The Still Point Of The Turning World (10 page)

So Ronan would have his own path that had nothing to do with me, and I would try to understand it in my limited way. We are creatures, all of us, growing, shifting, moving, but never really arriving. I was thankful to Hegel for making his nerdy, complicated graphs and diagrams about Spirit. Thinking about that—and not a Disneyfied version of the shoebox heaven, with a cutout Jesus glued to a Popsicle stick and flanked by white construction-paper angels sprinkled with glitter, the one many of us were encouraged to imagine in Sunday school—was helping me.

And Ronan was making me think, yes, and he was making me think about thinking (Hegel would be pleased), but my task as his myth writer was still to understand my son as a person and a being who was independent of me and yet dependent on my actions, my attention, my love. I would not and will never do him the disservice of regarding him as an angel or telling myself that God had “other” plans for him, and for me. My plan was simple and yet impossible: to go with him as far as I could along this journey that we call life, to be with him as deeply as I could from moment to moment, and then to let him go.

10

Grief is:

An empty pillow book

Waiting for someone to change the subject

Ink spilled on white pants or a white sheet: ink from a pen, ink from a squid, blue-black and slimy

Sighing a lot

Feeling naked in private and feeling private in public

Running amok

Bulimic, anorexic, gluttonous, abstemious and possessed of other varying appetites

Flammable

Responding to a simple question with a trilogy, already a bestseller in online preorders

The sea, wherever it is found

A blister slowly shaping itself to the bottom of a foot

Turbulence in an airplane as soon as you are handed a cup of hot coffee or tomato juice or, if flying internationally in coach/tourist class, a plastic cup full of red wine

A hand on an ass when it is not welcome

Long nails in need of clipping

Airport food

A sudden nosebleed

Slutty

Faithful to the last

History misspelled by an accidental keystroke: “shitory”

An eight-hour time change every five minutes

Standing on a table while people discuss your faults, a few strengths

Impulsive and cantankerous: a terrible travel companion

Time. All clocks. Every watch, even Swiss made

A stuffed panda with a single ear, forgotten on a bus, slumped over like a sleeping passenger

A stereotypical image of a dictator: broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, a jagged ponytail with furiously splitting ends, busy eyes, bushy eyebrows

A dog that barks all night until it is kicked

Green and slippery, like the truth, like a lie

A bird halfway between the lowly pigeon and the self-righteous hawk, circling

A story by Kafka

Endlessly resourceful

A half-read book

Worrying about a beloved friend staying in Paris in a rented flat. Is the roof secure? Is there rain in the forecast? Did she find milk at the store? What is she eating?

An endless conversation with past and future selves in shouts and whispers

An unwashed nightgown on a dirty hook

Sudden chatter of sunlight, everywhere

A skinny rat swimming past a subway car during a rainstorm, car stalled out and bobbing

Trash from the upstairs neighbors flying past your window

Not telling you anything

Chasing a coin across the floor before it drops out of reach

Amateur at everything

An unfinished letter

Stinky air fresheners with names like “Summer Daffodil” and “Sporty Grape”

A vacation in the middle of the ocean, crappy raft optional

The phrases “getting accustomed” and “being brave” and “you’re my hero”

A shoddy translation

A stack of postcards from places you’ve never been bound with a rubber band, discovered in the bedside drawer of your favorite friend

11

The moment
before joy is horizonless. What falls
falls surrounded by what’s falling.

—Philip Pardi, “Sonata”

I
n those winter and early spring months of 2011, I was writing about Ronan and he was still alive. As a teacher of writing, I had in the past yammered on at length about the importance of gaining objectivity about a situation drawn from real life—especially a deeply personal or emotionally difficult one—in order to render it effectively without sentimentality or nostalgia. I chucked that piece of advice, because after Ronan’s diagnosis I found the opposite to be true. I wrote with my son in my lap or within arm’s reach. I wrote while looking right at him, in the middle of feeding him, talking to him, wiping his mouth, ruffling the fuzzy hair on the back of his head. I wrote in a rage, in tears, through laughter, exhaustion and bizarre moments of euphoria. For many years I had a quote, given to me by a writing professor in graduate school, pinned above my desk:
Write with blood.
I thought it sounded serious and writerly. After I started writing Ronan’s story, I finally understood what it meant and took it down. The advice was too resonant, too true, and I didn’t need it anymore.

Many writers have written beautifully about grief while in the raw early stages of it (Joyce Carol Oates, Megan O’Rourke, Robin Romm and many others); grief, this extreme experience, forces a writer to draw on her deepest resources, and such a dive demands so much work that what comes up must be heaved onto the page almost immediately; otherwise it might eat the thinker alive, drown them. (
It steadies me to tell these things.
From “Settings,” by Seamus Heaney.) Or at least that’s how I felt. You can eat fire for only so long, and then you’ve got to spit it out in another form or risk the burn.

But as I pulled book after book from my bookshelves, looking for how various writers told their grief stories, I’d read a few pages and throw them on the floor. My skin prickled with mean-spirited annoyance and then I felt myself getting
angry.
I was vibrating with rage. Many of the books were about dead spouses, dying parents, dying dogs.
My loss is different,
I thought.
My loss is worse,
I thought. I felt sick to my stomach, sat down on the floor, put my head in my hands and thought,
Wait . . .

My initial reaction to these books, knee-jerk and overly emotional, automatically assumed the existence of a ladder of loss and a method for placing a person’s sadness on a particular rung. So . . . what, on the lower rung the loss of a pet fish? On the upper rung the loss of a parent, a spouse or a child?
Yes,
you might say,
just like that
. Okay, but what if the fish belonged to a five-year-old, and it was his first experience with death and you were charged with explaining what had happened and what it meant while Goldy bobbed in the water of his bowl cum grave? What if the parent or spouse or baby was suffering for years or months or even for just one minute, then what? Bumped down a few rungs on the ladder? This idea that there existed a hierarchy, a “my grief is more grievous than yours” method of ranking, with those at the top having a more gut-wrenching, authentically earth-shaking experience while those on the lower rungs were—what? Just super, super sad?—was obviously ludicrous, and I was reluctantly forced to admit my shortsighted and simplistic response.

Loss, like any profound human experience, is not quantifiable—if there did exist a competition for grief, who would want to win it? This is precisely why grief, like love and any other foundational, deceptively simple human emotion or state of being, is the terrain of artists. And it is a writer’s even more specific job to give voice to loss in whatever ways she can, to give shape to this unspeakable, impermeable reality beneath all other realities. Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “One Loss” speaks precisely to this fact. There are not a handful of losses to master, but one; not a tangled batch of emotions to understand, just the one: grief.

When I emerged from those first thunderous days after Ronan’s diagnosis, I began to write because it felt like the only thing I was able to do. I could not have been more surprised, and I was actually embarrassed. I wanted to
write
?
Really? Losing my child, an experience already against the expected natural order of things, would be my first experience of a loss of this magnitude (but there again—what do I mean by that? That pesky ranking system), and I had expectations about what a “grieving person” does, says, feels, how they act, what they
do.
Wasn’t I supposed to run barefoot through the streets in my nightdress and shriek and howl and pull my hair out? I did a version of this, only indoors. But one can maintain that for only so long. Eventually I sat up and thought,
Yes, this is apocalyptic and world ending,
but also,
leave me alone, get out of my way, I’ve got work to do, let me write.

Why? I’d been disconnected from my writing life for years, and during that time I’d been preaching in writing classes about the importance of establishing objective distance from difficult life stories before trying to render them on the page. Or, and I quote myself here, “otherwise those stories can be heavy loads for the reader to lift.” “Writing,” I prattled on, “should not be therapeutic; it’s not therapy; it’s
art.
”
Now I had my own monstrous load to haul around, and although I still believed that it couldn’t be all doomsday and sadness in the writing, even if that was how the heart felt, I found my advice, and my chirping on about “paper doll physics”—which has nothing to do with physics but everything to do with how you separate the “I” on the page from the “I” doing the writing (and yes, a physical paper doll is involved as an illustration)—naive at best, but borderline self-righteous and wholly uneducated in the vicissitudes of grief. In those first hellish weeks, I had to write; that was all there was. That was living. (My friend Lisa, also a writer and one schooled in the ways of grief, called me every day.
Write!
she urged.
Do it right now!
)

That’s all very dramatic
, I thought, writing with Ronan snuggled into my armpit,
but what does writing do
? It was not saving Ronan in the literal sense (if only if only if only) because nothing could, and it wouldn’t save anyone else and it certainly wasn’t going to save the world. What about my intentions? Was I trying to “save” Ronan, as if turning his story into a project would make the situation less “true” and therefore easier to bear? Yes and no. Writers scribbling in the midst of grief have noted the ways in which writing about the experience from the inside creates something new, namely, a safe or safe-ish place to rest. A net, a landing point, a dock from which to view the turbulent and troubled water without having to wade in it every moment of every day. In a word: relief. The act of creation forces the creator to establish a new world with new rules and structure and form, an act that is sustaining not only in an emotional and a human way
but also in an artistic way.
This last point is key; yes, these grieving writers journaled and documented their day-to-day lives, all those singular moments, but they also went back and shaped their words. They did the work of revision, they wrestled with language and form. Plunked down into a situation in which they were entirely helpless, they found something to
do,
not to distract themselves from the situation but to look it straight in the face as artists, like it or not, are required to do. Otherwise, what are we doing?

After those first few weeks of blackness and bouncing back and forth in the void, I realized that I didn’t want to be coddled or protected from the wild unpredictability of my feelings. I wanted to work, laugh, write, be,
live.
People fully expected the weeping and gnashing of teeth, but they also expected the griever to get over it already. Grief makes people feel awkward, in part because we’ve been trained to say things like “I can’t imagine” and “Somehow you’ll get past it” (as in step around it as if it were sidewalk dog doo-doo? Unlikely) and “keep yourself busy,” all these useless sayings that stem from the death phobia that permeates our culture. And, I would argue, because grief is so intimate and unwieldy and, like individual experiences of pain, truly unknowable, even to the person walking or stumbling through it, it can be difficult to make a connection with someone in the midst of it, even if that person is your spouse, your mother or your best friend, or even yourself.

We all avoid death—we don’t want to see it, talk about it or think about it. But digging into the experience of loss is not only deeply profound but artistically, at some points, absolutely electric. People want (and sometimes encourage) the griever to numb it or erase it or at the very least ignore it, and all a writer can think to do is to pull it closer and wrap her arms around it and dig in her fingernails and
hang on
. “Don’t write if you don’t feel up to it,” people cautioned me when I told them I had started to write about Ronan. But it didn’t matter if I felt “up” to it. It was my responsibility; it was my job. It ordered chaos, focused energy, provided a way of “bearing up” that no period of restfulness could possibly accomplish. In other words, rendering loss was a way of honoring life. I brought my whole self to the page and used my whole heart to consider what I was writing. I let go of my old fears about how my work would be received, how
I
was or would be received, and just created. There was nowhere to go inside Ronan’s diagnosis, but on the page my mind could move, and I was, for that brief period of time—an hour, four hours, three minutes, five seconds—free.

So you might say that I was and still am compelled to write, called to write, forced to write. Who is doing the calling?

God?

Pastors and priests and other holy folks and men and women of the cloth (I love this expression because it brings to mind loincloths, as if pastors were early hunter-gatherers, but of souls instead of big game) are “called” to their vocations. It sounds nice, but when your pastor dad is “called” to middle-of-nowhere Nebraska when you’re a bratty fourteen-year-old, the romance of the idea fizzles quickly (as does the playfulness of the loincloth imagery). Saint Paul, née Saul, had a conversion experience akin to a seizure of the soul and spirit that prompted him to change his entire life and write lots and lots of letters. Martin Luther was struck by a violent lightning force of a calling that had him trembling on his fat knees on a dirt road somewhere in rural Germany, questioning all that he had previously so ardently believed in. Out of this experience he crafted Lutheranism. John Calvin believed that our vocations were preordained by God. Do lawyers have such melodramatic vocational callings? Plumbers? Maids? Editors? CEOs?

In Frances Sherwood’s novel
Vindication,
about the life of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, there’s a scene in which Mary is trying to puzzle out the age-old “why bad things happen to good people” conundrum. Why do some people receive soft down pillows and chocolates and other people are left to battle a constant shit storm? For answers she turns to Mr. Price, her pastor, her mentor and, most important, the first and only gentle man she’s ever known, a man who believes that women—and especially Mary—can have a life of the mind and that her wholly original ideas will teach and inspire and change people.

“Let God be the judge,” Mr. Price cautioned. “Things happen for a reason.”

“Bad things?”

“Sometimes. We learn from them.”

Mrs. Price nodded in agreement.

“Tell me,” Mary insisted, “is there a reason for a child’s death? What does a dead child learn?”

Mr. Price has no pithy answer for this, and I doubt Calvin would either—his children all died in infancy. But later in Sherwood’s novel, which pulls no punches and can be rough going, this portrait of the artist as a young woman makes clear that being a brilliant thinker cost the tormented, mercurial and impulsive Wollstonecraft; her inner and outer lives were constantly at odds. After a second suicide attempt, Mary awakens on the bank of the Thames, having just been rescued from the water. This event marks a kind of rebirth for her, an awakening.

“We must go on living,” Mary concluded. “It is our duty.”

•   •   •

Is it enough? “What did you do to manage it?” I asked other dragon moms, thinking about how the next few years of my life would roll out. “Make memories,” they advised. For some that meant going to Disneyland or the Bahamas with their families. I understood both approaches, but they didn’t resonate with me. “We sat on the couch a lot,” one mom, Sharon, told me, about her time with her son Harry, who died of Tay-Sachs when he was two and a half. “That’s what I remember most.” That spoke to me. I spend (and have spent) a great deal of my life sitting on couches—reading, writing and talking on the phone. During my college summer vacations, when I wasn’t peddling overpriced bras and matching panties at the lingerie store in the mall or selling hiking boots and waterproof watches at the sporting goods store on the other floor of the mall, I parked my book-hungry self on the blue-flowered couch in my parents’ living room and got up only for meals, the mail, the Cher exercise video that I did once a day and the nightly jabberfest with my closest friends on the phone in my dad’s basement office, where I installed myself on an equally comfortable yet rattier couch.

When I sat writing with Ronan on the couch, there existed inside this helpless, frantic sadness exquisite moments of pristine happiness and an almost-perfect peace. I propped him against my chest and circled my arms around him to get to the keyboard on my laptop. I stared at him and tickled him and kissed him and wished that my words, anything, could save him. But no, writing would not save Ronan.
But,
I thought,
it might save me.