Ok, so I'd love to say that my many-month absence has been tied into my inability to change the language settings on my Gmail account. I'd love to say that it's because I've been traveling. Or because I've found a new job.
All of these things are true. But they're not correct.
There's no good reason for me to neglect this space except one: I didn't know where to go. What on earth do you say while you grieve? "Hello, everyone... here's a post about how I'm still grieving..."
No. And I also felt the need not to write anything silly. Like how I don't really know what "business smart" means, as a dress code. How the centrifuge at the laundromat shredded my only appropriate pair of pants...
But tonight, I think I've isolated something that is both past and future. In as much as I want to think about either of those things.
I've been reading Nicola Griffith, lately. The most recent of her Aud Torvingen series. Let's nevermind the fact that I think of Aud as--that, in fact, she is-- a superhero. Let's not discuss how passionately I want her to simply occupy my couch; to feel her spring-coiled power, to look at the gorgeous expanse of her legs in my living room. No, that's all just good writing.
What I'm interested in is how deftly this novel explores the concept of fear. Fear in every tense.
My girlfriend and I don't, generally, discuss certain feelings. We don't much "process." We don't really know how to, not with each other. It's a strange state, actually. One that forces me to be far less verbal, and entirely more present. It's important that she gets my message right from the beginning; it's vital that I understand hers.
But tonight, somehow fear came out. The way we anticipate it, the way we hurt over what is simply a message. The way we worry it into a great monster. And my girlfriend--my weathervane and my lee--named her fear for me.
It's so simple in its brutality. I can comfort, I can soothe. I can open myself up and say, "Here I am. I'm just like you." But I cannot protect. It is not only me who has lost. Who is grieving. And who, again, will lose.
There is always a monster bigger than you.
November 6, 2010
May 22, 2010
What I Meant
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.
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 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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