My Dinner With Cheryl
We said we wouldn't die the way our mothers did.
Here’s a story I haven’t been ready to tell until now:
In the autumn of 2015, I read in O Magazine about the Dinner Party, a series of meet-ups across the country for people in their 20s and 30s who were grieving the death of someone close to them. The idea being that people in their 20s and 30s are not typically grieving a personal loss (in modern America, anyway), and we tended to find ourselves feeling isolated within our social circles. The Dinner Party was a place to gather with a community of those who, whether they were talking about it or not, had a broken thing clanking around inside of them, and these people would understand that we could still be funny, interesting, and good friends, even if (or especially because) we had a broken thing clanking around inside of us.
I thought of the gift that being a grieving weirdo is to the world, which is that we can sit with you, push the immediate discomfort aside that comes from being triggered, from having your own deeply troubled beast see its likeness, and instead give those deeply troubled beasts a space to roam around and sniff each other and just be.
The Dinner Party walked a fine line, the way it billed itself, which wasn’t as a support group; you weren’t gathering TO talk about the people you’d lost, but just to be fully yourself in all your clanking, messy, grieving glory:
The dinners are a welcome antidote to traditional support groups—"We've all been given cheesy grief books with a white dove on the cover," [Dinner Party co-founder Carla] Fernandez says—because they value honest conversation above all else. (Their manifesto reads, "We will abstain from bullshit.") The goal is to encourage more open expressions of grief and foster discussion of the way that loss continues to impact everyday life.
– “A Refuge When Nobody Understand Your Loss,” O Magazine
In the article’s photo, a group of stylish bohemians smiled around a fairy-light-strewn barn (I want to say — this memory is 8 years old now) with a gorgeous spread on a rustic giant dining table (again: in my memory), looking serene and cool and found.
I was far from serene and cool and found. I was still weathering the aftershocks of a panic attack that differed from my other panic attacks in that it seemed to go on for several days, burning a path through my body and brain all through the night, not letting me sleep, not letting me eat, and not abating with walking, box breathing, talking to my husband, or hanging out with friends. I call it “my nervous breakdown,” because I don’t know what it was, and frankly, reliving it now in order to describe it is making me feel a little buzzy, so can I stop? Just… I’ll say this: at some point I told Nat to look up inpatient mental hospitals in the tri-state area and see if they took our insurance.
Eventually I got in to see a therapist my friend recommended, and within 15 minutes, the combination of his soft brown couch, palo santo incense, and completely unalarmed—even slightly amused—smile, calmed me way the fuck down. He gestured in a way that said, you’re not going crazy, then told me anxiety comes from anger that has nowhere else to go but inward. It was like some kind of spell. (He also happens to be a practicing witch, so it might have been one.) I felt myself begin to come back, as if I’d fled my own body, barefoot and mindlessly running, and was now cracking open the front door to see if I could come home.
So things were still a bit touch-and-go when I signed up for the Dinner Party. I was quickly contacted by the very kind organizers and asked if I’d be interested in hosting. It turns out that a city full of people living in 500-square-foot apartments makes it hard to find a few who are willing to host several guests for a meal. Like most New Yorkers, we had to store our kitchen stuff in the living room and we ate dinner on the couch. Where would people sit?
“Don’t worry about that,” the organizer assured me. “All our New York hosts have small places, it can be very cozy and intimate.” To sweeten the deal, they said I could co-host with someone else, so we could take turns stuffing our tiny apartments with people. I was game, and they introduced me and Cheryl over email, and we made a coffee date so we could meet each other and see how things felt.
Cheryl was just 21—technically young enough to be my kid, I couldn’t stop thinking. And her birthday was the day before my mom’s. And our little brothers’ names were the same, with different spellings. These things made me feel immediately and unexpectedly tender toward her.
Cheryl worked as a graphic/UX designer for NASDAQ. We briefly bonded over our corporate servitude, and then got right into it. I told her my mother had been murdered by her boyfriend 11 years earlier and that I had found her body. She told me that when she was just 16, her own mother ended her life. She had to find this out from an uncle because her mother had gone back to Taiwan, and then she disappeared. I don’t remember how long it had been since she’d seen her mother. I don’t remember if Cheryl thought her mother had gone back expressly to do this, to end her life the way her own mother had. What I remember—what has stayed with me all these years—was Cheryl’s anger. How she hummed with it. As she spoke, she spoke fast, gesturing like an animated character or a comic. It reminded me of the way I used to get amped up whenever I talked about my trauma, rehashing what happened to my mom or in my childhood. Her energy at first made me a little nervous, which made me think right away of the mission of the Dinner Party, which was to give all of us grieving weirdos a place to be grieving weirdos, and I thought of the gift that being a grieving weirdo is to the world, which is that we can sit with you, push the immediate discomfort aside that comes from being triggered, from having your own deeply troubled beast see its likeness, and instead give those deeply troubled beasts a space to roam around and sniff each other and just be.
Cheryl and I bonded over our love for the city—even the dank subways and pee smells! And like me, she was a geeky goofball who named her plants: Stanley and Star Child and Severus. I never asked why the first two were named for members of Kiss. I remember this, too: She was adamant that she was “fine.” That she was processing her trauma and grief. She was seeing a therapist weekly which had helped her accept that her mother’s death was not her fault. And that this did not need to be her story, too. She had a loving partner and a younger brother to look after, and she reminded me so much of me in that way, that way that stands with fists clenched before a swirling hellmouth and says, “Not me. I’m going to beat you. Look at me, I’m beating you right now.”
I was still like that, back then. I’m not going to die like her! Look at me: I have a corporate job, I make enough money to live on the Upper West Side! I have a 401(k) and a loving, stable marriage! I can choose not to drink! I got so far away that now the sun doesn’t set over my ocean, it rises over it!
I think it’s a step in the right direction, that certainty. That defiance. I also think that much certainty can be a sign of shock, an indication there is road to hoof yet.
Cheryl and I decided: let’s do this. The organizers were delighted (relieved) and assigned us people. Seven invitees accepted (including Cheryl’s brother), one declined, and three never responded—I wondered if these four had signed up in a moment, then pulled back into themselves, unready.
Our first potluck dinner, in early November, was nice. We sat in a circle in my living room and warmed up to each other. I made “enchilada-flavored” quinoa-stuffed bell peppers. We talked about our losses and where we were in our grieving and what helped and what didn’t.
We reported back to the organizers that our Dinner Party was a success, and they were so thrilled. I will say, these organizers were outstanding—they took pains to make sure we were all comfortable and supported through this process. They even held a happy hour on the Upper East Side that Cheryl and I attended, so all us hosts could meet the organizers and each other.
On December 6, Cheryl sent an email to our Table inviting them to our second dinner at my apartment on December 13. She reiterated the goal of Dinner Party gatherings, which was to “talk organically about whatever comes to mind” and that no one was obligated to talk at all. She wrote: “There are two ground rules: 1) all of our stories are different — don’t judge or feel the need to censor yourselves, and pay the same courtesy to others. And 2) everything shared around the table stays at the table1.”
She ended with: “We look forward to having the safe, open space we've created grow, as we each continue to grow. See you soon! Warmly, Cheryl and Erin.”
Here’s what I remember: only about half our party responded that they could make it. It being so close to the holidays, I guess things were hectic. Then, on the day of the dinner party, all but one person emailed or texted us to say they were ill or had to work.
You know that feeling when you really want plans to be cancelled but don’t want to be the one to do it? And then the opportunity comes and you’re SO grateful and relieved. That was me. About 80% me. The other 20% was bummed out we didn’t have a more enthusiastic group. I kept picturing that smiling, serene bunch around the gorgeous farmhouse dinner table, thinking how much I wanted to make that moment happen for these fantastic, hurting people. But now it was going to be just me and Cheryl and one other person, and it was freezing out and getting dark so early, which makes everyone just want to burrow. So she and I checked in with that person: since everyone was bailing, we were postponing dinner until after the holidays, but she was welcome to join Cheryl and her partner for dinner that night, or text me to hang any time. She was cool, the new person said, she’d wait until January.
Cheryl and I wished each other a happy holiday and reiterated we were there for each other if we needed anything at all. We were excited about the forecasted blizzard, about the citywide pause it would bring, about playing in the snow.
According to my photo library, Nat and I wedged a Christmas tree into the bay window of our apartment and walked up and down Broadway and Sixth Ave, relishing the lights and the windows at Bergdorf’s. We did Christmas Eve at one friend’s apartment and Christmas morning at another’s. We did New Year’s in Long Island City, on the 22nd floor of a friend’s building with a crystalline view of Manhattan. We snuggled our friends’ new and gloriously chubby baby, to whom we were made fairy godparents. We saw Picasso’s sculptures at the MOMA. On a weekend trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I stared for ages at a painting of the Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner. I’d never seen anything like it. Most depictions of Mary have her highly stylized as something inhuman, porcelain-white and two-dimensional. An innocuous dove is always coming in through the window, symbolizing the supernatural injection of a baby into Mary’s teenage body. She also doesn’t look like a teenager in any of those dozens of paintings I’ve seen. Or remotely Levantine. Or remotely concerned.
Here, by contrast, is Tanner’s painting:
It gets me, even now. In my memory, it was massive, engulfing half the wall, though I know that’s not true. It lit up the room the way this incomprehensible presence lights up Mary’s room, which is astonishingly realistic: the rumpled rug, the stone floors and walls of a humble, ancient abode. And Mary, clearly young, clearly unconvinced. She’s listening, but I see fear in the light wrinkle of her brow. I see the humbling of an event beyond her understanding, beyond her control. This brilliant presence, this impossible and blinding occurrence — in spite of her fear, she looks directly at it. Traditionally, it’s supposed to be the archangel Gabriel telling Mary she is going to bear a child, the son of God, but Tanner has made this blinding light so disembodied, so unspecific, that it allows room for it to be anything that is too much for her earthly senses to register. It allows room for the realistic, complicated, and human experience of the legend, and therefore it allows room in the legend for us.
I have many favorite works of art, but this is the one that makes me understand what I need art to do.
Mid-January, I emailed Cheryl about planning another Dinner Party. Ten days later, one our Table messaged me. Had I seen Cheryl’s Facebook?
Since I last talked to Cheryl, she had posted on her Instagram some art that she liked, and a photo of two friends in the neon glow of a small-town Chinese restaurant, and pictures she took of Cayuga Lake at moonrise. On her Twitter, she posted that she’d completed a 10K, her first ever. And at some point, after these posts, her partner shared that Cheryl had ended her life.
How was this possible? I couldn’t absorb it. Cheryl was brilliant and funny and talented and outraged and grieving and generous and kind and wholly—electrically—alive. She was just beginning to share her story and work with suicide prevention organizations. After our first dinner party and before our second failed attempt, she’d written on Medium: “My mother made a choice in 2010 that I hope none of you or your loved ones ever consider.” Why had she, then? It didn’t make sense. I reeled, I worried that maybe it was because I had not done or said the right thing. Was it because we didn’t have our second dinner party?
I did this after my mother’s death, too: I should have protected her more, been more forceful about her staying away from her estranged boyfriend, I should have told her every day that I loved her and needed her and I should have kidnapped her and driven her out of state… but the truth is, I did do many of those things, spread out over years, and I have this sense now that there was a certain force I could not compete with. An ever-widening wound with its own gravitational pull.
Cheryl had written that her mother’s suicide “influences every aspect of my life and I miss her constantly. I have had to be strong. I have had to hide this important part of my experience.”
And her mother before her made the same choice. What it is, to be faced with the tragic lives of your mother and grandmother, to curse their choices and declare you’ll be different while also being secretly uncertain that you’ve escaped their fate. I know the feeling of the gravity pulling you somewhere dark but familiar, and I know how hard you have to burn the jets to get clear, to take the parts of your mother you admire and mourn and love and reject the rest, to work at becoming that new mother for yourself. I wish Cheryl and I could have learned it together.
Two years later, I was in a bar in the shadow of the hill where my mom was murdered, having decided to move back to that town and deal with it. I got day drunk and ended up shouting at a couple of men who interrupted me and my friends to tell us what they thought of our faces and bodies. I ran out of there, alone and ashamed and shaking with something awful and wordless, memories of all the times my mother threw knives at windows, flung her fists at people, screamed at cops, boyfriends, her own parents—she wasn’t wrong to: the world was out to screw women over, and she had to live among people who either perpetuated it or refused to see it. A Cassandra driven mad, gaslit until she choked, told to calm down and “go along to get along.” Her last words to me were, “I’m just going back with him to keep the peace.” At the trial we learned she’d hit him in the head with the cutting board as they were making dinner, and that’s when he “lost it” and stabbed her. After months of him threatening her, removing parts from her car, not letting her answer the phone. Was I going to die like her? Lashing out at last against a world that wanted me to keep the peace while it snuffed me out? I really thought I might. And it terrified me. It made me want to just get it over with. Sometimes, I still do.
Is there a number to call for this? A walkathon, somewhere to donate? Is this it? Is the answer in the defiant telling of our stories when we, especially women, feel like we should say less about ourselves and focus on making everyone feel happy and comfortable and safe?
Fuck that, as Cheryl would say.
She wrote this of the age she would not see: “I see myself now at 22 and my life is taking off. I see my mother’s life at 22 and her life is taking off. I don’t want a crash landing, like hers, like her mother’s before her.”
She wrote: “I see myself turning into my mother in beautiful ways.”
Oh, Cheryl. Me too. Cheryl, we might have done this, side by side. We could have sent each other things we wrote, things others wrote. We could have dinner and list all the tiny details we remembered about our mothers. We could tell each other the dreams they appeared to us in, the uncanny Tarot cards we just pulled. We could trade self-care tips and describe what we wanted our lives to mean, and I could have sent you this, which I just read:
You gotta resurrect the deep pain within you and give it a place to live that’s not within your body.
Let it live in art. Let it live in writing. Let it live in music. Let it be devoured by building brighter connections.
Your body is not a coffin for pain to be buried in. Put it somewhere else.
– Ehime Ora, Ancestors Said: 365 Meditations for a Peaceful Year
The organizers of the Dinner Party were really good here—they, too, were stunned and they organized a memorial with Cheryl’s partner, which I don’t remember going to. They planned to come to my apartment for a special dinner where we could talk about how this affected us. But again, in the days leading up to it, everyone but two people canceled. That summer, I had to admit that I didn’t have it in me to keep trying to host dinners. The organizers kindly reassigned us all to other Tables. I went to my new one once or twice, and they were lovely, but something had started to shift in me. I developed a sudden and almost supernatural obsession with going home, back to California, to contend with my mother’s death and start working on my book.
I almost wrote here that it had nothing to do with Cheryl’s death, but writing a memoir teaches you that all the events and choices in your life are traveling together, linked and long, like a train in the desert.
All this time I have wondered if it was my mother calling my name in the middle of the night, waking me from a deep sleep; my mother putting songs that we both loved in my head, on repeat, driving me crazy with them, making me sob on ladders, in subways, on park benches; my mother who flashed images of cacti and bleached cow skulls and serape blankets, the sun setting over the blue, blue Pacific. Go west, all these things said, go home.
But maybe it was Cheryl—or what I unconsciously learned from her, anyway. I believe that whatever we need to contend with in this life comes for us, comes through in our dreams, our encounters with people, our instruments of divination. We can try to suppress and deny it. We can tell ourselves we don’t deserve to contend or share, which means we never inspire others to contend and share, but it would destroy me to give in to that urge to stay small and quiet, and I don’t know if someone somewhere will kill me one day, but I do know I will not go down by erasing myself.
I went home to figure out my story and I had that scene in the bar, where I became my mother momentarily, when I always said I would not. I get it now, Cheryl.
Grief sends a brilliant and terrible messenger into the room with us. The artist, Tanner understood, is divinely tasked with looking directly at it. Maybe it’s the combination of fear and willingness in his Mary’s face that just guts me. I see the hope in it; hope that what the messenger offers is not blindness but illumination. And hope that whatever is asked of her, she will be up to it.
You can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) and the Samaritans Statewide Hotline (call or text) at 1-877-870-HOPE (4673), or call or text 988 or visit https://988lifeline.org/.
And:
Donate to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in Cheryl’s name. Her partner created this years ago and I’m so moved to see it’s still here.
The Dinner Party - If you or someone you know is grieving the loss of someone close to you, at a time of life where that’s not so common (before age 45, their website now says), I do highly recommend this.
So beautiful. Thank you for writing. Love to Cheryl.