Sugar Skulls

A season of loss...what our youngest, Bo, once called "The Tar Feeling" or "Bad Dream Feeling."

“Día De Los Muertos” just passed, and we celebrated by going to Sloss Furnaces, where I saw a sugar skull amidst all the festivities. It reminded me of when our hound dog, Bentley, who resembled a giant basset hound on steroids, ate four or five sugar skulls off of Bo’s “Day of the Dead” altar at our home in Silver Lake.

Except Bo called it a “Walter,” having misheard his wonderful first-grade teacher, Ms. Montanez, who had all the kids make altars for “Día De Los Muertos.”

We didn’t have the heart to correct Bo - we loved the word “walter” misheard for “altar.”

And we encouraged the “walter,” filled with favorite fruits, aforementioned sugar skulls, pictures, beads, treasures, paintings, drawings, and heaps of marigolds.

So when Bo came home from school to look at the “walter,” we heard a cry, “Oh no! Bentley ate all my sugar skulls off my walter!”

Of course, we promised to get more sugar skulls, and I found Bentley on a delirious sugar high racing around the house, shaking his jowls, slobbering with chunks of sugar skull everywhere.

And here is a picture of Bentley and Bo on a calmer day without a sugar skull high.

***

I didn’t make an altar/Walter this year, although I certainly could have, as the losses sadly came one after another, casting a pall over November. I’m in a kind of grief fog, and I’m not sure what to do. Still, Dia de Los Muertos at Sloss Furnaces was where we needed to be. It was something we began in Los Angeles, and it was Kiffen’s first time experiencing it in Birmingham.

1. Kenny

The losses began with Kenny, our neighbor in Alabama. He died on a Sunday morning during the Sidewalk Film Festival at the end of August. Kiffen went home to feed the dogs between films and found out Kenny had died. No warning. I didn’t know Kenny well. Recently retired, I knew he loved Alabama football, bowling, fishing, and cats. He bowled nearly every night of his life and fished on weekends. I learned later from his sweet sister that he’d been filling out an application to get a passport to travel. It was wildly unfair that Kenny was all set to travel with friends, only to be gone. They held his funeral at the bowling alley. Maybe his friends will take his ashes on their trip overseas, but I want to stage a protest and give Kenny a passport to travel and see the world. In the days following his death, I fed his cats, feeling the silence and loss of a neighbor I barely knew.

Here are his cats. I think they were grieving too.

2. Billy

Then Billy Sheets followed, our California neighbor and friend. His brother called me on a Friday and said, “Billy is in hospice,” and then Billy was gone the next day. What? His brother didn’t even know we had moved to Alabama. Our son, Flannery, grew up with Billy’s son, Noah. I was friends with Billy’s wife, Kate, a costumer, and his sister, Suzette, a set designer. Back when the boys were in high school, I kicked Noah out of the carpool because he was always late and what I considered a bad influence on Flannery during their senior year. Flannery was an equally awful influence on Noah, but I couldn’t see that then. They were also just boys, but I couldn’t take the computerized tardy call that came every night that said, ‘Your child was reported absent or missing…”

Kate didn’t even mind that I kicked Noah out of the carpool. She understood and said, “I get it.” Billy understood, too. Flannery and Noah were in a band together, The Flypaper Cartel, and they were great boyhood friends who met in the sandbox as babies.

One time, when the boys were two or three years old, we were over for dinner, and Flannery convinced Noah to paint his closet green. Kate discovered them covered in green paint and was livid.

“Noah never would have thought of that on his own!” she told us, ushering two tiny green boys into the room.

Kate brought up that green closet for years.

I was afraid we wouldn’t be invited back ever again. I loved Kate, who was acerbic and funny. She loved history, genealogy, astrology, style, and she loved Noah. Billy became a beloved theatre teacher at North Hollywood High School.

This is Lucy’s painting of The Flypaper Cartel.

When Noah died in 2015, I wrote about him and the drug world that I thought I understood. Once, I wrote him an 18-page letter that I even sent (so absurd) begging him to stop using.

That’s when I thought I had the words to make someone stop.

Anyway, Kate died of a broken heart a few years later, and now Billy has died. This tiny little family lived up the street in California. Kate (Kathleen Ernde) was a costumer for the old sitcom, Different Strokes. She was up to do costumes on Seinfeld, but had just had Noah and wanted to be home with him. She said, “Besides, what was some show called Seinfeld anyway?”

Billy Sheets was a great blues singer, and his father, also Billy Sheets, was a voice-over artist for films like one of the clowns in DUMBO and THE BRAVE LITTLE TAILOR. Noah studied opera and became a beautiful opera singer on the streets of Silver Lake and the halls of Pasadena City College.

How can they all be gone?

Flannery sang at Noah’s celebration of life. I thought that Noah’s loss would turn things around for Flannery. It did - around and around and around.

Billy’s celebration of life will be on November 16th. Right now, we are flying to Los Angeles to be there with Billy’s siblings and hopefully to see Flannery.

Where do I file a protest for all this loss?

Billy sang and played music the last night we were in our rental home in Echo Park. Here is Billy at a gig.

***

3. MaryMargaret

Then came Cousin MaryMargaret. Her celebration of life is on December 1st in Carterville, Illinois, which is also her birthday. She was supposed to walk through graduation at Tulane Law School this December, but instead, they overnighted her diploma to her when they found out how sick she was.

I’ve spent the last week writing her obituary. It begins:

MaryMargaret Kelly was born at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, DC, on December 1, 1960, and shared a birthday with both her parents. On the day of her birth, the Secret Service filled the maternity wing due to the only other baby with the last name also beginning with “K” by the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior, aka John-John. As a teenager, MaryMargaret occasionally mused aloud about whether she might have been switched at birth.

Where can I protest? Where do I file a complaint for this bullshit?

Valerie

But somehow, it’s Valerie Privett who has shaken me hardest.

She left on the same day as MaryMargaret due to complications of a stroke, but I only found out a week ago.

October 18, 2025.

How can MaryMargaret and Valerie both have slipped away on the same day?

I don’t even know how to begin describing Valerie. She had a Tennessee accent like Cherry Jones, and looked like someone Cherry Jones might play on stage or film. I took Valerie to see the play “Doubt” starring Cherry Jones at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles when Val visited us in California.

At intermission during “Doubt,” Valerie shook her head, headed straight to the bar, and said in a loud voice, “IN-TINZ!” in the most southern accent you can imagine.

Then she said it again for all to hear, “IN-TINZ.”

I started laughing, and that became a word I used anytime anything got to be too much.

“IN-TINZ!”

A former women’s college basketball coach from South Georgia, Valerie loved the Lady Vols, Pat Summitt, UT football, and all her dogs (boxers and bulldogs) over the years - “Fats, Gatlin, Duke, Sugar, Winter, Newman, Rocky, Oreo, Chopper, Shelby, Dozer, and Grayson.”

She never missed a Lady Vols game or a UT football game. She sold insurance in Knoxville and advised us years ago to buy life insurance and not term life insurance either. We followed her directions because that’s what you did with Val. She was direct, practical, and no-nonsense when it came to business, but a big-hearted softie in so many other parts of life. She was devoted to civic engagement, and delivered meals-on-wheels for twenty years, worked food and clothing drives, donating resources and time to work with the unhoused, and also volunteered at the Wesley House. For her celebration of life, people have been asked to bring a sleeping bag to donate.

I should have been prepared for her loss. Years ago, she told me she had no interest in living to be a ripe old age. We were on a boat in the mountains when she told me this, and I don’t know how we got talking about death, but she said she definitely didn’t want to live to be an old woman, being a burden on anyone.

I said, “How old?”

She said, “Sixty. Maybe sixty-five. That’s enough.”

“Valerie! That’s not old.”

“Old enough. What? It’s the truth. Can’t you handle it?”

“Yes, but…”

And we talked about other things…

Valerie was the first girlfriend of my college roommate, Nicki, and we stayed friends forever. We were all gathered around Nicki this time last year - only Nicki got better, and now Judy and Valerie are both gone, and Judy was the one who ordered the chocolate cake and cherry pie for our birthdays. It had to be just right.

Judy and Valerie are next to Kiffen.

How can this be?

Whenever I had a book come out, Valerie always showed up at Union Ave Books in Knoxville to buy several copies and to make me laugh. I took Bo with me to the mountains when Bo was little. Bo adored Valerie, who let him steer the speed boat, make a fire, and eat anything, which was plenty of ice cream.

Valerie also generously allowed me to rent her mom’s cabin in Townsend, Tennessee, to write for two weeks on my Maggie Valley novels around 2006. She picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at the cabin and said, “There are groceries. Now get to work. See you in a week.”

I didn’t need a car because I was there to write. I called her mom’s Townsend cabin my “Knoxville YADDO” for a writing retreat of one.

After a week of writing (there was no Internet, and I got so much done I remember writing 17 pages one day), I went to do field research. It was a fall Saturday, and Val and her friends were already pre-gaming and partying at her house before going to Neyland Stadium in Knoxville.

She offered her old jeep for me to drive, but I dreaded the idea of mountain roads, navigating a stick shift.

So I asked her, “Can I drive this thing, you think?”

And she shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Can you?” Then she laughed and said, “Wait, I got something for you.”

Then she gave me two Big Orange Jell-O shots from her pre-game tailgate party and said, “These will relax you.”

I took them, and a calm washed over me, and working the stick shift came back like I did it every day. I drove all over the mountains like I owned them. I interviewed people at a fall festival, saw sorghum making with the old black mules in Cades Cove, explored Ghost Town in the Sky, and captured fall like I hadn’t seen it in years, living in California. It was a long Saturday, but I got her jeep home and safe and sound, and made huge progress on what would become “Louisiana’s Song.”

A generous tipper, Valerie was also the type of person to grab the bill at dinner before you even knew what happened. It was like she had a secret handshake with the waiter. If you protested, she’d smile and wink at you and say, “Too slow. Next time.”

In October, Valerie and I made plans to go see the new Pat Summit play called “PAT” last month, playing in Knoxville. I wanted to treat her because of all the times and meals she had treated us.

We were going to go out to dinner and then to the play, but MaryMargaret got so sick, I backed out to be with her, and Valerie wrote: “Prayers..so sorry. Pancreatic is brutal. Do what you need. We’ll make it work. Safe travels. Love u.”

So Valerie, Nicki, and Nicki’s wife, Debby, went to the play, and they loved Lisa Soland’s performance as Pat Summitt.

So again, where do I protest this bullshit?

MaryMargaret and Valerie were two of my touchstones for decades. They were direct and honest, and they couldn’t stand pettiness or meanness - they were kind above all else and had wicked senses of humor. They didn’t know each other, but they would have loved each other.

I put MaryMargaret in a novel and Valerie in a short story.

How could they both leave on the same day?

Valerie’s celebration of life is the same day as Billy’s, on opposite sides of the country.

I’ve been teaching and focusing on my students because being with them is like having guardrails to keep me on track, navigating this grief that has somehow settled into a dissipated numbness on these dazzling days of autumn with leaves changing into such rich reds, yellows, and raspberry gold.

Do we get on a plane to fly to Billy’s?

Do we instead drive to Knoxville with a sleeping bag to donate at Valerie’s celebration of life?

After Thanksgiving, we will drive to Marion, Illinois, for Mary Margaret’s celebration of life.

It was Flannery’s birthday yesterday, and we got to talk.

He’s having a hard time, so I listened.

He’s still mad about some things, and I get it.

We said, “I love you” a lot.

I don’t have an ending for this…I keep thinking I’ll find an ending.

So instead, here are some long-ago pictures of my time in the mountains - my writing desk at Valerie’s mom’s cabin, taking the boat out, and exploring the abandoned “Ghost Town in the Sky” in Valerie’s jeep, where I found the creepy abandoned schoolhouse that I always thought would make a good ghost story.

I explored “Ghost Town in the Sky” and was so creeped out by the old schoolhouse where all the students and the teacher were very present in the quiet classroom on top of Buck Mountain, a twisting road of switchbacks, where my dear friend Ernestine used to say, “That’s the road where you meet yourself coming.”

And Billy’s dad, Noah’s grandfather…so long ago, too.