“I’m like long cold dead rocks. I have memories. Time and place have had their say.” Nora Zeale Huston
When I seemed to be loosing my world I could not bear to look at endings. Mom’s death, the marriage’s decay, my body’s failings as it spit out my uterus like a spent container.
I file these events events under miscellaneous.
Instead of grieving I became a voyeur. I would linger at my friend’s losses to gape. Looking through her life viewfinder needing to perceive any landscape but my own.
My grief not aborted but fused.
Her losses epic. Her spouse dead. All their dreams shattering when the car hit the rocky landscape. With children to raise, horses to feed and few resources to buffer the trauma, her life in code blue. Her world Arkansas during the great depression. The children teetered precariously toward adulthood. Childhood’s sweet memories though muddied sustained them.
“We are lucky to have been scathed,” my friend once commented. (Is she thinking medieval flagellations where souls immolate themselves to know Jesus suffering?)
“Lucky to be scathed”, her words tattooed into my psyche.
Years later we lose another world. (Or perhaps life is reverse archeological dig. Just chip away till instead of excavating gems all is lost.)
Now year’s later life is again altered. If we were lucky once now we are now high rollers. The worn carpet is rolled out.
We talk trying to comprehend yet another tectonic shift.
On a dormant March Michigan morning, her voice holds some Arizona sun. She calls from her high mountain home that seems to be shifting into a financial precipice the way rock avalanches after rain.
The grey of of Michigan melds with the mist. I weep. My bodies’ only warmth the tears. She is with coffee, perhaps her only warmth. Her wood-burning stove had been spitting back smoke like spite. She plans to climb to the roof to unclog the arties of the chimney.
In earlier chapters of loss I took pilgrimage to her home. It was there I took refuge while I readied to hike the Grand Canyon. I needed solid ground to steady my footing. I see all as metaphor. If I can drag myself out of the great hole I can pull myself out from the Carbuncle of my life.
Our sisterhood nurtured by loss. I need her sun voice.
Sorrow wants to inhabit my body make me its host. I have worn it before. I am at home in the sad. But this garment encumbers me. It is granite. I do not want it. I chisel at it with words.
Once I cloaked my sad with extra pounds and billows of blown mentholated smoke. I grew a pinched brittle demeanor. I forced the world away with the stench of stale. Too cumbersome. Either shed sorrow or become forever entombed.
Now I wail like a banshee. I take ice picks to wounds.
I do not want to live in sadness. Though left untended I remain shackled to it.
My friend by her listening walks me through shadow lands. Calmer, cleaner for having spent tears and named them the beast is vanquished.
Once I was agitator to my friend grief. “Write”, I badgered. Like Rodin. Chip away. (The sculpture Rodin’s secretary was the poet Rilke. Words, stones, circles…who is the artist, former of our freedom. He with chisel? She with pen?)
One winter Arizona night my friend picked up the pen. She puts it to paper. With the flourish of Calder. She spills out grief, till it becomes lyric.
She was ever so brave. I was ever so blessed and emboldened by her moment of courage.
This time, as the conversation spent itself she asks the same of me.
All seems too big. Big to write. Huge to revisit those moments where we fluttered to the fire. This impenetrable slab of granite, fixed, hard.
Her words “write” a tinnitus sound loop buzzing. Yet having witnessed her fortitude in the earlier chapters I am emboldened to try.
Recently I had questioned my grip on real. Dead children come to me in dreams. “Write”,’ they say. Lines of poems pop into my brain. I have to pull roadside to write on scrapes of paper.
Perhaps, I am crazy. But here in that land of the living while sitting in an asphalted parking lot a flesh and blood bleeding friend urges me to write.
When I study writer’s craft the mantra is always the same. “Write what you know”. I know loss.
What I know about grief is this:
I grieve in chunks. I latch on to one person. The man who signed on for a play date is cast him to the roll of “tragic lost love”. (He thought us a dalliance, unaware that I was couch casting the leading role in my psyche drama.)
I create soundtrack, haunting cello refrains or Luther Vandross ballads. When these lovers depart I seize the exit. Like a Pegasus I am lifted to heights that allow me view of life craters of sorrow that decimate the once verdant lands.
I weep only for lovers. Other losses are embalmed in a sarcophagus. Not hidden but like a B movie horror flick lurking below the coffins lid like a skeletal hand waiting to seize me and entomb me with them.
I get stuck in a familiar muck of love. When the chorus wails’ on loves demise, I am in company with all hearts. I did not die of loss.
When life’s roulette wheel spins haphazardly on sorrow, I brush past catastrophe. I blur the image of little cousin outfitted for her coffin in her white first communion dress.
I put the radio on scan until the country singer stirs tears with song.
I circumvent the black holes by listening to Mimi’s Lament from La Bohome of lost love. I tune into Eminem purging’s and anger at his missing love. I put the radio on scan until the singer tells the story of butterfly kisses.
I spill events under the guise of heartache.
I turn up the music. I weep for all. As it swells I flutter my lashes and blink forth the tears. They become wings to my heart. And those nameless heartbreaks sneak out. I am cleansed somehow.
So I write. No lyric or poem, just the musings of two women old enough to have lived much and lost much.
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