the question of self-pity

"People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it.' We understand the aversion most of us have to 'dwelling on it.' Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is unnatural, a failure to manage the situation." - Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

How many times did I say this to people - it's only self-pity that makes me sad. I'm not sad for him - he is no more, I'm sad for me. But I'm also sad for who he was. Now that I'm writing about him the hardest thing is not writing about the death. That gives me a certain comfort. I can feel a certain detachment as I'm describing what I'm going through. But when I write about his life, everything makes me sad - the good and the bad, the things we did and didn't do. I wish we had done more.

I wish we as humans didn't dread death. What is death to us? I just wish we knew what we have while we are living. But we can't. We just can't.

writing

I've started writing what I hope will be a book. Working title is Our Dark Knight. In a way it comes easily. I'm never at a loss as to what to write next, but it comes at a cost. Being truthful brings up pain that would otherwise lie below the surface. I realize that I'm in a peculiar state, one in which anger and self-blame become one. But I have no choice. I've failed at life. I need to succeed at writing. Otherwise I have no excuse for continuing to occupy space on this Earth. I owe it to him. His life is complete, but mine isn't. It's a lonely task. It makes me feel like I'm at the bottom of a well. Memories are not things you have. They are things you will never have again.

reading

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H. Auden, Funeral Blues

 I first heard the poem in "Four Weddings and a Funeral".  Was reminded of it reading Joan Didion's memoir about the death of her daughter, Blue Nights.  Went on to read the one about her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking. 

I never liked Joan Didion, although she was one of my son's favorites.  I always found her cold.  Now I think she is just like me.  Or maybe all people who lose their only child are alike.  In any case, it helps to read about someone else experiencing the exact same thing.  It makes you feel less alone.  Thank you, Joan.  You take comfort where you can find it.  I have always looked to literature.  Never thought I would find it in non-fiction.  It has changed my perspective on writing.  That even the most profoundly personal can be universal.

just deserts

Lately I've been feeling that I deserve what happened.  More than that - that we all deserve what we get.  And so I deserve this barren life, bereft of its only meaning - love.  Why?  Because of cowardice.

You told me I lived in denial.  Not exactly.  It's not that I couldn't see.  It's that I couldn't act.  My sins are all ones of omission.  I never did the wrong thing.  I just didn't do the right thing.  Because of fear.  There are instances that come clearly to mind.  But this is not the place. 

I said in the beginning that I knew I was always meant to write.  The reason I haven't is not because I think my writing is not good enough.  It's because I have no imagination.  I'm always amazed at how wildly imaginative my dreams are.  But in real life I have no access to that power.  But there's one thing I can do.  I can write what I know.   I was kind of a journalist after all.  I can take what I know and make people understand it.  Maybe even feel it.  That's all I need to do now.  I need to write about you.  Because you were amazing.  Because you had no fear.

Another reason I gave myself a pass on becoming a writer is because I thought you could do it better.  You were as good a writer as me, but you also had a life.  But although you wrote, you didn't leave behind much.  You were too busy living.  Well, I have no life now, so I have all the time in the world.  I will write about your life.  I don't pretend to know all of it.  I was in denial, remember?  But there are people out there who know about it.  They can help me fill in the gaps.

no love

Oh, who am I kidding?  Love can't save anyone.  You knew that.  You were wiser than me in so many ways.  Love is at best an illusion.  The best kind, but still an illusion.  No one can take away another's pain.  No one can give another's life meaning.  I was naive to believe that.

And you were right about me - I did live in denial.  As cynical as I am, I could never face up to how ugly things really are.  I was always secretly hopeful that truth and beauty will prevail.  

I am no more.

love

"everything passes before you get to scream I LOVE YOU out the the window of the train"

I hadn't seen that one before.  I know you meant it more than literally, but that's one of the biggest regrets I have for you - that you never really found a deep romantic love.  I think that if you had, it could have saved you.  I know that mine couldn't.

black hole

I think it gets harder with time.  Fresh grief has its consolations, not least among them - disbelief.  I remember the night it happened.  My mind balked at accepting it.  It tried to remove itself.  It would forget for a moment and then be cut anew by the knowledge. 

Now it can't hide from the knowledge.  I don't have to remember it each time I wake up.  I know it even in my sleep.  There is no place to hide.

It also gets harder to evoke your existence.  Your words are still fresh.  I get a fix of them every day, but there are only so many of them.  They are only you at a certain point in time.  They are not your essence, which was ever moving and evolving.  The hardest thing is not that I miss you.  I missed you even while you lived - you were away most of the time and the phone was a poor substitute.  The hardest thing is that you are frozen in time.

You lose a child continually as it grows up.  You miss the different stages of its life.  But you never expect its life to be complete.

One thing that I did not miss while you lived was your love.  It was as strong as when you clutched me with your chubby baby arms.  I feel supremely unloved now. 

Worse - I feel all my love is going into a black hole, never to be returned.

four months

"The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless." -- Samuel Johnson

And yet time goes on, to no avail.  

dream where I die

"I'll trade you one for two nightmares of mine,
I have some where I die, I have some where we all die." - Bright Eyes, Hit the Switch

They say you can't die in your own dream.  Nonsense.  Here's how I did it.

I was in my parents' apartment.  The time was twenty-some years ago.  Everything was correct - the topography of the apartment, everyone's age - my brother and I in our twenties, my parents fiftiesh, my son (who was absent) around five.  My parents and I opened the door to the bedroom and there lying on the floor by the bed were two bodies.  One was my brother, who was in some kind of fit, but conscious.  The other one, lifeless, was me.  I cradled my brother's head trying to calm him and I told him my son would need him as a friend.  My parents were strangely detached, just there as observers.  Nobody mentioned the body, but it seemed to be the reason my brother was distressed and at death's door himself.  And, of course, my son would need him, because he wouldn't have me.

pity

I find it hard to explain to people why I am not crying all day long.  When I do cry, it is for myself, because I miss you, because you were so precious and so profound and there is no one I can relate to or love as much as I love you.

But as for you - I feel you got the best of it.  I read some speculation, just to confirm, that your death was a painless one.  You stopped breathing and your brain was tricked into not panicking at this.  I knew that already when I saw how peaceful you looked in death. 

You were free while you lived.  You even traveled across the country like you wanted to and you loved it, despite the discomfort of being confined on a train.  In one of the comments on your photos you wrote:

"The country unfolds in your heart. The landscape is such a powerful message. Makes you want to run wild like a comanche. Brother I am in lov with this life."

You never had to compromise.  Yes, 26 years is short, but it is well beyond the time when most people find they have to settle, and let go of a limitless future.  When I was 26 we came to this country and I started on the 20-year grind to sustain our precarious existence.  Now I am safe, but with nothing to show for it.  The reason I lived for - you - is gone.  You, on the other hand, never lost your child-like optimism.  You still felt anything was possible.  What better way to end.

Still, I can't help wishing for my sake that you were more ordinary and less foolhardy.  That you are still here.   

half angel

wish

I always wished I could take your suffering on myself and now I have.

remorse

That's what the book was really about.  The fact that some words of unrestrained cruelty could unleash a chain reaction that ruins lives.  When you're with someone from the time they're born, when you are solely responsible for their very survival, how infinite are the chances of being thoughtlessly cruel. 

I am sorry, my son, for making you feel worthless because you didn't conform, for making you feel like a burden because you made my life difficult.  At least that's what you heard.  It wasn't what I meant.  I was angry at you for making yourself suffer.  Your suffering was my suffering.  Your well-being was my well-being. You were never separate from me.  I told you I loved you more than anything.  But that doesn't begin to describe it.  I love you more than being.

purpose

"Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be."  The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

Figures that the first new book I like is about a young suicide and his converse - the guy who "wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was."

What kills me is that I knew this when I was young.  I just closed my eyes and hoped against hope that it wasn't so.  I irresponsibly created another life, just to justify my own.  And he had to die in order to open my eyes to the ultimate meaninglessness of what I had done.  He died for my sins.

remains

I had braced myself for the holidays.  They are mercifully over.  But now I feel worse.  The new year is supposed to be a new beginning, but all I can do is cherish the past.  There is no light on the horizon.  No new life.  All I can do is gracefully wait for it to be over. To be freed of the chains of existence.

I know there are heavier burdens than mine.  I will try to be generous with what I have left to offer.  I sent a contribution to the project that made his last days brighter.  I know he would have wanted to keep that promise unbroken.  A part of him will live on in the extreme passion he lived and preached.  That's all I can do.

I decided I don't want his remains scattered in this country.  It wasn't kind to him and he railed against it.  What I didn't expect was that shopping for an urn to keep his ashes in would bring me down so.  Hiding him within a pretty object is not what he would like.  His friend, who visited on New Year's eve asked to see them and cried.  I look at them every day and feel nothing.  I know that's not him.  I knew it even when I saw his stiff body emptied of its organs.  His body let him down.  He was so much more than that.  He was light.  And darkness.  His father painted a shadowy half-angel just before he died. There is more of him in that than in the white ashes in the black box.

drama

The first time I heard this story, I reassured the person you had told it to that it was a tall tale.  But last night an eyewitness confirmed that you didn't break your foot slipping down a flight of stairs as you had told us.  You jumped out of a third story window after your friend died.  This ups to 3 the number of times I know you were near death.  I'm starting to think we were lucky to have you around this long.

things I look forward to

1) 10 p.m. - the time I feel I can legitimately go to sleep.  It's crept back from 10:30.  It sometimes backfires when I wake up before my alarm goes off in the morning.  Any night that I don't stay awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night after waking up with a pain in my guts or chest (I wonder why it varies between the two) is a success.  I still don't dream about him. Very different from when my mother died 11 years ago.  I would dream that she is there, but yet know she's dead, and I'd desperately try to reconcile the two. The difference is I watched her die and felt sorry for her, because she felt sorry for herself.  In the dream I would know that she couldn't survive and that I would have to relive her death again - heartbreaking.  Maybe because he didn't know he was dying, I don't have the same kind of dreams now.  But I also don't have the comfort of 'being with him' in my dreams, except for one time, early on, when I dreamed we were walking along a scary cliff together holding hands, and the dream ended as I turned and kissed his shoulder.   I guess that was goodbye.  In those days I felt his presence intensely.  I think it's a defense mechanism we have - goes along with the myth of the spirit staying around for 40 days.  I think it lasted about that long.  Now, I'm constantly aware of his absence.  When I sometimes feel for a second an animal optimism of being in my body, it is immediately crushed in the next moment by the thought that what's the point when 'that' happened.  I also think of this horrible year ending, but can't find any comfort, because 'that' cannot be undone.

2) my mid-morning cigarette

3) my after-work drink

That's about it.

foretold

I found your notes for a novel from a few years ago. It starts with a phone call telling you your mother's dead. Your biggest fear. You imagined it pretty well - the inanity of the stranger telling you he's sorry; no histrionics, no tears, just the physical weight of it, the broken sleep, the silence. It's uncanny. Just the way it happened. Only it wasn't my death but yours.

That must be the novel that went missing with your stolen laptop. I wonder if it's still out there somewhere.

won't you try?

Do you know there are spaces open and wide?
Believe me, there are days longer than nights
And you will be happy the minute you try
So won't you try?
--The joy in forgetting/The joy in acceptance, Bright Eyes

I had the first line of those lyrics inscribed on the iPod I gave you one Christmas, which you promptly lost.  But who was I kidding.  Days longer than nights?  Never for me.  Did I instill in you this sadness you couldn't bear?  You tried to be stoic, but you were too exuberant.  Not like me.  I can trudge like this forever. But you said:

"Everybody wants to go forever. I just want to burn up hard and bright."

That you did.  That you did.

godlessness

I'm sick and feeling sorry for myself.  I don't know what I'm trying to be anymore - superhuman or something? I'm trying to be philosophical about it, but the animal in me just bleeds.  I feel like my soul is hemorrhaging.  Yes, I need to be loved and I need to be pitied.  I'm not above that.

But there's only so much other people can do for you.  I regret every decision I ever made.  The difference between a world without God, I read today, is not lack of morality, it's lack of redemption.  There is no redeemer.  Everything is cast in stone.  Loss is forever.