Grow Where You're Planted

​

​

 

Published

Preface

​

When I was twenty, my parents asked me if, should anything happen to them, I would be willing to take custody of my (at the time) five under-aged siblings.

​

“Yes,” I said, “of course I will.”

​

Once all the Is were dotted and the Ts were crossed, I proceeded to do a deep dive into what, exactly, that would entail. And when I say “deep dive,” I really mean it because, keep in mind, this was a good ten years before Google had the answers for everything.

​

I contacted Tricare, talked to a military recruiter about Gold Star benefits, visited Arlington Cemetery to ask about funeral arrangements, read through and annotated both of my parents’ wills and life insurance policies, looked at the housing market in the area where I was going to college, researched and compared high-yield savings plans for kids, etc., etc., etc.

​

And finally, about five years after this project began (and around the time Google started to know most of everything and would, as such, have made this exhausting five-year-long endeavor dramatically shorter), I felt confident enough in my knowledge and understanding that, should something happen to my parents, I would be able to take care of myself and my (at this point, four) underaged siblings.

​

At which point I unabashedly said, “But my parents are never going to die, so it’s really a non-issue. So what am I going to do with all this research?”

​

The logical answer was, of course, to write a book. Unfortunately, at only twenty-five, I didn’t feel mature enough either emotionally or as an author to take on the psychological and emotional Goliath that was this book. That’s not to say I didn’t try, because I definitely tried, but everything I wrote came out as either trite or contrived and always a mess.

​

Fast-forward ten-ish years. I was enrolled at Brigham Young University (BYU) for my Master of Arts in Mass Communications, and I had to either write a thesis or complete a project. Unfortunately, as fascinated as I was by communications as a discipline, it was entirely new to me, and I didn’t feel up to the task of completing an academic thesis. I did, however, fall head-over-heels in love with narrative communication theories and realized pretty quickly that they aligned perfectly with the experience I gained while enrolled in my Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing about four years prior.

​

When I first pitched the idea of this book as my thesis project to my Chair, he was hesitant. The research focus of the BYU program was, very specifically, mass communications, so I had to definitively show and defend how and why a novel could be considered a form of mass communication. As an author, I felt this was pretty self-explanatory as novels are, on the whole, written for the masses, but I did my research and presented a more Aristotelian rhetorical argument as to why a novel should be considered an acceptable project for a mass communication’s thesis rather than the Sophistic rhetorical statement I would have preferred for being easier and less all-consuming.

​

But I digress.

​

The short of it is that I got permission to write a novel for my final project. Now, of course, I had to write it.

My project was approved in April of 2020, and by the time I left for my family reunion in Idaho in July of that same year, I had made exactly one chapter’s worth of usable progress. I’d certainly written much more than that, I just couldn’t write anything that stuck. It just didn’t feel right.

​

Of course, it was pretty easy to guess why I was struggling to write about a family stricken by the unexpected deaths of their parents considering I’d never lost anyone closer to me (at this point, anyway) than my paternal grandfather, and he passed away when I was ten(-ish). I needed to figure out my personal relationship with grief and grieving if I was going to write anything substantial, but how? It’s not like that’s the sort of experience one can gain on demand. And even if it was, who would want to?

​

So I decided to put the book off for the summer and just enjoy my time with my family in Idaho. We went white water rafting, had picnics, went to the pool, ran around the park like hooligans (there were small children involved so it’s not quite as ridiculous as it sounds), and just generally had a great time until two days before the party was set to transfer to Oregon (because I had one brother we never saw who lived in Idaho and another brother we never saw who lived in Oregon, so we were splitting time even though everyone was in both places. Don’t ask me why; I wasn’t involved with the itinerary).

​

On that day, we all went four-wheeling in this well-known spot about forty-five minutes from where we were staying in Nampa. My brother’s wife’s parents owned two four-wheelers, and we also rented a dirt bike and UTV for an extra good time.

​

It was a total blast. I’d never been out on an ATV or dirt bike before, so it was an illuminating experience. For one, I decided I absolutely need a motorcycle someday.

​

We were out for about three or four hours, until just around noon, when my siblings and I decided to take a break. We went back to basecamp where my nieces and nephews were starting to fuss about being hot, hungry, and tired, and Mom planned to take them back to the house for lunch and some R&R. But since we’d brought back the ATVs, she figured she’d go out for a bit since she didn’t have the chance earlier. She and my dad rode the ATVs and my brothers DJ and Adam, one sister-in-law, and I were in the UTV behind them.

I drove the UTV, and it was super nerve-wracking to see my mom, who had never done anything like this in her entire life, ride over hills and dales and dusty trails like a kid in a candy store, but she actually did an amazing job. She and Dad even went up this one hill that was basically vertical; so much so, that I literally thought both she and my dad would roll top over tail on the way back down. But nothing happened, and Mom pulled up to the UTV once she’d reached the bottom, a mess of smiles and giggles and joy.

​

She did, however, flex her right thumb and say, “I think I jammed it. It kind of hurts.”

​

My sister-in-law and I both offered to switch places with her, but she declined.

​

“I’ll never do this again,” she said. “I might as well get as much as I can in now.”

​

So she climbed back on her ATV, and I got behind the wheel of the UTV to follow her and my dad back to camp. Dad was in the lead, and I thank God for that regularly because that meant he didn’t see what came next.

​

On the final turn before camp, literally only feet away from where the rest of my family was, there was a big crack in the dust-dry trail. None of us had any problems navigating it because the ATVs handled really well, and it was so obvious that it literally could not be missed. I watched my mom slow down to navigate the crack, and then, and I’m dead serious about this, the whole world slowed down when I saw her hand jerk. Her injured thumb hit the accelerator on the right handlebar and the ATV lurched toward the crack in the dirt.

She hit the crack at a bad angle at too quick a speed, and the tire caught. The whole ATV rolled over her before flipping all the way around and coming to a stop on all four tires.

​

I slammed the UTV to a stop with a scream, threw on the break, ripped off my seatbelt, and sprinted for her. She was dead. I knew she was dead, and my only thought was that I needed to get there before Dad or the boys because they would all fall to pieces, and they needed someone to be strong because this was a complete nightmare, and someone had to make sure the babies didn’t see their Nana dead with her neck broken and all the blood that was surely everywhere, and what would we do for the funeral? We were in Idaho, but my parents lived in Nebraska, but my mom was from Pennsylvania, but my dad was from Arkansas—

​

My mom groaned and moved just as I skidded in the dirt beside her head. I sent up a frantic thanks to God as I thought back on those four summers of Girl’s Camp as a Young Woman and the first-aid training we had to do. I propped her head up with my knees because she was on her side and worked the helmet free. I checked her spine and skull to make sure everything was lined up properly without any worrying dents or open wounds. 

​

Nothing that I could see, but what about what I couldn’t see?

​

My brother Zachary kept saying, “She’s fine, she’s fine. She just needs to walk it off.”

​

The babies were crying, “What happened? Where’s Nana?” And my sisters-in-law struggled to soothe them because they were just as horrified as the rest of us.

​

Fortunately, Adam’s father-in-law was there—he’s a licensed physician’s assistant—and I also had two sisters-in-law with medical training. Between the four of us, we had her as patched up and comfortable as she could be outside of a hospital, then we loaded her into my car, and I drove forty-five minutes with her and my nurse-trained sister-in-law to the nearest hospital. 

​

She went in and out the whole ride and in her more lucid moments, she kept mumbling last words to people she knew: my dad, her vice-president, my siblings, her parents. I wanted to tell her to shut up, of course she would be fine, but I didn't, because what if she wasn't? So I stayed quiet as I drove and listened, remembering, just in case.

​

I’ll spare you the gory details and say just this: four cracked ribs, a splintered collarbone, and hematoma in both legs. It was, quite frankly, a miracle that was all.

​

We ended up going to Oregon without my parents, who had to stay in Idaho so my mom could be treated at the hospital until she was medically cleared to return home to Nebraska. None of us wanted to go without my parents, but we didn’t have a choice. Not only was our Oregon trip already booked and paid for, but we had nowhere to stay in Idaho.

​

So we went to Oregon, and it was beautiful. Our second day there, we went to a beautiful beach town to explore, walk along the beach (the Oregon ocean is freezing, even in midsummer), and go crabbing, which is something Zachary was both newly introduced to and newly obsessed with. My brother caught somewhere around eight or ten of the creepy sea spiders, and we went back to his house to cook and eat them.

​

Now, for this next part to make sense, I have to flashback almost thirty years to tell you that I was horrifically afraid of spiders from the time I was eight years old and woke up with a daddy long leg on my face until I had mostly kicked it when I was seventeen because not reacting was the only way I could stop my brothers and sister from tormenting me with both real and fake spiders because they thought my fear was funny.

​

Kids are mean.

​

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of saying aloud that I didn’t like the crabs because they looked like giant sea spiders. A mistake because, right in the middle of a conversation with my sisters-in-law, Zachary came up behind me and said, “Hey, Cassie.”

​

I turned and came face-to-face with a giant, beady-eyed sea spider. I screamed, jumped up from the table, and burst into tears. I cried so hard that I ran from the kitchen, into my room, threw myself across the bed, and proceeded to sob into my pillow for a good half-hour.

​

But what does this have to do with my project?

​

Because I finally had a solid understanding of how I personally grieve. I’m a pragmatic griever. A stoic griever. A giving griever. A shielding griever.

​

I take it and take it and take it and smile the whole way through it because people need me to be strong. They need me to be okay because they’re not okay and because the only other person who could be that strong, smiling presence is also not okay.

​

And then, when I’ve taken on so much and smiled my way through it all, letting it build and build inside me, one small thing punctures a hole in my shield, and all that pressure comes rushing out at once.

​

Any other day or time, I probably would have just rolled my eyes if Zachary shoved a sea spider in my face, but that day, with all that built-up pressure, that little prick was all I needed for everything to come pouring out in a rush of emotion.

​

I changed my approach to writing this book that day.

​

For one, I wasn’t even able to look at it for months because all I could see when I opened the file was that moment when my mom rolled over, and I was sure, absolutely sure, she was dead.

​

I kept putting it off and putting it off until October of 2020 when I literally couldn’t put it off any longer if I wanted to graduate on time, so I sat down and wrote the entire 180,000 words in three months, finished my academic introduction, submitted everything to my thesis committee, and defended in January.

​

And then, of course, I had a novel in hand and nothing to do with it. So I decided to publish it.

​

Please know that a lot of this is super raw, meaning I had to do a lot of soul-searching to figure out how I would handle Andi’s situation and pull from that to create her experience. That isn’t to say, obviously, that this book is autobiographical, but there are certainly a lot of autobiographical elements involved.

​

For one, the siblings in this story are based on my real-life siblings, but that doesn’t mean a 1:1 ratio. For one, I seriously fudged our ages, and for anyone who knows I have an older brother in real life, I killed off Andi’s older brother for story-logic reasons. Other characters are also based on people I know, but again, don’t expect a 1:1 for anybody.

​

There were also a few real-life incidents that I referenced, including the time I set water on fire when I was 15 and nearly burned the house down. As far as I know, there was nothing in that pot but water, and yet, literal flames were rising from the top. How did it happen? I have no idea, but I do have a team of witnesses who will corroborate that it did, in fact, happen.

​

Otherwise, this is just a story; even if it is, in a lot of ways, a deeply personal story for me. That being said, I would like to state as a general disclaimer:

​

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Thank you for picking up this book. I hope you enjoy the ride.

​

~Cassiopeia Fletcher