“For I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping.”

Joyce Carol Oates in The Tattooed Girl

For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping

If I can ever believe these words, so ethereal, so lyrical, describing both the object and its reflection in a way that adds dimension to a life flattened by despair, I will have reclaimed my son. For now, the moments, the hours, the months of longing have led only to more longing. A mirror within a mirror, cast back and back a thousand times always and only to the original image. A boy with tearful blue eyes.

Yesterday I went to see another movie. A silly boring animated film someone recommended as being “so much more than a cartoon.” I don’t know what that means. A cartoon is always a cartoon. Even with a tender message, a cartoon remains brittle. But I went and I remained seated though several rows were filled with children from summer camps, whispering and giggling. Little heads everywhere in the darkness. When the movie was over I walked the short distance to the drug store. I bought nail polish, more body cream I don’t need, a razor to shave my legs, some eyeshadow. Then I drove to the memorial that the Compassionate Friends Organization has dedicated to children who have died.

About a quarter mile down a bike/running path, past a bench bearing a small plaque from a mother to a son with whom she had shared the best nineteen years of her life, there to the right appearing almost apologetically in a patchy surround of scrawny oak trees,—four large stones to which bronze plaques had been affixed, filled with the names and dates of children who have died. Some who were born and died the same day. Others, in their teens and twenties. So many names. So many lives unlived. How had all these parents survived? All around the path separated by marshlands and a shallow inlet from the bay, are large homes. In the backyard of one were the sounds of children yelling from a pool. I could see the top of the water slide, a little boy perched aloft, then disappearing, squealing with pleasure.

I sat on a little bench in what shade there was. I talked to Maxx. I looked at the few seabirds flying above and I watched a few perched some distance away in the wetlands. It was hot. Maybe over 90. There, across the street from where I had parked my car, was the hospital where 10 years ago, after chemo, I had received 6 weeks of radiation for my treatment of breast cancer. Every day, five days a week, I drove from work to receive my allotted minutes of internal burning under a giant revolving, whirring machine with red laser beams criss-crossing my naked chest in a lead paneled, air-cooled room. Showing up for my prescribed treatment so that I could live to raise my children. If not for them, I would not have fought like a demon, willingly subtracting body parts one after another. If I had known then, a decade later, that I would be sitting on this bench in the oppressive summer air mourning my son, would I have chosen to die instead? Would I have chosen my own death rather than be with him as he died? What kind of life is this that a mother has to ask herself these questions?

Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum?” I asked him in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.”

Primo Lev in Survival at Auschwitz

I picked up a small stone and set it upon a dead oakleaf on top of one of the memorial boulders. Then, hot and sweaty, I drove home. I will say this. I don’t want to be here. I just don’t. I cannot find any peace. My heart shatters again and again, moment after moment. I cannot stand this life.