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.

survival

"All the time that I’d been thinking, I cannot continue to live, I’d also had the opposite thought, which was by far the more unbearable: that I would continue to live, and that every day for the rest of my life I would have to live without my mother. Sometimes I forgot this, like a trick of the brain, a primitive survival mechanism." 
The Love Of My Life
Cheryl Strayed

That piece of writing touches on almost everything I have experienced with grief.  Except the acting out.  I haven't been bad.  Not in any recognizable way anyway.  I have stuck to duty.  I have been mean maybe, impatient, but not self-indulgent.  Do 2-3 cigarettes a day count?  In the magnitude of my loss - hardly.

So is this it?  Have I overcome?  Have I healed?

"Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do."

Done.  But it doesn't feel done.  It feels like everything might still fall apart at any minute - my carefully constructed ordinariness.  My body that feels as strong and fit as ever, with hardly a wrinkle marring my brow.  Surely this can't go on.  I will wake up one morning and not recognize myself in the mirror.

"Somewhere, floating on the surface of my subconscious, I believed — I still believe — that if I endured without her for one year, or five years, or ten years, or twenty, she would be given back to me; that her absence was a ruse, a darkly comic literary device, a terrible and surreal dream."

A surreal dream made all the more terrible by the lack of outward change.  I want to see the monster in the mirror.  

birthday

27 years ago today I didn't sleep, because I was becoming a mother.  Typically, I tried to cheat and dozed off between contractions.  But you were coming fast and I had to rouse the snoring nurse next to me to tell her it was getting serious. 

You were so big, they had to cut me, but you came out perfect - round-headed - a little white bunny as the nurse called you.

Last night I slept, but in my dream I worried that you had dropped out of school, and about what were the options to remedy that.  Then I woke up and realized I needn't worry about you anymore.  I miss the worry.  That was my gift.  I'll take it.

2 dreams

I don't dream of him often, but when I do I feel like I was really with him.

This one was the other night: he came home with a tattoo on his face - temple and forehead.  He had tried to cover it with makeup and I started wiping it off.  Something about 20 or 22 days, to do with Sudan.  He was 17 by my calculations and this time I didn't let it go.  I marched him to the tattoo place, which was in an apartment, like a doctor's office and threatened to sue them.  They didn't seem too perturbed.  Then he was in a hospital bed, presumably to have it removed.  He was really skinny, his ribs were sticking out of his chest.  He wasn't mad at me, but I felt bad about causing him additional pain with the removal.

This one was five weeks ago: I was with him and it was now.  I think my mother was there, too, but we went out, me and him and this is the only part of the dream that I remember.  It was dark outside.  We went to a girl's house.  Everything was kind of dingy - the place, as well as our clothes.  He was wearing something like pajama bottoms, or loose thermals - two layers of them.  At her place, the girl had some white powder out and she casually snorted it.  I thought it was cocaine.  He had some, too. I didn't, but I didn't try to stop him.  It seemed like it was not a big deal.  When we left, the bottom of the wooden staircase was blown out, so we had to get down from the first landing which wasn't too high, about chest-level, but I wondered how we had gone up.  Then we went to some kind of club.  Before that, I noticed that he was now wearing pants, but I was wearing the pajama bottoms and I thought it would be best to change.  I had my yoga pants and I thought that would look more decent, but I ended up wearing jeans under a dress.  When we got to the club I thought they were going to ask us for IDs and I realized I had left my wallet behind.  I told him that and he laughed and said "don't worry, I have money."  They let us in.  The club was kind of dingy, too.  He seemed at ease in this world. I felt it was a place where I could be with him.

longing

I felt some yesterday for the first time and it wasn't for the past.  It had to do with the crisp autumn air and I felt it in my legs.  Of course, I wanted to kill it, because I can in no way satisfy it.  But it's a sign of life.

Anniversary

I think the animal in me has gotten used to missing you.  I no longer wake up every time with a spasm of pain in my gut.

From now on I shall no longer mourn you.  I will only celebrate that I knew you, that such a force of life came through me.  Through the tears I will be grateful for being granted the privilege of loving you.  And I will try to deserve the love you gave me and the trust you had in me.

a brick wall

That is what I hit any time I think of the future, any time I have a fleeting hope, any time I try to get around it somehow.

calm

I've been holding up so long, it's like I can't feel it anymore. Wondering if the floodgates are bound to break.

"You are what you pretend to be."