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How can this be truer?

When I was still a teenager, I was an intern at a small newspaper in San Francisco. A staff reporter had those words floating around on his screen, the phrase bumping and tapping against the edges, a screensaver he’d devised. 

It’s something I’ve never forgotten. And when I’m lost as a writer, it usually floats across, and bumps against, the edges of my mind. There’s almost always a way for a sentence, or a paragraph, or a snippet of dialogue, or an entire chapter to be more true. 

Writing about grief, sometimes you know when you get there. You can almost hypnotize yourself, take yourself all the way back. The night my brother died, I was on a work trip to Miami. It was a Friday night, and the clack-clack of high heels on a South Beach sidewalk drifted up into my hotel room. I remember the feeling of being wrapped in a bright white hotel towel, being on the cold bathroom floor, experiencing nausea, then realizing I was just hungry, but the hotel didn’t have room service and there was NO WAY, there was NO WAY I could leave that room and go into the world where I was the girl whose brother just died, his body on a gurney rolled into a van and out into a stormy night. Clack-clack went the high heels. 

I tried not to think about where his body was, or that I would never see it again. “Cremation,” he’d scrawled weakly in pencil on some form they gave him in hospice. 

So, I was stunned and hungry. 

I didn’t want to recall the videos I had arranged, for some well meaning nonprofit to film my brother before he got too sick to say much, or to look like himself. This group, these lovely volunteers, they film parents in hospice with young kids, tape them reading a favorite bedtime story. My brother, Morgan, he read “Goodnight, Moon” to the camera. As it turns out, the way you never end up watching your wedding video — and it maybe only gets used by DATELINE if your spouse disappears under mysterious circumstances — you really never do watch the video of your dead dad reading you “Goodnight, Moon.” 

If it can get truer here, I felt stupid for having the idea, and ashamed, because while I wasn’t there for this video shoot across the country, I had planned it, an exercise fueled by survivor guilt and the desperate need to feel helpful. His wife told me that it was one of the few times he cried while he was dying. 

That’s on me, bro. I don’t forgive myself. I never will. That’s as true as it gets. 

I wrote about that night in Miami, and the times later, when my dad would lament the end of my brother’s baseball career, as we watched my oldest son play Little League. I wrote about the way a season of baseball became urgent to us, a place to pour our attention and love and grief, and the way my dad became my hero for figuring out how to do his own grief his own way. He kept all the pictures of my brother, and the newspaper clippings about the Santa Rosa Little League All-Stars, in a shed outside of his mobile home. “I can’t look at the pictures every day,” he whispered once. “Do you think that makes me a bad dad?”

No, I do not. 

Some might want an altar with candles and photos, but not my dad. He just wanted baseball. 

The light of grief was already too bright, stadium lights blasting his twitchy eyes like the infinite particles of dust that swirl around the bleachers.

Today is six months since my book came out. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written, mostly because my editor at Penguin, Tracy Bernstein, never let me get away with anything. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for this story, because it was about my brother. 

When it comes to grief, my dad has cracked the code for himself, but I haven’t yet. All I can do about grief is tell it, the cold floor, the guilt, the hunger, goodnight comb and brush and mush, and Goodnight, Mother F*cking Moon. 

Just before the book came out, my publisher sent over the first review, a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. It was like a dream. They don’t give their reviewers bylines, but whoever you are, thank you. Then, David Oliver from USA Today wrote a beautiful feature. Cal Ripken, Jr. agreed to endorse the book for no good reason, other than his love of both books and baseball. I reached out to the guy who wrote SANDLOT(David Mickey Evans), and he also endorsed the book. All the people I badgered for months to come to my reading at Changing Hands Bookstore - they all came. Standing room only, with Jimmy Rhoades introducing me, a night that makes the highlight reel of my life. The MLB Network had me on @highheat, all because Alanna Rizzo felt like answering a DM from a Little League mom. I had so many wins, because of all the friends and strangers who responded to this story, and opened doors for me to talk about it (Becky Bartkowski, Megan Finnerty, Ted Kamp Amy Silverman Bill Goodykoontz Adam Carolla KTLA 5 News Cater Lee Karen Wang Yvette Bowser Chuck Klosterman Christine Blackburn Paul Gilmartin Anthony Mattero Sonoran Living Good Housekeeping Today Show USA TODAY Michelle Newman Michelle Glicksman Lizz Schumer Dr. Drew Ben Mankiewicz Lauren Michelle Gilger Rebecca Cook Dube Rheana Murray and many others. Mike Rowe had me on his podcast, The Way I Heard It and it elevated the book to number one in both grief and baseball on Amazon. 

I don’t know if I was very compelling in interviews, because I was so anxious, and the subject-matter was challenging. When I was alone writing and rewriting, I could hack away at the words until they struck just the right tone, sometimes funny and sometimes grief-y. But speaking extemporaneously, I usually sounded either too rehearsed or rambling. I had intensive stage fright, but I couldn’t hide away, so I did my best. I won Sports Book of the Year (American Writing Awards). The top audiobook director in the world agreed to direct my audiobook (Scott Sherratt). Wins. 

The week the book was released, I was at a Little League All-Star game when I got a Google news alert on myself. Good Housekeeping chose my book as a best gift for Father’s Day. That was everything all at once. I was there with my dad on the sidelines I’d written about, and someone who didn’t know either of us understood what it had meant, and continues to mean, to watch your kids and know all you can do is cheer and wish and hope and pray. The rest is in the hands of fate. Pride rushed through me, a warm burst floating up inside my lungs and throat. 

The only way this post could be truer is to tell you that I fought and fought, almost every single day for the past six months, and the book never did become a bestseller. I can catalogue the wins in my mind all I want, and there were many, but this tugs at me. I wrote the best book I could, I hustled with all I had, but I still feel like I came up short. I visualized the book for sale at airport bookstores, but I didn’t get there. When I walk by the books at the airport, I have to subdue a brief avalanche of jealousy and despair. 

In my book, there’s a young baseball player who is terrified of getting hit by a pitch. He needs to stay in the batter’s box to hit the ball with any power, but he keeps leaking out with his hips, stepping backward and away, unable to be the boss of his own fear. I tell myself, I stayed inside. That was the goal. Write from the danger zone, where the pitch can bruise your ribs. Still, there’s no guarantee of a hit, no matter how many right things you do. I wrote this book not to “win” writing, but for my people, the grievers. I definitely didn’t solve grief, because I still feel just as bad about my brother, dead now for almost eight years. I still feel stunned he actually died. After writing about it almost every day for 18 months, the main thing I can say for sure is that grief isn’t impenetrable. Joy and even euphoria can slip through the veil. In fact, I’d say moments of pure wonder and gratitude sidle up to me frequently, like a skittish cat that’s just gotten used to me. 

The silly index card on my desk says, “Use authentic voice to connect with humor and heart.” Yeah, I wanted a mission statement, like they say you’re supposed to have. It didn’t say, “win writing,” and thus forever be free of self-doubt and sadness! BOO HOO I AM NOT A BESTSELLER!!!!!!! 

To get truer, I just wanted to express some kind of state of the union, six months later, and really to say thank you to everyone who helped me, by reading an early chapter, by covering the book in some way, by buying it, listening to it, recommending it, reviewing it on Amazon. Part of me feels like I let people down. But much like in baseball, there’s always the top of the inning and the bottom. Baseball leaves room for surprises. I’m not a NYT bestseller, but I have been the recipient of massive, magical doses of human kindness and generosity. Like a hitter on an 0-2 count, I keep trying to make contact. 

It’s a true as I can get to tell you when I wake up, I have to resist the urge to classify myself as a failure, as someone who just isn’t relevant enough. I stop, and credit myself with sitting around at a Barnes & Noble in Tempe for three hours one Saturday to sell nine copies of MAKING IT HOME. I’m proud of that, and of the email I got the following week from a very old man who probably bought the book out of pity, this poor lady with her stack of signed books in Tempe, but he tracked down my website to tell me how touched he was by the book, how it took him back to his days coaching his kids. And that’s a connection I made using my authentic voice, and some too-long eye contact from the folding table at Barnes and Noble.

Grief, baseball, success, writing, self-promoting, these are all complicated. I’m just here looking at the scoreboard during the sixth inning, happy I even got to play. I’m relieved I’m still in it somehow, with no idea how it all ends."

Teresa Strasser, author of Making it Home: Life Lessons From a Season of Little League