Shaping Memories

This is what I want to say. My son died four months ago,two weeks after my mother died. Two deaths: both suddenand unexpected, yet fought and feared countless times. I havelived with loss and I have lived with gain, but this time is likeno other.

If I was a world in orbit it would be as if the continent of mymother and the ocean of my son had been removed like giantcones taking all my gravity and leaving me teetering on theedges of my emptiness.

If I was ever whole, in a pretty dress, soft, with a little makeup,and moving freely among people with a smile that wanted toshow delight, now I am a line of India ink. I am a black linethat traces the back of my head, down my spine to my heels.I am like a computer image, and there is only white, endlessspace surrounding me.

After the first wave of grief, I remember lying on my bedand experiencing utter freedom from fear, that once constantcompanion. It didn't last very long, but it is a place I canrevisit, a God moment, a window into how He wants me tolive. Lately I have noticed that embarrassment is just a luxuryemotion now that I have been laid bare by profound loss.

A couple of months ago when I was still spending most of mydays in bed, I found I was grateful for the smallness of the spacewhere I lay flattened, immobilized. What must they experience,those whose families are torn from them by genocide, war anddisaster, those who radically suffer, fleeing across newsprintwith nowhere to rest but in the paper image? I could rest onclean sheets in a house I owned where everything was familiar,but inexpressibly altered, alien. That small space held me like ahammock for a burn victim. Maybe only my eyes were alivejust so they could stream with tears, then stare at a world I nolonger knew. Stunned, I'm still stunned, but the inner vibrationwas more noticeable in the earlier weeks. Today I need to bevery still to feel it.

On Palm Sunday I missed the shiny, green palm fronds.A lifetime ago in a different world I wrote a poem aboutpalm fronds and at least one about Easter. I have been manythings, worn many hats. Now I have no goals left. The futurehas no relevance for me, only heaven. There are moments ofgreat freedom. I enjoy simple pleasures. But there is the eversilent return to an oscillating pool of memories that measuresloneliness by eons.

My story, my world, is all I know and that only in glimpses as ifby an onlooker. It is "now" that I want to talk about, but thereare shaping memories.

My father's father died two weeks before I was born. Thatsort of placed me in time, a story to tell, a defining momentthat was to prefigure my father's death three weeks beforemy own daughter was born. Six weeks later she nearly diedof pneumonia. There seemed to be many deaths as I grew up.I had to sit still with the grownups, all of us in stiff-backedchairs, the only warmth coming from a stream of illuminateddust. The air is thin and musty smelling, like cedar and oldbrocade through that key hole to my past. My first ambitionwas to be a clown, then an astronomer, an opera singer,philosopher, and last a poet. On and on, fast forward to 1956,Christmas vacation our senior year of high school, the rip tidethat drowned my best friend and washed me to shore; we were18. Life as I knew it came to end there on that wet, reekingsand. Then followed debutante balls and drinking, marriage andprecious babies, miscarriage, the prison of anorexia, depression,hospital, divorce, former husband murdered, coming to knowGod, or to know at last that He knew me and loved me.

If I am me sitting in a room on a chair at a table where I cansee my body, I am aware that starting from the middle of myforehead upwards in an arc as far as my right arm can sweep,there is a void stretching to the end of time, as if only a portionof me is grounded in the place where everyone else is living.I can see the place, but my remnant body seems filled withNovocaine, numb as wood. I want to tell my son Clax's storybecause he was extraordinary. We were alike in so many ways.We shared not only a creative spirit but also similar heartaches.Yet uniquely he knew rapture and he suffered. He was so brave,valiant, a knight errant, full of love that longed for a way out.But I am too pressed down and stunned to move beyond thetiny part of me that is left in the present moment.

I think it was after missing the palm fronds in church that theimage came to me—a suspension bridge of wooden slats andrope stretched between two worlds. I swayed wildly with onlythe handrails to keep me upright. I needed this image to getmy bearings, to find things I could hold onto now that I wasmore or less out of bed and functioning as an ink black line ofa person.

With everything changed I came to be certain of only twothings in my seeing, breathing, teetering self: the love that mydaughter and I share, and my relationship with God. Here inthese two certainties my reality resides. It is enough.

My Handrails

In my bedroom one night, maybe early April, I picked upour little cat, Dandy and cradled him. He's a frail, older cat.How I longed for God to cradle me. I knelt by my bed andprayed. The anguish was so great that I got up and sat on thecedar chest at the end of my bed. It is on top of this chestthat I keep the box of Clax's ashes. I placed my hands on thebox's deep blue velvet cover and through my open door sawhis empty bedroom at the end of the hall. As I was crying fromevery cell in my body, there came a peace. It wasn't gradual, yetthe suddenness didn't startle. Though I soon thought of gettingup, I knew I needed to inhabit this space. Holy God, otherthan I, gave me the gift of consolation. Now I have anotherplace to revisit that is more real than writing. A meeting withthe Father who met my heart's desire and cradled me.

The image of the suspension bridge began to show me that thehandrails were made of many things. They were not just ropes,but palm fronds, the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, wearingsomething red on Pentecost, the colors of the Church calendar,green and purple and red and white, confession together ina setting of worship. Part of the grace has been to challengeand plumb my own resources for staying close to God. Him Iurgently, constantly need and long for, knowing that He is mylodestar.

An Open Door

I want to express myself because my core life isGod-breathed. As I express, new life breath is given in arhythm known to God. At times, though, long times, I am asif under water, holding that breath. I become a moist, emptygourd while my interior runs away, trying to make a break forit.

Now let me begin to tell you...