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.