Well, I haven't posted much. Clearly. Of course, those of you who know me probably don't expect much, anyway. And I guess I appreciate that.
The truth is, I have written. I've written three or four different posts. Most deleted because they're, really, not what I want to say. Always, there is the line from Prufrock: That's not what I meant, at all.
But writing goes the way of living; very often, what comes out is a great surprise. I sit down to do one thing, and, somehow, I create another. So, to circumvent any need for poetry, I will make a list (my writer-friend Jill has illustrated the succinct power of the list) of all that is with me.
1. I miss my brother.
2. I am giving myself license. To miss him and to be self-destructive.
3. Self-destruction is less dramatic, as I get older.
4. I need. I have an intense need--the kind which is there in all of us, all the time.
5. Loss makes this need a sad hunger. Insatiable.
6. History has taught me: this will become a longing. And then a simple hurt. And then a fact.
7. The fact is that I could not save him. I could not, maybe, ever have saved him.
Also, there is this: I'm back in Copenhagen, with what was waiting for me. Regular life. Normal life. Easy to be here, without him. It's a guilty ease. But also, I am immobilized. And I'm not particularly self-motivated, as a rule.
So, again, this is not what I want to say. Or even what I meant. What I meant is his smile and hopeful voice: Hey, big sister... It is a person, flesh and bone. Living, hands and blood.
But I do understand, now, that words are the only thing I can do. And I understand, now, that these symbols are an adequate illustration for loss. Because they are essentially a removal. Sorry little place keepers for the thing itself.
May 22, 2010
May 13, 2010
Things
Of course, it doesn't make sense. There is no sense in it.
If this were someone else’s thing, their life, there’s little doubt it might have gone this way. There’s little doubt that the twenty-five year old boy would have succumbed to all the demons he’d met.
How fitting would have been that funeral, then. How easily canonized the pretty day, the hand-in-hand walk from the grave back to the church.
I process all of these things, now. They are all a part of this, and yet still wrong. Grief delivers all things wrong, to me. It makes an uncommon family phone call portentous; it turns the crystal around my neck into a life vest.
In short, I feel the need to ward off everything. I feel myself descending to a place where life is a warning, a line cobbled in stone, a last breath.
The ordinary fact of it is that I ache for my father. A hurt I can’t believe. I ache for me, and for all of us. All of us who had this boy—this magnificent boy—as our care. We could have done better, I have thought. Because somewhere, there’s an outcome—a purely rational outcome, I think. A boy who didn’t die.
Reality, however, is where we all fail. It’s where we grieve and suffer until our throats go numb. It’s where we find how much we loved, are loved; qualifiers so often measured not in major events, but in moments. And in things.
I gave my brother two items of note in the last few years. One, a framed picture: I held him, a child sleeping in a rocking chair. The other was a modest silver cross I’d found in our mother’s jewelry box. I was, for some silly and perhaps not-silly reasons, convinced that it protected me. And I’d told him to wear it.
Objects. Baseballs, and trophies, a worn leather belt. T-shirts and wallets. Just little remainders. These are what I have, what I keep. But, still, they work like amulets. They feel like some kind of power.
Funny thing, though, is the power that we are. That thing that is living, alive and unbroken. I can hold this baseball—I can wear these jeans, this sad little scarf—and I will. But these are nothing so much as an afterthought. A longing.
The day my brother died, there were two things of consequence on his nightstand. One, the picture—an almost blurry, candid shot of his sister holding him in a rocking chair. The other, a tarnished silver cross.
If this were someone else’s thing, their life, there’s little doubt it might have gone this way. There’s little doubt that the twenty-five year old boy would have succumbed to all the demons he’d met.
How fitting would have been that funeral, then. How easily canonized the pretty day, the hand-in-hand walk from the grave back to the church.
I process all of these things, now. They are all a part of this, and yet still wrong. Grief delivers all things wrong, to me. It makes an uncommon family phone call portentous; it turns the crystal around my neck into a life vest.
In short, I feel the need to ward off everything. I feel myself descending to a place where life is a warning, a line cobbled in stone, a last breath.
The ordinary fact of it is that I ache for my father. A hurt I can’t believe. I ache for me, and for all of us. All of us who had this boy—this magnificent boy—as our care. We could have done better, I have thought. Because somewhere, there’s an outcome—a purely rational outcome, I think. A boy who didn’t die.
Reality, however, is where we all fail. It’s where we grieve and suffer until our throats go numb. It’s where we find how much we loved, are loved; qualifiers so often measured not in major events, but in moments. And in things.
I gave my brother two items of note in the last few years. One, a framed picture: I held him, a child sleeping in a rocking chair. The other was a modest silver cross I’d found in our mother’s jewelry box. I was, for some silly and perhaps not-silly reasons, convinced that it protected me. And I’d told him to wear it.
Objects. Baseballs, and trophies, a worn leather belt. T-shirts and wallets. Just little remainders. These are what I have, what I keep. But, still, they work like amulets. They feel like some kind of power.
Funny thing, though, is the power that we are. That thing that is living, alive and unbroken. I can hold this baseball—I can wear these jeans, this sad little scarf—and I will. But these are nothing so much as an afterthought. A longing.
The day my brother died, there were two things of consequence on his nightstand. One, the picture—an almost blurry, candid shot of his sister holding him in a rocking chair. The other, a tarnished silver cross.
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