So Poe

Last night I watched the most gruesome and darkly comic Forensic Files* and one that reminded me of the horror of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing.

Here’s the story: A man and his wife were axed to death in bed—but not quite. The cops on the scene found the dead husband downstairs, collapsed, blood all over him, the house, the floors, the kitchen, his socks, even outside on the doorstep. He’d been axed sixteen times. The wife was axed in the head in bed and still alive, but barely. The EMTs went to give her oxygen and couldn’t find her mouth she was so badly bludgeoned. She actually lived, and with surgery, her face was almost normal except for the two huge scars that told you exactly where the axe had landed.

But here is the freaky part: the husband—axed sixteen times, remember—WOKE UP from the bed where he was axed, and went about getting ready for a normal day! He pulled a sweatshirt over his bloody head and clothes, went downstairs and started breakfast. He even went outside to get the newspaper, and when the door closed and locked —HE GOT THE SPARE KEY FROM ITS HIDING PLACE IN THE FLOWER POT AND LET HIMSELF BACK IN. Segoi! He finally collapsed right there with the paper in the front hall from lack of blood.

Here’s what happened: the axe penetrated deep enough to cut the neocortex, which obliterated the reasoning part of his brain, the part that said, Why am I covered in blood? What is this pain? OMG my wife is dead! This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife! But the axe blade did not reach deep enough to cut into the paleocortex, the part of the brain that controlled his primal instincts and second-nature habits, so he got up, made breakfast, got the paper, and even remembered where the spare key was hidden. This story is SO POE. A man doesn’t know he has been brutally axed and is minutes away from dying, covered in blood, reading the paper, making coffee…

What element of Poe’s writing does this remind me of? The nearness of death. The inescapability of the end for each of us. So near, it crosses over, and so human, I can feel it in my cells. Poe’s story, Loss of Breath, is about a man who, literally loses his ability to breathe in the middle of a heated argument with his wife, and then…meditates on this fact.

Poe gets right to the edge of death, then the spark jumps the gap, and I am dead. I can feel being dead. And not in the moment of crime, or the too-fantastic moment of being murdered, but in the almost pedestrian, creeping, ultimately more horrible understanding that death is here now, waiting patiently as we make coffee, crack open eggs, reach for the morning paper.

Visit Melissa’s Amazon Author Page at


*Forensic Files, Netflix, Collection 7, Episode 16, Family Ties.


Santa Fe River Trail, Feb 12, 2017

Every weekend I go walking along the Santa Fe River Trail, less than a block from my house. Today, the faded winter colors of bark and branch were punctuated by some surprisingly bright natural and not-so natural elements.

How crimson splashes brighten the faded winter branches!
A different bush with bright magenta berries.
Birch trees and a large elm in this business garden off St. Francis.
Townhouses with a view of the Co-Op and the river.
A lizard didn’t see his shadow.
Elm tree frames the snowstorm in the eastern hills below the Santa Fe Ski Basin.
Rosehips’ iridescent color in a winter garden.
The brightly painted walls of La Familia medical services.
Day of the Dead detail.
Walking Trail communiqué.

Two Women, Two Films: ‘Arrival’ and ‘Jackie’

jackie-arrival-v2I watched two movies with women protagonists this weekend. The films couldn’t have been more different, but each in its own way, was a discerning moving portrait.

Both women are asked to do the impossible and must find the strength to command their universe.

In ARRIVAL, linguistics professor Laura Banks—played by Amy Adams—is asked to put her life on the line to communicate with aliens, or ‘Heptapods.’ Her continual lapses into memories of her daughter who died interrupt the work only she can do until the interruptions become the answer to her searching. The cinematography is rich and real, mirroring the carefully transparent process that the scientist uses to reach the extraterrestrials. And when the military demands answers too soon, the process is aborted and she must risk her life to save the world. And she never resorts to heels to get the job done.

In contrast, Natalie Portman’s JACKIE digs her heels into the mud when no one else will find the perfect spot in Arlington Cemetery to bury her husband. Unlike the gorgeousness of the filmscapes in the science fiction film, here the camera clings to Jackie’s every move like the dried blood on her pink wool jacket. This unrelenting extreme closeup is so uncomfortable it feels wrong— but then, that is the point. Reality is shattered, and the murderer is murdered. The world has gone crazy. Even the editing is disturbing—a scene will jump from the beginning to twenty seconds later in the same scene breaking our honed sense and structure of the grieving process.

In both films, we participate in what looks like the unraveling of each protagonist’s mind, but in the end, we see she has been the steady support we have been looking for, even though she never really believes it herself.

These two contemporary film portraits of women—though neither written by a woman—offer a shift in the landscape of tired female character tropes—the broken bird, the lost girl, the determined widow, the hot scientist. They have to hang on in traditionally patriarchal social systems (politics, military, science), confirm they have the skills to do the job before them, and find their own core of resilience to do the right thing even if it is against what everyone around them suggests.

Jackie’s dilemma is played out in a very public arena—she is now irrelevant with the death of her husband the president. Yet she still must be seen as standing for what her husband stood for, and that means deciding to walk with the coffin on parade, out and available for anyone to shoot.

For the professor, the woman in a man’s world dilemma shows up as she must ‘translate’ why she can’t simply get answers from a species who don’t even know what a pronoun, subject, or question is in our language. She must trust that her way of communicating will offer the best results, even if the process takes longer in a very impatient world.

But here is the really unique element to these characters—that, as women, the final struggle isn’t against men, that is just the world they live in. The true struggle is a visceral attachment to what is ‘right.’ For Jackie, that’s understanding the media’s need for a fairy tale. Jackie is the one who defines the presidency as ‘Camelot,’ and gives that brilliant piece of PR to the journalist, Theodore H. White, (whose name isn’t mentioned in the film or the credits, and who is not the earlier T. H. White, and, no relation to me that I know.)

For Prof. Banks, it is her final trusting of what looks to us like the grief of madness. In the climax of the film, she asks her colleague, “Do you trust me.” Something she herself finally learned to do.

Although these two films are radically different in tone, mood, and style, they both tell the story of what it means to act from what you know—to follow that voice inside you that is sure-footed and resilient amidst the chaos that can come without warning.

by Melissa J White
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writers: Eric Heisserer (screenplay), Ted Chiang (story)
Actor: Amy Adams

Director: Pablo Larraín
Writer: Noah Oppenheim
Actor: Natalie Portman


Director Jodie Foster on Men and Failure

Screen Shot 2016-05-14 at 11.58.05 PMI know I’m watching a good movie when the story in my head runs out and I have to let the movie tell its own story. That’s how “Money Monster” impressed me watching it this evening.

The premise of the plot is known before you sit down in your cushy seat—disgruntled investor holds the TV studio and host hostage for a bad stock tip when he loses his savings—but how it will pan out is the most important part of any story: the writer’s POV, the theme, the director’s concept.

What I enjoyed was the realization that even as I was watching this film, the changes in plot pulled me in so many directions, that I had to let go and allow the film to deliver on its own.

There’s an emotional surprise every few minutes, an important part of this thriller genre. While we’re still in the first act, George Clooney‘s character, the “monster” of the TV show, “Money Monster,” comes up with a brilliant idea—to change the value of the stock in real-time, thus giving Jack O’Connell’s character—who’s taken the TV studio hostage because he lost his savings on said same stock—a ray of hope that the stock he bought will regain its value. For just a page of script, Clooney makes an authentic appeal to the viewers tuned into the live show, and the stock begins to rise, just a point. I’m thinking, wow, live crowdsourcing. What if this was how all stocks worked, how far away from reality is this? And just as that gleam in the actor’s eye sparkles, the stock drops.

Not everyone laughed, but I did. “I was interested in this idea of men and failure,” director Jodie Foster has said of this project. In that moment, when Clooney understands that the world wouldn’t pay to see him live, his character is allowed to fail, and that sets up the very interesting dynamic of what ends up essentially being a buddy movie—between Clooney and O’Connell—showcasing the theme of men’s failure and how women have to be the cool-headed, brave, fixers. Enter Julia Roberts‘ character, the show’s producer who whispers so intimately in Clooney’s ear via a tiny wireless speaker, telling him to breathe, giving him direction, “producing [his] survival,” Foster puts it.

And just when you think men and the women who rescue them is the theme, in comes a new woman character who is anything but cool-headed and supportive of the man in her life. Wait, there’s two.

The film is full of small, quiet moments that are dramatic in their own right. When Roberts clears the studio, when Lenny Venito (Lenny the cameraman), silently returns behind the camera, and other moments that come and go, spinning the story as quick as you can spin a camera on a studio set.

In an interview with Foster, she mentioned that were it not for the mega-Hollywood actors attached to the script, she might have produced the movie via a smaller screen. But there are reasons to watch this type of “real” thriller in a movie theater, and that is the reaction of the audience. The story is about the audience as much as the main players. Not only in our ability to relate to each character, and not only mirrored in the scenes of audiences watching the hostage crisis live on TV, but also in the theater itself. Watching an event as a group, we share the tense situation, the moments of levity, which gives us a chance to let our own minds change and react together to the flashing images on a screen.


Photo: George Clooney and Jodie Foster, © 2016 – TriStar Pictures

Frozen Placenta by Melissa J White

 I was almost finished defrosting the refrigerator when I stuck my nose in the freezer and a rotting smell hit me.

I moved the ice cube trays out of the way and saw two large plastic bags in the back. I pulled one out and found a huge chunk of snow saved from last year at the ski basin. That was funny—it had just snowed six inches yesterday, no need to keep that memory. I tossed the bag into the sink.

But the other bag was still stuck. That smell… The plastic ripped away in my hands leaving a huge chunk of blood melded to the freezer floor. Nothing else would have that much blood. And all of it thawing—the black ice turning rich red.

I was looking at a frozen placenta.

It was at that moment of realization that my youngest, Asher, let me know the truck with our new fridge had arrived. My cell phone rang. I washed my hands and talked to the delivery guy who was walking down the driveway. He wasn’t sure his truck would make it. I told him I’d pull him out with my four-wheel drive if he got stuck.

We met out front and he confirmed the deeply packed snow on the walk wouldn’t be a problem. He and his buddy came in to check their navigation and I quickly closed the freezer door.

To my horror, the extra guy suddenly pulled the fridge completely away from the wall to check behind it. Black filth on the floor, years of it. While the new fridge was getting prepared outside, Asher—bless his heart—started cleaning the floor behind the fridge and I went back to my blood bath, frantically trying to loosen the frozen mass before they came back to take it away. How would I explain this stuck, frozen body part to two appliance guys, one with a Korn T-shirt? Would they even know what a placenta was?

Then I realized exactly whose placenta was defrosting: Asher’s. Must be. We buried Talaya’s at the foot of Talaya Hill, Colin’s in the back yard of the house he was born in, under the apricot tree. This must be Asher’s from La Cienega. We hadn’t done anything with it during the five years we lived there, or the five years we had it here; just moved it from one freezer to the next, like an old piece of wedding cake.

I looked down at Asher scrubbing away in the corner. Ten years, was all I could think. Such a long time. Once, Asher and this frozen meat were one and the same inside me.

I grabbed a kitchen knife and began hacking at the ice.

“What are you doing?” Asher’s porcelain face peeked around the corner. Had he felt something? Was there still a visceral connection between him and what was born with him? I held the knife out of sight.

“Go help those guys get around the couch, OK?”

I waited for him to disappear into the other room, then sawed away at the frozen mound. Finally it was free. I dropped the ball of blood in the trash, wiped out the rest as best I could, mopped up the floor with more paper towels, washed my hands, and tied up the garbage bag. I placed it in another bag, dark green. Now, where to put it? My hands were shaking, I started to laugh at the absurdity when I heard voices in the living room.

I rushed out the back door. In the furthest part of the trash area, I slipped the bag into a garbage bucket and covered it with a plastic lid. I secured the waste with half a cement block. I washed my hands once more in the kitchen sink, shades of Lady Macbeth.

When the new fridge was in place, and the old one tipped back on the dolly, I watched as brown water dripped out the bottom, then trailed across the linoleum as they took it away.

Of course they got stuck in the driveway, even though I told them to start from a flat place and go very slowly: low and slow. But they sped up just as they hit the patch of ice on the incline. I was watching from the window thinking I would have to suggest a tow, when a half-ton honked and stopped—a friend, apparently, with a chain to rescue them.

I ran off to a meeting in town and wasn’t back home until night. The first thing I saw when I walked into the kitchen was not the sparkling new white fridge with the freezer more efficiently located on the bottom, but a small, dark green bag directly in front of me near the dining room’s sliding glass door. There it sat, sucking in the energy of the room like a black hole.

As in most families, no one really listens to the mom, so although I didn’t get an answer as to how the bag came back into the house, I took it outside a second time, and this time put a full cement block on top of the bucket to make sure it would be harder to move. Then I told my husband to take it to the dump on his next run.

Asher had already organized all our food in the new fridge, excited by an actual butter door and vegetable drawers. He read the appliance booklet the moving guys had left behind, and showed me the new temperature gauge.

But it was—no kidding—the beginning of spring when I encountered the bag again. It was still in the plastic bucket but had moved to the tool shed. I confronted my husband who said he couldn’t take it to the dump and just throw it out.

What happened to us? In our twenties, when our first child was born, we knew the value of a placenta; we even cooked and ate some of it, having learned how rich in nutrients it was. That was us then: goat’s milk and cloth diapers, water births and no TV.

Things changed by the third kid, by the time Asher was born. Life got more hectic, money got scarce, TV got better. And we forgot to have any kind of ceremony over the last placenta.

So we dug a hole out back under a giant piñon, and dumped the contents of the bucket into it, held our breaths—and our noses—as the plastic bag slid down into the earth. We settled a large piece of flagstone over it, hoping it would be too deep for the coyotes to smell it.

I was about to suggest we say a few words, like we were burying a pet, but that didn’t seem right. We’d ended a huge cycle. We were giving the earth back to the earth, moving out of the guiding part of the roller coaster part of the parenting ride, and into the hold-on-tight part.

New fridges and old blood.


Photo from

Falling into Mindfulness

In the microsecond before my head hit the pavement, a moment of cinema-like slowness ran through my system and I understood that phrase, “and the ground came up to meet her.”

It was too dark, I was too tired, I shouldn’t have been running downhill after a long day on only four hours of sleep, a generous margarita at dinner, and half a piece of chocolate cream pie—I blame the chocolate cream pie, every smooth, velvety forkful.

The pie was what made me think I had to get in a 1.5 mile jog while there was still enough light left in the sky. In fact, my last pain-free, tequila-warmed memory was that of an incredible sunset. The low bank of steely rain clouds pushed down to the earth in the west with a shocking orange disc of sky in between, like the innards being squished out of a jelly doughnut.

And then I was falling.

Being a student of mindfulness, I remember the realization that I was falling, and that if I continued to fall at the current pace and trajectory, my head would crack against the asphalt, which it did.

I was lucky, somehow, that after my feet tangled up, and my knees kept moving forward, then my hands, then my right shoulder, it was actually my thick nerdy glasses that broke my fall, because they broke first and slowed down my face from making too huge an impact with the ground.

After the fall, I couldn’t move. I didn’t black out—I knew where I was, and I had enough awareness to know that I should move off the shoulder of the road eventually, but since I could see no cars coming in either direction, I didn’t have to move just yet. I couldn’t move, anyway. I could breathe, but the fall was so quick, that it took a minute for my mind to catch up to the reality that I was no longer upright. It felt so wrong that my whole body was on the ground and my glasses smashed.

As I lay on the pavement, it was like I was waiting for someone to emerge out of thin air to help me. But there was only silence. I lay there listening.

I had done it, was all I could think. I’d had the fall I’d worried about ever since I moved out last year and started living alone. The accident with no one nearby to help. How careful I’d been in my house on the slippery wood floors in my socks, cutting squash with a sharp knife, and with my finicky truck—unscrewing the radiator cap slowly with a rag to cover any hissing steam.

A long, drawn-out word finally emerged when my mental reality caught up with my physical reality. “Fuuuuuck!” I said it twice.

I pushed myself up to a sitting position and reached for my glasses. The frames were broken, one lens popped out, but still intact. I unzipped my right coat pocket and tucked them in. Perhaps they could be saved—expensive progressive lenses. Without them, I was even closer to the ground. I still couldn’t bring myself to defy gravity and stand up. I didn’t know how bad I was hurt.

“Get help,” my brain articulated. But first, I wanted to stand up. Not just to assess any injuries, but also because I didn’t want anyone driving by to worry and stop. I staggered to my feet and found my phone in my other pocket, cushioned in its case. I pulled it out.

A year ago, in very nearly this same spot on the road, I’d dropped my phone when I was out walking and the glass smashed irreplaceably. Now it had its own cushy orange case. I called my neighbor first; I’d just seen her and her son out admiring the sunset. No answer. I called my daughter who always answered my calls late at night. No answer. I left her a breathy message, trying to sound positive. I called my youngest boy. No answer.

It was at this point, standing not quite straight, at the side of the road in the rapidly darkening air, that I could have started crying. When I could have wallowed in all the miseries of leaving a long marriage and an only best friend. When I could have reminded myself that I was alone, lone, lonely. That no one knew where I was, and no one cared.

But, kind of remarkably, I didn’t even think to cry.

My brain kicked into practical mode. Was anything broken? I looked down and took inventory. The palms of my hands were scraped, stinging, and bleeding. One fingernail was jagged. There was a hole torn through the left knee of my jeans, blood oozing out of minor cuts. My shoulder was sore under the thick wool jacket. Something warm on my face under my right eye. I brushed it off gently. Was my face bleeding? I pushed the camera button on my phone and reversed the direction. My dark, glassless face peered through the gloom back at me. I could see cuts around my right eye, but no gushing blood. I turned the phone off and stowed it slowly back into its case, back into my coat pocket, and zipped the pocket carefully closed with just the tips of my fingers. A car passed by and I stood up taller.

Nothing was broken, that much was clear. No sharp, stabbing pains. I’m just going to walk home then, I said to myself, and it seemed funny that I was limping back up the hill I had come flying over only minutes before.

The air stung the cuts on my face. My left knee was stiff so I walked slowly. I looked again at my hands and knew I would have to get any gravel out from under that scraped skin. My vision made the ground closer and the distance blurry. Was I dizzy? Not really, but maybe still a little shocked.

I thought how stupid it was that I had gone out running at night when less than a year ago, my sister in Albuquerque had done exactly the same thing—tripped over an unseen pipe and planted her face right on the road. She had a serious black eye for weeks and her right hand was badly sprained.

But I refrained from calling myself names. Instead, I marveled at the fact that after I’d just gone head first on the asphalt, I could get up, think, be practical, and get home on my own.

The more I walked, the better I felt. Maybe this is what Fight Club was all about—getting punched and getting back up. In the past, when I had some painful accident, I would immediately re-live other painful experiences in my life and grieve for them all over again. Like falling into a pool of water, and following an underground spring to another and another pool of water, tears would spill out over injustices that were years, decades old.

Tonight was different. Instead of dipping into other griefs, I got up like a football player after a grinding tackle, checked for injuries, picked the turf out of my helmet, and played on.

Resilience. Cushion. Buffer. Shock absorber.

When I got to my porch, I saw my laundry whipping in the breeze, about to be torn from the clothesline. I actually took a step toward it before I said to myself, “Really? Is laundry your priority right now? Don’t you think you should get inside and start taking care of yourself? Laundry can wait.”

My kids got my messages, came over to wash my cuts, apply antibiotics and ice packs, make tea, show me kitten videos, and watch “Better Call Saul” with me. These are all things that keep you moving forward instead of being stuck in the past.

Like the doughnut of tissue between the vertebrae of your spine, I had built up enough cushion so that this pain had its own, unique feel, undistracted by the memory remnants of past misfortunes.