The day after her funeral, my dad and I again joined forces up in her room, where she was found dead. We fingered through journal after journal, opened drawer after drawer, looking for..... who knows. We didn’t sit, because the mattress and piled blankets both looked disgusting and it’s kind of weird to sit on the dying location of your sister/daughter, only days afterward. Also, the floor was really dirty, so we hung out, standing for hours, sometimes crouching, in the 5x3 space between the bed and the dressers, searching and reading - sometimes silently, sometimes aloud. I was particularly interested in finding material for my play - the only short-term way I knew how to deal with... all of this. A psychiatrist’s gold mine. 

We’d been eyeing the small jar of pot, next to her bed, for a while now... somehow the cops/ people who took her body didn’t catch that (they took loads of pills and any other legal and non-legal drugs they could find). We were about to take off and spend the night at my mother’s house, about an hour away, when my dad slipped the jar into his inside jacket pocket, “just in case.” 

After playing casino, a card game my dad and I have spent hours of our lives playing together since I was a kid (after he got tired of playing War and finally taught me an “adult” game), he pulled out the jar. One of us (not sure which) said, “Wanna get high?” We laughed and said, “It’s the way Meadow would want us to honor her -- way more so than a funeral -- even if it was a pretty liberal funeral for Jews.” 

I had never gotten high with my dad before. I think, once when I was about 17, I got stoned with Meadow in front of him and it was kinda weird... He said it’d been about 20 years since he’d lit up. 

I pulled out a pipe from my suitcase (what? I happened to have a spare) and packed it for him. He eagerly looked on, remembering the good ol’ days and we smoked Meadow’s pot. In honor of her.