29: Research, Lineage, & Police Reports

How it feels to find out about the ones I love from the county sheriff's perspective.

In April 2013, my Aunt Diana died in a way that still has no real answers, only assumptions from the state and professionals hired to determine what happened to a body when there is no one around to answer questions. If you’ve been around, you know that my Aunt Diana’s body was found in a river in Southern Oregon in the late Spring of 2013. I write about it a lot, I think about it a lot, I talk about it a lot. As I sit with what it means to write something that will live in this world, I think through questions of disposability and family, erasure and disappearance – and of course, as always, girlhood and class. Who among us is memorialized, who is publicly mourned, and who is forgotten and disposed of in one way or another? 

There are many things I’ve told you about my Aunt Di. All my life, I called her DiDi, we shared a room when I was a baby, and she taught me how to say my first word during a 49ers game (touchdown). She was my mother’s closest friend, she rode a Harley, she had 5 beloved cats (Jo, Mo, Bo, Yo, and Princess), and she traveled the world. All of this is who she was before she became the thing that defined her death and what happened thereafter. 

Aunt Di & my siblings, sometime in the early ‘90s

As I spend time with my studies, the tensions of graduate school at a “top university,” and what it is I want to write in this world – I am turned toward her and therefore turned toward myself. I could write an entire essay about the ways in which grad school has challenged me and walked me to tension and out again, and one day I will show you the poems that have been born from that tension. 

Last week, as I settled into my own research and writing, I decided to request the records on file for my Aunt Diana’s death. What I found and what I learned sits in me like a stone.