By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale

I hurl my Dream in and watch it catch fire. “Burn, baby, burn,” I mutter under my breath. Church of the Firepit solemnly witnesses, sipping scotch and cracking jokes supportively.

Church of the Firepit started during 2020 lockdown when the real church closed down and our neighbors invited a few of us over for a socially-distant BYOB at their backyard firepit. Every week, after learning how to homeschool on the fly and setting up home offices and Zooming our little butts off, we’d gather at the firepit, clutching bourbon or beer and relaxing into our chairs as we remembered how to laugh and enjoy adult conversation. Even after lockdown ended, our firepit gatherings continued, and I dubbed it Church of the Firepit. These neighbors who had been friends before became family as we processed the world together and showed up for each other week after week, trauma after bloody, tumorous trauma.

I’ve been cleaning out my office. Sounds benign. How bad can an office be? Let me rephrase. I’ve been cleaning out my 44 years of collected life strata. My office is the Memory Dump of our home, and if you scrounge around long enough you’ll probably find Bing Bong lurking behind a stack of Psalty the Singing Songbook CDs or a dust-covered craft project from my son’s preschool over a decade ago.

I’ve racked and stacked the detritus of our lives, and my beloved writing space has become so chaotic that I can’t sit at my desk without my eyes wandering around my jam-packed shelves. I should write, but look at that mountain of receipts from appliances we don’t even own anymore. I should write, but there’s a pile of fourth-grade math homework my 17-year-old might want someday. I should write, cue skeletal hands filled with school permission slips bursting through the floor and pulling me into the Upside Down aaaggghhhhhh!!!

The end. It’s a fire sale. Everything must go. I grab trash bags and start tossing, wiping the shelves with a microfiber dust cloth as they groan their thanks. Freedom!

I’m motivated by my grandmother, who died last year at 98. She saved everything in organized, carefully-labeled stacks. She was a museum curator and treated her home with archival skills. But when she was gone, everything remained, and I realized as I wandered through her familiar rooms, someday my kids and grandkids would go through all my things. What did I want to leave behind? 

I came home from her funeral to the phone call that I had cancer and the realization that 98 years were not guaranteed. I’d better get my shit together in case I tapped out early. What did I want my kids to paw through when I was gone? Not these cluttered shelves.

Half a year later, I stand in the middle of my office wielding a trash bag like a weapon and fight tears. I’m overwhelmed by the task, by the last months spent in chemo and radiation, by the rest of my life. As with every other area of my life, I start with books. Books are always an excellent beginning.

I start ROY G. BIV-ing them like I’d seen online and secretly made fun of. But to bring order out of chaos, I turn to the rainbow like the bookstagram influencers before me, and it works. Slowly, shelf by shelf, I feel calm descend. Making other people’s books look nice on my shelves takes a tiny bit of the sting out of the boxes and boxes of my own sad books stacked against the wall from canceled events with no opportunity to sell them. Stupid coronacancer.

As I work my way around my shelves and desk drawers, I keep finding boxes of expired Cadbury eggs stashed all over in drawers and cubbies like I’m a squirrel storing nuts for the winter. I stop to eat one. Nothing says “processing feelings of professional inadequacy” like eating expired chocolate out of a desk drawer.

One shelf is dedicated entirely to every yearly planner I’d made in my adult life. I’m not sure why I thought I’d need them, as if, like Brett Kavanaugh, some day I’d be called to testify before Congress and would need to prove that I was at a pediatrician appointment with Evie in 2013. Heaven forbid I not be able to pinpoint the exact dates and times of every swim meet Elliott’s been at or the preschool’s Bike Rodeo 2011. I shove them all in the trash bag, hoping the bag doesn’t rip.

A pile of greeting cards spills out across the carpet. I start opening them and my heart slides into my guts. A heaviness overwhelms me.

“Dear Melanie, we’re so sorry for your loss … ”

“Dear Melanie, know that your babies are in heaven … ” What? Ew.

Why the hell did I save every card from when we lost our final in vitro embryos and the last shot I had at getting pregnant? Why did I do that to myself? And how could I have known I’d stumble across them unexpectedly when currently racking up a new pile of condolences, this time for cancer? I made a mental note to throw away all the cancer cards and not do this to myself fourteen years from now because who knew what fresh hell I’d be facing then?

I do know why I saved them. I’m so grateful for being loved, for people taking the time. But with the memories of support come the memories of pain, so I cram them into the trash bag. Planners with a side of crushed expectations and a life I’d never know.

I clear off the boxes and debris on top of the bookshelves and my hand hits a wooden plank. I think it’s a loose shelf and get Alex to come help get it down. I snort when I see what it is.

DREAM is painted on the wooden sign in big, curly letters. The animal print ribbon I used to hang it in the playroom at our old house still streams from the hooks on the back. “Dream.” My throat catches in a cross between a laugh and a strangled cry. The dreams I had when we hung that sign over our miracle in vitro babe zip around my office now, unleashed like evil genies from a bottle. I try to catch them and shove them back in. 

We’d lost the rest of our embryos and were in the adoption process. We built a beautiful playroom off the back of the house with a big window that looked out over our backyard. We’d be in various adoption processes for the next several years and our dreams for what family would look like would go through endless variations. But that playroom was filled with light and wonder. We were young, and healthy, and hopeful.

I hold the sign now in my office. It’s covered in dust, just like the dreams it espouses. Our babes are teens, and everything feels spikey and edgy and each day is a precipice we could fall right off. 

“Let’s burn it with Church of the Firepit,” I say.

“Excellent,” Alex agrees.

A few weeks later, I toss it into the fire. I want to howl primally into the forest, but I just stare as the flames lick the paint and the “R” and “E” blacken, leaving only “D—AM.” I laugh. The dream is dead and our life looks different than we thought, with D—AM trauma and D—AM cancer and D—AM challenges we couldn’t see coming. I miss the hopefulness of the young mom who hung that sign. In her place, a cynical melted Barbie of a gal just trying to keep everyone alive, herself included. 

I let a little of the cynicism melt away with the sign. I wonder.

Can’t make room for new dreams till you burn the old. Goodbye playroom hopes. Hello … ? Hello whatever’s next. 

Photo by Alex Dale.