About ten years ago, I was an Irish dancing mom. Our girls had wigs, dresses, and spray tans; we traveled all over the Midwest to competitions. I always told them that if I ever got dementia, they could just play me “Kilkenny Races” and I would be back. That music lives deep in my bones.

So you can imagine my delight when I opened Sally Thomas’s new collection and discovered that “The Blackbird” in the title story refers to a traditional Irish dance that I have seen performed many times. As the young narrator Emlyn tells us, after the arrival of the British, Irish women defiantly performed “The Blackbird” behind the half-doors of their cottages, their arms tucked to their sides so that no one could see them dancing.

With its quiet tribute to a mother dying of cancer, The Blackbird opens a sensitive examination of loss and grief. These stories, which fearlessly tackle divorce and remarriage, dementia and caregiving, pregnancy and abortion, birth and grief, ask the ultimate question: How do we live with our loss? What do we do? Now?

Four interconnected stories about the Mallory family appear in random order, like old friends we haven’t seen in a while. In “Doing Without,” a son in the middle of law school drives away after Christmas and is never seen again. One winter night, his parents, Cash and Caroline, are awakened by a sound like footsteps on the driveway. In her longing, Caroline constructs what is surely the rustling of dead leaves into the form of her son coming back. She and Cash live in a remote place; the young women in Cash’s law firm always wondered what Caroline did with herself all day. Her main preoccupation, she tells us, was her love for her children. “She had found joy, even pride, in the idea, in its secrecy, like a baby growing inside her that no one knew about but her.”

That image of the unborn child becomes a blessing years later in “The Beach House,” when Caroline visits the house her grandfather built on the Gulf Coast one last time. Thomas describes the beach so beautifully here that I practically lived there myself; much of the story’s emotional weight lies in the carefully chosen details of weather and sea. In a dream, Caroline sees “her son, John, a child, curled up in the body of a dolphin like the fetus in a cross-sectional diagram of the womb.” And in the morning, the dolphins appear.

Suddenly the strait was full of them, waves made flesh. Everywhere they jumped and dived, appeared and disappeared again. … Or perhaps you saw them when you looked closely because you wanted to see them, not because they were there.

This final sentence recalls Caroline’s earlier desire to call her son into the driveway. Such key scenes signal each other across the pages of the book, even when the stories are not explicitly linked.

In “A Fire in the Hills,” which won the 2020 JF Powers Award for Fiction, Spotted ThingsLavinia, a psychologist, teaches victims of abuse and polygamy to love and forgive their past selves. Lavinia is recovering from her own trauma related to her former lover Bernard, now a well-known orchestra conductor. “When I dig into the past,” says Lavinia, “there are many things that seem inconsequential at first glance. What do I do with these fragments of detail?”

Lavinia’s solution is to construct an alternative self – someone who will endure all the painful experiences that she cannot quite shake off. Like the ex-husband in Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign bodyBernard once set up his imposing grand piano in the dining room of their shared apartment; and like Bea Nightingale in Ozick’s novel, Lavinia seems liberated once the piano – and Bernard with it – are gone. “That was the real me,” Lavinia emphasizes, describing her secret visit after she fled the apartment, “the real me, the strong me, the smart me, walking along the cracked sidewalk with my parka unzipped.” But before Lavinia emerges from her memories, she must descend into her darkness: “I am (still) that woman who has not yet left her boyfriend. She has not gone; I know that now; she will not go.” Elsewhere, Lavinia says of a patient she loves who will one day no longer visit her: “People are like plastic that never fully biodegrades. When you have used each other up, there is nothing left but the landfill, but it is all still there, the people, the past.”

Of the stories in the collection, “Nothing Less Than Everything” most clearly shows how a person of faith makes amends for the past by entrusting his suffering to God. Like Caroline Mallory, Reid is grieving for a lost son; and now she centers her daily activities around the Mass:

The day was bright and radiant, and even the grief I always carry with me seemed to be part of that brightness. Like my faith, it was something I had to do: go to work, go to Mass, go to the tomb, make my personal Stations of the Cross through the city.

Reid once took in her son’s high school girlfriend when they were both drug addicts. Out of compassion, she continues to offer the girl shelter and work long after her own son, Lennox, has died. Reid offers her daily suffering “for the holy souls in purgatory, which I imagine will include my own soul one day. In this way, I hope to attain my salvation.” When a man who may be Lennox’s father appears at his grave, Reid says only this: “I was given a child. I accepted it as a gift. And those were the conditions.”

Thomas takes her biggest risks in “The Happy Place,” the novella that closes the collection. Amelia, Caroline’s daughter and the sister of the missing John, struggles with problems of her own making. She insists that divorce and co-parenting are like a full-time job, and when her mother dies after a long bout of dementia, she is dismayed to learn that no one ever sold the beach house. With her second husband Kurt and twelve-year-old daughter Mallory, Amelia heads to the Gulf Coast for one final visit to sell the property.

But a week on the beach gives Amelia the opportunity to rethink her life and her choices. Did she divorce her first husband “because there was something fundamentally wrong with her, some bottomless swamp of selfishness, a stubborn refusal to settle?” And as for Mallory,

He/she had broken her by divorcing her father. Or, worse, she had broken her by fathering her with that father… Now she had broken her even further by bringing in this new father and saying, “Come on, let this guy buy your tampons, little girl.”

Kurt is teaching Mallory how to fish when Amelia’s ex-husband calls and asks to talk to her. But as Amelia walks along the shore to give Mallory the phone, she falls into the water, loses the phone and inadvertently calls her ex-husband into their family idyll. There is something threatening about the man’s refusal to let Amelia clear up the misunderstanding about the interrupted conversation. She fears that one day he might apply for sole custody.

Amelia’s fundamental question in “The Happy Place”—has she loved enough?—is perhaps the most troubling in the entire collection. Earlier, on their final visit to the beach, Amelia’s mother Caroline describes caring for her husband Cash during his final illness.

Dying, she thought, was a different kind of lovemaking, more intimate than physical proximity, though you didn’t lose yourself in the same way. Instead, you felt yourself becoming more present, heavier and heavier in your own body, while the other person disappeared more and more, until finally you were just in the room, breathing what air you had left.

Similarly, Amelia’s husband Kurt cared for his first wife Julie when she died of cancer. And although Kurt and Julie were not intimate for three years during her illness,

what he had learned was that holding someone down while they vomited was a form of lovemaking. Brushing the last hairs from her shiny scalp: lovemaking. Changing the catheter bag: lovemaking. Holding her hand as she subsided at the end of her erection: lovemaking. …Amelia thought that if she was looking for the most primal form of surrender, she might well choose the catheter bag.

But the problem may be that Amelia imagines Reception such care without ever giving it. Perhaps that is why she is finally broken. “It was a primal wound, the loss of a mother,” Amelia says; and for her, this loss comes from afar and after her mother’s long period of dementia. Due to the demands of her life, Amelia practically hands her mother over to a caregiver, LaKisha; and in a strange reversal, it is Amelia who comforts LaKisha at Caroline’s funeral. “They had made a bargain, Amelia thought. She had sold LaKisha some human suffering, and what had LaKisha paid her for it? Sole rights, again, to her own mother?”

But perhaps Amelia could have chosen to forget herself as she was forgotten and to serve lovingly and cheerfully as LaKisha did. Instead, she tries to insist that her mother remember her: “A. Mee. Lee. A. Say my name.” This is a hopeless situation, both for Amelia and Caroline. If I were to develop dementia, I know full well that not even the best rendition of Kilkenny Races could bring me back. But how much better it is for us now as daughters and sons to devote ourselves entirely to caring for the person left behind, whatever condition they may be in. As we read in Isaiah 49:15, “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”

But while Amelia objects to LaKisha’s primacy at the end of her mother’s life, she understands that “the memory of this person who had no memory would be folded up after her death and given to the family for safekeeping.” Like many of us, Amelia has become embroiled in a crazy, secret dance behind the locked door of her heart; and in the end, she is left with a paradox of forgetting and remembering.

Perhaps Lavinia sums it up best at the end of A Fire in the Hills: “Put aside the examined past. It never changes and remains the same.”

The Blackbird and Other Stories
by Sally Thomas
Wiseblood Books, 2024
Paperback, 269 pages