens to the rain in the chimney and watches the snowflakes from her window.
Persephone now dresses in blue, the color of the sea and the sky. In her living hours, in her spring days, she wears blue and searches for the blue in her surroundings. She is dependent on blue, and she looks for it, even from a distance. She carries her own interpretations of things and understands people far less than she did before. She is wary of her same-age friends who feel they know something of the world at fifty-one. She is constantly surprised by life. Her children are the greatest mystery and surprise of all. How come she feels so much joy in the water now, the ocean, the swimming pool? Why does the water seem to be her home, rather than the land? She wonders if she will ever feel grounded, as though she truly belongs to a place. Her mother’s teachings have never left her, and yet she does not know if she ever really learned them. She reassures herself that the lessons are still with her.
Persephone now showers in the evening to wash off the day. Persephone knows many people and yet she loves to spend her nights with her partner. She lives in the moment and does not divide her life into good and bad moments the way she did when she was young. She is always on the cusp of something, but she doesn’t exactly know what. She feels best when she has made a day of leaving her town, seeing the other ones and ending the night beside the fireplace. She wonders about the people who she lost when she went into the underworld, but she knows in her heart, they are happy. But they are elsewhere.
Persephone now appreciates the little things. The sight of small children at the crosswalk in fluorescent yellow vests, sitting with the beagles and drinking coffee. Persephone just moves forward. In her heart she is still that young girl though the mirror tells her that she is now wise.
Suzanne Bolos Westhues has been writing all her life, and she has had the lucky circumstances to be able to teach English Literature and Writing since 1995. She has taught and lived in Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic, Helsinki, Finland and Boston. She has run preschool story hours and taught American literature to Finnish teachers. In Boston, she has taught poetry, memoir and writing to students from all over the world. She lives in Boston with her husband and her two rescue beagles.
