ICE PACK

In the early years after Maxx died, I wrote a good deal-- attempting to use landscape metaphor in my descriptions of what grief might “look” like. I dreamt of trying to climb out of cavernous holes in a desert floor, desperately clinging by my fingertips to small outcroppings of crumbling earth. I huddled in the backs of tunnels, scraping my skin against jagged rocks. Once, Steve was driving a car in which I was a passenger and he simply drove us off the edge of a high cliff. We sailed out into the open air for seconds, then began the plunge toward earth. I looked at him, my mouth open in a silent scream, thinking, “Well, this is it. This is how I die. It really is over.”

This week I read what felt to me to be one of the best descriptions of the uncharted, terrifying journey that is grief. “Journey” really isn’t the right word--something else that is alluded to in the passages below. It feels too simple, too bland to describe the experience of losing a child. We have no language to accurately convey the lives we lead now. But Mr. Sides has captured, as well as any writer can, (without knowing that he did, I’m sure) the utter helplessness that comes from having lost all sense of control, any sense of the familiar, all meaning in the face of a catastrophe as large as child loss.

This excerpt is from “In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette,” by Hampton Sides, Doubleday, 2014, (pp 269-270).

...time was running out; the short Arctic summer would soon expire, and they would be trapped on the winter ice.

At least then, however, the ice would make some manner of sense. At least then it would freeze into something reliable, with surfaces that feet could understand.  There was no order to this kind of ice, no consistency. Its every feature--its color, texture, solidity, expansiveness, crystalline structure, collapse points, tendency to shift, potential for fracturing, capacity for absorbing or reflecting light-seemed in constant flux.

...One could stare at it all day and never see coherence. Needle ice gave way to striped puddles, to thick driven snow, to ruined battlefields of shards and bricks, to spectral blue sculptures of ancient ice, and to the wind-whipped corrugations of snow that the Russians called sastrugi. The pack’s logic, its forces of repulsion and attraction, were inscrutable. It was the very definition of random.

Splashing and stumbling over it, the men kept trying to find the lip of some pattern, something predictable or usable, some groove they could lay their thoughts into. But none was apparent. This melting icescape seemed to observe an Arctic corollary of pi-- a sequence that never repeated or resolved itself. Every scalloped intricacy, every winking lane, every hummock and pressure ridge, every honey-combed crevice offered mysterious new warps of design.

At first, De Long strove for a vocabulary to characterize this exasperating quality of the ice….Finally, he seemed to tire of descriptors, settling instead on one all-purpose word: mess.

“A fearful mess,” “the rotten ugly mess,” a confused mess,” “one bad mess,” “the sliding, shifting mess.”

That’s a perfect descriptor: “mess.”