this is my life

Having lived for nearly 20 months now after the event that ended my life as it was, I wonder not why I do it, but how.  The why is obvious - because I have no choice.  Ending my life, although still eminently desirable is too violently hurtful to people, who do not deserve to be hurt more.  Living is only hurtful to myself.  And I deserve it.  I don't mean because I am responsible for an accidental death thousands of miles away.  Logic says I am not.  But I deserve to be alone.  Without a child, or a lover.  I had those, but I couldn't keep them.  Therefore, this is my natural state.  So I must get used to it.  I don't hate myself enough to kill myself, so in order to continue living I must relinquish the self-hate as best I can.  I no longer pine after a do-over.  That would mean I think I deserved better.  I don't.  This is acceptance.  This is my life.

the new normal

There are days like this - I've slept through the night, nothing aches, I don't have to do anything, there is a blooming tree outside my window, there is no discomfort in existing.  Yet the center of my existence is gone.  I'm like those people who lose their vision and can only see out of the periphery of their eye.  That is the best I can do.  This is the new high.  I can only live life on the edges.  My center is gone. 

stuff

Had a breakdown today, caused by - yes, stuff. 

I often have the same thought, when I'm handling some random object, usually in the kitchen - that this was around while he was alive.  That's not unusual, of course - most things predate his death, which was only 18 months ago.  But the thought persists.  Sometimes I think: I didn't have this while he was still alive, or: he hasn't seen me in this. 

But today was different.  I was just about to do yoga and was looking around the room, which was not very tidy and had all these objects strewn on the dresser - multiples of each - scarves, hats, and sneakers on the floor.  And I thought - why is this stuff still around, and he's not.  I mean it's not even his stuff.  But somehow it irks me that my money has gone to all these stupid objects, which will exist forever, and he does not.  And all my money couldn't save him.

Fear of driving

I remember the last time I drove a car.  I had to pick up my husband from the airport. To change lanes on an almost empty road, I looked back several times, wavering until the driver behind me started desperately gesticulating to encourage me to make the move already. I remember every time I’ve driven – there were so few of them and they were always terrifying.  Every time was like my first time.  I always had to think which was the gas, and which was the brake.

I only got my license at 36.  I thought it would finally make me feel like a competent adult, like I wasn’t just impersonating one.  

When I was growing up my mother never drove.  She had a license, but after a near-accident she never tried again.  She would always overreact at my father’s driving. I can see her hand reaching for the dashboard as she yelped for caution. I was never scared then.  I thought nothing bad could happen to us.  Once when we were driving through a mountain pass my father had a gallbladder attack.  Fortunately, my mother was a doctor and travelled with all essential medicines.  She gave him something and we had to stop and wait for his spasms to pass.  That’s the first time I questioned her not driving.  I decided I wouldn’t be like her – this ultra-competent woman who could save a life, but couldn’t operate an automobile to save her life.

When I turned 18 I promptly signed up for driving lessons.  I wanted to go with a friend, but I got wait-listed as the class was full and so I dropped it.  At 19 I got pregnant.  That summer I went to the beach with my brother and my new husband.  My round belly covered in hot pink spandex did not stop me from swimming and diving, to the horror of mothers with small children around me. The vacation ended abruptly when my husband was called back for work.  My brother drove us back at night on another perilous mountain road.  I sat alone in the back seat in the dark not seeing where the road would swerve and for the first time I felt a paralyzing fear for the life growing inside of me.  

When my son was a baby we were constantly shuttling between our parents’ homes as we didn’t have one of our own.  He would always promptly fall asleep in the car as I held him on my lap in the back seat.  When we finally got our own place I was alone there with him a lot, since my husband traveled for work.  One time my son got the stomach flu.  He was two or three years old and the vomiting and diarrhea had left him limp.  I had never seen him so sick that he wouldn’t speak or play.  He smelled like nail polish from the dehydration.  We didn’t have a phone line installed yet.  I had to leave him alone and run to the payphone outside to call a friend with a car.  I felt so scared and helpless that I barely got the words out to explain what the problem was.  Later she told me she had thought ‘the worst had happened.’  No, that would only happen years later.

Throughout his childhood I would have recurrent dreams that my son was in danger and I had to drive him somewhere, but I couldn’t.  Often in the dream I would have to take control of the car while I was in the back seat.  

When I finally achieved some financial stability, after having moved to another country and struggled to support my family while going to graduate school, I bought a car so I could learn to drive.  It took me three tries to pass the driving test, and I was shocked when I did.  I felt like a fraud.  

I forced myself to drive the car for practice, once getting stuck in traffic for five hours, my ass turning numb.  But at last I was able to drive my son, like a proper mother should.  He had, meanwhile, turned 18 and gone away to college.  

When it was time to bring him home after his first year, I started out early to beat the traffic. When I got there he hadn’t gotten up or packed.  That took us a couple of hours. By the time we finally started back, I was already exhausted and missed a turn without noticing, heading in the wrong direction.  I was also hearing a strange noise coming from the car and I realized, turning cold inside, that when I’d parked on a slope in front of the college I had halfheartedly tried to pull the manual brake and then forgot to release it.  The brake had been scraping against the wheels all this time.  I kept that to myself as my son was already apprehensive about my navigation and driving skills.  Instead of saving his life with my driving, I was putting it in peril.  I was a fraud.  

Once I found our way back, though, he promptly fell asleep, sitting shotgun with his guitar between his knees, the small car stuffed with his clothes and furniture.  I got us home, but not before once nearly fatally forgetting to look back into my blind spot before changing lanes.  The car next to us moved over to avoid collision, while my son stayed asleep.  

Years later he would laud me for that trip, saying what a trooper I was.  My son never got his license.  He was scheduled to take a driving test the morning he died.  He had the same aversion to driving that I do, that my mother did. I must have passed it on to him in the womb that night when I first felt fear for him, for us.  Now I have no fear.  And I have no reason to drive.

18 months

When I think of it, I invariably think of you as a toddler.  Your death is in its toddler age.  You were a fabulous toddler.  You were fabulous at every age.  Just not viable at last.  I can't help but relate your beauty to your unsuitability for life. 

I'm listening to your music.  To music you would have listened to.  I miss you so much.  I wish I had someone to talk to about you, but I'm too far gone.  I feel it coming - the unbearable.  "This country of endured, but unendurable pain."  Your words - how could you have known this?  I think you knew I could endure it.  And you couldn't.  We survive every moment but the last.

cloning

A few nights ago I had a dream that we had my son cloned and he was living a second life.  He was about 8  and he was the same person.  I mean he had the same traits and character - he wasn't aware of his past life.  But we were and yet we were making the same mistakes with him...

When I woke up I actually worried for a moment that there was nothing to clone, because it was all burnt, but then I remembered the organs from the autopsy...wonder what happened to them.

Since that dream I have been taking more interest in news about the progress in cloning.  I also read an article that with new techniques, people can be revived up to 7 hours after death.  That might have worked.  And they are still the same people.  So when do we really die?

books

My son was not one for neatness.  He would sleep on a bare mattress on the floor and go without socks, and for all I know, without underwear, rather than do laundry.  But he had a profound respect for books.  He would scold me whenever I would leave paperbacks splayed out face down. saying it would ruin the spine.  All of his books, hundreds of them, are immaculate. 

silent scream

I can't breathe.

There I was only today thinking almost cynically - time really does heal.  After all - am I not living proof?  Going about my day to day, more like living death, but still - breathing.

And here I am now pierced by the thought of all the things I could tell him, all the love that only he could absorb.  And the way I pulled back from him and didn't pour all that love out.  And I want to scream, but I don't.  The tears pour silently down my grimacing face as I write this.

I was listening today to a podcast - a philosophical argument about when death is relatively worse.  The argument was that it is not so bad for an infant to die because it isn't yet connected to the person whose life will have value. For the infant itself it is not so different from dying in the womb, which cannot be considered bad because it is almost the same as the 60% of all conceptions that end in spontaneous abortions.  And it is not so bad for an older person to die, because the years of quality life he would lose are not so many. Death is not so bad when there is no good life left. By those calculations the very worst death is that of a young adult.  The very worst.

And yet I have been trying to comfort myself that all deaths are the same, and his was at least painless and unforeseen. 

And that is just considering the person who dies.  And what about those of us left?  When is death worse?  When we wasted the life.  Oh, I want so badly to be unconscious, almost as badly as I want to scream.  This is my scream.  The scream that will never be heard.  The life that will never be lived.

dreams

I had a long series of dreams last night.  In one an emotionally extravagant friend of mine came through the window like a good witch, bringing many people with her, some of them quite old, and speaking of transcendence.

Then, my son was an infant. He was very quiet and serious and suddenly I realized I hadn't breastfed him all day.  I wasn't sure if I could, but when he suckled I could see the milk coming, although I couldn't feel it and my breasts were their usual size and not engorged at all.  He did not seem ravenous, but merely performed his part dutifully. 

A previous night, he was grown up and some calamity had befallen him.  As I rushed to his aid I thought thankgod it's not the worst that has happened. 

I hate waking up.

"Write what makes you happy"

That's the advice someone gave me when I told him I was having trouble with the novel I had started.  I scoffed at him that that wouldn't make very good art, but he just nodded wisely, as if that didn't matter.

And, of course, it doesn't.  Only I don't want to be happy, so I can't write that.  But I can write what's on my mind and I finally started doing that.  As much as I like reading fiction, creating it does not seem to give me any satisfaction, perhaps because I'm not good at it.  Fortunately, I can always tell bad writing when I see it.  I just can't always help it.

dreaming

My son's aunt had a dream about him - that he was surrounded by girls seeking his attention.  In the dream she thought that wherever he is, he is popular.

Last night I dreamed that while I was fully aware of his death, I was with an old friend and we were trying to see if he would appear while she was around.  We were in the neighborhood where he was born and we didn't know at what age he would appear.  Then I saw him playing with a group of kids, around age 4-5 and I remembered him also being there in adult form, but when only his father and I were around.

sanity

"You've seen what you were and know what you'll be
You've seen it all - there is no more to see."

When I'm at my most sane I think 'a life is a life.'  It doesn't matter how long it is, just how full, how satisfying.  When I'm at my most sane I envy him.  I am not afraid of death.  I'm afraid of a life that has gone on too long.  I wish mine had ended two years ago.  Then it wouldn't have been an altogether unhappy life.  But I can't wish to have left him behind.  So in a way, I'm happy for him for having gone first.  For that I can take on the pain.  That I can do for him. 

loss

Losing a relationship is losing part of oneself.  People are not replaceable.  One cannot live in memory only.  One ceases to live in part. 

verdict

Writing is hard.  Not writing is hard.  With writing we create our own world, our interpretation of the world.  Writing brings us within.  Living brings us out.  Which is our true self?  The inner one, most would say.  And yet, the one we show to others is what will remain of us.  Is there really a reality that is not shared?  We can share our writing, too.  People can say they understand us.  But that doesn't break the solitude.  Maybe it intensifies it.  Life is a trap.  We try to forget ourselves in others, but nobody can really hold on to that.

"Because sorrow feels too heavy and joy it tends to hold you with the fear that it eventually departs."

of writing and pain

The writing has stalled for a week.  Of the two parts, as I see them - the fantastic plot and the real details - I'm much more interested in the details.  Those flow, but they are not what will make the novel.  I need to think about it all the time, to plot it, but I'm not really interested in that.  I knew it - I always lacked ambition.

Coincidentally, or not, the pain has also subsided.  The last time it flared up it was different.  It was in the chest, the solar plexus, or the heart.  Where it belongs.  Since then my depression has abated somewhat.  I can contemplate the day ahead without wanting to end it.

Writing is both a chore and a pleasure.  I avoid it, but then am relieved to be doing it.  It's the only thing that stops time.  It's painful, but I seek out pain.  It's the only emotion I can feel.  I do the same when I wake up in the middle of the night.  I think of painful things until I get tired enough and can fall asleep again.

The question is whether the writing makes it harder or easier to be me.  That's what I have to figure out.

constancy

The pain has subsided a bit - when I do get it, it's only a mild burst of heat in my abdomen.  It's really more panic than depression, and I'm not the anxious type - I can usually talk myself down, so I manage it.  What is always there is the despair - the thought that my baby is dead and there is no future without him.  But really there was no future all along, just the illusion of one.

quick, short, sharp shock

It went away for a while - the pain upon awakening.  Then it came back recently.

It's different now - kind of a quick burst that spreads quickly.  Not quite the gut-wrencher of before when I would have the moment of anticipation before it reached its deepest.

My depression has gotten worse - this is perhaps its physical manifestation.  Or just existential terror.

fiction

So, I've been writing. It's going better than expected. I've discovered the secret to fiction - the story line is made up, but the details are real. Go ahead, laugh. Yes, I've been reading for forty years and I never quite got it till now.

I don't know if I can follow the story line he wrote. It's too foreign to me. What I'm doing is using it as a platform to go back to his childhood. To tell it from his perspective, without sentimentality.

It has a life of its own. Hopefully, it will find a shape, just as the other one did.

Life after death

Boredom really does yield fruit. Being stuck in the house for a few days and not being able to start a solid read, I think I finally found an answer to what I am meant to write next. I've had the title for a few days but I had no idea what it would be about. I knew it would be fiction. It will not be about my life after his death, but about his life after my death. It will be the novel he wanted to write. It will be the life he should have lived.

Après moi, le déluge

I so wish this could be the end of the world. Then it would have all worked out for the best.