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: RS Deeren
RS Deeren’s debut collection of stories, Enough to Lose, is forthcoming September 2023 from Wayne State University Press. He earned his MFA from Columbia College Chicago and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, where he is the fiction editor of Zone 3 Press. Before pursuing writing, he worked in the rural Thumb Region of Michigan as a line cook, a landscaper, a bank teller, and a lumberjack. Find him at www.rsdeeren.com and on Twitter @RSDeeren.
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