Sailing Home

Michelle Gurule

When I landed in Phoenix for my Uncle Ray’s funeral, my sister, Aunt Tiff, and nephew picked me up curbside. “Pack light,” my sister, Bianca, had warned two days earlier when, over the phone, I said, “Okay, I’ll come out there.” It was January 2024, and I’d been standing in the living room of the house my partner and I had just bought in Albuquerque. A purchase that marked this city as permanent or, at the very least, long term. I’d spent the morning wrestling with curtain rods and my decision to lay roots in a state away from my family, for a job that wasn’t mine. I worried that by signing the deed I’d pledged my allegiance to love, and in doing so, had inadvertently given up any agency I had in the direction of my life. Like a sail, subject to the wind. 

Meanwhile, Bianca, my mom, and nephew—very much in charge of their direction—were en route from Denver in a car, apparently, stuffed to the brim.  

“If I fly out to Arizona, you’ll drop me off in Albuquerque on your drive home?” I asked. Confirmed. “And I, along with you, and eight of our other relatives, will be sleeping in one of two hotel rooms?” I was hoping to highlight the absurdity. “Will there even be a place for me to sleep?”  

“Free hotel rooms,” my sister said. Which was courtesy of one of my four aunts, Aunt Janice, cashing out her hotel loyalty points earned by her working nationwide for FEMA. Good thing too. The free rooms were what made such a good family turnout possible.  

“Don’t be a bitch,” my sister said, clearly exhausted. She was on the eleventh hour of their drive. “Mom just wants you to come.”  

In the car, I greeted my sister and nephew, then kissed my Aunt Tiff, who, along with my late Uncle Ray, I hadn’t seen for nearly three years. Aunt Tiff looked herself, though. A salt and pepper tomboy with a shooting star tattoo on her neck.  

“Shell, guess who was just at the casinos?” Aunt Tiff said while giving me a mischievous eye. “We lost sixty dollars.” I looked out the windshield to the highway, keeping my curiosity to myself about which of the two actually lost their money. Neither my aunt nor sister had cash to spare, and neither let that stop them. The trip was, in part, a funeral. And, in part, a rare chance to get away. 

Tiff and my three other aunts all splurged and flew out from Newport News, Virginia. We used to live there too, until I graduated the third grade, and my dad announced that he was sick of the east coast and would be moving closer to his family in Colorado. Thus, delivering my mother one hell of an ultimatum: we left with him, or we stayed without him. My sister and I felt this move as a patriarchal hammer to our fingertips, but my mother, who was forty-one years old at the time and had a primary role inside a vibrant, buzzing family, must’ve experienced it as a hammer to her whole world. When she called to tell me about Uncle Ray’s funeral, there was the grief of losing her brother in her voice, and there was the joy that, for a couple days, all of her sisters would be together again.  

“I’m spending the day with your sister and Chuy because I needed a break from all those bitches back at the house,” my Aunt Tiff said, laughing. 

“Aunt Kathy is getting on my nerves on this trip,” my sister told me. To which my Aunt Tiff gave a robust, mm-hmm. Poor Aunt Kathy. Of all the siblings she’s the most Type-A and, as a result of this, has the worst reputation and the most responsibilities.  

“Just so you know, Aunt Kathy has been volunteering you for everything at the funeral,” my sister said. 

“Everything” was for me to read a four-page poem Uncle Ray wrote, but I already knew this. My Aunt Kathy called and asked if I’d do it. My sister put on a voice, “She said, ‘Oh, Michelle is a good public speaker.’” 

My sister’s tone suggested irritation, as though my role in the funeral was favoritism. She was also asked to share a memory, but she promptly rejected the idea. Of the entire family, only my Aunt Kathy volunteered to read a psalm, and Aunt Kathy was only able to convince one other person—my mom—to read a poem.

“Mom didn’t write the poem herself,” my sister said. “She found it on Facebook.” 

Well, whatever. She’s not a poet.  

“Why won’t you share a memory?” I asked my Aunt Tiff. 

“Ain’t no way I can talk in front of all those people,” she said. “Plus, once Ray moved to Arizona, I don’t really have too many memories of him. He wasn’t really a big part of my life after he left.” 

This knocked me back into my seat. I looked over at Chuy, my sweet angel nephew, who’d recently said something similar to me during our Thanksgiving visit. “You’re not a big part of my life,” Chuy said, offhandedly, as he, my sister, and I lay in bed, each taking the same attachment style quiz. He (an avoidant, turns out) wasn’t even being a jerk. He was merely sharing about his life. “What do you mean?” I asked, wrecked. I had lived with him from the time he was born until he was ten and I moved to New Mexico for graduate school. I’d expected to move back after graduation, but I met Daisy, fell in love, and my plans changed. I had tears in my eyes when I told Chuy, “I’m a huge part of your life.”  

“I barely even see you,” he said, defensive. “I see you, like, at most, once a month.”  

“Exactly,” I said. “Once a month. That’s a lot.” Frequent Gurule visits, either in Denver or Albuquerque, were something that Daisy and I agreed on when they accepted the job. Truthfully, we were lucky to find work in New Mexico, considering Daisy had applied for dozens of teaching jobs nationwide (as is the way within academia). We would lay in bed at night, restless, wondering about the future—Where would we end up? How would I experience my nephew’s teen years if we lived in some faraway place like Boston? Where could we be happy?—and together we would pray for an offer in Albuquerque. My family was only a seven-hour drive away. 

After Chuy’s bomb drop, I ran into the living room to tell my mom that she had to go talk to him right away. To tell him that he was wrong. That he was too young to really get it, but what he actually meant was that I don’t see him every day, not in the way I did when we lived together before I went off to grad school. He’s just a teenager, and life feels like whatever is right in front of you at that age, but it’s a skewed perception. “You have to tell him,” I begged my mom, “that I am a very big part of his life.” 

“Oh, Michelle,” my mom said nonchalantly. “He didn’t mean it.” She then suggested I leave it alone before returning to watch Paternity Court reels on her phone. Typical, I thought. Just typical. My whole family thinks I am too sensitive, too emotional, and especially too verbal. “God help, Daisy,” my dad often says when I call him on my daily walks. “Not everything needs to be a whole-ass-conversation.”  

Says you, I thought, and remembered his decision to move us across the country. Then that familiar feeling arrived again—that lack of agency. A sail flapping in the wind. I made a note-to-self that I oughta talk to my therapist about it. 

 ***

When we pulled up to my uncle’s single-story home, I was impressed with my mind’s recall ability. I may not have been able to point it out in a lineup, but I hadn’t forgotten the orange tree in the front yard and the in-ground pool in the back. Maybe such luxuries are so foreign to our family that they become unforgettable.  

“Brace yourself, girly,” Aunt Tiff said, as we filed through the garage. “It’s chaos in there.” 

Walking through the door was like an explosion of confetti. My uncle’s dogs were small and barky, and I think one bit my hand, but it was hard to tell because I was surrounded by my mom, aunts, my Uncle’s widow, and my cousin—all coming in for a hug. I felt a little bit shy. The whole room had been in cahoots for the last 48 hours. Eaten every meal together, cried and bickered. I was late to the party. And although my aunts are reliably the same each time we meet—bossy or anxious or uncannily quiet—our relationships all suffered from distance-onset-stagnation syndrome. The closest I’d ever been to any of them was when I was eight years old and certain I would not survive without seeing them every week. Touching their breastbones with my forehead. Combing their hair with my fingertips. Each aunt was an offshoot of my mother. I needed the whole family tree to make sense of myself. I felt sick at the thought of my nephew relating to the distance.   

Goodness, grief. So much can be lost without anyone dying—just years gone by and lives unfolding in separate states. 

My aunts all seemed to be updated on my life, however. Their questions stacked on top of one another like a chorus: Do you have pictures of your new house, Shell? Where’s Daisy? What’s happening with your writing? Is it hot in Albuquerque right now? Do you want some sausage lasagna?—you can pick out the meat. 

No, no, I said and pulled out a Tupperware of pinto beans from my bag. They’re a staple in The Bean Protocol, a diet I had been following thanks to being in a migraine cluster period. Surely it was the stress of moving, my brain cinching from the weight of what the decision meant. I started talking about my mom’s move out to Denver for my dad every week in therapy. In a weekly yoga class, my mantra was, “My life is in Albuquerque.” I offered myself no possibilities of elsewhere. But there in the present, my relational wounds flared up. My “emotional auto-immune disease,” Daisy and I called it, when I couldn’t relax in the middle of the day. When I was crying, saying I just needed to know if this risk I took would be rewarded with safety. The only thing that helped the migraines was dosing Propanol and the beans.  

“You get the migraines from us,” my Aunt Tiff said proudly, then squeezed my hand. 

 ***

That evening, after hours of gossip and Candy Crushing at the kitchen table, half the aunties made a second trip to the airport for my cousins Kim and Little Ray, Uncle Ray’s kids from his first marriage. Born and raised and left in Tennessee. They’ve had a tough life: a teeth pulled instead of filled kind of life. Stark opposites to Ray’s two kids in Arizona, both of whom had braces growing up and went to college and had a steady father in their lives. My sister and I talked about this as we laid out by the pool in the interim.  

“I feel bad for Little Ray and Kim,” she told me. “It has to be hard to come here and see the way Hannah and Caleb were raised when their mom struggled to keep the lights on.”  

After we moved to Colorado, I would often envision my life if we had stayed in Virginia. It would’ve been better, I was sure when I was young, to have stayed without my dad in exchange for my maternal family. My mom, sister, and I could’ve lived in my Grandma’s spare bedroom. We would’ve shared a bed and would’ve likely only ever visited my Dad during summer breaks, but those were difficulties I would’ve accepted to not have felt so familially alone.  

“Let’s go back home,” I often said to my mom, grieving our old life.  

“Should we?” she’d ask. In Colorado we had a solid roof over our heads. But we were lonely enough that my mom contemplated that decision for years—family or security? I was lonely enough that had I been the shot caller, we would’ve left.  

Of course, the story’s already out: we never did leave.  

And after one entire decade, I began to think of Colorado as home. My sister and I assuaged, we rooted in, found friends, eventually my nephew was born, and by the time my parents divorced, my mother would’ve had to leave us, her children and grandchild, if she were to move back. My therapist says this whole mess was an early life trauma. That moving states led to family rupture for years and eventually the breakdown of my parents’ marriage, so it made sense that I was anticipating rooting in Albuquerque would evolve into some grand self-betrayal. It made sense that I feared that romantic love was not a safe place to invest.  

“Are Kim and Little Ray mentioned in Uncle Ray’s poem?” my sister asked, referring to the one I’ve been asked to read at the funeral. I was given the hand-written note earlier that afternoon. Dated February 14, 1996, it was a four-page prose poem dedicated to his wife, Lori. It begins with the line, “Today I caught myself wondering out loud, ‘What was the best day of my life?’” The letter worked to answer that question through memories and reflections over the years: “Was it when I was nine and saw the ocean for the first time?” he wrote. “Was it the day I met you?” 

I had been moved by the letter’s immediate intimacy. I could picture my uncle as a young boy, as a father, as someone deeply in love. Odd to think it, but it was a stunning piece to read at his funeral. It truly captured a sense of his life.  

“Yeah,” I said to my sister. “All of the kids were mentioned.” And then I read a few lines out loud to her. 

It could have been the day Ray was born.  

I was eighteen, fresh-faced and scared to death.  

It was the day my dad walked back into my life.  

It could have been the day Kimberly was born.  

I was older, still fresh-faced, and still scared to death.  

These days brought pride and joy into my life.  

It could have been the day Hannah was born.  

She came into the world feet first.  

To the melodies of Russian Folk songs.  

It could have been the day Caleb was born.  

And the days that followed as he struggled to survive.  

His tiny body punctured, prodded, probed, invaded.

“Damn,” my sister said, stopping me. “He really put Caleb’s business out there like that?” 

“I don’t think it’s that private,” I said, laughing.  

“I guess,” my sister said. Then we watched Tik Toks together until my cousins arrived. 

 ***

It was after 9 p.m. when we finally arrived at the hotel. Of the two rooms the ten of us were split between, one had three people on noisy CPAP machines, which meant the other seven of us were sharing two queen beds and an air mattress in the second room.  

I was, however, relieved to see our room laid out like an apartment. The door opened to a kitchenette and living room (where the air mattress just fit), and on either side of the suite were two queen beds in separate rooms. Aunt Tiff and Aunt Janice (our FEMA breadwinner) were in one bed. My sister, Chuy, and I were in the other.  

It was unexpectedly sweet to catch up with my cousin Kim—a woman 20 years my senior, whom I hadn’t seen in six years. It was the first time I didn’t feel that our age gap was in the way of our connecting. She was frank about her life and her feelings in a way I found refreshing. On the car ride over to the hotel, she told me and my sister that she was heartbroken about her father’s passing, but that she was also angry at him for leaving her and Little Ray behind all those decades back.  

“My brother and I both have major abandonment wounds,” she told us in between sips of Mountain Dew. “I think it’s a big reason why Ray’s struggled so much with addiction throughout his life.”  

I could only nod.  

“As a mother,” Kim said, “I don’t understand how my dad could’ve just moved across the country from us kids and left us behind.” 

My mom, who is twelve years older than Kim, once told me that when Ray left for Arizona, she too was angry at him and threated to kick his ass. I like to picture my mom back in the 1970s. Young and tan and red-haired. The most beautiful woman around, ready to sock her brother for his departure.

Truth is, regardless of everyone else’s feelings about it, Uncle Ray moved West for love. And, as a result of this, it was his wife, Lori, and their children, Hannah and Caleb, who knew him best. The day-in and day-out for decades. It was the three of them who bore witness to the Alzheimer’s, the slow deterioration of his body and mind, and his very last breath. For cousin Kim, it was not her choice to be so far away, but that was how things unfolded.

***

As everyone prepared for bed, my mom, cousin Kim, and I were completely stumped while trying to fill the air mattress. It was made all the more difficult because I was curling my mom’s hair with a hot iron while she was figuring out the pump. “I don’t know how to curl short hair,” I told her, but she insisted.  

“It doesn’t matter how you do it,” she said. “I just don’t want it flat.”  

The curls wouldn’t hold—not even for even a minute. “It’s not working,” I told her. “Your hair is too… soft.” 

“Just figure it out,” she said, a little testy because the electric pump seemed to be forcing air, but the mattress wasn’t holding any of it in. Kim and I both tried to take over, but we were just as incompetent at the task. 

“Bianca!” we yelled, and my sister stomped in from the other room.  

“None of y’all have any basic common sense?” she asked, and Kim and I shared a look. Bianca figured it out quickly and the mattress became plump. We said thanks and hurried her off with a “yeah, yeah, we got it from here.” I was back to curling my mom’s hair—it was still not really working—but then the mattress was full, and we couldn’t figure out how to get the pump off without releasing all the air.  

“Bianca!” we yelled, and soon she was back, even more annoyed, saying almost exactly the same thing. “Damn, do y’all really not know how to do this?” 

Really, we told her, we don’t. 

“Why don’t you just curl your hair in the morning?” My sister asked my mom, suddenly in a sour mood. “You know it’s not gonna hold, so it’s going to look flat anyway.” 

“I have some of the best hairspray ever,” Kim told us. It was 10 p.m. and she was still sipping on the Mountain Dew. “You only need a little bit. This stuff is like concrete in a can.”  

I would realize in the morning that I had sprayed too much when my sister asked me, “Have you seen mom’s hair?” She was laughing. 

***

The memorial service was being held at a nearby funeral home. I’m still not sure if my uncle identified as religious, but there was a Christian tone to the ceremony. Prayers and psalms and frequent mentions of my uncle joining my Grandma Shirley in Heaven. It was a nice place, the funeral home. Set up like a banquet room. Round tables in the back with floral centerpieces and photos of Uncle Ray with his friends and family. There was a thoughtfulness to the selections, each of us in attendance appearing in the photos. There was even a picture with my dad, which Lori must’ve chosen for my sister and me.  

I was not skittish approaching his open casket because my mom, sister, and nephew were all with me, saying farewell. This is my mom’s brother, was all I could think as she cried and kissed his forehead. “I love you and I’ll miss you,” she said aloud. The whole ambiance of grief got to me, and I started to cry too. My nephew patted my back.  

“Look how blue Ray’s fingertips are,” my mom said. “Lori said she didn’t want to put gloves on them so we could all touch his bare hands.”  

Lori and my uncle both knew he was going to die once he received his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Unpredictable as the disease is, there is no other outcome. Lori stepped up immediately as his caretaker. She was there for the humorous parts, like when Ray bought her a haul of lacy, far-too-small lingerie off Amazon (the sexual part of his brain highly activated) and for the hard parts (him falling, being unable to use the restroom, his loss of word recall). A few months back, I spoke to Lori over the phone and told her that I found her commitment to their marriage, my Uncle, and their love, inspiring. And still I hoped there was someone taking care of her, seeing as my uncle no longer could. Lori broke down crying and handed the phone off to my mom.

***

“Did you see Ray’s karate master up there?” my Aunt Kathy (the type-A one) asked me later. Friends and former coworkers of my uncle came and went over a few hours. Some stayed for the service, but they were shy around Ray’s big family and hid out in the back. I was there, up front, watching everyone take their turn at the casket, so I saw clearly when the karate master awarded my uncle an honorary Black Belt. It nearly brought his wife and kids to their knees. 

My aunt took a seat beside me and grabbed my hand. I knew she was happy to see me, but I also knew my sister felt jealous of this. In 2021, when my sister got married, my Aunt Kathy posted more pictures of me on Facebook than anyone else. “Even me,” my sister had said. “The bride.”  

So I felt stiff when my aunt told me that her son—my cousin—inherited a whopping, lottery-esque $250,000 from his father passing away (the money was tied up in a house sold after he died), and how my cousin conveniently “got fired” from his construction job two weeks after the money arrived into his bank account. Now all he did was sleep in her spare bedroom and buy shit he didn’t need. He was on the cusp of being flat broke again, but every time she tried to talk to him about it, he’d scream at her, so she’d given up and was going to let him drive himself bankrupt.  

My sister was eavesdropping, as I said, “What a fool!” We were interrupted when the service began.

***

“Family and friends, we gather here today in memory of Raymond Carter, to celebrate a life lived with purpose and passion, to share in the sorrow of our loss but also in the joy of having known and loved such a remarkable person,” the officiant, a suited man in his sixties, said. On the projector screen, there was a black and white photo of my sixteen-year-old grandmother holding my infant uncle. Then, a photo of Ray and his family at the Grand Canyon. “Let us begin by observing a moment of silence, to quietly reflect on the precious moments we each shared with Ray, and to prepare ourselves for the tribute and remembrance that lies ahead.” 

The officiant nodded his head and took a seat in the front row. My Aunt Kathy had been prepped that this moment of silence would be her cue. That when she felt enough time had passed, she would stand and walk to the podium. She gave it about 90 seconds. 

“Romans 14:7-8,” she started. 

“For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.” My Aunt cried as she read this, and then she excused herself to her seat. 

The room was quiet as the entirety of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” played over the stereo system, and then it was my mom’s turn to read the Facebook poem, a piece by Sara Rian. 

they do not die 

and become afterthoughts. 

they are the first thought. 

the thought that replays 

until we fall asleep.

My sister smiled at me.  

Pretty good, I mouthed.  

My mom took her seat as “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac began. I knew when the song ended, it would be my turn to stand up. For time being, I focused on the letter in my lap. My Uncle’s handwriting was all block lettering. I read one of my favorite parts to myself, Is it one of the days we both call in sick, so we can spend the day together? Is it one of the days that ends standing in the carport together watching a summer monsoon roll across the valley? The part of the story I never got as a kid was that Ray and Lori were madly in love. It’s not to excuse his leaving Kim and Little Ray behind, but his leaving was all I’d ever heard about. At his funeral, as I watched Lori’s shoulders heave up and down with true, heartbroken sobs, I could see that that fateful decision was not made out of malice. Likely, it was very hard. Presumably, it split Ray’s whole world in half.  

How very fortunate I have been to find you, he wrote.  

Marry you.  

To have been loved by you all these years.  

Our lives so inextricably linked, we might as well be a single creature.  

Of all the stories that were true that day—my mother lost her brother, Kim lost a dad she felt abandoned by—this one was true too: Lori lost the love of her life.

***

The entire letter took me eight minutes to read. After having briefly composed myself, my voice cracked on the very first line, “Today I caught myself wondering what was the best day of my life?” And I cried the entire way through until the last one, “Today is the best day of my life.”  

And the crowd mourned.

***

“Do you wish you never left Virginia?” I asked my mom the next morning as we drove home to New Mexico and Colorado, respectively. My aunts boarded their flight back east. They were off in the clouds as we were passing through a Saguaro Cactus forest. The goodbye felt meaningful. Like, life is fragile. We can’t let so much time pass before we see one another again.  

“Of course I wish I never left,” my mom said. “But if we stayed, we would’ve ended up like Kim and Little Ray.”  

What she meant was that we would’ve ended up just so fucking screwed, without even our basic needs met. But, after this weekend, I also understood it meant that if things had been different, I could’ve harbored the same abandonment wound Kim spoke of. I could’ve watched my dad move across the country and start anew, while my sister and I were left to wonder how he could’ve chosen anything, anyone, over us.  

I wanted to tell my mom something my therapist had told me just a week earlier, “People rarely make choices or experience hardships they utterly can’t live with. Usually they find a way to accept the way their life shakes out in the end.” But my mom was already ahead of me.  

“You know, any time I miss Virginia, or think, ‘God damn your dad,’ I tell myself that if we’d stayed, Bianca wouldn’t have met Chuy’s dad, and we wouldn’t have him,” my mom said to the car. Her voice was resolved. “Chuy alone made it all worth it.” 

I smiled at my nephew in the rearview mirror.   

The next sign read, 375 miles to Albuquerque. My sister and nephew settled in for a nap while my mom, as she does, watched Paternity Court reels. I was in my head, picking out the weeds. All my recent anxiety resulted from the feeling that I didn’t have agency in my decision to stay in Albuquerque, as though Daisy’s job offer was another hammer to my life, rather than a series of conversations and joint decisions to continue building our life together. As though I hadn’t raked my own decision over the coals, over and over again, and still, over and over and over again, landed on the word, “Yes.” 

I looked at the scenery, then back to the road, and vice versa, feeling renewed. Or if not renewed, like I’d released an old fisherman’s knot inside my chest. I pushed the gas pedal, eyed the time. I was eager to get home.

Michelle Gurule (she/her) is a writer and educator based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in HuffPost Personals, Slate, Electric Lit, The Offing, Joyland, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. In 2021, the excerpt, “Exit Route,” won StoryQuarterly’s Nonfiction Prize, judged by T Kira Maealani Madden and was later listed in Best American Essays Notables in 2022. Her memoir, Thank You, John, which explores the complexities of sex work, class, power and Michelle’s intersectional identity as a queer, white / Chicana woman, is out fall of 2025 with Unnamed Press.