Lisawwendell

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    Lisawwendell

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The Loneliness of the Long Distance Mother

“Lisa, remind me again what Laura’s son’s name was. I can’t remember in my fudge of a brain.”

My lovely, heartbroken friend who lost her beautiful grown son to cancer 6 years ago was asking me, another bereaved mother whose young adult son died from T-Cell Lymphoma two years before that, about the name of a third young male cancer victim who died 7 years ago. She said her brain is “fudge.” That’s on a good day.

Immediately, I thought I remembered the title of a book, The Brain of a Long Distance Runner, which turned out to be “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.” Not exactly what I thought I recalled in terms of the metaphor I was seeking, but just as apt, perhaps more so. In any case, where is the book, the article, the professional scholarly research on either--the loneliness of the long distance mother, or your brain on the long haul of grief?  Because that is what we, the bereaved of many seasons, are doing-- running the longest distance, the rest of our lives--under the weightiest burden imaginable---surviving without our children. And over the extended course of this slog, our brains have become---other---altered, if you will. In the bright-sided lingo of the day, it is called “transformation.”  I prefer the term devolution.

The early stages of this protracted process are forgiven--almost excitedly so--as if the act of showing kindness is something for which the outside world is to be congratulated.. It is expected that we will be unable to think clearly, make sound decisions, move into our new empty lives with determination---though it is not at all unusual that our so-called “bereavement leave” will amount to no more than 3 days--maybe a week or two if we work for a “compassionate” supervisor who “understands.” But, those early days, during which we have been begrudgingly given a time- stamped pass on our inability to function, come to a halting, often uncomfortable, (always to us, unbelievable) end. Death, after all is death. The living must continue to soldier on. And most of us do, regardless of the irrational shame, self-loathing, and the betrayal we are likely to feel as we engage in this forced march further and further along into a pointless future away from our beloved children.

With guns at our backs we learn to carry the weight of our loss, but our hearts are hobbled and our minds have shrunk. I believe this is true--perhaps literally--but certainly in a figurative sense that absolutely translates into the realities of our lives. We are no longer capable of either generating or sustaining the neurological synaptic energy required to function, feel, be, as we once were. It is gone. What does this mean? What does this, as the mental health professionals like to say in their oily psych-speak, “look like”?

I imagine how our brains begin the dissolution process is different for everyone, but I venture to say that perhaps one of the most unnerving aspects is the change in our perception of time. All time. Linear time, that concept upon which we base our entire lives, is shattered. The past and the present fuse into one and the same; the future, apart from the terror that accompanies even the thought, disappears entirely. A hallmark of trauma, we are stuck right here, right now, in a nightmare that will not end. This stasis wreaks havoc. We lose our place in the scheme of things;  lose any autonomic physical or emotional stability that can be assumed from the simple movement and placement of ourselves in space. We are in a free-fall determined and represented by a catatonia of the soul.

Over time, this inner disappearance of a center is reflected externally in an overall inability to think, to act, to find any meaning, any purpose. We lose ourselves in this sorrow and the sorrow engulfs us. Without the active practice of thinking, acting, being, we become ghosts. To those around us we may appear to be present, but our presence is an illusion, a hologram…. we are long gone….. Then, even our own gone-ness becomes irrelevant, most poignantly perhaps, to ourselves. What happens to us no longer matters--not in any sense that those who have not been through this holocaust can even begin to understand.

There is, in all of this, an odd upside, or at least a lighter shade of black. Being a “shade” is not necessarily the worst thing that can occur (that, certainly, has already happened).. There is a definite, albeit disconcerting, freedom in living the invisible life. Freedom first from the expectations of others, then more significantly, from our own expectations of ourselves to remain in a world where we are not, cannot, will not, be seen.

And then, under the umbrella of absence, we are, truly, completely at liberty to forget….the names of other people’s children, the absurd demands of a supervisor, a distant relative’s birthday, where we dropped the car keys, laundry soap, to turn off the television, plug in our phones, to eat, sleep, laugh, breathe….and in the forgetting to become one with our loss. To disappear into the expansiveness of our broken hearts, to be defined, motivated, filled to the brim and pushed forward by that which has annihilated us.

Watch Your Thoughts

Every morning I think about life and death. I remember awakening to worries about work, or what to have for dinner, or an argument with Steve, or an extra five pounds I wanted to lose.  Now, I walk to the bathroom and only thoughts of death assail me. They begin before I can even pee. His dying. My living. Here we go. The weight descends. The day begins. Only it is always the same day, with the same thoughts. Dead, dead, dead. It is coming close to eight years. I say this to note the irrefutable horror that despite the time that has passed--every day begins with his death.  

Another thing. I am so tired of reading about how learning to tolerate one’s emotions is the key to initiating and maintaining mental health. It is the inability to tolerate one’s most painful, frightening sensations that leads to avoidance, continuing fear, anxiety and addiction. So advise the experts. Well, I can honestly say that I have not only been tolerating these feelings for most of my life, living with, trying to manage and accept various and sundry frights, but since Maxx died been subject to the worst storms of sorrow imaginable. In my 62 years of life, and in particular the last 8, I have lived bowed with loss, desperation and incalculable loneliness to the extent that I can’t even begin to understand any longer what is meant by the need to “integrate” this grief in some alchemical way that will allow me to ever again feel any sense of purpose or peace. This is simply not possible. It is what we used to call 30 years ago, psychobabble.

I did not become addicted to drugs. I did not become dependant upon alcohol. I never attempted suicide. I have simply continued.  I felt everything. I feel everything. I saw everything, I see it now. The memories do not fade. In fact, it may be that they become more clearly etched against the backdrop of passing time. My heart is heavy, freighted with the dregs of grief. The wash of pain, back and forth, never ends. Is this neurochemical habit, or tolerance?

I am reading a book called The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: And The True Story of a Life Lost in Thought--a book about OCD. The author, David Adam, writes: that “psychologists have identified three types of dysfunctional belief important in the development of OCD. The first is an inflated sense of threat and personal responsibility. The second is perfectionism and intolerance of uncertainty. The third is a belief in the over-importance of thoughts and the need to control them.”   

Further: “Inflated responsibility is probably the most important dysfunctional belief in OCD. Obsessive-Compulsives often feel responsible for having thoughts and for the negative consequence of their thoughts on themselves and others-and (this is what knocks me down)AND FOR NOT ACTING TO PREVENT THOSE CONSEQUENCES.They believe that if they have any influence over an outcome then THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE for it. This triggers a cascade of twisted secondary ideas--’having this thought means I want to do it’ or ‘if I fail to prevent harm then it is as BAD AS DIRECTLY CAUSING HARM.’ “ (Caps, mine.)

With these as qualifying characteristics, is this grief-stricken life in which I live not defined by OCD-the obsessive thinking that I caused my son’s death by not doing enough, or knowing enough to prevent it?

He also discusses the phenomenon of the disorder that results in disordered thinking that leads to mistrust, nay, disbelief in one’s memories of events. Am I misremembering because I cannot trust my own mind to play back either a realistic chronology, or more crucially, the interpretation of events that mirror that chronology? What really happened and when? Did I think this and then that? Did I do that based upon what I perceived to be real? Was what I believed to be true flawed at the outset because my thinking, my perceptions were skewed as a result of mental illness? An “illness” I never even realized I had?

I am not laying claim to suffering from OCD. Nor do I think, strictly speaking, that I have PTSD. But I do firmly believe there are striking elements of both disorders that have become lodged in my brain--so much so as to define who I am now in a way that feels to be permanent. A distinction of a particular sorrow. Branded onto my heart, burned forever into the synapses of my neurochemistry--inescapable.

In the facing page is this quote by “Unknown’

Watch your thoughts, for they become words.

Watch your words, for they become actions.

Watch your actions, for they become habits.

Watch your habits, for they become character.

Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

FURY (Part One)

"I plead to thee, oh Furies, avenge these heinous deeds. Descend with wings of razors, grant me the vengeance that I seek. I beg for retribution. Let the rivers all run red, punish those who swear false oaths and allow me my revenge."

When I was a little girl kneeling alone behind the closed door of my bedroom listening to my father shouting, my mother’s rage filled cursing, I remember feeling afraid. In those infinite moments when fear began its slow timeless seep into my brain- one sludgy drip at a time, any childlike assumptive sense of safety about the world was corroded into a twisted landscape of dwarfed possibilities. And born of this fear, inevitable by-products, came the oozing slime of anxiety, the undulating burn of fury.

Though years of self-study, analysis, and reading have helped me to intellectualize the genesis of these emotions in all clarity and understanding, this knowing has made little difference in my ability to either redirect or minimize my default emotion- instantaneous insurmountable anger. It is a place I can, and do, drop into in a nanosecond. I cannot say that I am transformed into a vengeful harpy for there really is no transformational process involved--an act that requires an alchemical transition from one thing into another. This is more the reflexive movement of someone throwing off a thin mantle of civility to reveal the thing that lies beneath--the muck of decades bubbling just below the surface.

“Here,” is what I am,” I silently scream. “Here.  Have a look. Then take a step back. Better yet, run.” The rage I feel is consuming. The need to apologize, to obfuscate, to deny has grown significantly less important over the years. It is as if an unseen hand has been chiseling away at the flat gray rockface to reveal, neither the graceful shape of meaning, nor a startled glimpse of the glittering essence of mindful purpose, not the opportunity for a momentary psychic swoon into the infinite universe of connectedness--but only this: a small hard mound of black grit. Obsidian scratchy bits that are at the center of my soul. About, and because of which even I, ever the agent of a seething wrath, can sustain awareness only temporarily. Yes, there is fear, but the anger that has layered itself in striations of molten lead--one eruption after another, after another--has made of the fear an inconsequential ash not worthy of notice, a mist of dust to be coughed away, extruded with all the other floating debris of a wasted life.

Once, this fury had a center. Nor did it then feel like a fury, but rather a powerful destiny to which I had willingly shackled myself. There was a centrifugal force that kept me anchored. So simple. My children. First one, and then the other. Individually, and together. I lived for them. My world existed, took shape, became real only because they had been borne. I was as nothing, or of very little substance, before they materialized, flesh and bone, tears and drool, pee and yeasty breastfed baby poop, dimpled elbows, and sticky snot; and later, much later, clusters of pimples, knobby knees, curling hair and soft swellings. Before this wellspring of fecund growth, the occurrence of which gave purpose to a series of heretofore random twitches that had passed for living, I became transfigured into one who simultaneously has, and sustains, life. How much greater a purpose than this? How is there a meaning more substantial? This was granted to me early---too early to realize the magnitude of the gift--though on some obscure level I knew it to be the only truth that mattered.

And then, after the willing giving over of my heart year after year to their combined overarching divinity, (for, to me that it exactly what it was) I was annihilated in the sudden and swift destruction that accompanied the removal, the unimagined disappearance of one half of the whole that had been my world. And with his vanishing, so too did the other half begin to subtract itself from my awareness until all that was left was a nothing that predated the nothing I had been before.

How does this not turn one into a screaming lunatic? How does this not create the pyre, ignite the kindling of rage into a conflagration of howling despair?

Christina’s World

Andrew Wyeth

2007

Amid the fires of the last century-

the cities and the Jews-

stands the Angel of Death

mighty as in the Plague Years

and in ascendancy still

Harvey Shapiro

“A Momentary Glory”

“You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth.You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. and when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near. let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as your could.

Louise Erdrich, “The Painted Drum”

When Maxx died I lost not only my son, my family as I knew it, and myself, but my home--not just our house on Leafwood where we had all lived for 17 years--but any sense of home I’d ever had, the intrinsic human need for a deeper feeling of placement on the earth. Uprooted, exploded into fragments, I became as bits of debris swirling in a vacuum; particles of matter blown by random gusts of hot, sucking wind.

Two years after he died, we moved out of the house where he had grown up. Such a cheerful little boy, an unrestrained bundle of gap-toothed smiles and excitement, curiosity and enthusiasm.  The spiritual, emotional, and physical embodiment of joy. He brought that with him, squirming wet from me, corkscrewing his lively being into this world, into my heart, where it seemed there would be no end to the promise of his life force, a continual unfurling of this fulsome love--this startling unexpected hope. Maxx, more than any other, settled me into this mess of an existence, a chaos I had never been able to explain, understand, contain or shape. He fixed me, with a firm definitive tuck and a pat into a pocket of this universe--his universe--where I was gently held -- comfortable, secure. He tied me to himself and my own knowing with a steady hand. I never again felt unmoored. Until he died.

Thereafter and literally overnight, though we remained in that house for two years, “being at home” was no longer a state of mind or physical space describing anything even vaguely associated with comfort or familiarity. What had once been our refuge, our family’s hearthstone had suddenly begun to emit a suffocating miasma of ghostly memories, driving me to fits of screaming and pounding the walls. From corner to corner, his bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, I shrieked his name. “Come back, come back, come back!”  

And so, at last, when I was able to finally recognize that our home had been replaced by the reflection in a funhouse mirror--distorted, bizarre, the hallway alternately too long or too short, the floors that came undulating up to meet me as I collapsed in a heap whenever it became too much to remain standing--I was able to make the concentrated effort required to pack and leave.

I never expected again to feel at home wherever we landed. And I can say now, almost six years and three moves later, that is exactly the case . Despite the fact that we have found a lovely rural area surrounded by farmland and vineyards, this is not home. I cannot say, wouldn’t even attempt to speculate that this home-lessness is a permanent condition, but I strongly suspect that it is. Losing Maxx remains a devastation on so many levels, not the least of which is my ability to feel that I belong--here, there, wherever. Home equals belonging--membership, relatedness to others, connectivity. These all feel gone now. I have become a refugee in my own life. A serial traveller, without standing in a world where every sunrise, scent, sound, visual, thought, reminds me of home; a passing whisper of what was, mocking my broken heart.

INCLEMENT WEATHER

Rembrandt, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

Strength isn't about feeling powerful or certain. It has very little to do with denial or avoidance. It is not a delusional reality bracketed by empty homilies and easy platitudes.  It is rarely a place of comfort and there is little immediate solace to be found anywhere within its lonely realm. Real strength is about crawling to the finish line on bloody hands and knees. Real strength births, with every harrowing breath, a courage we do not know we possess and though we never failed to recognize the depth of this ferocity in our beautiful dying children, we excoriate ourselves for following in their stead. We punish ourselves for doing exactly the thing for which we loved them ever more deeply as the light they shone in a gathering darkness dimmed. We blame ourselves for their deaths; we blame ourselves for living. We become as crazed animals--maddened by the confusion of our days, the push pull of of an agony that never ends, the suffocating nature of loneliness and longing. 

Here is a truth. It is as hard a truth to understand as it is to know our children died. Every day that we live is a testament to our strength. Every day that we wake into a new life of grief (for every day it is new again) we must reaffirm that this pain is what our purpose has become. This may not feel, or be true in the beginning when all of existence has been thrust underground. But in the movement of a time so achingly slow it as if we live permanently entombed, the blackened earth around us shifts enough so that we sense there is a choice to be made. I think it is a very simple choice, albeit one so complex and challenging in its ramifications, to make it once is not possible. The nature of this decision requires that it be made over and over and over again. Perhaps every day for the rest of our lives. 

We choose, as did our children, to keep going. They could no more escape their illness than we can escape our grief. We move into the hurricane every day clutching tight to our hearts the unspeakable pain, holding close the losses that now define us---but we move. And that is the choice. To move into this storm fused into one with the sorrow we will not, cannot leave behind.  That alone speaks to the greatest courage that as sentient beings we can ever know. This is who we are now. Mothers alone--but never without our children.