How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

  Phil says, “A few months later, she showed up in my dream. She was sitting on the couch in her old living room, her feet up and her circulation stockings on, watching House Hunters, and she said, ‘Oh, Phillip, sit down. Look what I have. I can have all I want now.’ And she had the biggest barrel of vanilla ice cream in front of her, and a giant spoon, like in a cartoon. And I knew she was all right. And I ain’t even had anything to drink that night, and there she was, and we had ice cream and watched television and when I woke up I cried. I could taste the vanilla ice cream. I really could.”

  One by one, the others weigh in. A woman named Trisha, who’d lost both her mother and her sister within a few years of each other, says her mother showed up in a dream the very night after she died. “She’d been in a wheelchair for a long time, and we were in a room somewhere, it was very bright. And she didn’t have the chair! She was walking! She hadn’t walked in years and there she was, up and about. I remember she said, ‘I’m going to go look for your sister now,’ and she walked out of the room.” Trisha pauses, her eyes wet. “That made me feel better. Thinking they would be together. And that my mother could walk again.”

  I still haven’t seen my mother, except for that video on her cellphone. And part of me hopes it’s because she’s busy with people she hasn’t seen in a long time, like her parents, or because she thinks I’m okay and I don’t need her, or maybe she’s worried she’ll frighten me. I don’t know, but I still hope, every night, regardless.

  I think I’ll tell my group about the cellphone thing sometime.

  I know they would believe me.

  And I do find it comforting that maybe when you die you get back all the things you’ve lost, like your legs, or your parents, or your daughters, or even your mom, and you get to eat all the ice cream you want, finally, and it doesn’t hurt one bit.

  June Frances Tolliver passed away on May 13, 2019, at the age of 45, in Mesa Luna, Arizona. She is survived by her daughter, Grace Maria Tolliver. They were a well-oiled, good-looking, and good-smelling machine.

  June was loved, now and forever.

  No one really knows the story of their parents. After all, as Tiger Tolliver says in this book, “It’s very hard to think of your parents as people, full of bad checks and bad decisions, fistfights and broken hearts, all of it.” Our parents pick and choose what to tell us about how they grew up and became, well, those people telling us what time to go to bed, or when to study, or why we can’t go to that party.

  You quilt the story of your parents through small patches of memory, some bright and hot, some so faded the truth of them is almost invisible. Maybe in the end, through photographs, you finally have a semblance of a whole. You can piece a parent together this way.

  But what if your parent’s whole life fits into one shoebox? What if there are tremendous gaps in the story?

  The story of June Tolliver, who loses her parents as a child, was partly inspired by my own mother. Her mother died when she was seven, and my mother and her brother were sent to an orphanage. A baby sister was given to relatives; no one knows why they didn’t take the older kids, too.

  Her father remarried soon after. A nice family adopted my mother and her brother. They grew up comfortably. Photos of clean, smiling kids in cowboy chaps, my mother’s hair curled just so. A shy smile at thirteen, but a hint of sadness in her eyes, a look she would carry her whole life. A friend painted her portrait. He called it Sad Lady.

  She didn’t like to talk (at least to me) about her days in the orphanage. Sometimes the smell of boiled cabbage would set her off, or a scene in a certain movie, but her outbursts were brief. Once or twice I asked what her mother’s name was. She couldn’t remember. Perhaps that was something she had to bury, in order to go on.

  Before I was born, my parents took in foster children. Later, they adopted my brother. Perhaps this was something my mother carried, too: a need to help kids who needed family just when their lives were darkest, just like she once had.

  Tiger’s story is what can happen when one child finds herself at the mercy of strangers.

  On any given day, there are almost half a million kids in foster care in the United States alone. Almost 2.5 million children are now homeless in the United States and one in twenty-eight kids has an incarcerated parent. More kids than you know are being raised by a non-primary relative.

  These children are all around you: in your class, on your team, in your neighborhood, your camp, sitting quietly among the stacks in your library. Do you know them? Like Tiger, do you only realize how many broken lives are around you when you have a broken life of your own?

  No one story can encompass all the experiences and minute details of foster care and juvenile detention. Or even grief. In this book, I’ve tried to tell a story about lost kids. Kids who have found themselves without parents, or family, for a variety of reasons: death, addiction, neglect, abuse.

  Not all kids have safe home lives. To not show Thaddeus’s experience does a disservice to every kid who’s ever been abused by a family member. Sometimes that abuse happens in foster care, too, as we hear from Blondie and Brownie.

  But I have also tried to show the LaLas, the Teddys, and teachers like Walrus Jackson, who try hard to make kids’ lives better. There are people working valiantly in foster care, in homeless shelters, in teen homes and hangout centers. There are teachers and school counselors and librarians and grandparents and aunties and half siblings who open minds, homes, and hearts. These people fight the good fight each and every day to try to lessen the Grand Canyon–sized hole in kids’ hearts.

  How to Make Friends with the Dark is, above all, a book about grief. This is a book about learning how to go on, about finding your way in the dark. Mae-Lynn’s father dies from cancer. Taran and Alif lose their father to a car accident. Tiger loses her mother to a brain aneurysm. And Lupe Hidalgo’s brother dies by suicide, the second-leading cause of death for young people ages fifteen to twenty-five.

  We must do better by our young people. We must engage in open conversation about depression and mental illness. Our schools need more resources, more support.

  Once, I posed a question to my friends on Facebook: “What would you tell someone who’s died if you had one last chance?” Lots of people said things like “I love you” or “I miss you.” One person said, “I forgive you.” Another person said, “I just want you to know I’m happy now.” And a lot of people messaged me privately because not everyone has good things to say about the dead, and that is a true and valid thing, and we need to listen to these people as they grieve in their own way, too. And one person said she wished her mother had written her a letter telling her how to live without her, because she didn’t know how.

  That stopped me in my tracks, because it’s true. There is no manual or primer for grief. There are lots and lots of books, but there’s no minute-by-minute manual that lets you know the smell of Pond’s Cold Cream will cause you to burst into tears at Walgreen’s, or a certain song on the radio will make you pull to the side of the road to cry. And that these things last the rest of your life.

  Within three years, I lost my mother and my sister. I don’t have the answers; there’s no blueprint for grief. What there is, is a lot of stumbling around in the dark, looking for a warm hand to hold on to.

  I can’t explain the Grand Canyon–sized hole inside me, so I wrote a book about it instead. I hope that if you are wandering that dark road of grief, Tiger’s story helps you in some small way.

  Kathleen Glasgow

  P.S. My older brother undertook a hero’s journey to piece my mother’s story together through Ancestry.com posts, locating old neighbors, county files, and even old immigration records. He found that baby sister, now a grown woman, though my mother had already passed away.

  But just before that happened, he did find out her mother’s first name, which she had long forgotten.r />
  It was the same as her own.

  WHERE TO TURN FOR HELP…

  If you are feeling suicidal: suicidepreventionlifeline.org

  If you need grief counseling: dougy.org/​grief-resources/​help-for-teens/

  If you are a homeless teen, or know someone who is: nationalsafeplace.org/​homeless-youth

  If you are a child or teen in foster care, you have a mandated bill of rights. These may vary from state to state, but you can get more information here: childwelfare.gov/​topics/​systemwide/​youth/​resourcesforyouth/​rights-of-youth-in-foster-care

  If you are an LGBTQ youth: thetrevorproject.org/​#sm.00004zcgdcu9kfl8s8s24qwbinvh5

  If you have an incarcerated parent: sfcipp.org

  If you are the victim of sexual assault: rainn.org/​about-national-sexual-assault-telephone-hotline

  A lot happens when you write a book.

  You think you have one story, and then it turns out you have an entirely different story.

  And even after that, there’s one more story inside that one waiting to be trimmed, polished, painted, buffed.

  And a lot of people are responsible for shaping my scraggly first idea of a girl and her mother and grief into the thing you are holding right now.

  Krista Marino is, hands down, the best editor on the planet. Even when I do entirely uncool things, like, uh, rewriting an entire novel while she’s out of the country on vacation? She rolls with it! I mean, she said, “Put it back,” meaning everything I’d taken out and replaced, in the nicest way possible, when probably she didn’t have to be so nice. But she is. And she’s also funny, and very good at making me face my fears and write the story that needs to be written.

  Everyone at Delacorte Press and Penguin Random House makes my writerly dreams shiny and wondrous, especially Barbara Marcus, Beverly Horowitz, Monica Jean, Mary McCue, Kristin Schulz, Jennifer Heuer, Alison Impey, Kate Keating, Cayla Rasi, Elizabeth Ward, and Kelly McGauley. Thank you all so much for the time and care you’ve taken with Tiger’s story.

  A couple of years ago, an agent told me she couldn’t possibly take on my first young adult novel. “You need to find a champion for this book,” she said. And I did. Julie Stevenson has been my champion since she plucked me (and that book) from her plethora of daily queries, and I’m forever grateful that she understands my writing style and the stories I want to tell, and that she’s with me every step of the way, being her usual joyful, funny, strong, and superb self.

  Sometimes writing is exceedingly lonely, especially when you write about difficult topics that have a personal edge. I missed my mother and my sister so much while writing this book, and excellent humans like Janet McNally, Lygia Day Penaflor, Bonnie Sue Hitchcock, Sandhya Menon, Jeff Giles, Robin Roe, Julie Schumacher, Karen McManus, Julie Johnson, and Shannon Parker talked me through hard moments, even when they might not have realized that was what was happening. Thanks also to the Sweet Sixteens for continued support.

  Tiger’s story is about grief. Part of how I fought through writing her story was to ask people about their own Grief Life (thanks, Janet, for coining that phrase), because no one grieves in the same way. No one’s Grief Life is the same. Special thanks to Susan Moger, whose response to one of my Facebook posts, about what you’d say to someone who has died if you had one last chance, inspired the character of Alice in this book.

  Many thanks to Holly Vanderhaar and Elizabeth Noll, and to my front-desk pal, Mitch Gerson, for sharing his horse stories with me.

  And thank you to Nikolai and Saskia, who have the biggest hearts and the best laughs, for always letting me hold you just a little tighter, a little longer.

  KATHLEEN GLASGOW is the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces. How to Make Friends with the Dark is her second novel. She lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona. To learn more about Kathleen and her writing, you can visit her website, kathleenglasgowbooks.com, or follow @kathglasgow on Twitter and @misskathleenglasgow on Instagram.

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