Rita died recently. From what I was told, it was a "good death." Family at her side, acknowledgment, hand-holding, gratitude. Love. We should all hope for what my grandmother got in her final moments. She married into the Deeren family and without her, the Deerens would have faded into the annals of the Census Bureau decades ago. I'm the last of the Deerens.
Author: RSDeeren
RS Deeren is a PhD Candidate in Fiction and a Teaching Assistant at UW- Milwaukee. He is a Luminarts Cultural Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. His short story "Enough to Lose" was anthologized by John Freeman in Tales of Two Americas and his fiction, poetry and nonfiction can be found in Joyland, The Great Lakes Review, Midwestern Gothic, Cardinal Sins, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Before moving to the western shore of Lake Michigan, he lived in the rural Thumb Region of Michigan where he worked as a line cook, a landscaper, a banker, a teacher, and a lumberjack. His dad is proud of him so he might as well retire; it doesn't get much better than that.
