“To Be Held” by Emma Zimmerman
“To Be Held” by Emma Zimmerman is the winner of the 2022 Debut Prize in Nonfiction for Emerging Writers. Here’s what Touchstone’s Editor-In-Chief, Achilles Fergus Seastrom, had to say about the essay:
“The developments of the past decade (COVID-19, gun violence, crises in mental health and education, among others) have left us all wondering how to process our experiences and understand the world. ‘To Be Held’ is an essay that boldly seeks to help us understand ourselves and our experiences. Zimmerman creates space for us all to know we are not alone. Not in our experiences, and certainly not in our need to be held. It is a compassionate study of our recent experiences and a compassionate recognition of ongoing hardship.”
Accompanying “To Be Held” is an original broadside art piece influenced by the essay, created by Oen Griffin.
“To Be Held” by Oen Griffin. This original piece was inspired by Emma Zimmerman’s prize-winning essay.
Note from the author: The following is a work of creative nonfiction. Names and other identifying details have been changed throughout the text.
After Jack died, we copied Robert Frost poems onto oversized lined paper. Nineteen seven-year-olds etched, “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” as Mrs. Baker recited stanzas to us. Robert Frost didn’t write for second-grade minds, and yet we had woken from nightmares far beyond those dreamed by most second-grade minds. Perhaps Mrs. Baker knew we would reach for something cathartic — something like poetry — before too long.
As I write this, I stop and wonder where Mrs. Baker lives now. Does she still teach? How old is she? I begin to google her name, only to realize that I do not know her first name, or at least have not remembered it for some time. In my head, she is always Mrs. Baker, reciting poetry to a classroom of second graders in rural Connecticut. She will always recite poetry.
To this day, the events of his death come in fragments of headlines, as if someone is reading them to me. An omniscient voice from faraway. The voice is always deep, and the facts stated firmly. A sand-headed boy. A weekend trip to Cape Cod, the last of the season. Tidal pools and quiet surf. A morning walk. A collapsing bluff. A mass of heavy clay. In those early days, we did not understand why our parents hugged us tighter in the mornings. We hugged them back. We gripped our siblings’ hands. We clutched the blankets we had once stopped clutching. In school, we copied poetry.
While I may not remember her first name, I will remember her grace, the little details of her. The little details of us. The yellow notebooks where we copied stanzas in straight lines. The way she erased “Reading Buddies” from the schedule that day. Jack had been my reading buddy. When he died, we were halfway through some hardcover with a name that — for the life of me — I cannot remember. Something about a family of dogs, their stubby tails poking out from human clothing. I cannot remember.
But I remember the way we held the book: two pairs of child hands, one clutching each side, a hardcover screen veiling little heads, his tow-headed and curly, mine brown and ponytailed, one small voice trading off with the other.
I remember, too, the sticker chart — that day in February when he had been gone for four months already. Four months. Such a different length of time when you are eight and when you are forty (how old was Mrs. Baker?). That day, I caught her placing a gold star above his name on the sticker chart. My bug eyes peered up at the stepstool, her clogged feet, her calloused hands. And I knew that I was not supposed to alert grown-ups when they made a mistake, but this seemed like a pretty big mistake, so I very quietly and very privately whispered, ummm Mrs. Baker, I think you made a mistake. A moment of pause. A slight smile. Oh honey, she said. Today is his birthday.
In second grade, we learned to compartmentalize—break the word into parts, pronounce each vowel, count by fives, measure an inch. You teach second graders that numbers unfold in order. How to tell them: now, we must count by forties? Now, we will jump to yards? Such departure is not written in math books. There are no rules for this. This is not the way we cut a life.
“& poetry is what I reached for in the days when the ash would not stop falling,” writes Sarah Kay in her poem “Jakarta, January”. Throughout the poem, Kay moves between her memories of 9/11, when she was in eighth grade in New York City, and fourteen years later, when she is teaching a classroom of sixth graders in Jakarta during the 2016 bombing: “tomorrow a sixth grade girl will come to class while her father has the shrapnel pulled from his body & maybe she will reach for poetry,” she writes.
For me, the truth will unfold slowly, year by year. I will not realize it in full until I have reached adulthood myself. Or some semblance of adulthood, which, I will have learned, is nothing but a construct — just a level of feigned control. Mrs. Baker could not have known the first thing about teaching death to second graders. No one could. “& poetry is what she reached for in the days when the ash would not stop falling.”
***
In the fall of 2021, I am teaching a classroom of undergraduates about creative writing. I am also teaching myself how to feign adulthood. How to hold hands in a world where mine still reach to be held. One weekend in November, I am reading the novel Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li, the entirety of which is an imagined conversation between the narrator and her teenage son, who died by suicide. Where reasons end. Throughout the pages, the mother and dead son quarrel with words, struggling to find exact language. It’s a book that yearns for the right words, while its subject transcends them.
The same weekend, I am also reading stories, essays, and poems by my students. Most of my students are nineteen and twenty years old, pandemic teens and young adults, in their second year of college, their first year of in-person college. They write about death and dying and depression and anxiety and culture shock and gendered violence and rape and assault and abusive relationships. On two separate occasions, a student hands me a suicidal ideation story, and I must call the university’s wellness department to get them help. I am an underpaid, undertrained graduate student. I have not been briefed on this. I want to scream into the phone. Tell them I do not know the first thing about teaching trauma, teaching death. Where, I want to ask, are the rules for this? This is not the way we protect a life.
When I was in second grade, I did not know children could die until Jack did. Still, while growing up, childhood death remained a rarity. Nine years would pass before a gunman walked into an elementary school, fifty minutes from my town, and killed six adults and twenty children. On the day of the Newtown shooting, my high school English teacher collapsed into her chair, behind the computer screen. I remember the way her eyes bulged. Her gasp. How her shoulders slumped forward. I remember the green ribbons we wore the next week. The revamped school security, the new safety drills. Never again, we said. “The school is in lockdown which is a word we did not have when I was in sixth grade,” writes Kay.
“Where, I want to ask, are the rules for this? This is not the way we protect a life”
One of my students has written an essay about falling in love for the first time. He emails the class; says he hopes this subject is alright. It is a lovely story, padded in Beatles lyrics and sensory details — the scent of onions sizzling on a kitchen stove, teenage him and teenage her, their long silences, puppy love. I thank him; remind my students that they are allowed to write lovely things. They need this, I think. Or maybe, I need this: a break, a breath. Silence the questions. How to write atrocity? How to teach atrocity? Where reasons end.
***
So much suffering is written by template. Perhaps, we are always looking for structure —straight lines, stable limbs. After trauma, we look to be held. Sarah Kay’s “Jakarta, January” did not arise spontaneously. Instead, she wrote it after a poem by Hanif Abdurraqib “USA v. Cuba,” which he wrote after a poem by Frank O’Hara “The Day Lady Died.” The subjects of the three poems diverge considerably. Kay’s poem is about the 2016 Jakarta bombing, Abdurraqib’s poem is about racism, and O’Hara’s is responding to the death of Billie Holiday.
While their subjects vary, the three poems are related through their structure. In each, there is a rapidity — a movement from scene to scene, a breezing through detail after detail. Look at this small thing! Now, look at that! Each poem ends with a cessation of movement. It happens suddenly, disconcertingly so. The effect is a breathlessness.
In “The Day Lady Died”, we move rapidly — from the train station to the restaurant, the bookstore, the liquor store — then:
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
In “USA v. Cuba”, we are stuck in a traffic jam on the way to a soccer game. Abdurraqib moves quickly through memories of being racially stereotyped and others’ expectations that, as a Black man, he will always be late. He ends:
I’m always running late I’m always running I’m always trying to move time backwards & tell everyone that I love them & isn’t that funny & Nate points to an ambulance speeding down the highway opposite us & disappearing into the sun & I don’t want to think that there might be a body inside of it & then all of the cars start moving
In “Jakarta, January”, Kay ends with:
the students are quiet & looking at me & waiting for a grown-up or a poem or an answer or a bell to ring & the bell rings & they float up from their seats like tiny ghosts & are gone
There is a fleetingness to the events before trauma. A jumping quality. Second grade feels like this too. I remember the books we read before his death, or almost remember; their pages flip quickly in my mind. I remember the couch, before my mother told me the news — its coarse fabric under my hands. Then standing. Then running. The sick in my stomach, the toilet seat. I remember the thwack of jump ropes on recess pavement the week before he died. He had asked me to play tag with the boys, but I had said no; I jumped rope with the girls instead. For years afterwards, guilt sounded like jump ropes, thwack thwack, on recess pavement. My mind could not slow these memories.
In my mind, there is only a before and an after. Not hearing the news. Not receiving; I don’t remember that. Just before and after. And always, rapid movement, jumping. Like O’Hara, like Abdurraqib, like Kay. So, when I read these poems together, something clicks. I think that I have spent much of my adult life trying to find a template with which to portray childhood pain. Or else, with which to understand childhood pain. To portray. To understand. What is the difference? Perhaps adulthood has a definition after all — the period in which we search, constantly, recklessly, for some meaning within the childhood that haunts us. I have returned to the first line of this essay many times: After Jack died, we copied Robert Frost poems onto oversized lined paper.
Each time, a different word grips me. I run with it. Jack. Poetry. Oversized. Now, it is copied. Copied — like Kay, like Abdurraqib. Mrs. Baker. Me? And yet, even copying feels wrong. There is always too much of other peoples’ suffering, deeper suffering, surrounding my own. The collective blankets the personal. There is always too much that I do not own. What a concept, to own a suffering.
I try:
Connecticut, December
after Sarah Kay, after Hanif Abdurraqib, after Frank O’Hara
When I am in eleventh grade, a gunman walks into an elementary school & shoots six adults and twenty children. Just fifty minutes away, I am sitting in a high school classroom, learning how to write the AP English essay. My English teacher drives a white van on which she and her husband have painted murals & literary quotes. She swears at kids in class — but only when they deserve it, only the conceited ones. She is bright colors & loud words. I think she is everything; knows everything. Today she has no quotes for us. Today she sits at the computer, sinks into her chair, & gasps.
In the evening, we will worry about our Facebook statuses — how to signal pain, shock, morals. I will worry about the seven-year-old I’m scheduled to babysit that night. Must I explain this day to her? How will I care for a child this evening? I worry; I worry. My world is small, the day is big, & all I know is to worry. After all, what is a teenage girl but a loud & scared thing, playing adult, waiting for the day when she will stop pretending? She will not stop pretending. I have not stopped pretending (“& what is a girl if not a pulsing thing learning what the world will take from her,” writes Kay).
I was seventeen years old when the gunman shot twenty children & I did not know where I would go to college or when I would take the SATs or what I would eat for dinner, but I knew that my mother’s pastor buried some of those children. Pastor Lee — who had just moved from our Connecticut town to that Connecticut town. Pastor Lee — the soft-voiced man from Hawaii, who wore green leis around his neck on Sunday. Who, each time he baptized a baby, would bounce them on his right hip & walk with them, from the pulpit to the final row of pews & back whispering, welcome, welcome to your church family.
In 2021, my students don’t go to church or synagogue or mosque. Most of them are atheists or agnostic. They search, constantly, recklessly. They smoke weed, Juul, scroll TikTok, scroll Instagram, watch a YouTube video, watch ten YouTube videos, go to therapy, read news stories about shootings, watch tv shows about shootings, take Paxil, play video games, find out before bed that there has been a shooting in their hometown that day, take a sleeping pill, wake up in the morning & walk to school.
No, this is all wrong. The shock value is too manufactured. Too coopted. Too true crime for a crime that is all too true. I search for other forms — memoir, fiction, poetry. Hand me a short story, a novel, a prose poem. But keep the newspapers. I don’t want simple facts. Not the blanket-logistics, too easily transferred from one tragedy to the next. Give me the specifics of this story. What color was the paint on the home that she left? What shoes did he wear on his walk to school?
There is a routine to this pain. Nineteen-year-old hears of mass murder, takes a sleeping pill, wakes up and walks to school. I wonder what is gained for a society if atrocity writing moves beyond the realm of the specific—not the hardcover book, not the pastor with green leis. Have we given into violence not as atrocity but as expectation?
“To portray. To understand. What is the difference?”
***
In the fall of 2021, I require my students to write from template too. For each creative writing submission, they must choose a model piece (a story, poem, or essay) and write five rules — five literary elements that they will borrow from it. It’s an exercise I borrowed from another writing teacher, a former professor of mine. I assume my students will be wary. After all, they signed up for a creative writing class to practice nonconformity, free-thinking that departs from the academic monotony. I have done a lot of work to make them accept my authority. They must believe that, despite my face, I am not twenty years old. There are blazers and heavier makeup, a strict syllabus, a deeper tone to my voice. They will follow my rules, sure. But their world has already given them plenty of outlines for trauma.
For their final submissions, I let them depart from rules. Free form within reason, I tell them. Of course, you can still use a model piece and write parameters if you wish to, I say. Some shy laughter. Class ends. Sleep-deprived creatures in platform sneakers drift warily from their seats. “Like tiny ghosts & are gone,” writes Kay. And then, late December has come, and I am sitting on a couch with my third cup of coffee, eyes sweeping a laptop screen, opening Word document after Word document. In one after the other, I find a list of rules, or at least a preceding paragraph. They might be stream-of-consciousness, jagged, and loose. But they are templates, nonetheless.
***
Two years after Jack died, there was a new girl in my class: blonde, blue-eyed Makayla from Montana. Makayla, who did gymnastics and had two pet bunnies and told us stories of camping trips and snow-capped mountains. Makayla, with parents who expressed their love loudly and often — a dad who rode motorcycles and went fishing on weekends, a Girl Scout-leading mom who cooked big Sunday dinners, and two older brothers. She was her family’s princess, with pink ribbons in her shiny blonde hair. I loved her and I wanted her to love me most. Looking back, I can’t tell whether my love for Makayla was a crush or that platonic, best friend-longing of little girls. But I can tell you that I was not the only one. So many of us wanted to be loved by Makayla.
A month into my friendship-worshipping affair with Makayla, she gathered us into a corner of the soccer field. We had graduated to the big-kid playground by now, on the other side of the elementary school from where Jack had played tag two years earlier.
In a corner of the soccer field, Makayla stared at us — her gaggle of girl disciples — with those blue eyes. She told us she was about to let us in on a secret, but we couldn’t tell anyone. She told us that she came from the ghost world. In the ghost world, everyone was older than they were in the living world. She was twenty-nine years old and married to Jack, our classmate who had died two years before she arrived in town.
Make it stand out
“But their world has already given them plenty of outlines for trauma.”
For the rest of the school year, we followed Makayla, our prophet, around the soccer field. She relayed stories from the ghost world. She told us about Jack. She brought in stuffed animals and told us they were Jack’s and her children — that they had baby-ghost spirits inside. She was divine; she was the pink ribbon tying us to the afterlife. And we were mesmerized.
The next summer, Makayla’s house in Connecticut burned down. Her parents got divorced. She moved back to Montana with her mom and her brothers. And just as quickly as she came, she was gone — from our classroom, from our playground, and from our minds (“and everyone and I stopped breathing,” writes O’Hara).
We were in high school when Makayla found me on Facebook. On her Facebook page, her parents engaged in public arguments in which atrocities were thrown around like baseballs. I saw little fragments of her life pop up through the years. Her pink ribbons were replaced by a heavy layer of eyeliner. Her father had a baby with a woman not much older than her. She was married by age twenty.
I often wonder how Makayla found out about Jack’s death. Although it would not have been hard news to discover, as the tragic death of a second grader was one of the more terrible things to happen in our rural, Connecticut town. I imagine Makayla’s mother researching her kids’ new school. Perhaps she found an online article and informed her daughter that a little boy had passed away two years earlier. Perhaps she left the room and Makayla tiptoed over to the family computer, sifting through news articles and storing tidbits of fact in her brain.
I wonder about the pain Makayla experienced at home — the kind that would make her want to hold a gaggle of little girls in her palm and convince us that she was married to our dead classmate. I wonder about our willingness to be held.
Emma Zimmerman is a writer and freelance journalist. Her journalism has appeared in Outside, Runner's World, and Trail Runner, among other publications. Her essays and literary nonfiction have appeared in HuffPost, PRISM International, Away Journal, and more. Emma is an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at NYU, and she lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is (very slowly) building the skeleton of a first book.
Broadside Artist:
Oen Griffin received her Bachelor’s in communication studies at Kansas State University. When she’s not teaching or doing grad school things, she enjoys doing improv, playing pickle ball relatively poorly, and working on art projects— especially with friends!