I wrote my first poems when I was in the 5^th grade. I kept a diary when I was in high school, but stopped writing in it when my mother read it and was so upset at some of its contents that guilt and a lack of privacy wiped out my desire to continue. I wrote a few poems after that, but stopped writing after my marriage to John Robison, a Presbyterian student minister who later turned his attention to getting his PhD in philosophy. I stayed at home with our son John Elder, born in 1957, a distressed baby who grew into a troubled, but sensitive boy who had difficulty getting along with other children and who was often rebellious, both at home and later in school as well. He seemed most content when playing or reading alone. It would be many years into his adulthood before he was diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome.

My husband spent much of his life teaching courses in ethics, and early history of philosophy. Along with John, I’d turned away from the God I’d been taught about in church and looked for my spiritual nourishment in music and painting, both the occasional paintings I did myself, and paintings that I looked at and loved in museums and books.

It was only after a dream, followed by a psychotic episode in 1971, that I rediscovered myself as a writer. I began to write in earnest in a psychiatric hospital and have never stopped. I received my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts in 1978, enabling me to be eligible for teaching positions.

Our son Christopher—now Augusten Burroughs—was born into a deeply troubled marriage in 1965. Unlike John Elder, Chris was a content and happy baby. As a young boy he wrote poetry and made up plays, while John Elder, nearly 8 years older, worked on cars and developed what turned out to be his own audio business when still a teenager.

John and I were divorced in 1978 when Chris was 13 and John Elder was 21. Chris and I moved from our home in Shutesbury to Amherst nearly a year later. I’m writing my story of these years in a memoir and a book of autobiographical essays.

I led many creative writing workshops in the Pioneer Valley over the years, but the workshops that contributed the most to my emotional and spiritual life were those in which I worked with children as Poet-In-Residence in elementary schools in western Massachusetts, especially in the Donahue School in Holyoke, where a boy in the 5^th grade defined poetry as “something that comes from the bottom of your heart,” and another boy who’d lost his mother wrote in a poem: “Never let your mother die because she’s the one who loves you.”

In addition to my work in the schools, I led a writing workshop for women in a minimum-security prison, an on-going workshop in my home, and summers in the annual Writers’ Workshop at the University of Massachusetts.

By 1988 I was burned out. I took a year off, intending to go back to work after a time of rest and recuperation. Instead, in 1989 I had a stroke that paralyzed my left side and shattered my speech. After several months in the hospital, I went back to Shelburne Falls where, for over 18 years, I’ve lived in a tiny apartment on the banks of the Deerfield River. I’ve looked out at the ancient apple tree that leans over the water below my back porch—buds blooming, and blossoms floating to the water in spring, the watery plop of ripe apples in early fall, and falling snow on bare limbs and branches in winter. Across the river a clump of maples grows, and beyond them a small mountain rises. And above the mountain—sky. For what more could I ask?

A reader wrote to me at my website, saying that she was sorry, “that your health has left you sort of trapped in your body.” I appreciated her compassion, but reading her words made me smile. While it’s true that I had a difficult time feeling trapped in my body for a while after my stroke, I am anything but trapped in my body now.

First, I learned I could flow with the river with my eyes, just as I could climb the mountain to its top and back down again. I discovered that freedom from a paralyzed body not only had to do with my eyes. More importantly it had to do with memory, imagination, meditation, and prayer.

Later I discovered the boundless nature of the spirit.

I was 3 ½ years old when I went outside to play one afternoon. From the yard I could see the rear entrance of the funeral home. Just as I stepped on the warm grass with my bare feet, I saw the undertaker unload a body from the hearse and carry it through the wide back door of the funeral home. I thought of my grandfather’s recent death and ached with loneliness. I would have gone with him if he’d let me. I wouldn’t have been lonely then. But when I thought about growing up and dying alone I felt terribly frightened.   

Then, as if instructed to do so, I looked up at the sky.

Above me three small white clouds floated slowly toward what I now know was the North. As I stood watching, I heard a voice speaking in my heart.

“Don’t worry, Margaret,” the voice said. “You will die in the North when you are very old. By that time you will understand about death and you will not be afraid.”

God has talked to me, God who’s taken Granddaddy to Heaven has talked to me, I thought and my whole self filled with wonder. I felt comforted as never before. All my troubled thoughts dissolved, and I was once again in a world of butterflies and flowers, and the heart-shaped fish pool where fish flashed gold among the lily pads.

Now I’m an old woman and live in the North just as the voice told me I would. And I am no longer afraid of death as the voice predicted. It’s been a long journey from the Cairo, Georgia of my childhood to the New England of my old age, and I know that—for all its detours, wrong roads taken, and stops along the way—it has always been a spiritual journey. I also know that the all loving, all knowing voice I heard in my heart when I was a child has been with me forever, even during those times I turned away from it. I know now that I’ve always been coming home.