The Field by Victoria Garza Reviewed by Beth Alvarado
The Field by Victoria Garza
Publisher: JackLeg Press
Released: 11/15/22
176 Pages
ISBN: 9781737513490
Review by Beth Alvarado
A Book for All Souls: Victoria Garza’s The Field
……………….In the middle of what looks like a field, right next to Interstate 280 South in
……………….northern Ohio, is a grave. It’s a new cemetery, few trees, and fewer graves. On
……………….the ground is a rectangular granite stone that reads Virginia Marie Garza, Born
……………….October 31, 1968, Died May 19, 1978. My nine-year-old sister and cousin were
……………….put in the ground, forever. I was ten and not having any idea how long forever
……………….was, I was constantly surprised. And still, I am surprised.
So begins The Field, Victoria Garza’s lyric memoir about grieving the sister she lost almost forty-five years ago. But this is not only her journey: it is her mother’s, her father’s, the rest of the family’s. It is her sister Gina’s story, the story of her very short life and of the things she “tells” Victoria in visions and dreams. To some extent, it is the story of the woman who drank too much and caused the accident, the story of the uncle who was driving and of the aunt and cousin who were also in the cab, the ones who had to find and comfort the girls as they were lying broken in the field.
What perhaps is most impressive about this memoir is the matter of fact, unflinching way with which Garza recreates her grieving process as a ten-year-old girl: “Saying ‘I know she’s dead, Mom’ does not prevent me from thinking that my sister is just hiding and bound to show up at any moment, and I should therefore be prepared.” She remembers making lists of questions to ask her sister when she returns home as a way of controlling her thoughts. A few weeks after Gina’s death, she imagines her own death and makes mental lists of the ways it might happen.
It’s not surprising, I guess, that a child’s grieving process is not so different from that of an adult. Death makes children of all of us, in a way, throws us into an unreality in which we need to find new ways of understanding, new laws of physics, even, ways of resurrecting the dead.
……………….At the funeral, I walk into the field adjacent to the parking lot. I close my eyes and
……………….the blazing sun behind my eyeballs lifts me out of the parking lot and into Pearson
……………….Park. From there I can see Pickle Road, the truck, the field, my sister, but instead of
……………….her lying there dead, she sits lotus-style eating an orange.
The immediacy of this particular scene occurs again and again throughout the book. We experience, along with Garza, the ways that memory can be as present, if not more present, than our current reality, as well as the ways that memory, like grief, washes over us again and again, often when we least expect it.
The occasion for writing the book is September 11, 2001. Garza had been in Texas visiting family when the planes hit the towers and, as she returns to New York City later and sees the “hole” the towers left in the skyline, she realizes, again, that she will die someday, that everyone she knows will die. This seems to me another universal truth about grief: one loss not only brings back other losses, but it makes us conscious of all the possible losses. And it’s not as if we are ever finished grieving, as if there’s such a thing as closure.
Even when she is 18 and is visited by Gina, who tells her she’s not to blame, that it’s time to let her go, even that is not closure, although it certainly seems to be a kind of double-edged comfort. Why can’t Gina stay? What are all the other things Garza has lost? She will never, now that she and her wife have their own children, be able to call her sister and share stories about raising them. Loss keeps taking on new permutations, new dimensions. Which is why, throughout the book, Garza turns to St. Theresa and Neruda, Buddhism and Octavio Paz, Dickinson and the gnostic gospels: we have been trying to make sense of the mystery of death for as long as we’ve loved others.
Anna Deveare Smith, the actor, has written that if we can listen to someone’s voice, be fully present both to what they say and what they can’t say, we will be able to vicariously inhabit their bodies. Garza includes, here, in Memorias, the voices of members of her extended Mexican American family. They’ve all been marked by the loss of Gina and her cousin Connie. When Garza’s mother speaks, we are in the presence of an extraordinary woman, wise and strong and vulnerable. When I read her Memoria, my heart is broken all over again for my sister who lost her daughter in a car accident; all these thirty-seven years later, it’s still hard for us to talk about what happened, which, in a way, makes it seem as if my niece never existed. Yet Garza’s father speaks; her cousins and aunts speak. Everyone is affected in their own unique way, their voices woven throughout the book. This is the way the Memorias function: as witness and chorus, their words vibrating in our bodies, creating empathy.
The most surprising scene takes place when Garza’s mother invites Mrs. Meinert to meet with the extended family. In our culture, we are so set on retribution or reckoning, as if that will make something whole again, but Garza’s mother is much wiser. Mrs. Meinert has the courage to stand before all of them, grieving adults and children alike, and apologize. Garza writes of that moment, Sitting there, barely able to watch her speak, my heart grows soft and expands, and
……………….I feel so bad for her. I feel so sorry for the burden this woman will have to bear, that
……………….I momentarily forget that my sister is dead because this woman had too many gin and
……………….tonics at bridge club. I’m so grateful to Mrs. Meinert for giving me a moment
……………….of forgetting. It will remain one of the greatest gifts my mother bestowed on
……………….our family, the gift of showing us a way to forgive.
The death of a child never makes sense. The death of a child is what parents, grandparents, older siblings fear most. How would we survive such a thing? Would we want to? There were times, reading this book, that I wanted to put it down. I can’t even voice the fears it struck in me because they run so deep, and I am so afraid that even giving voice to them might cause them to happen. The narrative dwells, as Garza reminds us with a quote from Anne Carson, on “the edge of the unthinkable.”
We know Garza’s memories have crystallized over time, have been turned over and over in her thoughts until they’re like polished stones. The beauty of her book resides in these closely observed moments, in her mother’s wisdom, and in the ways the family members support one another, even in the ways some of them fail in their grief. Through the narrative of their grieving, Garza has woven, along with quotes and passages from many writers and wisdom traditions, her own meditations on what death, what faith, what grief mean and give us.
All of that creates a counterbalance. There is no comfort for this kind of loss. And yet—there are better ways of surviving than living in silence, than rendering the dead invisible. Garza says, in the beginning, that she does not know “what to call this story,” and it’s true, it is like nothing I’ve ever read before, but it is a generous and moving debut.
Victoria Garza holds an M.A in Media Theory, History and Criticism from University of Arizona and an M.F.A in Film Production from the NYU’s Graduate Institute of Film & Television. Currently, Garza is a senior writer for Apple.
Beth Alvarado, author of Anxious Attachments, winner of the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales.
15 February 2023
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