Stolen Treasure

She was my aunt. Her name is Sharon. But not pronounced in the conventional sense. One of the things I loved most about her was that everyone (even the cops) pronounced it Shern. And she insisted on it. If you tried to call her “Sharon,” she would swiftly correct you.

Even if you were the cops.

And although she had gathered a few names in the family (as anyone who is around for some time in Black families tends to, I think), she was always simply Sharon (pronounced Shern) to me.

The thing I loved most about Sharon was that she was a poet. Hers was the first poetry I ever read where I heard the writer’s voice in my mind. Having the gift of words in common with her convinced me that maybe I was part of the family after all, in spite of how alien I felt most of the time.

One day when I was in my early teens, she randomly produced a brown faux-leather briefcase with those three-digit combination locks to the left and right of the handle. She gave me the combination and said her poems were inside. She wanted me to type them up for her. She went on speaking as I thumbed the dials; her words dissolved as I popped the locks. When I opened the suitcase, her voice drowned completely. It was no flood of light accompanied by a chorus of angels, but something more interesting.

And with choruses of its own.

EconoLodge stationary, bound together by folded corners; McDonald’s napkins—the fancy ones embroidered with the notorious Arches from back in the day; weathered, wrinkled pieces of legal paper… Every surface covered with script—with lyrics, with verses.

With choruses.

I felt like I was looking at stolen treasure.

She was saying something about money when I abruptly turned to her and said I would do the job for free. To me, it was no job.

Stolen treasure it was. But not in the way one might suspect.

My aunt Sharon was mostly known as a drug addict, by the police and even by most family. Many would see her coming and run in the other direction, because she always seemed to need five, ten or twenty dollars. Or had some smart-ass observation to tell you in a smart-ass way, usually about your dumb, stupid ass. When annoyed, she wouldn’t threaten to beat you. “I’mma cut you,” and “I’mma cut yo’ ass,” were her standard-issue lines. And when she was really pissed, she would fish around in her pockets for her lighter, flick it, and threaten to set you on fire. But those moments were rare and hilarious, perhaps because Sharon was rare and hilarious. Bizarre as all that may sound to the uninitiated.

(I never felt unsafe around Sharon, because, with Sharon, you always knew where you stood. If you didn’t want to be on shaky ground with Sharon, then don’t walk on shaky ground. Simple as that.)

Underneath, Sharon was suffering. I suspected as much when I was a small child and would watch her when she thought no one was looking. She peered at empty floors and far corners of rooms sometimes, the way cats do when looking between worlds, as though she was lost in thought. Or memory, maybe, because the horror on her face told me she wasn’t lost: She knew exactly how whatever was unfolding before her eyes had gone, would go, was going. When I was a little older, she, not realizing I could read at the time, would let me spy her writings-in-progress over her shoulder. The older I got, the less she allowed that to happen, probably because she feared I would come to judge her the way most people did. In the Real-Time World, Sharon told it to you straight but seldom gave straight answers. In her poetry, she told the truth—the excruciating and sometimes beautiful truth—of her existence.

In “The White Eraser,” she wrote about crack as a hungry blank beast that dissects and devours you and everything you love:

“The White Eraser

Comes into your home

It shuts off your lights

It cuts off your phone….”

               In “Sacrifice,” she speaks of her hope to be a good mother to her first daughter and how that required her to give up drugs. She tells about the push-pull between that hope and her substance use disorder; her daughter and the drugs; her and the drugs, her daughter, her, the drugs and the drugs… The drugs... And the drugs. Between the lines is the story of a living sacrifice that always had to be made in order for others to live. And that sacrifice always had to be her.

Although at the time I didn’t understand what had happened to Sharon (much less have the vocabulary to describe what that something was), I knew something had happened to her. Her heart bore a wound, and the poetry came out of that wound. It was her stolen treasure. The drugs, when they were sweet, salved the pain, lightened the burden of her suffering to allow her to put one foot in front of the other to walk in the Real-Time World, even though she might not have always known where her feet (or the world) were taking her.

Her life was a prison of suffering. Inside the suitcase lived the keys, I just knew it. All I had to do was decipher the keys and puzzle it all out.

When you’re a teenager, everything seems so fucking easy. Even despair. You also think you know all there is to know.

But the more I read and transcribed Sharon’s poetry, the more I realized I didn’t know. They were like shadows on the edges of my peripheral vision, shapes enshrouded in fog. And frightening ones at that. She spoke of demons you can imagine only if they already live in your head.

And, at the time, my skull was quite crowded with enough dark things knocking around.

When I grew older, my mother shared with me the stories of what had happened to her and Sharon in their childhood—the story of living sacrifice I heard clawing between the lines of “Sacrifice.”

The shadows and shapes began to come into focus; the puzzle started to crack.

But I was still missing something: Words.

I understood bad things had happened to Sharon when she was a girl. I understood the drugs muted the pain screaming inside her to let her hear herself. But I didn’t have the words to describe that, not in a way people could understand (much less care about) without losing the truth or bleaching it romantic.

It wasn’t until I started working in behavioral health that I began to learn. Trauma, abuse, coping… At my day job, we serve some of Kansas City’s most vulnerable people. They live with diagnoses ranging from depression and anxiety to severe and persistent illnesses such as schizophrenia. Some struggle with substance abuse disorders, often developed out of desperate attempts to cope with their symptoms and suffering. Serving people such as these helped me to learn the words… Complex trauma, maladaptive coping mechanisms, substance dependence… Serving people such as these helped me to not only learn the words to explain what happened to Sharon but also how to help people like her, even though I am no psychiatrist, psychologist, therapist, or social worker.

Sharon helped me to love and better help the people we serve at my day job. The world lost Sharon before I could learn from them how to better love and help her.

It is because of Sharon that I know you don’t have to be a social worker, therapist, doctor or the like to help people. Each of us has a part to play; each of us can help to heal. I see her daily in the people I serve in community mental health. She is the angel on my shoulder who guides my interactions with them. She visits often in my dreams and even more often in my words, especially when poetry comes out. She sits across from me when I take pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. She tells my inner critic to shut the fuck up and tells me to set the page on fire.

She is my muse.

She was my aunt. Her name is Sharon. But not pronounced in the conventional sense.

She is a stolen treasure. Stolen from this world too soon. And I will treasure her forever.