pantoum's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LOSING MY RELIGION

Filing my taxes last week and talking with a friend about the upcoming first anniversary of her father's death have really brought home the fact that the Ginger's mother has been gone for almost a year.

Mom died April 15 and hers was a horrible death to watch—worse than my father's even, and he basically melted after cancer attacked the portion of his brain that controls body temperature.

What killed Mom was blood clots forming all over her body.

She turned black and deep red and her body swelled until she was unrecognizable and looked for all the world like a bald, black, and red version of William Hurt metamorphosing into his primordial self in Altered States.

And then she died in her fifties as one of the most vibrant—and definitely one of the kindest and most accepting—women I have ever known, the closest thing to a loving mother that I have ever experienced.

Despite walking around with a crushed heart, I am so thankful that the Ginger and her family and years of expensive therapy taught me how to (at least sometimes) understand and express my feelings.

Poetry and music started the process, and creative activity certainly helped it along, but those are largely internal processes. They require full consciousness, but nevertheless allow me to express myself without necessarily communicating my feelings to anyone else directly (or sometimes even to myself).

In many ways, the Ginger's family taught me how to care for myself too—and Mom and the Ginger definitely taught me how to be gentler with myself.

Mom, a massage therapist, also helped me access and release some of the pain I hold in my body. But, more than anything, she welcomed me into a loving family and gave me a place to be that I believed would always be a safe place, a place where I believed I would always be accepted and loved.

Their love made a place where I could, in my own stuttering and halting way, express my feelings. Eventually. With much anguish on my part. But they were patient and coached me along. And I really did walk around without feeling anything for years. Nothing. I simply could not feel anything.

I sometimes worry that this is how most men move in the world (since I was basically fathered and not mothered, and raised as my brothers were). I hope most fathers are not as hard on their children though and that more men are able to access their emotions, their vulnerability, than I realize.

I talk about this with my little brother sometimes. He lives with and loves a kind and wonderful woman, but still finds it almost impossible to identify his feelings and relies on exercise to keep himself stable.

Anyway, today's Writer's Almanac features a sad but beautiful poem that Donald Hall wrote after losing his wife. It's from his collection Without.

Letter in Autumn
This first October of your death
I sit in my blue chair
looking out at late afternoon's
western light suffusing
its goldenrod yellow over
the barn's unpainted boards—
here where I sat each fall
watching you pull your summer's
garden up.

Yesterday
I cleaned out your Saab
to sell it. The dozen tapes
I mailed to Caroline.
I collected hairpins and hair ties.
In the Hill's Balsam tin
Where you kept silver for tolls
I found your collection
of slips from fortune cookies:
YOU ARE A FANTASTIC PERSON!
YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE
WHO GOES PLACES IN THEIR LIFE!

As I slept last night:
You leap from our compartment
in an underground railroad yard
and I follow; behind us the train
clatters and sways; I turn
and turn again to see you tugging
at a gold bugle welded
to a freight car; then you vanish
into the pitchy clanking dark.

Here I sit in my blue chair
not exactly watching Seattle
beat Denver in the Kingdome.
Last autumn above Pill Hill
we looked from the eleventh floor
down at Puget Sound,
at Seattle's skyline,
and at the Kingdome scaffolded
for repair. From your armature
of tubes, you asked, "Perkins,
am I going to live?"

When you died
in April, baseball took up
its cadences again
under the indoor ballpark's
patched and recovered ceiling.
You would have admired
the Mariners, still hanging on
in October, like blue asters
surviving frost.

Sometimes
when I start to cry,
I wave it off: "I just
did that." When Andrew
wearing a dark suit and necktie
telephones from his desk,
he cannot keep from crying.
When Philippa weeps,
Allison at seven announces,
"The river is flowing."
Gus no longer searches for you,
but when Alice or Joyce comes calling
he dances and sings. He brings us
one of your white slippers
from the bedroom.

I cannot discard
your jeans or lotions or T-shirts.
I cannot disturb your tumbles
of scarves and floppy hats.
Lost unfinished things remain
on your desk, in your purse
or Shaker basket. Under a cushion
I discover your silver thimble.
Today when the telephone rang
I thought it was you.

At night when I go to bed
Gus drowses on the floor beside me.
I sleep where we lived and died
in the painted Victorian bed
under the tiny lights
you strung on the headboard
when you brought me home
from the hospital four years ago.
The lights still burned last April
early on a Saturday morning
while you died.

At your grave
I find tribute: chrysanthemums,
cosmos, a pumpkin, and a poem
by a woman who "never knew you"
who asks, "Can you hear me Jane?"
there is an apple and a heart-
shaped pebble.

Looking south
from your stone, I gaze at the file
of eight enormous sugar maples
that rage and flare in dark noon,
the air grainy with mist
like the rain of Seattle's winter.
The trees go on burning
Without ravage of loss or disorder.
I wish you were that birch
rising from the clump behind you,
and I the gray oak alongside.

My ex-family lived—and the Ginger's father still lives—on a huge plot of farmland by a major river and Mom's ashes are spread along a rock ledge in the woods near their house, a beautiful spot where the river gurgles and breathes.

I wanted to carve something out of rock to put out there with her and thought I would spend a lot of time just sitting out there with her, doing that.

I really want to go visit her too, but don't know if that's an appropriate thing to ask (and what if the Ginger stops by to visit while I'm there?).

The Ginger's father would almost certainly be fine with my doing this, but I worry it might break my heart too much to go back there, since I loved being there 9and with them) so much.

On second thought, maybe I'm better off finding one of those great blue herons that I have seen on a regular basis since Mom died and visiting with it instead ... or I'll just visit with Mom in my head—something I do most days anyway.

1:48 p.m. - 2005-03-20

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next