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"