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.