Where I Am Now

I don't know whether it is appropriate to share these thoughts. It is my response to the entire (for me) delusional idea of "moving on." I appreciate that the vocabulary around grief is limited and that there is no easy way of describing the particulars of such individual devastation. So often it feels, because of linguistic limitations, that the failure of words to capture the depth of emotion, forces us to believe that grieving is an all or nothing process. Either one "moves on," bucks up, behaves appropriately, finds "hope," or one becomes a burden, a drain, a sloppy, self-pitying, self-indulgent mess. How disgusting. How like a pathetic emotional woman. A woman with no guts. A leech, a drain. Kicked to the curb. Cut from the herd.

But I think it is much more complex than that. I believe that we can be broken, destroyed, gutted and strong enough to accept our half-lives simultaneously.

So, here goes.......

The difference for me is that I am not "moving on." There is no "on" to move to. Yes, I live. That does not mean there is substance to, or meaning in my life.



I will say it. There is no real reason to live my life. This is not about suicide. Nothing so final. Losing Maxx ended my existence in the only way I knew I could be alive--as his mom. He completed the circle and it is now irreparably broken. Some people do not make it out of this disaster "alive" in the way we know and expect life to be (or become again), and I believe I am one of those.

I have not come to this lightly. I do not expect others to understand. My own particular reasons for why and how I have developed this way are unique to me, as are any of the forces that shape our lives, and they do not allow for any external or internal reality other than the stark loss that envelopes me. This is not a popular, or even tolerated stance. Everything, everyone, pushes us mercilessly without exception, or a second breath, to rejoin the flow. I am not capable of doing this. I am, on the other hand, very strong and extremely capable at surviving. That is my habit and it is as powerful as my refusal to pretend that anything will ever be OK again. Ever. So, I am Sysyphus. I cannot live, nor can I give up.

I ruminate, I read, I watch films, I write the same things over and over carefully crafting descriptions of the same event--the end of my life. I obsessively examine what has become of my life both while awake and in my dreams. I stare at others in dismay and often through tears. I am drawn to the energy of the living, but I hold myself apart. Maxx was my bridge. And he is gone. Though, unfortunately, while I am strong enough to remain erect most of the time, I am not strong enough to build another bridge. Nor do I want to.

I have tried to be someone other than who I am for my daughter and to some degree, my husband. They are all I have left and I have no wish to hurt them. My feeling is that they will (and have) gone forward without me. And that is as it should be, but I can no longer live for them in a way that perverts my own authenticity so that they might have an easier time of it. I have my battle and they have theirs.Though I have wished desperately that my daughter could be a comfort to me (and I to her), this has not happened. I am as lost to her in the storm of my anguish as she is to me in the winds of her own. Steve stands by me. He is as ruined as I am.

All threads were broken, connections unraveled, and unraveling still. Here and there I am able to knot a few loose strands together strong enough to withstand the drag from one day to the next. But, I am alone in my efforts. There is no family. There are no friends. There is not now, nor has there ever been any safety net. I am one who put all her hope for a life well-lived in the hands of one beautiful child. And that beautiful child died. I was mistaken. I see that now. I made him responsible for my happiness and it is likely he felt that burden even as I denied it was happening. I loved him to distraction. How could he not have known? And this alone probably caused him additional pain, understanding that he was dying and that his passing would likely destroy me. What that must have done to him is a thought I can sustain only in short bursts, for the knowledge that I might have caused him more pain is unendurable. But it is what happened and there is no way, or reason to change, deny, reconstruct, or resolve any of it.

So, while I acknowledge the new realities that others choose and are able to build for themselves, I know this is not my path. At the same time, though everything conspires to keep those of us who have sunk below eye level from giving contours or voice to this pain, this is all I can do. The rest---all the various activity that defines a life is just so much badly hammered together scaffolding--precarious, unstable, destined to be blown away in the first fierce gust. When that happens, and it does and will for all of us, we have only ourselves.

Perhaps then, my choice, if one can call it that, not so much about where I won't go, as it is about facing down the demons where I stand now and from whom I choose not to run.

Shroud

I wonder how long I can write about this loss. Forever, I suppose. Though it makes me uncomfortable to leave the faucet open, so that the dripping never ceases. There is a precarious balance in grief. It is rather like a fine art that requires a certain mastery. There is a measured pace to its expression that is particularly so if one makes the choice to live in the shadow of its sacred darkening.

This is not an uncomplicated choice. It carries with it great risk because to follow ones heart in this way is to self-ostracize, to purposely select the shunned life. First one must make the decision to feel what one feels for as long as it is necessary. This alone can take years, I think, for the desperate need to avoid all that is frightful can be a powerful temptation. Easy, so easy to choose the soft drape of anesthesia, to fold oneself under the umbrella of pointless "doing," ceaseless, directionless activity. Easy, except for those whose demons turn the spotlight into the corners, keep the kleig lights on so that there is no darkened corner into which one can crawl. I am one whose mind will not shut down, whose crawlspaces have all been illumined by a power, it seems, that is not my own. Though perhaps I delude myself. No matter. The reality is that my room is awash with the stark, unforgiving light of my loss. So, the decision is made, or more precisely forced into existence.
Then, once the lines are cast, there comes the dance for survival. At every turn, an inconceivable stretch of one's limbs, a contorted reach beyond imagining, a wild flinging to ford flash flood waters where a moment before one had been standing on what was certainly firm ground.

Clearly, there is no choreographed sense to this danse macabre. It is more like being held captive by an unseen puppeteer whose abrupt movements cannot be anticipated and never controlled.

So, I write and I feel guilty for writing. I feel guilty for having come to this deep excavation, this place, this writerly "being" where I have longed to live my entire life-- carried here, not by some personal and laudable commitment of my own, but tossed along in the torrential current of pain begun with my son's death. I am guilty that the opening in my heart through which race all my deepest, most confounding sensibilities of "self " cloaked in the overpowering need to examine and comment upon each one, can only have been released in the bloodrush of my son's passing.



This is what my husband and daughter call my "drama." I "use" it to create and maintain a pall of unforgivable self-fulfilling misery, something around which they must walk carefully and through which they cannot penetrate. They cannot find me, see me, know me, feel me, unless they acknowledge the shadow that accompanies my every step. And though their naming is spoken most often in anger, they are right. My "drama" is my shroud. They do not understand, perhaps because they cannot see through or past their own anger and loss, that the shroud is not something I have chosen to wear in defense against them or the world, but because it has become my skin, a scarred inflexible patchwork of flesh grafted in anguish.

Confusion

I have written a few things that I have meant to post, but then lost total interest--in writing, in posting, in expression. One of the hardest things about grieving is the inherant futility that becomes such a pervasive part of one's personality, outlook, approach to living. Honestly, who really cares about my personal experience of this holocaust. I hardly care anymore. None of it matters. It's as pointless as dusting furniture in an empty house.

But, I have nothing else to do. So, here are some new posts, though I'm not certain why I am bothering, or what really I'm doing.

I am not very good at this. I mean any of it. Life. I am simply too confused on how it should be "done."

Here are some bullet points:

I want to write but I don't know where to start, in what genre, how to begin, how to punctuate, how to close, where/if/how/why I should submit anything anywhere.
I can't get my mind straight. I don't know what thought to follow, or how far to go with it. Should I really, finally learn how to use my 4G phone or my camera? When should I stop editing a sentence?
Should I vacuum, call my daughter, ride the stationary bike, start a new diet, learn Pilates instead of doing the same 7 yoga poses over and over again? Should I start using my hand weights again? Should I join a gym or take a class?
Would it make any difference if I took my job seriously? Would my thoughts of Maxx diminish somewhat in direct correlation to how intently I was able to concentrate on the superfluities of "working?"
Should I volunteer to work with shelter dogs?
Should I start crying now or later?
What the fuck am I doing?

All I really know is that I hurt all the time. I desperately try to corral my thoughts into one pen or another in absurd attempts to manage the chaos that blasts from the moment I awaken until I try to sleep at night--at which point the dreaming begins. There is no rest. How many times have I written, "I am lost." How many more times must I, will I write those words? Is this internal explosion a permanent state of being? I fear that it is.

Sometimes, when I would lie with Maxx as he began to drift off to sleep, I would have the sense, really the vision, that I was soaring over mountains and valleys, rivers, and farm scapes far below. Like those airplane shots in travel logs. Controlling my sweeping dips and arcs, seeing all that expansive beauty below me while my baby boy's back was fitted snugly into my chest, the steady, soothing sounds of his thumb sucking, a musical backdrop to my flight. Such safety. Flight without the risk. (Though wasn't it all risky? How could such deep love not be the risk of a lifetime?)

Now I am shot upwards suddenly as if I were propelled by a landmine. There is no small curved body with its luxurious fleshy baby smell, no birdlike chirpy sounds, no fuzzy head against which to nuzzle. Just the explosion of my heart and mind. Just the explosion.

Of course, there hadn't been a fuzzy head against which to snuggle for over 17 years when he died. But that is the other thing about grief. What were once poignant memories of a shared past become grindingly painful realities in the present. The past becomes our now. And more frighteningly, a future freighted with the burden of loss.

Passing

It is again November. The fourth November since Maxx's death. I say death because I don't believe he "passed" anywhere. He died.

When I was 32 , a year before Maxx was born, Steve, Megan, then 3, and I lived in a cramped two bedroom duplex in Alhambra. One afternoon in late May of 1985, my mother, who had been gravely ill for almost four years with metastasized breast cancer, had collapsed on the kitchen floor of her apartment about 40 minutes away in San Pedro. The 62 year old divorcee who lived directly beneath my parents in a two bedroom carbon copy flat, heard the sudden dull thud of her fall as my mother stood at the counter pouring hot water for a cup of tea. The neighbor rushed upstairs. Later, that same woman who, by the way, ended up marrying my father not quite two years after my mother died, liked to "thank god" that she had been at home and not out as she usually was at that time of day performing her rigorous roster of pastoral duties as an ordained minister of the Unity Church. Wasn't it lucky that she hadn't yet left and so could be with my mother while she "transitioned?"

Sitting on the kitchen floor, in a puddle of Earl Gray holding my mother's hand, waiting for the ambulance that would take her to the hospital where she died several days later.

"What luck that I was there with her, or she would have been entirely alone," she would comment at every opportunity eying me like a scrappy nasty tempered plucked parrot.

"You know, Lis, (she liked to use my family nickname without ever asking me) sometimes your mom would just sit there in the kitchen and bang on the floor to have me come up and help her put on her bra when your father was gone." My mother would never have done such a thing. Like some kind of caged chimpanzee.

I never stopped hating this woman even though she took good care of my father for the next 20 years, until he "transitioned" a year ago from Alzheimer's. She also assisted him in "transitioning" through his comfortable pension and is now living on whatever he left her in his will. Honestly, he was a bastard and she did me a favor.

Before she used the word in this context--to somehow soften the gut-wrenching details associated with the slow disintegration of the physical and emotional body--I had never heard this phrase and so was both aghast and horrified at the banality of the statement. "Transitioned?" Into what? Where? Having had no prior experience with death, or those who hovered at its edges, I had no idea at the time what the term meant, Apparently, this is what was (maybe still is) said when someone loses consciousness and "passes over."

In any case, Maxx did not pass. He died. Four Thanksgiving's ago. Four Halloween's. Four Christmas's. This week I have come apart. Megan spoke of cellular memory. I have heard the phrase and I understand it's meaning. This does not stop the shock that I register at the force with which it takes me down.

It is the change in seasons. The color of the light in the sky. The early chill in the evening. The darkness at 5:00 pm. The need to dress more warmly. A time when I used to begin buying warm socks and sweatshirts, hats and another umbrella. Now, these are just the days I crawl through to get to December 6th.

They are vaguely defined "people," and I used to be a nameless one among them. Accepting and accepted, they live with one another beneath that light, and whether it lasts forever or for a moment, there must be a kind of closeness while they are enveloped in the light. I am no longer one of them, however. They are up there, on the face of the earth; I am down here, in the bottom of a well. They possess the light, while I am in the process of losing it. Sometimes I feel that I may never find my way back to that world, that I may never again be able to feel the peace of being enveloped in the light, that I may never again be able to hold the cat's soft body in my arms. and then I feel a dull ache in the chest, as if something inside there is being squeezed to death."
Haruki Murakami
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle

Other

One of the things that happens when one loses a child is that our brains become "other." However we were used to thinking of ourselves, our loved ones, the rest of the world, vanishes. The familiarity, the subtle comfort we experienced in and around our ways of being alive, are extinguished. The circuits between our thoughts are broken. We are shockingly dissociated from our very selves. We are dissolved, disappeared. Not only had my son "been taken," but now, in this darkness I discovered that my own mind was gone. No longer safely contained within the loving confines of a structure called "my family," surrounded by the familiar irritations and joys of being alive, I was in a wasteland where anything and everything could attack, and did. Where previously there had existed miles of carefully constructed breastworks behind which I could take shelter, trenches into which I could dive, now I was hurtling into space, freed by my son's death to know the terror of an illusory reality blown to bits. I was undone. And into the vacuum created by his absence rushed every possibility for unraveling, finally and forever.


My mind would not stop. It does not stop, even now. The rush of despair brought with it every raw option for dissolution. I am not speaking of suicide, though I did, and sometimes still do, examine closely the choice for a final severance. Rather, there is the shock beyond the loss of Maxx, of losing myself to myself and all the destruction that entails. The breaking down of every single, conceivable knowing that defined me to me. This deconstruction continues.


I live in this body. I am 59. My hair is gray. My waist is thick. My skin is dry. My back hurts. My hips, left knee, jaw and neck crack when I move. I used to eat fish several times a week. I need to have my teeth cleaned. I have a job, a husband, a 30 year old daughter. We have two dogs. I like one, but not the other. I need to dust and clean the bathroom. I have a dead son who would have been 25 this past August.


All of this is real. But there is the other reality that exists; just there, in the space where Maxx should be. The door that flew open at his death stands ajar but it is not my son with his young man's lanky body, the palpable scent of energy, impatience, hope, simmering exuberance whose bursting aliveness fills its frame. It is only a faint shadow, an outline, a transparency through which all of everything, all of nothing can be glimpsed. The edges of a once sharp future now faded into the white-blue of an endless gaping sky.


I am in the hurricane of thought, unable to configure the raging into a cohesive ethic according to which I can live, or even die. Everything is real. Nothing is real.


Grief does that. It is a force as powerful as the cancer that killed my son.


The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. they had an intimate understanding of man's vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended the knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized. Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn't understand. Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness. And they had the caustic knowledge that no one had come between them and tragedy. Coming home was an experience of profound, perilous aloneness.

For these men, the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness. There was no one right way to peace; every man had to find his own path, according to his own history. Some succeeded. For others, the war would never really end. Some retreated into brooding isolation or lost themselves in escapes. And for some men, years of swallowed rage, terror, and humiliation concentrated into what Holocaust survivor Jean Amery would call a "seething, purifying thirst for revenge."
Barbara Hillenbrand
"Unbroken"

November, 2011 Four Years Ago

Four years ago, I lost my 21 year old son, Maxx Wendell, to a rare, aggressive T-Cell Lymphoma. This cancer was the horrible, preventable result of having been prescribed medication to keep his ulcerative colitis, a condition with which he was diagnosed at the age of 12, in remission. Medication about which there was no public disclosure regarding its potentially deadly consequences. That is another story.

Losing a child is insanely catastrophic. Literally. Those who live with this loss will understand immediately. A tedious introduction to the devastation of grief is unnecessary. Others can never imagine the depths to which we descend, the hollow silences into which the whispers of our lost past penetrate, the sound of our own internal howling.

In the years since Maxx died I have written thousands upon thousands of words in efforts to reclaim what I can only think of as my own brain. My sanity. My footing. And still, I am not able to say that any of my efforts have made a difference--whether or not my position in space and time is really more about finding my way back to kneeling than being flattened into the earth.

I am still here. I am still writing. Seems I cannot stop. Don't know why I would. Can't watch him grow, Won't be at a law school graduation. Won't be at his wedding or the birth of any children he might have had. There are no more gifts to buy, no more dinners out, no more wildly funny or thoughtfully considered conversations to have. No more Maxx. Not in this life with his family where he belongs. With his beautiful older sister. With his dad. With me, here, the mother to whom he gave birth. Here, where he should be until I die first.

So... I will write. Maybe someone will read.