by Elizabeth Hazen
For my forty-fifth birthday, on a whim, I ordered a kit to make a dollhouse room—not a whole house, but a single studio with a bookshelf and desk and tiny guitar. I waited for it to arrive with a vaguely familiar giddiness, like when I was a child and my mother helped me order a new toy from the Sears catalogue. I checked tracking, the twenty-first century version of looking for the mailman out the window. I was filled with a sense of possibility.
In 2027, GRACE & GRAVITY will be edited and published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Submissions for Volume 12: Grace in Justice are open through November 15th.
Three days after I turned forty-five, I learned that a former student had died. She was sixteen. There were whispers of fentanyl, assurances it wasn’t suicide, but I really don’t know what happened except that her sister found her and couldn’t wake her up and now her mother, a teacher with whom I had worked, was posting hundreds of photographs of her on Facebook, so every time I checked my feed, she was staring at me with her giant teal eyes. I still pictured her as a toddler coming into the office I shared with her mother, shyly accepting the stickers I offered. I felt the injury of her loss in ways I would not have predicted. I was so weepy that I wondered about perimenopause. I embraced my seventeen-yearold son whenever he emerged from his room.
When I finally unpacked the kit two days before the funeral, I was stymied by the hundreds of pieces sealed in separate plastic baggies and the eighteen pages of instructions. I had believed it would feel good to build something, and I was charmed by the whimsy of returning to a childhood pleasure now that I am firmly middle-aged, but the parts were too small, and I had no energy to figure out the complicated directions. I now knew I would never be able to assemble so lovely a room as the one pictured on the box. What had I been thinking? I am too impatient, too imprecise.
Afraid to attend the service alone, I texted former colleagues and arranged to carpool. I took an Ativan. In a pew near the back of the packed church, I considered the possibility that the collective mourning, the vibrations of sobs and stifled rage, could be absorbed by the masses, lessening the pain for the family. But this was magical thinking, a grasping at agency in a situation beyond my control. The permanence of death hits more concretely than it did when I was in my twenties, and I understand now that grief is like love; it expands and grows around us, accommodating and steadfast. I keep seeing her face. I feel her loss in my gut—not like a punch but like an ulcer. A cutting absence. And I keep thinking, if this is how I feel, what about her sister? What about her mother?
The next week, I finally cut my losses and tucked the dollhouse kit into a storage ottoman that contains all my abandoned crafts: collaging supplies, embroidery sets, an eyeglass case with the image of a cactus I began crossstitching a few years earlier. Over and over, I fall in love with the idea of focus, of repetition, of making things—lovely, delicate things that my husband or son or friends might enjoy. But I get bored, overwhelmed. There are too many details, everything is too precious. Ultimately, I keep the unfinished projects out of sight and mostly forget about them until the next whim takes hold and the cycle repeats.
Six months after her death, I still think of her most days, even fleetingly, and then think how her mother will never have a day again that is not a measure of grief and this is too much to consider, the tragedy too random, my fear for my own son too acute, so I try not to think about it at all. But on what would have been her seventeenth birthday, I fall into the rabbit hole of photographs her mother posts, drafting messages I never send.
When I was seven or eight, I had a dollhouse built from balsa wood. I have no recollection of its construction except a tactile memory of the wood glue we used to shingle the roof peeling from the tips of my fingers. The house had four rooms and a staircase and window boxes I filled with tiny flowers I bought at the craft store with my allowance. I furnished the house with cabinets, miniature dishes, a wicker basket smaller than a thimble, balls of yarn fashioned from single strands of embroidery floss, bedspreads clipped from fabric scraps. I wallpapered the rooms and upholstered wood sofas and chairs, but even then, my fingers were too fat, my workmanship shoddy, this world I tried to create within the larger world not quite within my grasp.
I “♥” all her mother’s posts on Facebook, but don’t comment. I think of the last conversation I had with her nearly three years earlier—something about boys making inappropriate comments—but the details are gone. I want to believe I gave her wise advice, but in truth I can’t remember. So much has changed since then, I barely remember who I was myself. This forgetting nags me, compounds the loss. What else have I forgotten? How can I mourn what I cannot recall? How do any of us know which of the endless daily wonders we should try to keep?
Occasionally, I take the box from the ottoman and consider the dollhouse studio. I still like the idea of it. I even have moments of believing I have the wherewithal to complete such a project, just as I did when I was young. I clear my desk with every intention of building it, or at least starting to build it, but end up watching videos of other people assembling tiny rooms. Sometimes I imagine that I am watching myself, that it is my hand holding the slenderest tweezers, placing a single rose no bigger than a dandelion seed into a vase on the vestibule, everything sized for a person no bigger than a finger, a person who does not exist.
Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Epoch, Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. She has published two collections of poetry with a third slated for publication in 2026. She lives in Baltimore with her family.
