It is again November. The fourth November since Maxx's death. I say death because I don't believe he "passed" anywhere. He died.
When I was 32 , a year before Maxx was born, Steve, Megan, then 3, and I lived in a cramped two bedroom duplex in Alhambra. One afternoon in late May of 1985, my mother, who had been gravely ill for almost four years with metastasized breast cancer, had collapsed on the kitchen floor of her apartment about 40 minutes away in San Pedro. The 62 year old divorcee who lived directly beneath my parents in a two bedroom carbon copy flat, heard the sudden dull thud of her fall as my mother stood at the counter pouring hot water for a cup of tea. The neighbor rushed upstairs. Later, that same woman who, by the way, ended up marrying my father not quite two years after my mother died, liked to "thank god" that she had been at home and not out as she usually was at that time of day performing her rigorous roster of pastoral duties as an ordained minister of the Unity Church. Wasn't it lucky that she hadn't yet left and so could be with my mother while she "transitioned?"
Sitting on the kitchen floor, in a puddle of Earl Gray holding my mother's hand, waiting for the ambulance that would take her to the hospital where she died several days later.
"What luck that I was there with her, or she would have been entirely alone," she would comment at every opportunity eying me like a scrappy nasty tempered plucked parrot.
"You know, Lis, (she liked to use my family nickname without ever asking me) sometimes your mom would just sit there in the kitchen and bang on the floor to have me come up and help her put on her bra when your father was gone." My mother would never have done such a thing. Like some kind of caged chimpanzee.
I never stopped hating this woman even though she took good care of my father for the next 20 years, until he "transitioned" a year ago from Alzheimer's. She also assisted him in "transitioning" through his comfortable pension and is now living on whatever he left her in his will. Honestly, he was a bastard and she did me a favor.
Before she used the word in this context--to somehow soften the gut-wrenching details associated with the slow disintegration of the physical and emotional body--I had never heard this phrase and so was both aghast and horrified at the banality of the statement. "Transitioned?" Into what? Where? Having had no prior experience with death, or those who hovered at its edges, I had no idea at the time what the term meant, Apparently, this is what was (maybe still is) said when someone loses consciousness and "passes over."
In any case, Maxx did not pass. He died. Four Thanksgiving's ago. Four Halloween's. Four Christmas's. This week I have come apart. Megan spoke of cellular memory. I have heard the phrase and I understand it's meaning. This does not stop the shock that I register at the force with which it takes me down.
It is the change in seasons. The color of the light in the sky. The early chill in the evening. The darkness at 5:00 pm. The need to dress more warmly. A time when I used to begin buying warm socks and sweatshirts, hats and another umbrella. Now, these are just the days I crawl through to get to December 6th.
They are vaguely defined "people," and I used to be a nameless one among them. Accepting and accepted, they live with one another beneath that light, and whether it lasts forever or for a moment, there must be a kind of closeness while they are enveloped in the light. I am no longer one of them, however. They are up there, on the face of the earth; I am down here, in the bottom of a well. They possess the light, while I am in the process of losing it. Sometimes I feel that I may never find my way back to that world, that I may never again be able to feel the peace of being enveloped in the light, that I may never again be able to hold the cat's soft body in my arms. and then I feel a dull ache in the chest, as if something inside there is being squeezed to death."
Haruki Murakami
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
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"
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"
Friday, October 28, 2011
November, 2011 Four Years Ago
Four years ago, I lost my 21 year old son, Maxx Wendell, to a rare, aggressive T-Cell Lymphoma. This cancer was the horrible, preventable result of having been prescribed medication to keep his ulcerative colitis, a condition with which he was diagnosed at the age of 12, in remission. Medication about which there was no public disclosure regarding its potentially deadly consequences. That is another story.
Losing a child is insanely catastrophic. Literally. Those who live with this loss will understand immediately. A tedious introduction to the devastation of grief is unnecessary. Others can never imagine the depths to which we descend, the hollow silences into which the whispers of our lost past penetrate, the sound of our own internal howling.
In the years since Maxx died I have written thousands upon thousands of words in efforts to reclaim what I can only think of as my own brain. My sanity. My footing. And still, I am not able to say that any of my efforts have made a difference--whether or not my position in space and time is really more about finding my way back to kneeling than being flattened into the earth.
I am still here. I am still writing. Seems I cannot stop. Don't know why I would. Can't watch him grow, Won't be at a law school graduation. Won't be at his wedding or the birth of any children he might have had. There are no more gifts to buy, no more dinners out, no more wildly funny or thoughtfully considered conversations to have. No more Maxx. Not in this life with his family where he belongs. With his beautiful older sister. With his dad. With me, here, the mother to whom he gave birth. Here, where he should be until I die first.
So... I will write. Maybe someone will read.
Losing a child is insanely catastrophic. Literally. Those who live with this loss will understand immediately. A tedious introduction to the devastation of grief is unnecessary. Others can never imagine the depths to which we descend, the hollow silences into which the whispers of our lost past penetrate, the sound of our own internal howling.
In the years since Maxx died I have written thousands upon thousands of words in efforts to reclaim what I can only think of as my own brain. My sanity. My footing. And still, I am not able to say that any of my efforts have made a difference--whether or not my position in space and time is really more about finding my way back to kneeling than being flattened into the earth.
I am still here. I am still writing. Seems I cannot stop. Don't know why I would. Can't watch him grow, Won't be at a law school graduation. Won't be at his wedding or the birth of any children he might have had. There are no more gifts to buy, no more dinners out, no more wildly funny or thoughtfully considered conversations to have. No more Maxx. Not in this life with his family where he belongs. With his beautiful older sister. With his dad. With me, here, the mother to whom he gave birth. Here, where he should be until I die first.
So... I will write. Maybe someone will read.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
“For I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping.”
Joyce Carol Oates in The Tattooed Girl
For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.
Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping
If I can ever believe these words, so ethereal, so lyrical, describing both the object and its reflection in a way that adds dimension to a life flattened by despair, I will have reclaimed my son. For now, the moments, the hours, the months of longing have led only to more longing. A mirror within a mirror, cast back and back a thousand times always and only to the original image. A boy with tearful blue eyes.
Yesterday I went to see another movie. A silly boring animated film someone recommended as being “so much more than a cartoon.” I don’t know what that means. A cartoon is always a cartoon. Even with a tender message, a cartoon remains brittle. But I went and I remained seated though several rows were filled with children from summer camps, whispering and giggling. Little heads everywhere in the darkness. When the movie was over I walked the short distance to the drug store. I bought nail polish, more body cream I don’t need, a razor to shave my legs, some eyeshadow. Then I drove to the memorial that the Compassionate Friends Organization has dedicated to children who have died.
About a quarter mile down a bike/running path, past a bench bearing a small plaque from a mother to a son with whom she had shared the best nineteen years of her life, there to the right appearing almost apologetically in a patchy surround of scrawny oak trees,—four large stones to which bronze plaques had been affixed, filled with the names and dates of children who have died. Some who were born and died the same day. Others, in their teens and twenties. So many names. So many lives unlived. How had all these parents survived? All around the path separated by marshlands and a shallow inlet from the bay, are large homes. In the backyard of one were the sounds of children yelling from a pool. I could see the top of the water slide, a little boy perched aloft, then disappearing, squealing with pleasure.
I sat on a little bench in what shade there was. I talked to Maxx. I looked at the few seabirds flying above and I watched a few perched some distance away in the wetlands. It was hot. Maybe over 90. There, across the street from where I had parked my car, was the hospital where 10 years ago, after chemo, I had received 6 weeks of radiation for my treatment of breast cancer. Every day, five days a week, I drove from work to receive my allotted minutes of internal burning under a giant revolving, whirring machine with red laser beams criss-crossing my naked chest in a lead paneled, air-cooled room. Showing up for my prescribed treatment so that I could live to raise my children. If not for them, I would not have fought like a demon, willingly subtracting body parts one after another. If I had known then, a decade later, that I would be sitting on this bench in the oppressive summer air mourning my son, would I have chosen to die instead? Would I have chosen my own death rather than be with him as he died? What kind of life is this that a mother has to ask herself these questions?
Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum?” I asked him in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.”
Primo Lev in Survival at Auschwitz
I picked up a small stone and set it upon a dead oakleaf on top of one of the memorial boulders. Then, hot and sweaty, I drove home. I will say this. I don’t want to be here. I just don’t. I cannot find any peace. My heart shatters again and again, moment after moment. I cannot stand this life.
Joyce Carol Oates in The Tattooed Girl
For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.
Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping
If I can ever believe these words, so ethereal, so lyrical, describing both the object and its reflection in a way that adds dimension to a life flattened by despair, I will have reclaimed my son. For now, the moments, the hours, the months of longing have led only to more longing. A mirror within a mirror, cast back and back a thousand times always and only to the original image. A boy with tearful blue eyes.
Yesterday I went to see another movie. A silly boring animated film someone recommended as being “so much more than a cartoon.” I don’t know what that means. A cartoon is always a cartoon. Even with a tender message, a cartoon remains brittle. But I went and I remained seated though several rows were filled with children from summer camps, whispering and giggling. Little heads everywhere in the darkness. When the movie was over I walked the short distance to the drug store. I bought nail polish, more body cream I don’t need, a razor to shave my legs, some eyeshadow. Then I drove to the memorial that the Compassionate Friends Organization has dedicated to children who have died.
About a quarter mile down a bike/running path, past a bench bearing a small plaque from a mother to a son with whom she had shared the best nineteen years of her life, there to the right appearing almost apologetically in a patchy surround of scrawny oak trees,—four large stones to which bronze plaques had been affixed, filled with the names and dates of children who have died. Some who were born and died the same day. Others, in their teens and twenties. So many names. So many lives unlived. How had all these parents survived? All around the path separated by marshlands and a shallow inlet from the bay, are large homes. In the backyard of one were the sounds of children yelling from a pool. I could see the top of the water slide, a little boy perched aloft, then disappearing, squealing with pleasure.
I sat on a little bench in what shade there was. I talked to Maxx. I looked at the few seabirds flying above and I watched a few perched some distance away in the wetlands. It was hot. Maybe over 90. There, across the street from where I had parked my car, was the hospital where 10 years ago, after chemo, I had received 6 weeks of radiation for my treatment of breast cancer. Every day, five days a week, I drove from work to receive my allotted minutes of internal burning under a giant revolving, whirring machine with red laser beams criss-crossing my naked chest in a lead paneled, air-cooled room. Showing up for my prescribed treatment so that I could live to raise my children. If not for them, I would not have fought like a demon, willingly subtracting body parts one after another. If I had known then, a decade later, that I would be sitting on this bench in the oppressive summer air mourning my son, would I have chosen to die instead? Would I have chosen my own death rather than be with him as he died? What kind of life is this that a mother has to ask herself these questions?
Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum?” I asked him in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.”
Primo Lev in Survival at Auschwitz
I picked up a small stone and set it upon a dead oakleaf on top of one of the memorial boulders. Then, hot and sweaty, I drove home. I will say this. I don’t want to be here. I just don’t. I cannot find any peace. My heart shatters again and again, moment after moment. I cannot stand this life.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Birthday
Yesterday was a day of assault. Everywhere, everything was mortar fire. I did not come away unscathed. I was trying to keep quiet, a low inner profile because tomorrow (today) is Maxx’s 23rd birthday. I will not say “would have been.” I will not talk of him in the past tense.
The new college semester is beginning on Monday. The new Freshmen are landing on campus to move into their dorms. Young men walking in T-shirts and basketball shorts are beginning to appear. Young men with close-cropped hair and long legs taking loping strides across green lawns. Big shoes and back packs. The look of innocence and insouciance mixed with a bit of wide-eyed hesitancy. It is breaking my heart. Summer breezes blow dead leaves from the trees and into small swirling circles along the gutters.
Just at the lunch hour one of the full time professors, a Ph.D., the Co-Chair of the Psychology Department and a practicing therapist for over 20 years came into the back office to say hello. She taught Megan, she’s known me for about 12 years and she knows about Maxx. She has two grown sons of her own, one is Maxx’s age and the other a bit younger. She took Megan to dinner once during the first year after Maxx’s death to talk with her about how she had lost her own teenage brother when she was 18. I thought, given who she is, or at the least proclaims herself to be, that she knew better.
She announced to everyone that they were putting their house on the market and moving to the town in which we live—a city I would do anything in my power to leave. She comes from wealth, as does her husband. She is a well traveled woman—one who takes summers in Greece, Italy, all of Europe. She had just returned from a month in Africa. She is always tan. One of those for whom working to earn a living is probably completely financially unnecessary, but who likes to pepper her pronouncements about herself and her well-lived life with facetious remarks about how retirement, now, is impossible. One of those who chooses to cloak herself with the “salt-of-the-earth” persona when it is convenient and politically correct. “I’m a highly educated, cosmopolitan, thoughtful, professional, moneyed women who owns and wears eclectic clothing and jewelry from all over the world, with a beautiful family leading a charmed life---but I’m still “real,” a person of the earth.”
I was standing up to leave with my purse on my shoulder, ready to go to the grocery store during lunch—to test the waters of the drink and frozen food isles again—to see how much further I could go, or if I could do it at all, to subject myself to the fire of self-immolation, to withstand the frostbite of a dead heart, to walk past items I would have purchased for him, to look at packaged Sushi, to step from my ghost wasteland into the throbbing sound of people shopping, looking to feed themselves, gloating on the freefall gluttony of consumerism and all that implies in a life untroubled by suicidal gloom. I was holding my keys in my hand. My keys. I had a short list in my purse. If all went “well” in the store, I was going across the street to pick up some items at the drug store. I am patient with myself and I don’t plan too far ahead. Always, when I leave to drive somewhere alone, I am waiting for the car accident that I secretly hope will annihilate me in a violent blast of crushed metal and bone.
I was turning my back when she made this self-satisfied announcement about needing to buy a new home where it’s warmer than the foggy coastal town she lives in now, with a pool so her boys would have a place to bring their families, a party-house.
My jaw clenched. My head started to buzz. I looked at her in disbelief. Her “boys” are Maxx’s age. Did she just forget I had a son who died? Did she think because it was something that happened “a couple of years ago” that the mention of her future happy family gatherings was anything I would be interested in, or ready to hear, let alone acknowledge with pleasure at her continued good fortune? I did not respond because there were two other people to whom she was also speaking. I did not know what to do. To walk away. To run away. To scream and run. Perhaps it would have been different if we had not had some kind of semi-relationship that implied an understanding between mothers of sons, had we not had conversations in the past about our boys, (before and after Maxx became ill) had she not on several occasions presented herself as a loving mom and a caring individual. Had she not been a mental health care professional schooled and practiced in the treatment of psychic pain.
I said goodbye and left. I was artificially, superficially pleasant.
I did go to the store where I watched obsessively as a mom and her 20 or so year old son shopped for family groceries. I lingered too long in one aisle after another in a state of shock, trying to select a brand of breakfast bars, crackers, walk quickly past the juice aisle, but wait, I wanted bottled iced tea. There were new drinks he would have liked. Power drinks. I talked quietly to myself and shook my head. I haven’t purchased or eaten fish since he died, but I picked up some frozen salmon burgers. I don’t eat salmon but I put the patties in my basket anyway. I bought fresh sourdough. I looked at magazines and remembered how we tried to find something for him to read on the way back to the hospital where he was taking a 4 day chemo treatment. We never had much luck, because everything he liked to read was about health and fitness…and he was dying. I bought some low fat Swiss cheese slices because I should not be eating full fat cheese, though whether I get fat, die of a stroke, or keel over with a heart attack doesn’t make any difference to me in the least. I bought vanilla yogurt. To others it appears that I am “shopping,” reading labels, making selections on some basis of preference or information. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t know what I’m doing or why. I might as well be stumbling through the always open door of Hades.
Returning to my car, I noticed the young man wheeling a full cart behind his mom. They were laughing. I got into the front seat gasping. There is an ancient rusted mechanism in the heart of a bereaved parent who finds herself stuck in the outside world—one, that if all goes as it should, would never be noticed, let alone used, that slowly, haltingly groans into the on position when the stunning immediacy of grief becomes too great to bear. It is as if all life around you grows dim, fogged through tears, though you may not actually be crying. Sight, though working minimally, is not connected to what is really there. Sound disappears, but a screaming in your brain that comes from your heart begins its piercing shriek. It is at once distant and deafening. A physical bursting within your mind that breaks over you with the force of a cyclone.
WHY IS HE DEAD???? WHERE IS MY BOY??? PLEASE, PLEASE, I WANT MY BOY!!
This is how I drove the short distance back to work. I did not stop at the drug store. The drug store where they play that horrible canned music from the 70’s and 80’s popular when I was in my teens, 20’s and 30’s and life was still ahead. “I love you more today than yesterday, but not as much as tomorrow.” “I can’t live if living is without you. I can’t live, I can’t live anymore.” “Baby, baby don’t get hooked on me, I’ll just use you then I’ll set you free, baby, baby don’t get hooked on me.
Where did our lives go? What happened? Who are these people who live? With their party-houses and plans for a future? You are dead. So am I.
Today is your birthday. We donated money to St. Jude’s hospital and sponsored 9 DogTown dogs in your name. We love you and miss you sweet Maxx. Always, always, always. Always and forever.
The new college semester is beginning on Monday. The new Freshmen are landing on campus to move into their dorms. Young men walking in T-shirts and basketball shorts are beginning to appear. Young men with close-cropped hair and long legs taking loping strides across green lawns. Big shoes and back packs. The look of innocence and insouciance mixed with a bit of wide-eyed hesitancy. It is breaking my heart. Summer breezes blow dead leaves from the trees and into small swirling circles along the gutters.
Just at the lunch hour one of the full time professors, a Ph.D., the Co-Chair of the Psychology Department and a practicing therapist for over 20 years came into the back office to say hello. She taught Megan, she’s known me for about 12 years and she knows about Maxx. She has two grown sons of her own, one is Maxx’s age and the other a bit younger. She took Megan to dinner once during the first year after Maxx’s death to talk with her about how she had lost her own teenage brother when she was 18. I thought, given who she is, or at the least proclaims herself to be, that she knew better.
She announced to everyone that they were putting their house on the market and moving to the town in which we live—a city I would do anything in my power to leave. She comes from wealth, as does her husband. She is a well traveled woman—one who takes summers in Greece, Italy, all of Europe. She had just returned from a month in Africa. She is always tan. One of those for whom working to earn a living is probably completely financially unnecessary, but who likes to pepper her pronouncements about herself and her well-lived life with facetious remarks about how retirement, now, is impossible. One of those who chooses to cloak herself with the “salt-of-the-earth” persona when it is convenient and politically correct. “I’m a highly educated, cosmopolitan, thoughtful, professional, moneyed women who owns and wears eclectic clothing and jewelry from all over the world, with a beautiful family leading a charmed life---but I’m still “real,” a person of the earth.”
I was standing up to leave with my purse on my shoulder, ready to go to the grocery store during lunch—to test the waters of the drink and frozen food isles again—to see how much further I could go, or if I could do it at all, to subject myself to the fire of self-immolation, to withstand the frostbite of a dead heart, to walk past items I would have purchased for him, to look at packaged Sushi, to step from my ghost wasteland into the throbbing sound of people shopping, looking to feed themselves, gloating on the freefall gluttony of consumerism and all that implies in a life untroubled by suicidal gloom. I was holding my keys in my hand. My keys. I had a short list in my purse. If all went “well” in the store, I was going across the street to pick up some items at the drug store. I am patient with myself and I don’t plan too far ahead. Always, when I leave to drive somewhere alone, I am waiting for the car accident that I secretly hope will annihilate me in a violent blast of crushed metal and bone.
I was turning my back when she made this self-satisfied announcement about needing to buy a new home where it’s warmer than the foggy coastal town she lives in now, with a pool so her boys would have a place to bring their families, a party-house.
My jaw clenched. My head started to buzz. I looked at her in disbelief. Her “boys” are Maxx’s age. Did she just forget I had a son who died? Did she think because it was something that happened “a couple of years ago” that the mention of her future happy family gatherings was anything I would be interested in, or ready to hear, let alone acknowledge with pleasure at her continued good fortune? I did not respond because there were two other people to whom she was also speaking. I did not know what to do. To walk away. To run away. To scream and run. Perhaps it would have been different if we had not had some kind of semi-relationship that implied an understanding between mothers of sons, had we not had conversations in the past about our boys, (before and after Maxx became ill) had she not on several occasions presented herself as a loving mom and a caring individual. Had she not been a mental health care professional schooled and practiced in the treatment of psychic pain.
I said goodbye and left. I was artificially, superficially pleasant.
I did go to the store where I watched obsessively as a mom and her 20 or so year old son shopped for family groceries. I lingered too long in one aisle after another in a state of shock, trying to select a brand of breakfast bars, crackers, walk quickly past the juice aisle, but wait, I wanted bottled iced tea. There were new drinks he would have liked. Power drinks. I talked quietly to myself and shook my head. I haven’t purchased or eaten fish since he died, but I picked up some frozen salmon burgers. I don’t eat salmon but I put the patties in my basket anyway. I bought fresh sourdough. I looked at magazines and remembered how we tried to find something for him to read on the way back to the hospital where he was taking a 4 day chemo treatment. We never had much luck, because everything he liked to read was about health and fitness…and he was dying. I bought some low fat Swiss cheese slices because I should not be eating full fat cheese, though whether I get fat, die of a stroke, or keel over with a heart attack doesn’t make any difference to me in the least. I bought vanilla yogurt. To others it appears that I am “shopping,” reading labels, making selections on some basis of preference or information. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t know what I’m doing or why. I might as well be stumbling through the always open door of Hades.
Returning to my car, I noticed the young man wheeling a full cart behind his mom. They were laughing. I got into the front seat gasping. There is an ancient rusted mechanism in the heart of a bereaved parent who finds herself stuck in the outside world—one, that if all goes as it should, would never be noticed, let alone used, that slowly, haltingly groans into the on position when the stunning immediacy of grief becomes too great to bear. It is as if all life around you grows dim, fogged through tears, though you may not actually be crying. Sight, though working minimally, is not connected to what is really there. Sound disappears, but a screaming in your brain that comes from your heart begins its piercing shriek. It is at once distant and deafening. A physical bursting within your mind that breaks over you with the force of a cyclone.
WHY IS HE DEAD???? WHERE IS MY BOY??? PLEASE, PLEASE, I WANT MY BOY!!
This is how I drove the short distance back to work. I did not stop at the drug store. The drug store where they play that horrible canned music from the 70’s and 80’s popular when I was in my teens, 20’s and 30’s and life was still ahead. “I love you more today than yesterday, but not as much as tomorrow.” “I can’t live if living is without you. I can’t live, I can’t live anymore.” “Baby, baby don’t get hooked on me, I’ll just use you then I’ll set you free, baby, baby don’t get hooked on me.
Where did our lives go? What happened? Who are these people who live? With their party-houses and plans for a future? You are dead. So am I.
Today is your birthday. We donated money to St. Jude’s hospital and sponsored 9 DogTown dogs in your name. We love you and miss you sweet Maxx. Always, always, always. Always and forever.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Sundays are the worst. Sundays I disintegrate into utter internal chaos. My mind flings itself, a ramrod against the doors I’ve worked so hard to keep closed all week, opening one after the other onto adjoining charred cells each rank with the sour smell of fear. This one reeks of doubt—did I do enough, did I say enough, did I fight long enough, did I make the right choices at the right time—this one spews the acid of panic into my face—how can I live the rest of my life and never see him again? Never hear his voice, touch his face, run my fingertips through his hair?—Here, this one, filled with the smothering smoke of disbelief—is my child really dead? How could he have been here so full of life, then gone? Is he still gone? He is not coming back? This one, heated beyond bearing with the rage of an unquenched fury, the fire fueled by my vitriolic wish to destroy all that continues, myself included, because he cannot live. Here is where I spend a great deal of time, sweating drops of blood, coiled in a corner, a dying snake, before I can, slither myself forward into the last cell, the one with the mirror propped against the wall showing me who I have become. A silver shining that reflects the destruction that make-up, a new haircut, or pretty earrings cannot disguise. Witness to the fact that I have forgotten to eat, forgotten to close the refrigerator door, or put the dishes away, forgotten to remember that I am still alive physiologically and require a minimum of attention just to remain so. Though why I can’t say.
I turn from a book, to something onine. From something online to the television. And all the while I am losing Maxx. Again, as if those days were happening now. Again and again I see his illness begin its slow strangulation. I hear his voice and am with him again in the hospital rooms, oncology, the ER, coaxing him to eat. Shaving his sweet head. Lying next to his body heated with low degree chronic fever, rushing for Kleenex to staunch his constant nosebleeds. Trying to memorize the marks and small blemishes on his back because I know in my heart he will die. Trying to sniff the skin behind his ears and stifle my screams. These are my Sundays.
This is what I do. I sleep until noon. I wake up and have coffee but no food. I look at my email from Chadwicks, and Victoria’s Secret, the Body Shop and Amazon. Steve and I will talk about what we will do, but in my head the clanging and banging of the ramrod bashing against the doors has begun and I know I will go nowhere, do nothing. I will read for a bit if I can. But soon, sooner all the time I will start the downward slide. I will begin to stare into a corner. Sometimes I get cold. Then I get restless. I will move back and forth from the living room to the kitchen. Finally, I will stand at the sink, arms spread holding the counter where I start to cry. This is where it usually begins for me standing at the counter or the stove. It is there in that kitchen, that formerly hallowed room where I cooked and fed and nurtured my tiny family, that my resolve, my shallow hope for something, anything, dissolves. Then I start to wander back and forth crying and talking, shaking my head. I will grab a sponge and a bottle of spray bleach and begin to spray and wipe. Crying and spraying. I don’t know what or why I am doing anything. I have come undone.
Sunday, used to be the day before the work and school week began filled with chores and homework and preparation. Now, there are no preparations. I don’t care what comes on Monday. Or Tuesday. These are simply days that pass until the next round begins. Sometimes I can wait until 3 or 4 before I take a pill and have a beer. Today it was a bit earlier. I went to sleep again about four hours after I had awakened. Then I get up to have something to eat, wait a few more hours, take another sleep med and go back to bed for the night.
I wonder what people think we do as we’re “healing,” (a favorite outlier word to describe a process that occurs in a Disney movie when after being orphaned in a forest fire, or watching both parents die in a stampede, the lonely little cub makes new friends each of whom in his loving and quirky way cares for him until he can be whole and strong again.) “Did you have a nice weekend.”? Sometimes I say, “ Fine.” Sometimes, I say “Not so great.” What I want to say, no, scream, into their dull-eyed faces, is “Don’t ask me about my weekends ever again.” Asking me about my weekend is like asking a prisoner if the wrack this Sunday was as painful as last, or the hot pokers which burned your skin were just as delightfully sharp and sizzling as they were when you last experienced them. Keep it simple. Don’t ask. Whatever we did or did not do is something we don’t wish to share with anyone in any case.
I turn from a book, to something onine. From something online to the television. And all the while I am losing Maxx. Again, as if those days were happening now. Again and again I see his illness begin its slow strangulation. I hear his voice and am with him again in the hospital rooms, oncology, the ER, coaxing him to eat. Shaving his sweet head. Lying next to his body heated with low degree chronic fever, rushing for Kleenex to staunch his constant nosebleeds. Trying to memorize the marks and small blemishes on his back because I know in my heart he will die. Trying to sniff the skin behind his ears and stifle my screams. These are my Sundays.
This is what I do. I sleep until noon. I wake up and have coffee but no food. I look at my email from Chadwicks, and Victoria’s Secret, the Body Shop and Amazon. Steve and I will talk about what we will do, but in my head the clanging and banging of the ramrod bashing against the doors has begun and I know I will go nowhere, do nothing. I will read for a bit if I can. But soon, sooner all the time I will start the downward slide. I will begin to stare into a corner. Sometimes I get cold. Then I get restless. I will move back and forth from the living room to the kitchen. Finally, I will stand at the sink, arms spread holding the counter where I start to cry. This is where it usually begins for me standing at the counter or the stove. It is there in that kitchen, that formerly hallowed room where I cooked and fed and nurtured my tiny family, that my resolve, my shallow hope for something, anything, dissolves. Then I start to wander back and forth crying and talking, shaking my head. I will grab a sponge and a bottle of spray bleach and begin to spray and wipe. Crying and spraying. I don’t know what or why I am doing anything. I have come undone.
Sunday, used to be the day before the work and school week began filled with chores and homework and preparation. Now, there are no preparations. I don’t care what comes on Monday. Or Tuesday. These are simply days that pass until the next round begins. Sometimes I can wait until 3 or 4 before I take a pill and have a beer. Today it was a bit earlier. I went to sleep again about four hours after I had awakened. Then I get up to have something to eat, wait a few more hours, take another sleep med and go back to bed for the night.
I wonder what people think we do as we’re “healing,” (a favorite outlier word to describe a process that occurs in a Disney movie when after being orphaned in a forest fire, or watching both parents die in a stampede, the lonely little cub makes new friends each of whom in his loving and quirky way cares for him until he can be whole and strong again.) “Did you have a nice weekend.”? Sometimes I say, “ Fine.” Sometimes, I say “Not so great.” What I want to say, no, scream, into their dull-eyed faces, is “Don’t ask me about my weekends ever again.” Asking me about my weekend is like asking a prisoner if the wrack this Sunday was as painful as last, or the hot pokers which burned your skin were just as delightfully sharp and sizzling as they were when you last experienced them. Keep it simple. Don’t ask. Whatever we did or did not do is something we don’t wish to share with anyone in any case.
Here's to another Sunday. I'll try do some Yoga tomorrow.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Today is Megan’s birthday. She will be 28. It will be her second birthday since Maxx died. When I was 26 I had been married for a year. When she turned 26, her baby brother had been sick with cancer for 2 months. Tonight we will have dinner and hug her, give her a few gifts, try to be together in some form for three or four hours as a family—shattered as we are—without Maxx. The idea of marking anything except the time passed in months, and eventually years, since his absence feels absurd. And for the most part we don’t even try. In fact, we do the opposite. We hide, we ignore, we live through until the next day.
But Megan’s birthday we will not wave aside, nor would we if we could. She is my firstborn. My only daughter. And I remember her baby days, her childhood with great love. Megan taught me how to be a mother. She awakened within me all the love I was meant to express. She turned my life from “me” into a state of “another,” a dynamic, electrified giving response mode—switched on and never turned off--that has determined the course and shape of my life all these many years since she was forcibly pulled from my body. I think she must have known, even then, that this was probably not a space she wanted to enter. This world.
But despite her fierce desire to stay put both within me and, failing that, in a universe where only immutable goodness and justice exists, and my inability to sustain that universe for her, loving Megan taught me how to love Maxx. She is the reason I live now. And it is her birthday.
My beautiful, smooth skinned, peach complected, intelligent, funny girl with the shining hair, hazel eyes, and delicate features. My lovely daughter whose heart is lonely and aching for her brother’s smile, wit, his gruff, but genuine expressions of care.
Her poor broken-hearted birthday.
But Megan’s birthday we will not wave aside, nor would we if we could. She is my firstborn. My only daughter. And I remember her baby days, her childhood with great love. Megan taught me how to be a mother. She awakened within me all the love I was meant to express. She turned my life from “me” into a state of “another,” a dynamic, electrified giving response mode—switched on and never turned off--that has determined the course and shape of my life all these many years since she was forcibly pulled from my body. I think she must have known, even then, that this was probably not a space she wanted to enter. This world.
But despite her fierce desire to stay put both within me and, failing that, in a universe where only immutable goodness and justice exists, and my inability to sustain that universe for her, loving Megan taught me how to love Maxx. She is the reason I live now. And it is her birthday.
My beautiful, smooth skinned, peach complected, intelligent, funny girl with the shining hair, hazel eyes, and delicate features. My lovely daughter whose heart is lonely and aching for her brother’s smile, wit, his gruff, but genuine expressions of care.
Her poor broken-hearted birthday.
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