Before You Read…
If you’ve been following Rockstar Ronan over the years, thank you for still being here.
These days, I do most of my writing over at Written Wildly on Substack. It’s where I share regular essays about love, grief, motherhood, ordinary life, and the making of my memoir. I write the things we often leave unsaid—especially about grief—and bring readers behind the scenes as my book takes shape with an incredible editorial team. (I still can’t believe I tried to wrestle 400,000 words into a book by myself.)
If you’d like to keep up with my writing between posts here, I’d love to have you join me there.
→ Follow Written Wildly on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/mamamaya4
Thank you for reading. Thank you for staying. It means more than I can ever say.
— Maya
After Ronan died, I didn’t ask to move back to the Pacific Northwest. I begged. I got on my knees and begged. Because that place wasn’t just home — it was us. It was him. It was rubber boots and bare feet and the two of us standing in the rain with our faces tilted up, catching it on our tongues like it was something sacred. Like the sky was offering itself to us and we were small enough and grateful enough to receive it.
Puddle jumping was our thing. Our thing. The kind that belongs only to a mother and her child and nobody else in the world.
But we stayed in Arizona.
Not my choice. And if you think being told to stay — in a place I never wanted, after losing what I lost — didn’t slowly unravel something between us, you would be very wrong. Grief does enough on its own. Add displacement. Add years. Add a woman who needed rain and got desert instead. It leaves a mark.
I’ve thought a lot about what I agreed to without agreeing. The conversations that ended with fine when nothing was fine. The way I folded myself smaller and told myself it was temporary. Just for now. Just until.
And then years passed.
And now it’s been over two decades.
And one day you look up and realize you have spent over half your life living somewhere your soul never agreed to call home.
And now it’s March in Phoenix and next week it will be 101 degrees. I need you to understand what that means — not just as weather, but as a verdict. As something imposed on a body already exhausted from carrying what I carry. The heat here doesn’t ask permission. It just arrives. It presses down on you like a hand on the back of your neck. It screams at you to move, produce, perform, shine — and there is no shelter from it, no softness, no shadow deep enough to breathe in.
There is nothing soft about living here.
No rain to catch on your tongue. No puddles. No moss. No green that asks nothing of you. No gray sky that closes in low and quiet and says, I’ve got you. Rest here. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.
The Pacific Northwest knows how to hold grief.
It keeps it safe. The clouds come in and the world goes quiet and the rain falls without apology, and the trees stand so tall and still they feel like witnesses — like they’ve been there through everything and will remain through everything still. That landscape doesn’t demand that you rally. It doesn’t punish you for falling apart. It doesn’t ask you to perform your survival for anyone. It just receives you. Holds you. Keeps what is precious without asking you to justify why it matters.
I need that. I have always needed that.
Because grief needs somewhere to live that won’t mock it.
And here — the sun is merciless. It floods everything with light and heat and exposure, and some days it feels like an accusation. Like the relentless brightness is screaming at me to be okay already. To move on. To put it down. To smile the way everyone around me seems to smile — easily, emptily, for reasons I cannot find and stopped trying to understand.
I connect to nothing here.
Not the landscape. Not the culture, or the absence of it. Not the people with their performed happiness and their love of a sun I experience as punishment. There is no water. No trees. No air that smells like the earth is alive beneath your feet. Everything here is surface. Everything here is shine. And I am a person who has been to the bottom of things — who has held her child as he left this world — and I have no patience left for surfaces.
This place holds the worst memories of my life. The hospitals. The waiting rooms. The drives I can still map in my sleep. The heat rising up from the parking lots while my insides were coming apart. All of it baked into the pavement, radiating back up at me every time I step outside like the ground itself refuses to let me forget.
And Ronan is not here. I’ve looked. I’ve looked everywhere.
He is not in the desert or the dust or the long sun-bleached stretches of road that lead nowhere green.
He is somewhere else entirely — and I know exactly where.
He’s in the rain.
He’s in the moss growing slow and patient up the sides of old trees. He’s in the ferns. He’s in the fog that rolls in off the water and softens every hard edge. He’s in every puddle on every sidewalk of where I grew up, in every small, wet, quiet town folded into the hills of the place that made us both feel most alive. He’s standing there in his little rubber boots, or barefoot, not caring either way — arms out, face up, mouth open.
That’s what nobody tells you about grief — it isn’t only about the person you lost. It’s about where you can still feel them. Where the world holds the shape of them. And every day I spend in this desert is another day lived thousands of miles from the place where my son is most present. Where I could walk into the trees and find him in the quiet. Where I could stand in the rain and feel, for one merciful moment, close.
Instead I am here.
Counting.
Counting summers. Counting the months until the heat breaks. Counting the years inside a promise I’ve made to myself — Portland, or Seattle, or somewhere in between. Somewhere with water and cold air and green so deep it gets inside you and stays.
I’ve made the best of it here. I have a pocket of friends I love dearly — really love, the kind of love that gets built in the trenches of hard years. I have a home that has become my sanctuary, one built from massive stones, the outside of it shaped by rock so it feels like the earth itself is holding it up. Nature is part of the house. The walls are rock. The desert light moves across them all day. It’s beautiful in its own way.
I’ve built a life here. I’m not blind to that.
But Arizona feels like Groundhog Day.
Every day the same relentless sun. The same dry air. The same endless stretches of brown and heat and brightness that never soften, never shift, never surprise you. The same season that barely changes. The same sky that never closes in low and quiet the way clouds do when rain is coming and the whole world seems to hold its breath.
It’s like waking up inside the same day over and over again.
And when you’ve lived through the kind of loss I have — when you have held the before and the after of your own life in your two hands and felt the weight of the difference — sameness can feel like its own kind of prison. Like the world has simply stopped moving and no one else seems to notice. Like you are the only one standing still inside a life that keeps insisting everything is fine, everything is normal, look how sunny it is, look how bright.
I don’t want bright. I want weather. I want a sky that changes its mind. I want to walk outside and not know exactly what the day will feel like on my skin. I want to be surprised by the world again.
When I can’t sleep — which is often, which is most nights — I scroll Zillow. Portland. Seattle. Sometimes smaller towns tucked between the water and the trees, places I’ve never been but that my body already recognizes. I’m not shopping. I’m not browsing. I am visiting. I am standing on those sidewalks for a few minutes, letting myself imagine that I’m already there. The street view photos with their gray skies. The moss on the front steps that the realtor probably wishes wasn’t there. The puddles in the driveway. The trees pressing in close and dark and full.
I dream about the rain the way an addict dreams about their drug of choice.
I know it won’t fix everything. I know grief comes with you wherever you go — it packs itself into the same boxes as everything else and unpacks itself in the new place just as quietly. But there is a difference between carrying grief and carrying it somewhere that fights you every step of the way. Somewhere that meets it with blinding light and 101-degree heat and the relentless demand to be okay.
And yet I have to stay. For now.
I have a five year plan. Poppy graduates high school, and then — then — I go. Portland or Seattle. Somewhere wet and green and quiet and mine. That is the timeline. That is the promise I have made to myself on every sleepless night, on every morning the sun comes up without asking permission, on every afternoon the heat presses down and I feel myself going somewhere far away inside just to survive it.
I cannot leave before then. I cannot take Poppy away from Woody, cannot fracture the thing we have built together as a family, I cannot let my longing cost my daughter something she should never have to pay. She is worth staying for. Woody is worth staying for. The life we have made together — apart yet together — it matters. They matter. More than my need for rain, more than my need for trees, more than all of it.
But I still scream on the inside.
And sometimes I weep in the shower.
And I feel things like rage and resentment — and then I feel guilty for feeling them, because of the love that binds us. Feelings don’t care about logic. They arrive anyway, unbidden and inconvenient and real, and the only thing I know how to do with them is feel them quietly, alone, where they can’t hurt anyone.
So instead I let them hurt me.
I will continue to survive rather than thrive. I know the difference. I know exactly what it feels like to thrive, and I know exactly what it feels like to white-knuckle your way through years of your life because the people you love need you to hold still.
I am holding still.
With my whole heart.
But I am counting.
The Pacific Northwest never fought me.
It met me where I was. It let me walk slowly. It let me disappear into trees when the world was too loud. It let the rain fall without asking questions. It let me stand still and feel what I felt without the demand to perform something brighter, lighter, easier for everyone else.
That is what I have been missing all these years.
A place that understands quiet.
A place that understands weight.
A place where a mother can carry her child in the open air without the sun bearing down like an interrogation lamp.
I have five years.
I can do five years.
I have already done so much harder things than five years — I have done the thing that breaks most people entirely, and I am still here, still standing, still showing up for the people who need me to show up.
Five years is nothing.
Five years is everything.
And at the end of it, I will point myself north and west toward the rain and the trees and the fog and the green, and I will go. And somewhere on a wet sidewalk in a city that knows how to hold grief, I will stop walking and tip my face up to the sky the way I did when he was small and beside me and the world was still whole.
And when the rain falls, I will feel him close again.
Not just for a moment.
The way I was always meant to.
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