This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all by Melanie Brooks (Vine Leaves Press, 2023).
Prologue
A little over a year before his own, my father attends a funeral.
It’s Saturday, September 17, 1994. Somewhere inside the expansive
Cathedral Church of All Saints in the South End of Halifax, Nova
Scotia, he sits, deliberately beyond the reach of any camera lens there
to capture the sea of recognizable faces of the over 600 mourners—
including local and national community leaders, news reporters, and
a handful of provincial politicians. Tension rides the lines of his body
as he hunches low in the wooden pew and grips my mom’s hand for
support. He wears his dark tailored suit, crisp white shirt, and satin tie,
handsome and robust despite concerted efforts to make himself small.
No visible physical signs yet forecast that in fifteen months, when his
lungs are ravaged by pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) and his body
emaciated by other unidentified opportunistic infections, he will die.
White-robed choir members and participating officiants with red
ribbons pinned at their hearts process down the long aisle of the narrow
sanctuary to the front chancel, and the resonant timbre of the church’s
pipe organ fills the space with the rich notes of the Anglican hymn,
“Alleluia! Sing to Jesus.” Beneath the gothic architecture—ornate wood
carvings, towering arches, and vaulted ceilings—the wooden pews and
additional blue folding chairs are packed with the family, friends, and
followers of thirty-eight-year-old Randy Conners. In the front row,
Randy’s widow, Janet, dressed in a long black gold-buttoned jacket
over simple black slacks, leans her slim frame against her fourteen-
year-old son as she dabs her tear-filled eyes with the tissue she clutches
in her fist.
Melanie Brooks (she/her) is the author of A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all (Vines Leaves Press 2023) and Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press 2017). She teaches creative nonfiction and narrative medicine in the MFA program at Bay Path University. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and a Certificate in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. She’s had numerous interviews and essays on topics ranging from illness, loss, and grief to parenting and aging published in the The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Toronto Globe and Mail, HuffPost, Yankee Magazine, Psychology Today, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and other notable publications. She lives in NH with my husband, two kids (when they are home from university), and chocolate Lab.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, Puerto del Sol, ANMLY, Fruitslice, among others. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
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